Sunday, January 23, 2011

Losing My Editing Cherry

College. Senior year. First and last writing class. I was a virgin as a writer, having been doing it only a little more than a year, and just in private. Never showed my work to anyone. A classmate who would go on to be a screenwriter and film director convinced me to try a writing class with him. I was scared and yet confident everyone would finally find out just how good I was and how bright my future would be. I was an undiscovered young Hemingway. Or probably more of an F. Scott Fitzgerald kid. I had immersed myself in all things Fitzgerald for my junior year, and was drunk on words, long, flowing rhythmic sentences and fat paragraphs.

Our teacher was a Harvard man who wrote and published poetry, lived in New York’s West Village and rode his motorcycle into New Jersey to teach at Rutgers University. He had the most eloquent way of speaking, and of course that Haa-vard accent, full of pregnant meaning.  He spoke in a dry, flat way, showing no emotion. I guess he thought his words would stir up passion on their own, and usually they did. Fred Seidel was a literary insider with the clubby Partisan Review, then the premier New York magazine for elite writers. All in all, a very intimidating guy for a 21-year-old wannabe who grew up blue collar in a four-room apartment and was a high school jock.

Weather permitting, we would hold the class outdoors on the grass of Rutgers’ 18th Century Queen’s College campus, with its ancient, ivy colored stone buildings. Each of us had to write something, a story, poem, whatever you fancied. First you would submit your work to Mr. Seidel and later meet privately with him. After that you read for the class to comment on.

I do not remember what my short story was about, except that it had lush sentences exploding with metaphor. I thought it was brilliant. When the time came for my sit-down with our poet emeritus, I was expecting a coronation. I walked into his office brimming with confidence, full of myself. I would leave an hour later a very different young man, and would learn a lesson that stayed with me the rest of my writing life.

Mr. Seidel’s trademark was brilliantly insightful and brutally honest summations of students work. I remember one class in particular in which this poor guy read his absolutely dreadful poetry for us. At the end of his reading, everybody was silent. Nobody knew what to say that wouldn’t drive the poet to tears. Mr. Seidel spoke for us. He started by saying the poems would be perfect for Hallmark greeting cards. The young poet actually smiled, thinking that as a compliment.  Then Mr. S. dropped his bomb: “Your work reads like a compendium of dead metaphor.” The poet left the class crushed, and undoubtedly ended up as an insurance salesman or accountant.

My moment came, my private audience with the Literary God. For one brutally ugly hour Mr. Seidel took my story virtually line by line, word by word, and blistered the bloated and flamboyant images in my words. He shredded the writing. I mean, totally, unequivocally shredded it!  I felt like my heart had been cut out with a steak knife, my brain seared with pain. At the end he gave me my one and only compliment on the piece, sort of. He said: “Somewhere in here there’s a good story lurking, but you haven’t written it.”

I will remember until the day I die the words I said to myself as I walked out of that classroom carrying the pages of my story, which looked like a road map of red lines, most of them cross outs and stinging commentary in the margins. My eyes were wet, the tears flowing down my cheeks. But at the same time I was angry, absolutely furiously angry. Not at Mr. Seidel but me! And I said to myself: “NOBODY…will EVER do that to me again!!!”

From that day on I edited and shredded my own stories over and over until they were ready to be read. I became a better writer for my bitter and humiliating experience. Even today, many years later, whenever I think I have finished something I ask myself, “What would Mr. Seidel say about this?” I would know in an instant exactly what his critique would be, and so I dove back in and continued editing…and editing...

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” – The Great Gatsby

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Welcome to the Void


January 18

I called this blog “Visions in the Void” because that is what it is like trying to write a novel, especially the first draft. No matter how well you wrote yesterday, today the screen is blank, waiting like a hungry beast for you to feed it. That is the Void. Often I will sit at the computer and stare off for long stretches into the Void, waiting for ideas to come. I have no clue where they come from. I often think I am merely a channel for something out there in that Void. I take from it and give it structure. I dread and love the Void at the same time.

When I am intensely involved in the writing of a book, it is there with me all day and night, inhabiting me. I get messages from the Void in the shower and often when I first open my eyes in bed. The bed visions are the weirdest, because I am not even thinking about the novel when I wake up. Adjustments to scenes, errors of logic, ideas for new scenes all come in a flash. That stuns me and makes me humble.

Many times when I edit my books I say to myself, “How did you think of that?” Unlike memories in your personal life, ideas/visions cannot be placed in time, as say a high school prom can. They have no past, no future, they just exist in the moment they come. Very strange, and yet very beautiful, larger than me, more inspired and important than Me.

My method of writing has evolved over the years. In the beginning I did very long outlines, often scene by scene structuring. The weakness in that system is you become locked into a plot/structure too early, and your characters have no room to expand and act on their own.

Then one day I read an interview with one of my favorite genre writers, Michael Connelly. I was stunned to learn he did not do elaborate prep work for a novel. He knew who the characters where, what the bare bones story was and then just sat down and wrote.

So I tried it. Structure came organically. The characters would tell me after each scene I wrote what had to come next. It was their book. I listened to them because they were living it, not me. The most planning I do is to write out full biographies of my characters, from birth to the present. Good actors always do that. A character did not begin in the present. He came from a history of experiences and memories. Until you know what they’ve been through, you cannot write about them with any authority in the present. Actors call these histories sense memories. For example, if my character bio says he had an authoritarian father, then I can predictably say he will dislike someone like that when he encounters them in a scene.

Most writers say the fun in writing is the writing, then the grind begins: the editing. I LOVE editing and rewrites. The pressure you felt in the first draft when you are constantly faced with the Void is gone. You have something down on page. Now the fun is in making it better. I love watching my book grow and evolve over the course of multiple drafts, sort of like having a child and watching them over the years turn into adults.

The key to editing is focus, focus and more focus. The worst thing you can do is fall in love with your words and get caught up in the rhythmic flow of sentences. What I do is read in a form of slow motion, like in cinema. In slow motion every sentence, every word is there for you, and in this state of mind you see all kinds of changes that can be made. The trick in achieving this sense of reading in slow motion is repetitive drafts. The more drafts I do, the more detached I get, to the point where I don’t know who wrote the book, my job is just to edit this person’s work.

Must go back to my book now. Welcome to the Void. Feel right at home. More in the future...