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.

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.

Read this Book!

“Without my parents here, it was a place of broken beauty.”—Reyna Grande The Distance Between Us: A Memoir

I came across TheDistance Between Us: A Memoir, by Reyna Grande, because I thought it might be a good choice for students in my community college reading classroom. Thus, upon opening it I sighed a bit, scanning its pages with a sense of duty and the weight of a teacher's analytical equipment.

Moments later, however, Grande's deceptively simple book broke through all that and started speaking directly to my heart. In fact, I spent its last forty pages in tears, followed by hours of reflection and mourning, trying to integrate all her book allowed me to see.

I learned how Grande’s parents’ decision to emigrate from Mexico affected the children they left at home. It helped me see immigration as part of a larger economic pattern and better understand its effect on both Mexican and US culture.

In this book, Grande is rigorously honest, reflecting a child's eye view in its early pages and in its latter ones an adult's courageous, and more nuanced, perspective of familial love and longing.

The Distance Between Us: A Memoir is about class, and the complexities of class, capturing what it feels like to be economically impoverished and the slender borders between poor and even poorer. This is an area rarely reflected in American prose, especially from the point of view of someone who has lived it this directly.

Once opened, The Distance Between Us: A Memoir, is nearly impossible to put down because Grande is very adept and harnessing narrative force. Her short chapters generally focus on small images and details that unfold onto larger truths. The images multiply over the course of several chapters in a manner that at first feels like a kaleidoscope. Only later do these images begin to form an ordered picture of an entire economic phenomenon, one that includes family violence, trauma, and abandonment as well as the power of education and the difficulties far too many have in accessing it.

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.