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.

Awesome and Icky

“Nobody ever gave me the answer I wanted. Nobody ever said, ‘Oh, so beautiful.’” ––Ottessa Moshfegh “Malibu”

In the last few months, I’ve read Sheila Heti’s novel How Should a Person Be? and three stories by Ottessa Moshfegh. Each amazed and left me a little terrified. No one, I think, will ever accuse Moshfegh’s or Heti’s work of being merely pretty––a criticism I sometimes level at my own prose.

Moshfegh’s short stories challenge because her characters display an incapacity for human connection and inability to treat others kindly. Heti, on the other hand, exposes a sense of writerly ambition so naked I cringe even as her willingness to express it openly delights the ambitious writer within me.

Both women appear to write fearlessly, and no delicate sensibilities will remain un-stung by their stories. Is this a generational shift? Have all the old questions about what is and what is not possible for “lady writers” suddenly been resolved?

When I read Moshfegh’s short stories “Malibu,” “BetteringMyself,” and “Disgust,” or Heti’s novel, I sense an entire generation of women writers no longer stuck pondering: Will the boys like us? Is this something I’m allowed to say?  Is this or that narrative point-of-view one from which I’ve been rightfully denied?

For example, the male protagonist of “Malibu” picks his pimples, sticks his fingers down his throat to vomit, and describes his uncle with a fixed and brutal gaze: “[H]e had a colostomy bag he didn’t care for properly. He used a lot of peach-scented air freshener around the home to cover the smell.”

For me, such images lend Moshfegh’s work an outsize authority. But why? Are ugly images naturally more serious? Do they imply greater truth than mere beauty? In Moshfegh’s case, the force and precision in her work, in part created through its coldness, lends the work an appearance of brutal, even courageous, honesty.

In “Disgust,” for example there is Mr. Wu. He is perhaps an unexpected protagonist for a woman writing in the Unites States as he lives in rural China. In order to prepare himself for a meeting with a woman he claims to love, he treats a teenage prostitute roughly by shoving his shit-smelling fingers in her mouth. Even so, I held a terrible empathy for Mr. Wu as well as a sense of awe for the places Moshfegh is willing to take her stories.

How different than your “average lady writers” of days gone by––Virginia Woolf, for example, with her bouquets of fresh flowers, light-filled canvases, sun dappled coast lines, and death. Of course, it would be impossible not to appreciate Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, but I sometimes experience Woolf’s work as taking permission for its existence and ambitions through its loveliness and restraint.

On the other hand, is Moshfegh’s colostomy bag more “true” than Woolf’s roses?

Is Heti’s character “Sheila” inherently compelling because she displays all her ambitions and shame? For example when fictional Sheila says, “Now that I had no hope of finding my soul by staying where I was, I wanted to take a different route to the one thing that would justify the ugliness inside me: I would become Important.” For me, such sentiments gain extra-literary force because we, especially we women, are taught to hide our craving and ambition.

I once read in a philosophical text that the problem with language is we use the same grammar to say true as well as untrue things. Nothing in the arrangement of our words reveals falsity. 

Does that mean if we replaced Moshfegh’s colostomy bags, pimples, and shit-smelling fingers rammed in the mouths of prostitutes with roses, sunshine, and moonlit landscapes her sentences would reveal a structure as beautiful and precious as more familiar literary work? If Heti’s fictional Sheila were more decorous in expressing her aesthetic ambitions, would the prose be more or less dynamic?

Is a sentence more or less literary because it contains beauty? For me the ugly is much more surprising, especially when it arises from women.

For eons, women have been taught to contain themselves. It seems these writers refuse that mandate. Are they not then radicals, radicals of unkind prose, a prose that stabs at self and other with equal strength?

How lucky I am to live and write during a time when such questions are being generated by work this loud and masterful.