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.

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.

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.

Who Do You Write For?

AUDIENCE

Who do you write for?

(and you are writing for somebody, aren't you?)

"Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I'll tell you a story."

--- F. Scott Fitzgerald

In my writing, I find audience to be such a fundamental motivator of process and fuel for voice, I don't know how anyone could write seriously without it. Or a sense of it.

Audience gets your hand moving, your fingers twirling. "What do you have to say?" is very closely entwined with "who are you saying it to?" It very much guides "how do you want to say it?"

Reading William Zinsser, like, the first week in my undergrad Journalism I course, helped me identify something I'd always instinctively guessed about audience: the stories you choose to tell, the words you pluck from the ether to tell them, are very much influenced by the imaginary people just off the page you're addressing. Or in the case of a high school Speech class, where everything written is read aloud that period, or the following day, or later that week, you're writing for your very real classmates, and the teacher, an audience of your peers, essentially.

Tickling my teacher and my classmates was always fuel for process, got me bending over the paper and going for the jugular, as it were. At the newspaper, and in my fiction, the audience is broader, perhaps, but I still aim for that sophisticated reader with a sense of humor and heart. Maybe that reflects me, but it's a bit different than writing to myself. It's presenting myself, as I am, in a persuasive way to bring people around to my way of viewing the world. It's a bit of voyeurism, of channeling another's thoughts, made easy by the lyrical voice that carries them there. At least that's how I see it. It's making love, in a way: swapping sweat, and fluids, and intense groans and glances, without mussing the bed so much.

An obstacle I've had to identify and work to get around in teaching is the idea of me as audience. Of course, I am a part of my students' audience. I see and hear how their stories are constructed in our sessions, and I read the drafts and rewrites they turn in. But are they writing for me, to me? I hope not. Because there I see the danger of writing to meet their idea of an ideal they think I'm looking for, or worse, to fulfill the assignment and just do the work for the exercise's sake.

Sure, sometimes you have to do that. But if in the process of doing the work you're not awakening something deeper, something more focused, something more tangible and living from the center of you that yearns to write, needs to write, then we really are just killing time in the cubicle, and in the classroom, and the prospect of students gaining something deeper from the writing, or learning something useful from their process, is cut off from the start.

Engagement, right? That's what an audience, or an idea of an audience in the writing process, brings to what's on the page. It's a mutual gut check: if the writer is invested in the material, we at least give them the benefit of the doubt and read on. If not, here comes the blessing and curse of the medium being so portable, able to held in the hands – it can always be put down, cast aside.

We're looking for the compelling story, the one that's never been told, or told in this way, before. Unless the writer has lived it, breathed it, smelled it, tasted it – or seen and believed in it enough to bring forth a singular vision – what the sophisticated reader is getting is merely a facsimile of experience. (Which all writing is, of a fashion, though we sophisticated readers demand that it stand up and dance a jig or take a bullet and writhe on the floor a bit for us. So damn picky, readers.)

Voice, and its awareness of audience, really sells a writer's commitment to the story, and how well we are engaged as readers. It doesn't have to be some mystical, fleeting thing. It's about identifying the material that is working, reading it aloud, directing and placing the demand on students to notice and comment on what is working in their writing, and to talk about why, and then to carry forth those insights in active rewrites of the material, going for and working toward an ever-more sustained passage of effective, engaging writing. To know who you write for, to feel around for the words and images and places and sights that get the story to where it is directed and most effectively get across what you have to say.

Getting Linked for Literature

When I decided to jump the track of my journalism career and veer into the uncertain world of freelance writing, I was blessed to have an arsenal stocked with weapons and talismans that made life on the outside a little less shadowy.

Foremost, my wonderful wife, who is also a writer, understands me and my passion and supports what I do. I cannot stress enough how important this is.

Second, my "chops" were in pretty good order, since as a newspaper reporter, and a prolific one at that, I wrote every day. When I wasn't writing, I was interviewing, or laying the groundwork for writing. And when I wasn't doing either, I was dreaming about doing both. I had a nice foundation of six years eating, breathing and sleeping writing.

Along with the chops came discipline. I knew the only way to get a story out was to get it out on the page.

Fourth -- and I didn't mean when I started this blog for it to be so ordered -- I had a soft place to land when I left the Naperville Sun. I was already well into a book project, and I had made up my mind to apply to MFA programs in order to find myself a new community of writers and contacts (very important) and continue honing my craft. I also want to teach. Now, I hadn't been accepted to Columbia when I handed in my resignation, but I had made up my mind that no matter what, I was going to go for it, I would write my way through whatever came up. OK.

The good news for me is that it's work out so far. Oh, I still lie awake some nights gnashing my teeth over money, fretting over the impracticality of leaving a career where I was solidly contributing and getting immediate gratification for an industry where progress is solitary and slow. But that conviction remains: I will write my way through whatever comes up. And now that I'm nestled into my fourth semester of grad school, with my nonfiction book just out, and a few freelance credits to my name, I'm looking forward to what's next. And taking stock of what I know -- and can share.

This is all a lengthy preamble to spotlighting a few of the reasons I'm blogging in earnest this year. The literary reasons, anyway. At school, I have ample opportunity to swap contacts, share publishing stories (many of which, inevitably, are about rejection), get turned on to tips and secrets, compare notes on process and find that crucial audience of peers that can help lead you to breakthroughs in your craft. As I pointed out above, I was well on the way to finding these thigs for myself months before my first semester in the MFA program. I knew I couldn't thrive without them. Much of writing is lonely, but you can't hope to succeed at it without the (at times painfully) public side: submitting your work, querying agents and publishers, contacting the media (from the other side now, for me), interacting with readers, networking, reading your work aloud in public (for some of us, A THRILL; for others, an invitation to their own beheading).

Early on, though I made it my mission to write every day, no excuses, when the writing wound down I also made sure to put in some productive time researching the business. I buried my nose and affixed a forest of Post-Its to market guides like Writer's Market and Jeff Herman's Guide to Publishers, Editors & Literary Agents, and agent tomes like Betsy Lerner's The Forest for the Trees. I eyeballed the fine print at the front of story collections, noting the journals where my favorite authors were published, as well as where Best Of... compilations found their stories. I also did a great deal of research online, fattening my Favorites menu with book publishers, agents, journals to submit to, web sites of writers I love, useful blogs, places for industry news and legal advice -- anything relevant, I socked away.

Getting this blog up and running, partly due to my publisher's beginning blogs on the book biz from a publisher's perspective and insider tips on book marketing, reminded me that all the links populating my own, personal bandwidth could also benefit YOU. At school, we get our fill of this stuff, and thankfully. But even my classmates have connections and insights that I don't have; any chance we get, we mine each other. Well, now a lot of the stuff I have, I've laid out here, like a Thanksgiving spread you're welcome to belly up to: dig on in!

This morning, I expanded my "For Writers" list into four categories: agents, industry news & advice, other writers, and submitting. This is by no means an original or comprehensive set up. Many of these links will lead you to sites and blogs that have a wealth of other information, and that's by design. This collection represents a chunk of what I have and use at the moment -- and a lot of my loosely-organized system depends on my "site hopping", following one fruitful contact to get me to the next, and the next, and so on.

So, about the lists:

The Agents category mostly contains sites where agents blog. These are the ones I've been reading for a year or more now. They're windows into the publishing world. Agents blog about query letters, and manuscript reading, and sales, and the way they do their business. Very useful to know for writers attempting to break in. And at the top of the list is a useful place to start -- or even finish -- your search for representation. Who knows how long AgentQuery will be free? Check it out!

The news and advice list is pretty self-explanatory and could have been twice as long. Of particular use to me are the legal advice sites: I've linked right to the pages I draw stuff from. For Chicago writers in a pinch or a jam, Lawyers for the Creative Arts offers pro bono services.

The Other Writers list could also be longer, obviously. These are a few of my faves, many of whom, like T.C. Boyle and John McNally and Jim Butcher and Marcus Sakey, blog about the biz and share their own tales of publishing and offer insights into process. I may in the future link to some of my colleagues here -- up-and-coming writers you should put on your radar screen.

Lastly, because it's so long (and hardly complete), is a list of journals you might want to submit to, or indexes of the same. Some I've tried knocking at, others I'll get to, others are the dreams we should all keep dreaming. As with any, make sure you familiarize yourself with what they publish before sending your stuff on over. The clot of query letters is thick enough with uninformed writers gumming up the works. There's also a link in this section to The Unsung Critic, who champions the cause of beginning writers (particularly screenwriters): he (or she) reads manuscripts and writes a review on the site. If that's your bag, baby, crinkle it.

Feel free to drop me a comment or a line with your experience following these links or surfing the waters of rejection/acceptance. And in all cases, GOOD LUCK!