A Hunger for Revisions

This morning in my writing group I heard a chapter read aloud from a novel-in-progress. I've heard the chapter at least twice before, maybe 3-4 times in all, and am familiar enough with it that I noticed whole new sections. In earlier iterations, the entire chapter was 23-25 pages, and the group had advised the author that her last 10-12 pages needed the most work. This morning, before she read, she apologized for ignoring our advice and said that she'd gotten enmeshed in the first 10 or so pages instead of working on the latter half. Those pages had grown to 20 during this frantic revision, which took place over the past week and ended when she went to bed last night. The writing was confident, passionate, rich in detail with gripping dialogue. The things she'd chosen to expand did need expanding, which somewhat startled all of us. Characters that were shadowy before are fully fleshed. Scenes she'd teased us with are deepened and broadened, enriched with details of setting, character, plot. Now the 20 pages are a stand-alone chapter. The writer is already planning her next step, which is to work on what had been the second half of the chapter and expand it into a separate piece.

I found myself feeling envious of the writer. Not the sort of envy that comes from a feeling of less-than. I know I'm a talented and accomplished writer. But I felt heartsick that I didn't have anything to return home to...this time I made a note: "I wish I had something written so I could work on a revision--go into it with my whole hands, like kneading dough." That feeling stayed with me all afternoon, and I'm hoping it's the prelude to a return to true, real writing, not the scattered pages I've produced over the past year: meandering story lines, interesting but not compelling characters, an ambivalence about the 'when' of things, a lack of enthusiasm about research (which I usually love), and no direction whatsoever. Still, the few pages linger and whisper to me at the oddest times, so something richer and deeper is in them than I'm seeing right now. Can hardly believe that after all these years I'm still freaked-out by the blank screen, am still hearing the whispered "that's shit" from the demon on my shoulder. [Wonder if the s-word will make it by the blog police. I gave up heavy cursing many years ago, feeling challenged as a writer to find better words than the George Carlin famous seven. But the s-word still makes its conniving way into my speech and thoughts from time to time. As well it should.]

I learned something today that I most likely already knew, buried deep in my unconscious...I cherish the phase of writing that produces such chapters as I heard today. I've done such revisions myself, many times. The way I write is like Ray Bradbury once described: "I throw up in the morning and clean up in the afternoon." My first writing generally suffers from too-much-ness. My first edits cut away to the truth. Then comes that delicious time when I wallow in what my characters have to say, taking my hands from the keyboard to ramble through my thesaurus and "The Synonym Finder," a favorite tool. I recline in my desk chair and think about what the character's thinking about, then snap back to the keyboard. I long for that.

I do feel better having written this.

The wider darkness

From my office window I'm watching winter come in. The onset of daylight savings time has widened the dark hours in my day (I'm a late riser, so I don't get the benefit of more morning daylight, and dusk creeps in an hour earlier). My window now stays uncovered most of the day so that I can get as much light as possible.

A section of woodland--44 acres--has been denuded for a housing development a quarter of a mile from the back corner of our lot. I've found myself living in fear about new traffic patterns that would turn our quiet street into a thoroughfare...I stand at my kitchen sink and watch joggers, mothers pushing baby carriages and strollers, neighborhood cats crossing. The mailman. UPS & Fedex delivery people who know they can leave a package on our porch if our neighbors aren't home. Folks standing in the middle of the street chatting. Children clattering by on skateboards. Around the corner a basketball hoop overhangs the street and locals know to watch for kids gathered beneath the hoop. The denizens of these quiet streets are rich in neighborhood. If the access to the development is anywhere but the highway, the increase in traffic by our house will be huge.

Even more disturbing is the animal life that's been driven from the 44 acres of forest that were destroyed. I saw 8 deer in our backyard last evening. Possums. Woodchucks, squirrels, the occasional chipmunk, even beavers (there's a wetland directly behind us, adjacent to the new development).

I've been rationalizing...people need places to live, but housing doesn't seem as driving a force behind this new development as money. And I question whether expansion of our small town is a good thing.

What I know for certain, no matter the outcome, is that worry/fear keeps me from writing, and that any time I'm worried, I'm not living in the moment and am, in fact, messing up the present with concerns about the future.

Still not writing much, and am not even thinking much about writing. Often when I'm not actually creating, I'm thinking along the liines of plot, characters, human behavior, settings. But right now all my voices are quiet, and that feels ominous. I don't think this is connected to the onset of winter and shorter daylight hours. Some of my best writing has been in the dead of winter. But because these posts have dwelled on the theme of darkness, maybe it's something I need to ponder.

Saturday a great line (or so I thought at the time) occurred to me as I was getting out of the car in our driveway. I thought, "I'll write that down as soon as I get inside." Then my husband and I got into a conversation, I went out to get the mail, the phone rang...the line was lost. In THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING, Joan Didion tells us how she always carries notepads for any stray thoughts that might bear fruit later. I know many writers claim to do that, but I wonder how many actually do. The times I've tried that, I wind up with scraps of paper and odd thoughts that I feel I should transfer from the scraps to a file on my computer, but somehow never do. I've thought of creating a "stuff" file with a shortcut on the desktop of my computer for easy access, but haven't done it. Such mental meanderings about this conundrum always leave me thinking that I don't take myself seriously as a writer.

Would love feedback from others, those who take notes and those who don't.

Writing into a black hole...

Hmmm...I guess it's okay to create another post on my own post. And since there are no comments, I reckon I'm writing into a black hole rather than from one.

The comments and post have loosened the writing muscles, and I want to keep exercising them. So I'll just have at it...if anyone comments, that's good.

Went to swim this afternoon, and reconnected with a casual friend who sometimes works the front desk at the gym. Her 74-year-old mother died a couple of weeks ago, and I didn't know because I've been out of town so much in the past 10 weeks, since my daughter was diagnosed with breast cancer. Talking with my friend about her mother made me realize how out-of-it I've been. Three gorgeous fall days have passed with me hardly leaving the house...not depression so much as a burst of a need to reorganize my office--maybe on the heels of having written a guest column in southernauthors.blogspot.com in which I talked a lot about my office. But the reorganizing also included our bedroom and living room, and after several days of hectic activity, I realized I was going through what I almost always do when there's been a crisis: try to straighten up what parts of my life I can, because I have no control over the enormous other things, eg, breast cancer. When I finally did go out this afternoon, I was hit with joy for the fall that is exploding all around me, in spite of the hideous drought and dire predictions of a colorless autumn.

Our cross-the-street neighbors have a sugar maple I can see from my kitchen window, and every October I'm surprised to see its glorious red-orange-yellow, having forgotten the starring roll it plays before it's naked for winter. I stood, stunned, beside my car, realizing how inwardly directed I've been in my flurry of moving furniture. Cleaning bookcases. Throwing away. Giving away. Borrowing my son's strong back to move the larger pieces. And occasionally returning to the keyboard.

There's a story roaming my brain and I'm not quite ready to commit it to e-paper, though now I'm convinced it begins in the fall, during a storm, in the full moon, hospital labor and delivery swamped (more from the storm than the moon). One of the mothers is a character from an earlier book.

I was about to write of character, plot, setting...then I realized I didn't want to do that for fear someone else would use my ideas...and here I am writing into a void. Funny! More later.

Writing from the Dark

The dark maze between…

...completion of a novel and publication. I finished my novel in December, 2005. On January 13, 2006 (my grandson's thirteenth birthday), I began a shotgun approach to finding an agent. Got lucky (providence does play a role in such things), and signed with a great agency in June. My agent (I got such a thrill when I first said that), using the same shotgun technique, sent my manuscript to six publishers...the rejections began to accumulate, but each one was framed in language that titillated and sucked me into believing an acceptance was just around the corner: "…persuasively written and deeply feeling…this is simply too literary for our list…a talented, accomplished writer…if the author had published previously or had a platform…a wonderfully gracious and lyrical writer…even a few years ago, I would have taken it quite seriously…a touching and well-written novel…but in today’s climate of fiction publishing…." Ah, well.

What happened next surprised and dismayed me--a total block. I haven't written much since the rejections began rolling in, and am hoping that blogging about this will get me over it. My mentor/teacher/friend--a fine novelist who’s been a midwife to the birth of over a dozen published books, and with whom I’ve been working for twenty years—said I wasn’t blocked but just going through a fallow period. So I looked up "fallow": dormant, quiescent, hibernating...a field waiting for seed. Whatever I call it, my natural story-telling voice has laryngitis, and I must quit straining it, wait out the quiet.

When I titled this blog "the dark maze between..." I had to resist what I really wanted to call it: "Ruminations from a Black Hole," which is what I'm feeling these days. But talk about negative...

My mentor also said that she’d never seen it fail, that writers almost always go through a spell of slumbering when a novel is finished. There are exceptions. I’ll cite two extremes--Stephen King, who writes 363 days a year, taking off for Christmas and the opening day of the baseball season, and Herman Melville, who was inactive for almost twenty years after MOBY DICK and before BILLY BUDD, although he did publish poems during his fallow period.

A few months after the first rejections of my novel rolled in (there’ve been about fifteen in all), I was so down emotionally that I sought counseling; a wise psychiatrist helped me see that I wasn’t so much depressed as I was in mourning over the completion of a project that had consumed me for eighteen years. Again, just changing the label of my mood from depression to mourning made all the difference. I took his advice and burned a copy of the manuscript in a ritualistic manner, breathing in some of the smoke to inspire me to write another, and wafting some of it northward, hoping a few molecules would make it to New York publishers.

Okay, that’s it for today…writing this has been therapeutic, and I’d love to hear from any other writers who’re in the doldrums or in the morass of waiting, waiting, waiting…