[Image: photograph, Rock of Ages #15, by Edward Burtynsky: “Active Section, E.L. Smith Quarry, Barre, Vermont, 1991.” Click image for larger view.]
This Paying Attention series of posts has recorded, intermittently, one or another aspect of writing (mostly) the novel which I’m now calling Seems to Fit. Every now and then I remember something important which I’ve forgotten, in the flush of creation (or re-creation); and I want to “bookmark” it, so to speak, lest I forget it again. (By “it,” I don’t mean a fact or a plot point. I mean something about the writing or the writing process itself.)
I’d laugh to think of these as “writing tips,” because I have no idea if they’re important to anyone else — or (if so) just how important. (And yes, I know — I often use the second person in them: You need to do this and that, and so on. Just talking to myself, see?)
But it’s been a while since the previous Paying Attention post, and I’ve almost completely shut off the tap of posts about Seems to Fit in general. In part, this stems from what’s going on in the book at the moment: each main character gets his or her own “final” chapter in preparation for the book’s gigantic next-to-last one; so in these chapters — which I’ve been working on for two-three months — I’m sort of saying good-bye to these people, in a book that I’ve lived with, one way or another, for twenty years. (Do not assume from that sentence, btw, that I’m bumping them off.) So to me it feels like an extended private moment, between them and me.
In a larger sense, though, my silence about Seems to Fit flows from something which I think has distinguished my blogging from my writing of fiction: carefulness.
As an example of the carefulness I’m speaking of, I’ll look at the most recent post (because it’s freshest in mind): yesterday’s whiskey river Fridays post.
I subscribe to whiskey river‘s RSS feed, so have read each recent post there by the time I get to work on my upcoming Friday post here. This week, I had a stray hour (+) at the end of the day on Wednesday, so started yesterday’s post then — zeroing in (by whatever mysterious process my subconscious uses) on Stephen Dunn’s poem, “Welcome,” and the quotation from Henry Miller. I added those to a new post — leaving the post title blank — then inserted the links back to whiskey river, and started researching the original sources so I could verify things like line breaks, spelling and punctuation, italicization, and so on.
On Thursday I started riffing on key words and phrases which suggested themselves to me. There were, let’s see… elements of surprise in the two samples, which suggested overturned expectation, or things overlooked…
Soon (well, all things are relative!) I had a handful of other passages, from sources other than whiskey river. I had a post title (which I kept tinkering with; originally, it looked nothing at all like “Seen Everything? Look Again”). whiskey river itself had posted the second Stephen Dunn quotation, which I loved. And I’d found an image to cap the post, that great Penrose-triangle sculpture.
So far, I myself hadn’t written squat. And the post was already way too long, even by my (haha) relaxed standard.
So I cut off a paragraph from one quotation. I tossed an entire poem. And I finally got the length down to about a thousand words. And then I set to writing my lone contribution: the note at the end, about Penrose triangles. I finished that on Thursday.
As it appears now, the note’s length (counting the last line, below the images) stands at around 150 words. But in its first form, when I opened the post yesterday morning, the note was about three times that length — between 400 and 500 words. It was full of gas, especially: “There is a [noun] which [verb]s” constructions, for example, instead of the more direct “A [noun] [verb]s.” And the words kept falling over themselves as I tried explaining how these illusions work.
(I should mention, too, that at some point on Thursday I’d found several YouTube videos of Penrose triangles in motion. These would have “explained” the phenomenon with no help (however clumsy) from me. But no, damn it: I wanted to write this. Furthermore, I wanted to… to… well, I guess you could say I wanted to at least try to live up to the written standards set by the quotations from “real” writers.)
Tinker, tinker, tinker… switch this phrase to the start of the sentence… transform passive to active… almost there, getting there, almost… The last thing I did was add the “Two’s company; three’s a crowd” line. (I liked how well it, yes, seemed to fit.) Re-read the whole thing one more time, corrected a typo or two. And hit the Publish button, at around 6:3o yesterday morning.
I don’t know: looking back over the above, it seems awfully involved. But when I’m working on a “real” blog post (not just a lagniappe, as a/b calls them), something like the above is pretty much the norm. I pay a lot of attention to word count. And I cannot stand learning that something’s fallen through the cracks, even a typo. I’m careful.
But non-bloggish writing?
Embarrassing admission: I’d been coasting. I have pretty much always known about my writing that I can “write good enough.” (Not that I’m one of the best writers, not by a long shot.) So my habit had been, you know: slap the words onto the screen, print it out, do a revision, boom, next chapter! I don’t know why I wasn’t doing my story — so important to me, if to no one else — the same intense favor I was doing my blog posts. When I realized (sometime in October) what was up, I was… well, ashamed, if that makes sense. Only after a couple days could I again look at my book without averting my eyes.
And that’s why I’ve almost completely shut up about Seems to Fit. It’s time, it has actually been time for years: time to really take the writing and storytelling seriously, to give it everything I can give it, and not just slap it together and pronounce it done because it’s “good enough.”
So yes, the brakes have been applied. Yes, I’m thinking about it more and writing it down less. And no, I’m not blocked.
I simply need to take it — everything about it — seriously. Because those people I’m saying good-bye to? If I don’t do right by them, nobody else will.
_____________________
P.S. This has nothing to do, btw, with the advice (variously phrased) to shut off your internal editor while creating. My fast “version 1.0” drafts, I concede, are not bad. But I do myself no favors by stringing together a bunch of version 1.1s through 1.5s and calling the result “final.”
P.P.S. I realize that this post will expose me as completely, ridiculously self-absorbed should Seems to Fit turn out to be a disaster, despite all this newfound alleged “carefulness.” Maybe that’s why I’m posting it — raising the stakes, see?
Nance says
Blogging has taught me that there’s not a chance in hell I’ll ever write anything longer or more formal than the next post; the same obsessive-compulsive traits (not the Disorder, just the fairly prevalent trait package) will turn the joy of written expression into something Sisyphean.
This post seems to fit my initial interpretation of your blog’s title. There’s an old (Irish?) saying that goes something like, “If you want to scale a wall that’s too high, throw your hat over.” Here, you demonstrate willingness to both run after your hat and hurl it.
Linger with your creatures and enjoy them.
Nance says
P.S.
Edit to first paragraph: …the same obsessive-compulsive traits…blah blah…(insert) that affect everything from my housecleaning to my haircuts will turn the joy of blah blah blah.
I rest my case.
fg says
Sorry, I see what you are saying, well as much as a person on the outside of this one on one relationship, writer + his/her text, can. But I will say ‘slow writing’ like ‘slow baking’ and ‘slow art’ sounds good to me. However you have hit another nerve – that photo!
Argh, I like that photo.
I showed along side Eward Burtynsky in 2008 in a mixed media show – one photographer, one filmmaker, one composer, one photo-journalist and an artist. During the show I met him and we ended up unintentionally talking for a couple of hours.
It was, in a way, a culmination of a long trail for me. Maybe not the end of it but a nice rounding off of events. In brief they went like this:
In my twenties – photographing holes, industry, building sites. The bigger the better. A mild obsession. For exmple, during this time I photograph the huge hole that would become Potsdammer Platz in Berlin.
Then – in the late 90’s I become obsessed with coming to China. I wanted to see and photograph the Yantze Valley before flooding.
Then – I visit Toronto and by chance see a Burtynsky photo in a gallery window. I walk in take a look around the small gallery and the photos stick in my mind. No one I know in London has heard of him.
Then – I see a paperback (now rare) of photos by Ed Burtynsky who has taken those very photos of the Yangtze valley bed demolished before flooding that I dreamed of taking. My friend gave it to me for my birthday because I kept looking at it.
Then I move to China.
Then a year later I am asked to exhibit in London and EB’s work is hanging adjacent to mine. (Because he, in the meantime, was making a bigger name for himself in Canada and slowly London has cottoned on. Since our show he has shown a number of big shows of work in London).
So, this story is not over and the process is
S L O W but what a pleasure.
Froog says
Love that Burtynksy photograph – it looks like a giant’s library, or some Gormenghast-y castle.
I watched Manufactured Landscapes, Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary about Burtynsky’s work (mostly in China, though with one passage about a ship-breaking beach in Bangladesh), a few months back – stunning.
Finding a good balance between fluency and ‘carefulness’ is always a problem; but I do mean fluency rather than just speed – you can flow slowly, like lava, if that’s your style of creation. But I think there’s a danger that obsessive attention to detail can stall your flow, rob you of necessary momentum.
I think it’s also, at least partly, a contrast between conscious and subconscious creation: your subconscious might be lazy, clumsy, inconsistent, a poor stylist – but it knows best about things like plot construction and characterization. Writers – artists of all kinds – need to be able to trust their subconscious creativity.
I have an ex-girlfriend who writes some amazing poetry, but…. she ‘polishes’ excessively, until sometimes she wears her poem down to nothing. Her first (or second, or third) drafts are usually excellent, but by the time she’s on her eighth (or tenth, or twentieth), she’s just changing things for the sake of change (or to avoid ever finishing?) and starting to make things worse.
Recaptcha gives me insomnium cranki, which is rather too uncannily appropriate…
John says
Nance: The obsession-compulsion does kick in from time to time. Part of it — worry about typos and getting things “correct,” within the limits of space and time — part of it stems from fear of public embarrassment.
Well, “embarrassment” is a little too strong. But I do not like the idea that someone might be reading along, absorbed in whatever-it-is, and hit a misspelling or other easily corrected bump in the road — and being thrown out of the absorption. If that makes sense. There’s a sort of sliding scale of acceptable bumps; I don’t obsess (er, as much) over typos in my comments on other blogs, for instance. But yeah, it’s very hard to break out of the cycle sometimes!
John says
fg: Glad you liked the photo. I’m not sure how I found it — it certainly surprised me; nothing like what I was seeking, I think. But (to my mind) it fit the topic. I especially liked the apparent geometric precision, at a distance, in what I’d normally think of as a very messy process (and up-close, probably is). Of course, they’re quarrying granite and not words or narrative, and only with great self-restraint am I not adding, …those lucky bastards. (Whoops. So much for self-restraint. :))
When I went to Burtynsky’s site, and saw that he had a whole section on photographs of China, going back to 2005 or so, it actually did occur to me that you’d probably crossed his path at some point. What very little I know of Beijing tells me that the community of native-English-speakers is small enough to intersect with one another at least once or twice, every now and then, and the subset who are artists, photographers, etc. is probably smaller even more likely to do so. (Which for that matter is true in New York or London or, well, north Florida.)
All of which said, that you evidently like both Burtynsky and the photo is kind of a relief. Ha.
John says
Froog: Isn’t that a great picture? My first view of it was at about this same scale, or even smaller, and for the few seconds before I checked the original I couldn’t imagine what it actually depicted. The subject looked like it might have been shipping containers stacked up at some arctic port, but even that occurred to me only when I realized that the scale was so greatly reduced.
This post was already so long that I excised from the original a meandering discourse on various differences between blogging and writing otherwise — especially when facing a deadline. I don’t post a lot of “time-critical” stuff here, as you know, but the whiskey river posts at least have an implicit deadline.
But working on the book? Well, as they say, if you never write it, no one will ever care that you tried. There’s an implicit — and rather literal (although not, uh, imminent, may the gods be willing) — deadline to my writing this book. I do eventually want to know what others think of it, to know with confidence that I did right by the characters and story. The only way I’ll ever know that is to release it, finally, into the outside world.
You’re absolutely correct about the dangers of overdoing it. Your poet friend suffers an ailment all too familiar to a lot of us!
The Querulous Squirrel says
Argghh! I wrote a comment and it disappeared and I’m too lazy to recreate it. Much of it could have been fodder for a blogpost, so maybe I’ll just do that. Meanwhile, thanks for leading me to this great photographer and this is a wonderful post on the writing process.
John says
Squirrel: Within a few minutes of your posting that comment (#8 above, not the missing one), I’d hurried to my admin dashboard to see if the missing one had gotten caught in the spam lint trap. Alas, no.
So I have no idea what it was about, but I’m pretty sure that if you do post about it over in your own tree, it’ll be worth reading.
Glad you liked the Burtynsky photo!