Grappling with the Revision Monster

Grappling with the Revision Monster

When it comes to my fiction, I am alternately driven and confounded, which I guess is as good a sign as any that it's worth pursuing.

I came into grad school scoffing at those who might write me off as merely a journalist, since my foundations were always in creative writing and fiction, and since I applied what I knew about that craft to the best of my nonfiction work. I think where I am now in my development is picking at the lock of revision, struggling to open the secrets that lie guarded there. Maybe there's a danger in making too much of this. You simply work at the material until it is ripe, until it moves, until it hits the target cleanly. But then, it must be a particularly sticky challenge since for many the material comes rather easily, but realizing the material's potential takes a great deal of time -- and work.

It is probably also a sign of my still-toughening skin in the matter of writing fiction that whenever I ask for criticism there is the blush of hope that my critic will be bowled over, and the material will have been born whole and perfect. And that when criticism comes, on the first read I fail to detect the positive feedback, and hear only the questions, and the cuts, and then despair that I'm truly in over my head, the secrets won't be unlocked, the way is barred.

Thankfully, I give criticism a second read, and then a third. And begin to calm down. And remember that if my journey has led me this far, perhaps equipped with a thicker skin I can make it a bit farther down the path.

Eventually you've got to shut out the demons you conjure to stymie yourself and focus on the real task at hand, that by dismissing your inner doubts as so much poisonous and unproductive black smoke, you can instead find the real and helpful voices that can lead you from a heap of drafts to a stack of finished pieces.

Yikes, maybe I spent too much time reading The Legend of Sleepy Hollow this morning. (In an old supplementary reader, published 1880.) Stripping all the artifice away, I guess I'm saying: Do we ever get over that childlike voice in the heart of us wondering, "Am I any good? Do I have a shot?"

So many variations on the answer to that, when the only one that matters comes from myself. And with that weighty prelude, I dig in to revising, hoping that I find a way for the arrow to hit the mark.

All My Good Buddies Read Me the Nightly News

I was minding my own business Friday afternoon, zonking in front of the TV while my son caught a snooze upstairs. Sportscenter was on, the wife wasn't home yet, and I'd been alternating ZZZZs and "huh's?" since sinking into the couch.

Well, I wake up to my friendly evening anchor faces, Brian Kenny and Jay Harris telling me what's up in the world of hockey scores and basketball trades and yeah, the usual everyday string of steroid hearings, drug arrests and coach recruiting violations, when a birthday party breaks out.

Bill Walton, basketball Hall of Famer and ESPN analyst, waltzes into the room on his rebuilt knees and brandishes a birthday cake before Harris (his 43rd, according to Wikipedia), warbling in his Deadhead drawl, "Happy Birthday to you...."

I had to blink a couple times, pinch myself. I grinned a little, at first, but this scene went on for a bit. And when I began to notice the camera angles -- those full-body shots so many news shows are going to lately, to vary it up, I guess -- and the canned chummy dialogue began flying about like so many rubber snakes uncorked, well, my sleepy grin bent to a snarl and I switched off the damn TV to get an honest 40 winks.

I just don't get the phenomenon of news "personalities" trying so damn hard to be your buddy, to bring their, well, lack of personality bumping into your living room like a relative you never asked to stay over, but keeps hanging around, munching your milk and cookies.

I'll try to dredge up some examples from my mind dump. OK. So there are the full body shots, the anchors walking or pacing in a studio before some huge screen, when we used to only get the awkward backwards shuffle on feature off-site interviews. There are all the weird props, like CNN has unveiled for its political coverage this season -- the kind of dynamic feeling they achieve there is on a level with Paula Abduhl dancing with a cartoon cat: childish, and a little creepy. There are the football preview dudes, standing around on their painted studio football field before huddling up and running a few plays. They way they look over their shoulder at you, as if you were standing on the fringes of their group, is more than a little disconcerting -- are they going to call my number? Hit me with a pass? Oh, God, will I have to decipher the quarterback's cadence? LAME TWENTY-FOUR-SEVEN CHUMMY TALKING HEADS... HUT HUT HUT.

You just end up feeling sorry for them, like at an awkward corporate function or high school reunion. They're trying so damn hard for you to LIKE them. We're uncomfortable, they're uncomfortable, and it's because they're mostly bad at it. The Weather Channel people ought to be honored with a Wooden Spoon award, or a Pullcord Dummy statuette, or something. I mean, it's weather, right? Just give me the highs and lows and the outlook for the weekend and save the comments about your bikini or barbecue or quotations from Whitman for your next keynote speech at Bumblef*** Vocational Tech.

OK, I'll stop shouting at the TV now.

It's just that I don't need any more buddies in my life, canned voices trying to sell me something I shouldn't look for on the TV or from a telemarketer in the first place. Part of giving yourself over to the mindless glare of the TV is forgetting you're doing it in the first place. Real skill in getting you to tune in is making you unaware of the hours you're devoting to it (hey, it's a national average), sitting in one place, imagination on holiday, colors flashing across your eyes, butt growing numb. And then Heather Tesch and Nicole Mitchell start riffing on actual evapotranspiration and it's not just the weather anymore, it's amateur hour at the local Funny Bone.

And you don't even benefit from the two-drink minimum.

I may be the voice crying in the TV wilderness here, but spare me the small talk and buddy-buddy stuff and just read me the news. Give me the scores, tell me the forecast, and let me enjoy my own off-key birthday warble from my own relatives and friends.

We'd ask you over for the birthday dinner, but I think you've already had your fill of smoked ham and cheesy corn.

Holy Gigabytes, Batman!

It's still amusing to me that my Google mail account can be stuffed with some 600 MB of extensive back-and-forth between friends, teachers, editors, bosses, and the goofy daily emoticon swap the wife and I engage in. You know:

:-*

;-D

8-P

It's like a mere 10 percent of e-mail capacity in the golden age of Gmail, and yet it swamps by a factor of three the Mac I took to college with me.

Don't even get me started on the pea-brained capability of my old Commodore 64.

Plugging my Power Mac 7100 right into the wall in my dorm room at Carnegie Mellon was my introduction to the wondrous and corrupting world of the Internet, circa 1994. People were still "fetching" documents and pictures across the country then, usually on campuses. Mosaic, an early forerunner of Netscape, was clanking along in its beta version, but no worries. At tech-savvy CMU we were hooked directly into each others' computers via the campus ethernet (first in the world to go wireless a few years later), and so began our transformation into electronic squirrels, hording all the free games and pictures (porn? NO...!) and movies and sound files, etc. we could click our happy little fingers to.

I remember in the first blush of downloading, I imagined I might squeeze an entire pirated movie onto my hard drive, as if that were even possible then. Instead, we made due with 20-second snippets from Animal House and sound files from Ace Ventura and Pinky & the Brain, and thought ourselves with it. And we were, for the time.

Part of being "with it" was the ritual almost-monthly scrubbing of your hard drive, or else employing the nascent StuffIt and other compression programs to clear up space on the computer for more bootlegged junk.

My 250 MB hard drive -- which ran a cool $4,000 for the whole system back then -- quickly capsized. And I had to browse the computer tech mags for the ominous-sounding external storage devices. I paid around $800 for my 750 MB "attic" to cram more junk in, which I connected to the main three-encyclopedia-volume-size drive with a SCSI, or "scuzzy" cable. Remember those? To take the air of geekdom off the whole hook up, I named one drive Chip, and the other Dale, or Calvin and Hobbes, or Gwen and Pam, whatever floated my dorm room sensibilities at that particular time.

And now my Gmail slush pile alone could devour poor Calvin... or was it Hobbes?

Oh well. At least I never had to resort to receiving e-mailed porn. That crap comes whether you ask for it or not.

From a recently dog-eared page

Nobody writes kids quite like Ray Bradbury.

That sense of childlike wonder, and terror, and love: he taps into it, with language that does justice to the "poetic" tag we so often eagerly slap on writing that moves, is lyrical, entrances, or some combination of the three. Which are traits of great writing, don't get me wrong. But poetic? Not necessarily.

Bradbury is poetic. He hammers away on a special nerve that snakes its way back to childhood; and so even when I am rereading a story or book of his for a second, third or fourth time (and so on), I find myself experiencing the same sensations of magic and wonder that stole over me in the initial reading.

Ah, I guess a long prelude to a snippet I wanted to share. From Something Wicked This Way Comes, about two boys, and the daily give-and-take in their way with each other:

"God, how we get our fingers in each other's clay. That's friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of the other."

Right on, right on.

Man vs. Wild

I've often remarked to my wife that the Discovery Channel show "Man Vs. Wild," which sends Katie and I'm sure at least five other females (as in hundred thousand) ooohing and aaaahing every week, could be just as effectively filmed in our backyard.

With a few well-placed grunts, and dizzying camera angles, and a day's growth of beard (facelifts and six-month fitness binges aside), your average Joe couch husband could do a pretty passing impression of survival hunk Bear Grylls caught in a Congolese cave pit, or tromping over shards of volcanic rock.

Our backyard has a wicked gopher holl in the far right corner -- I could spend ten minutes or so vamping my way over it. There's this weird silver grass sprouting up along the back fenceline -- I could spend a night talking about its dietary benefits and rip into it with gusto, a few strands provocatively poking through my teeth. I can mimic thirst, hunger, exhaustion. I'm a pretty good sweater, too, if it came to that. And I can rig up all the Boy Scout lean-to fires you could ask for.

Done with an Australian accent, I could have the Discovery film crew over here in a second. Or at least public access.

Ah, but my point. And I do have one.

Nothing makes me go all survivor guy like the recent dumping of snow we endured in the "Greater Chicagoland Area." Several powdered doughnut dustings nearly every day in the early part of last week, then the prodigious eight inch dumping Thursday, followed by the Super Bowl whiteout Sunday.

I'm normally a neighborly guy, but I reserve the right to pound my chest and act like the King Gorilla when I've spent an hour and longer digging out of our driveway and doing all the sidewalks on our corner lot besides. C'mon, across-the-street dude with the snowblower -- I'm up and leaning into it by 7, can't you pull the ripcord on your cakewalk device before the mail comes in the afternoon?

Probably dangerously, this attitude can extend to the roads. Me and my more-or-less family-man sedan, riding the bumpers of the SUVs and grumbling about "If you can't drive in it, there are perfectly good buses... short ones." Not really fair, I know. (I'm good at the personal guilt.) How can SUVs win in this weather? On the one hand, they're built for getting through it, so why the hell are they dragging ass? On the other, they're built for getting through it, so why ride MY slip-sliding-sedan ass -- gimme a break, gas guzzler!

See? They can't win. I can't win. Bear Grylls can't win (read about he and his crew faking their "authentic" survival shoots here: investigation). The only victor in all this is Mother Nature, who laughs at the trenches I dig to allow nonexistant walkers a place to cool their heels, and happily heaps on the wet and heavy stuff when the piles around my mailbox are approaching shoulder height (youch, says my back), then turns around and hits us with 45 degrees hours after my latest feat of shoveling, producing fog and receding piles.

Ah, but anyway -- it's a great workout, right? If you pull something major, and end up in traction for all of February, take heart: that scapegoat Groundhog says we won't see sun until March, anyway.

The view from our driveway Friday, half done:

This May Be Getting Out of Hand

More Books to Burn a Hole in my Wallet

Just slalomed home from another trek to the bookstore.

Went out specifically to buy books for my classes; came back with a bag a bit heavier than planned.

Ah, hell. I don't feel guilty, precisely. Just aware that I'm fairly stocked up for now. At least on new books. They'll eat the lining right out of the old wallet if you're not watching. And by you, I mean me. My sin, however venial.

Anyway, here's today's haul:

Sons and Lovers, by D.H. Lawrence

The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982

Both picked up for classes. The Lawrence for Advanced Fiction; Oates's journal for Dreams & Fiction Writing. Haven't read much Lawrence, so I'm into that, especially since it comes in place of reading Lolita for the fifth time. (Nothing against Vladdy the Great; you can't beat the "killer prose style" of maybe my favorite book; but stack of haven't-reads is growing tipsy on the shelves here, might as well dive in.) You can't swing a cat in a bookstore without hitting Oates. (I know, Katie: but why would you swing a cat?) And her journal is a great example of how that form feeds process. Hell, is process.

The Best American Short Stories 2007

Tales from Margaritaville, by Jimmy Buffett

What can I say? Borders, you have foiled me again with your Buy 1, Get 1 Half Price table. I probably own too many Best American collections for my own good, but they're always a great read. Katrina Kennison, when she was series editor, probably populated a quarter of my bookshelves with her picks for the annual: Rick Bass, Robert Olen Butler, Sherman Alexie, Corey Doctorow, Alice Munro, Philip Roth are among those I read first in these pages. And I slowed down long enough at the bargain dumps to see Stephen King guest-edited this year's edition -- pretty interesting -- and that after 16 years, Kennison had moved on in favor of Heidi Pitlor. All right. The Buffett book was suggested by my Parrot Head bro, Jake. And it was half price. So I took the bait. Short stories by the Bard of Key West? Well, it ought to be a good antidote, to say the least, for Munro and Oates.

Something Wicked This Way Comes

The Martian Chronicles

Dandelion Wine

All by Ray Bradbury, natch. I'd only intended to come home with Martian Chronicles, but... . These are the books I read and reread as a kid, checked out over and over from the library. It's a shame Borders didn't stock better, hardback editions, because for keepsakes like these, I would have bought them. But I've always been more about substance than style when it comes to stocking my shelves (hence the trail of broken spines marking my favorites), and I'm looking forward much more to owning these editions and having them at my fingertips whenever I want than helping the Borders cashier make like a Vegas day-tripper dinging the bell in slot row. When you can come home with three Bradbury classics for around twenty bucks, there's no reason to moan.

Not a bad day's haul, all in all.

We got a Live One Here...

... literally. And fortunately for him.

I was humming along on the treadmill this morning -- not literally humming, mind you, but approximating that humming in the sizzle and burn in my thighs as the belt rolled along about 4.3 mph -- trying to block out the conversations of the women elbowing along in place next to me, talking about how their husbands are the ones who usually "initiate things" and how when they lose the next 14 lbs. maybe they'd be the ones to "get things going," if you know what I mean, when the whole tiring sharade was pleasantly interrputed.

A sweaty slab of a guy, we'll call him Hank, happily wheezing, and sweating there in place beneath the glow of Oprah and Regis broadcast on the health club televisions, blahd something de-blah de-blah blah blah, and the women stopped chirping, and grinned at him familiarly, and I paused in turning the page of the book (in this case, The Name of the World, by Denis Johnson) I cart around protectively in these situations, and I listened for a moment.

He said:

"Guy I know says he keeps fit doing one sit-up a day. (The women were positively rapturous in their attention at this point.) Half in the morning, when he gets out of bed; the other half at night, when he goes to sleep."

The women broke up laughing; I smirked my sort-of puzzled smirk; and Hank ambled down the line, wheezing and sweating.

Well, if that's what it takes to remind you the old heart muscle is still clenching, the blood's still coursing and the body still bends, well, OK.

I'd much rather get myself all worked up in a fierce froth and pile crunches atop running atop a healthy bedtime tussle atop the large bowl of tortilla soup iced by the extra cupcake besides and then hit the pillow in a pleasant snore only vaguely undercut by remorse and then wake to the alarm bell to do it all again.

But I do know from now on I'll give myself credit for at least one sit-up. Nice to know that if you just make it through the day breathing you can count yourself in the plus column on that.