Part Two Revision Strategies: Writing without Readers

Part Two Revision Strategies: Writing without Readers

“And what is the main thing, we speak of beauty and good itself, and so in the case of all the things that we then set down as many, we turn about and set down in accord with a single form of each, believing that there is but one, and we call it ‘the being’ of each./That’s true./And we say that the many beautiful things and the rest are visible but not intelligible, while the forms are intelligible but not visible …. Then let’s not be surprised if the carpenter’s bed, too, turns out to be a somewhat dark affair in comparison to the true one.”

––Plato Republic

For many writers enrolled in beginning composition courses, texts are only a site for right and wrong. In their minds, “naturally” talented authors write in perfect drafts. Plus, there is seemingly no such thing as a reader separate from the writer, a reader who has her own needs and desires that might be in opposition to the writer’s expressive strategies.

For example, my students sometimes experience their texts as being made of concrete. Revision, if it exists at all is meant only for removing errors. Everything else about the text is immutable and fixed as a prison wall.

I need them (and myself) to experience our drafts as being made of clay, ready to be wetted, reworked, and shaped into new and infinite forms. Texts can become sites for discovery, experimentation, and play. Something that can only happen if we learn to smash, manipulate, expand, and refine them with curiosity and joy.

For years, I thought and spoke about revision as being made up of four possible actions and two possible entry points. This helped me rework my own writing and made the revision process real for my students, something I covered in an earlier post (“Infinite Revision”).

In setting forth the four actions (adding, subtracting, moving, or replacing) I hoped to create simple ways of entering an abstract endeavor. Through revision as play, I hoped we could offer our readers freshness, surprise, and a less rigid more authentic voice that arose from delight not rigidity.

Until recently, the goal of revision for me was the reader’s on-going interest, but as I explored in last week’s post perhaps the reader’s presence dims rather than illuminates the writer’s ultimate purpose.

It wasn’t until I heard the celebrated author Ottessa Moshfegh name another possibility for revision, one that ignored readers and focused only on uncovering stories in their most illusive and ideal form that I realized my own approach to revision might benefit from further refinement.

Sometime after Moshfegh’s visit to my class, I was awarded a fellowship to the CatamaranLiterary Conference in Pebble Beach. There I worked with Scott Hutchins author of the novel A Working Theory of Love. It was like being taught by Buddha. In his presence, the most anxiety provoking writing tasks––the beginning or ending of a piece, its revision or its goal––became achievable and charged with hope.

Like Moshfegh, when approaching revision discussions, Hutchins never explicitly spoke about readers’ needs. Thus my anxiety about a text’s ultimate purpose may have been eased. He did guide us, however, to closely explore the work of other writers in order to identify how and why we found them affecting.

Everything about Hutchins’ approach to writing and writers was gentle and encouraging. He offered frameworks that made revision seem like a fundamental, even enjoyable task. What he shared was immensely helpful, and in that spirit, I share it with you.

Hutchins draws from Stephen Koch’s excellent book the Modern Library Writer’s Workshop: A Guide to the Craft of Fiction. In it, Koch proposes that there are roughly three primary phases to the writing process.

Phase one is the initial draft, where a writer gathers clay and begins to sense the particular elements in what is being created. Phase two, by far the longest, is where a writer expands, improves, and builds on what the phase one brought forth. Phase three is a time of intense polishing. The writer “cleans” up and ideally reduces the text by about ten percent.

Hutchins also shared what he named as the key ideas he’s taken from Strunk and White’s classic The Elements of Style. Those ideas are: state things positively; avoid modifiers; use strong nouns and verbs; and pay attention to periodic structure, placing the most important words of each sentence just before its final punctuation.

In his workshop, we therefore spent time scanning our own texts and reworking them with these guidelines in mind. For example, “Don’t revise only thinking of your laziest reader” might become “Find entry points to revision other than reader reaction.”

Likewise, getting rid of modifiers means your sentences will become lively and direct, not “so,” “very,” or “too” lively and direct.

In general, the strongest nouns and verbs are those that are the most specific and sensory. So, whenever possible, use proper names and the most active form of any verb.

Finally, think about the impact and placement of each word in a sentence. Consider placing strong words at the end of your sentences where they will have the most impact. I wasn’t at all sorry to experience how such focused actions, generated such dynamic texts. Or as I should say, I gained confidence witnessing dynamic texts emerge from focused action.

Since then, what I’ve learned about revision is that like everything else about writing, one will never grow bored considering what it can do and how one might approach it. Revision is writing and to write is to revise; it is best to enter all of it with respect for its magnificent possibilities and compassion for the writer engaging in it.

Revision Strategies Part One: Writing without Readers

“Fuck the reader!”

––Ottessa Moshfegh

As a journalist working at small East Coast papers, I churned out three or four stories a day––a brutal tapping of the keyboard as I met one deadline after another. In the limited time I had to report stories, I rarely gained sufficient knowledge to achieve the punchy expert’s tone that newspaper writing demands. Nevertheless, I did what was expected of me. I disguised areas of impossible complexity behind a nonchalant rhetoric that pretended anything can be reduced to a headline, lead, and nut-graph, the nut-graph being the nugget we gave readers early on in a story in case they wanted to skip all the paragraphs that followed.

While writing, I imagined my readers sitting at home reviewing the day’s stories at the kitchen table or sitting on the porch with the family dog. “Town plans to fertilize farmers’ fields with treated sewage” might read a headline accompanying a story I’d reported only a few hours earlier. The water district manager assured me the practice was safe. Being an accurate reporter, I wrote what he’d said. But was it? Safe, I mean, to dump partially treated human waste on farmers’ fields, waste that had been treated with all kinds of toxins before being dumped?

In the short period of time I had for reporting and writing, it wasn’t possible for me to convey both what I’d been told and the air of doubt surrounding questions, that me, a non-expert, hadn’t even known to pose.

Instead I focused on writing a story that could be easily apprehended by my imagined reader, someone who I came to think of as stupid, lazy, and easily bored. Such a conception meant I wrote articles that were brief, to the point, and colorful only to the extent “color” made the story more interesting, not more complex. These, I thought, were the traits of a good writer.

In leaving journalism and coming to fiction, my imagined reader continued to loom over my pages. Only now, she was more open to complexity and nuance. She enjoyed the lyrical sentence, wanted to move past archetypes, and infer for herself any meaning stories might hold. I wrote and often harshly judged my own sentences with her in mind, finding courage to excise whole paragraphs. Her criticisms guided the action. Yes, she was tough, sometimes silencing the more playful, crude, less sophisticated writer that lived inside me, but who would I be without her?

If, during revision, I didn’t focus on her needs, my stories might collapse further into chaos, senselessness, and self-absorption. My imaginary reader demanded it. As a writer, I thought it best to serve only her needs.

Yes, during the initial writing stages––that opening period when I’m desperate just to get ideas on paper––I silenced her ranting; she was no good to me then. But later, when I tried to shape and solidify, it’s her I conjured. This imaginary creature was both bully and champion, and most of my writing life had been devoted to serving her. 

How exciting, then, to learn Ottessa Moshfegh, author of the highly praised novel Eileen and someone whose writing I much admire, writes and revises without regarding the reader at all.

A few years ago, Moshfegh visited a creative writing class I taught at Gavilan College (a rural community college at the southern end of the Silicon Valley). For weeks I’d been telling students that their workshop groups offered the important opportunity to hear from their readers. Then came Mosfegh who said she does her best to think of the reader not at all.

At first, I found it shocking that a writer as accomplished as she would dare revise in such a state of total self-possession. Though Moshfegh the person is warm, generous, and personable, something well demonstrated by her travelling far out of her way to work with a group of young and untested artists, Moshfegh the writer cares not at all about pleasing the reader or anyone else.

She explained she sets aside her ideas about readers’ needs in order to better serve the story itself, focusing all creative energies on apprehending it in its ideal form, revising only toward that illusive goal.

The term “ideal form” stood out to me in that particular moment. That same semester I’d been reading the Republic with a composition class. In it Plato poses his belief that everything we make––from spheres, to poems, to beds––is successful only to the extent that it matches that item in its most perfect incarnation, an incarnation we may never experience first-hand but one we can nevertheless sense exists.

Like Plato, Moshfegh seems to express that nothing should get in the way of the good, the good being whatever serves beauty and truth––not even imaginary readers.

I found the concept liberating, but a liberation that demanded great courage from writers. It takes courage to sense beyond the self into a more expansive place, a place where stories already exist without us, a place where the quality of our listening (not our will) determines how effectively our writing emerges.

As I now understand it, revision from this stance requires less anxious action from the writer. The goal is not to do but rather not to do too much. With a shift in focus from trying to please someone, who in the end, is impossible to know (after all the imaginary reader is a figment of imagination). One would instead maintain only what is precise and clear in a text, leaving everything else behind.

It requires one to write and rewrite in a state of trust, trust in a writer’s ability to intuit a story’s ideal state. This is akin to the old cliché about the sculptor who exposes the form as it already exists in the marble rather than creating it from a void. Or perhaps a better comparison is a doctor whose primary principle is “do no harm.”

I am grateful beyond all measure that Moshfegh articulated this radical stance, and someday I hope to experience writing from this graced and liberating position.

The Truth Exposed! Writing Behind Bars: Introducing the Women of San Benito County Jail

“Read this book! The strongest, bravest, and most brutally honest thoughts, feelings, and emotions ever put into writing by some of the most powerful, beautiful, and intelligent women locked behind walls.”

––From the cover of Ecstasy of the Streets: Agony of these Walls

An incarcerated person is someone whose shame has already been partially revealed. The public can look upon the inmate and draw all sorts of conclusions without knowing very much beyond the surface story of arrest.

The writers in Ecstasy of the Streets: Agony of these Walls have done their best to write their way through to a deeper understanding for themselves and their readers too. It isn’t always easy to say what one means, and the work in this semester’s collection walks the line between revelation and concealment as well as any I know.

The writer’s dilemma is that on some level we understand a reader wants authenticity (or at least its very good facsimile). We like to think we can recognize a piece of writing that represents a writer at her most authentic. It’s in the fresh way she uses language, the super specificity of her nouns, the way she exposes thoughts usually hidden from our curious and gleeful gaze. Whereas, the words a writer uses when masked, sound just like everything that’s already been written, and there’s no real risk to the writer in restating them once again.

Writers who are also incarcerated know their incarceration means they are among the most fetishized writers working. Who isn’t curious, at least a little, about women and men behind bars? Does one write toward these fetishistic conceptions or away from them? Does one try to appear authentic? Or does one simply try and tell the truth, a largely impossible challenge given how complicated truth can be and how vital hiding can seem to survival? This is the dilemma of any writer, somehow doubly amplified in jail. 

Rarely has one felt so vulnerable or had so many reasons to hide than as when one is in the state’s legal custody, though in any given lifetime only some of us end up experiencing the state's undeniable weight. Mostly you have to be poor.

Working with the writers in Hollister’s jail––located in one of the most impoverished counties in California––reveals a truth about the United States. Here addiction or mental illness combined with poverty leads to incarceration, and at the seed off all three there is often trauma.

Indeed, Center’s for DiseaseControl studies prove it. Childhood experiences of neglect, abuse, and violence often lead to adulthoods filled with poor health, addiction, and incarceration. In one sense then, we jail people for being traumatized as children.

By apparent, and tragic, and comic coincidence, what readers are most willing to engage in is a piece of writing infused with conflict, conflict promising to resolve its own tensions before the reader’s eyes with a balancing of surprise, truth, and inevitability. When writing from actual events the writer needs to appear unmasked and vulnerable. For this reason, and if the writer is willing, trauma can become a creative asset, for what is trauma if not conflict?

There is an implicit promise in the act of writing––what we bring to the page at last stands outside us. It may bring about connection with others, and holds the possibility of uplifting losses and pain. It’s as if what we put it on the page, may also put be put to rest.

On the other hand, it can also seem that shining light on our conflicts might destroy something essential in us, as if secrets were strengths, a feeling often underlined by fear that, anyway, our talents won’t match our truths.

Perhaps that is why there is so much tenderness in the jail classroom. The kindness students express toward each other sometimes leaves me in awe. They usually greet even the most marginalized among us with warmth and understanding.

By contrast, I often feel overwhelmed and frightened by people who lack resources necessary for survival or otherwise seem out of control in someway––the homeless, the addicted, the mentally ill.

The women of San Benito County Jail, however, make compassion look easy, and not only easy but also necessary. The well of tenderness they draw from seems somehow fundamental to survival itself––all of it––yours and mine included.

The work in Ecstasy of the Streets, Agony of these Walls contains their wise and caring words. Some of them returned to workshop, week after week. Others passed through before being released or sent to other facilities for longer stays, so the writing included in this book represents the work of people in transition in nearly every way. I hope within it, you find something to soothe whatever conflicts life has presented you.

To read the book, click here: Ecstasy of the Streets, Agony of these Walls (Writing from the Women of E & F Pod  Spring 2016)

Guided Tour: Along the Ruta Bolaño in Blanes, Girona, Spain (Journey in Six Parts)

“The visits to the chemist’s were constant and lengthy since in 1992 he was diagnosed with a serious liver illness. At the opening speech of the 1999 Fiesta Mayor, Bolaño made a special mention to the chemist’s assistants: To the chemist’s assistants of Oms Pharmacy, who always have a kind word for all.”

––Point 16 Ruta Bolaño

Part Six: The Living and Dead

My last night in Blanes, I finally stumbled across the folkdance performances. I’d been looking for the young dancers’ stage all week, but no one seemed to know where to find it. Even their guardians, who I saw in the bar couldn’t explain how to find the place.

And then suddenly, there it was in a hidden courtyard behind city hall, the very location where I believe Bolaño once opened a festival and thanked the pharmacy clerks, who filled his prescriptions and treated him well.

With intense uncomplicated pleasure, I enjoyed the performances. The Georgian youngsters flitted across the stage in staccato rhythms of precision and grace while their more elderly Turkish cousins seemed immune to such energetic displays. Instead, the Turks demonstrated the pleasures of a simple step repeated often, a step that could accommodate dancers of any age, infirmity, or ability.

Between numbers, I let my eyes wander across the courtyard and up one of the surrounding buildings where I spied a woman wearing a bra and underwear mopping her terrace and smoking a cigarette. In some ways, she appeared as the dancers’ opposite because they crossed the stage in intricately embroidered costumes with jewels sewn across sashes, while in other ways her simple movements mirrored almost exactly what was happening below. The gestures of the stage were like those of the farm––the planting of seed, the cutting of hay––a lot of it looked something like mopping.

Plus, beyond City Hall, the sun was setting, which lit up the square in the kind of golden light that makes landscape paintings seem like dreamscapes. From a certain angle, one could look upon all of it––the precious light, the woman on the terrace, the international gathering of dancers––and believe the world a happy and untroubled place.

Of course, this was weeks before refugees of nearby war and poverty took to the seas in increasingly alarming numbers. Many hoped to find themselves safely landed in Mediterranean towns just like this one.

Knowing what was to come and what had already happened, were some of the performances ridiculous? Sort of.

More than that, they were great. The troupe of Austrian men, in lederhosen, percussively slapping each other’s asses while their director played the accordion; the Armenian girls, in flowing chiffon skirts, lip-syncing romantic tunes in an over-the-top manner owing more to modern televised singing contests than folk dancing traditions of any nation; the young Macedonians lining up in a slow rendering of peasant courtship. All of it mesmerized, including the final performance of the night. A local troupe, who spun over the floor with olive oil bottles and bread loaves held high overhead, created a human pyramid in celebration of the Catalan nation.

Then again, one didn’t have to look too far to see examples of what might give rise to a Bolaño-like dark humor. A sharp-chinned man took the stage and was announced as the program’s international director. He had a villain’s oily hair and stood chest out, holding a clipboard in one hand the other balled into a fist; it looked like he wanted to threaten someone or at least demand higher fees from the parents.

During performances, he stood just off-stage, where half the audience saw him berate the show’s announcer, a woman with a newscaster’s honey-blonde hair and non-committal professional smile.

To me it seemed she was doing an excellent job, climbing the stairs between number in dangerously high heels to compliment even the blandest performers, announce the next group, and urge more applause from the crowd. None of it seemed to please the director.

While various children fluttered and spun on stage, he stood, inches from her face screaming long sentences at her forehead. But she was unflappable. Yes, she looked at him with dagger eyes, but otherwise offered no defense. It was as if she had an inner clock, telling her in exactly how many seconds she would be free of him, the stage dismantled, the chairs stacked, and performers and audience all returning to their homelands.

I couldn’t imagine Bolaño working the dancers into his fiction, but the off-stage humiliation––that seemed about right. However, despite the heavy presence of cynicism in his work, I find an almost intangible sense of human connection––its importance and beauty.

Along the Ruta and in my brief conversations with townspeople, I gathered that Blanes had, indeed, loved Bolaño. The town extended to him a welcome and helped him create a sense of home, one in which he felt comfortable enough to write some of the most powerful literature of our time.

That home didn’t depend on his talent nor literary fame; few, it seemed to me, knew him as a writer. He lived in Blanes and made friends because of a shared appreciation of drinking, and movies, and reading, and gaming, and families, simple things that anyone could enjoy.

The same uncomplicated bonds of kinship that imbue all of Bolaño’s stories (in spite of their depictions of violence, failure, loneliness, and injustice) highlight a belief in friendship’s importance and our common human purpose.

We can detect (a Bolaño verb if there ever was one) that he hadn’t given up on humanity. Everything truly awful about us––the way we ignore each other’s suffering or even go out of our way to cause it––is contained inside an equal possibility that we might just as easily extend mercy. In this way, Bolaño’s shout-out to the pharmacy clerks, who treated him kindly as he faced illness and death, is in alignment with his greatest literary works.

I on the other hand, will only ever know him through his writing, which provides an incomplete, likely false, picture of the man himself. Did I need to travel 6,000 miles to learn this? Apparently I did.

Once again, I know it to be true––the writer is not the person. The person who writes lands on the page part ghost, part channel, part remnant of overactive ego and will. From such fragments the reader begins a collaboration, which results in a living text made anew every time we open the book and read.