Let’s talk about readers–those generous folks who agree to read drafts of our work and give feedback. Here’s what Stephen Koch has to say in The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop:

We have said that you should write your first draft behind closed doors. But when you have moved beyond the first-draft phase, you would be very foolish indeed not to turn to other people for their opinions and advice. But how you got about this can be a very delicate busines, and you must do it in a carefully considered way.

I take editorial advice very seriously. I don’t expect praise (although some is nice), but I also don’t expect to be chopped off at the knees and when other writers don’t know how to deliver advice properly (with empathy, with an understanding of process and that each of us have distinct one), it makes me question the veracity of their advice.

I like what Koch says in regards to the distinction between criticism and editorial advice (shocking how many people do not know the difference between the two!):

Criticism is an intellectual enterprise–and a branch of literature–that owes you and your project nothing. It is a form of discourse, a means of assessing and understanding literary and artistic work, and a way of thinking about what has been written. It is absolutely free to do all these things without the slightest reference to your welfare. Nothing obliges it to say anything good or useful about you or your work. It has taken no vow to “first do not harm.” Nothing–apart from intellectual honesty and common decency–prevents it from being, with a perfectly clear conscience, relentlessly and wholeheartedly malevolent.

Editorial advice, on the other hand, is a service. It owes you its entire existence. It is there only to help improve your work, and it has no more right to ignore your interests than a doctor has the right to ignore a patient’s interests.

This distinction should be in your mind in every workshop you join and in every editorial exchange you have.

All of the readers I favor understand this distinction and treat their fellow writers with respect. I am extremely fortunate.

I took a few days off from my manuscript after finishing a large, mechanical revision. This morning, I’m ready to start anew. I’m turning, once again, to Stephen Koch in The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop:

We have said from the beginning that all writing lives off a two-stroke heartbeat of releasee followed by taking control. Antoher term for this rhythmic alternation between letting go and taking hold is revision, and as David Remick, the editor of The New Yorker puts it, “revision is all there is.” There are writers who imagine that doing a single draft is somehow a sign of superior skill. This is simply untrue. The biographical facts are clear: Most writers, including the most proficient and greatest, produce their work in many drafts, and do so from the start of their careers until the end. It is not even true that as you become more confident and skilled, the number of drafts you do will decrease. Sometimes the reverse is true: When he was my student, Madison Smartt Bell wrote brilliant prose and invariably wrote it in a single draft. It’s my impression that his first published novels were not greatly revised from their first drafts. Yet as this born virtuoso’s career has made him steadily more accomplished, Bell has become more, not less, of a reviser.

Somehow this blurb makes revision seem a little bit sexier to me today. Truly, I do love revising–it’s just that last week changing the I’s to she’s etc, was torturous. With that said, it’s given me new eyes for this manuscript, which is priceless.

This morning I went back to my journals. I opened March 2004. Here is something I wrote in my journal then:

So much in march. So much in it. The gray, gray sky.

Trees, burdened with late falling snow. Trees aching and arching. And limbs that break into goosebumps at the thought of brushing against them.

The buds were out red and proper and then the snow came and hid them. All winter long we’ve seen the deer tracks but now, we see, more easily, the tracks of the smaller creatures.

In Death Valley on the sand dunes, one can see patterns and twirls, shapes and road ways from the night before. The sidewinder leaves an ess behind. Rodents, beetles, tiny dropping prints. They fall in and out of shadow until the sun is too high and everything goes white.

No one will rush forward to defend beliefs. To help strangers. No one will force the car to stop. No one.

What will happen?

I ask this question over and over but it is never answered. I have no indication that anything will happen at all. Surely, though, just by existing things happen. They always do. They happen.

March, oh, March. You, damp and wet, you. You, dark and light, you. To feel your paper hands on my face once more is love. It is love.

The dog has the same eyes as my mother. He sees me with her eyes. I know who he is, my dog. He’s not telling me anything. He’s just here for me to take care of, to love.

Protect and protect and protect and covet, covet, covet.

It is as old and as cold as the old and cold sea. The snow exists forever. It blasts into the dark night where eyes wait to see it. It blasts. Blasts into the dark night, tracking the sky like all of the world’s born and unborn—stars and meteors and comets.

Did I dream it or did I find real pictures of my garden? I think it was a dream. Lying in the grass by the rows and rows of beans and lettuce. We just never ate it all.

No one really believes, I don’t think, that I will go back there.

There are tracks in the snow leading to the semicircle of gray, black. And moon. A meandering stream.

Snow wisps down and trickles, filling it all in.

Will there never be news that is good? I am ready to give in. Give in.

“Don’t try,” is what Bukowski’s tomb stone says. Maybe it’s a challenge. It means don’t try so hard. Just do. Or don’t bother but really meant as a challenge.

Don’t try, don’t bother.

I would like to go back to bed and be warm but I can’t. I need to wash the floors. I need to do so many things.

don’t try. don’t try. don’t try.
don’t bother. don’t try. don’t bother.
don’t try. don’t bother. don’t try.
don’t bother. don’t bother. don’t bother.

Someday it will all come out of me again. It will come and I won’t stop it.

Move. If you don’t move then you will stop. Move. Movement is the key. Use it or lose it. Move. Keep moving. Movement is momentum. Forward motion. With forward motion you leave a path for others to follow.

I have become slow and hollow. Need to move and fast. And move.

Tomorrow is the beginning of this new day when all movement is forward. It can still be reflective but it must also be forward. Okay? Yes.

Here is a piece I wrote two years ago, based on the journal entry:

There is so much in it.

The gray sky. Trees burdened with late falling snow, aching and arching with limbs breaking into goose bumps at the thought of someone brushing against them.

All winter long there were tracks of deer, leading to the semicircle of gray, black. And a moon. A meandering stream.

All winter long snow whispered down and trickled. The birds sang nowhere.

Then there are the tracks of the smaller creatures–the chipmunks and squirrel, fisher and fox. When the buds are out, red and proper, the snow comes again and hides them. Trees are slick with green and wet and one of them oozes white foam, like spit. A fat robin pecks at the earth. Snow melts and pools, shifts to raining. The balsams are feathery light and driveway gravel glows in the gloom. But nothing matches the sky for its whiteness. It is a desert of white–untouched, unmoving.

On the sand, on the dunes, there are patterns and twirls, shapes and roadways. The sidewinder, the rodents, the beetles–all leave something behind. Then they fall in and out of shadow until the sun is too high and everything goes white.

It is that whiteness.

To feel those paper hands on my face once more is love but they are as old and as cold as the old and cold sea where the snow exists forever. Where it blasts into the dark night, tracking the sky like all of the world’s born and unborn—stars and meteors and comets.

Two years have passed and I’m wondering about the choices I made. The clearing of the clutter. Where they the right ones? There is still work to be done. It’s exciting.

Here’s a lovely piece from today’s paper–Hindered by language, united by love of words, by David Masello:

I explained that I was spending a 10-day vacation in Vitorchiano studying poetry, the writing and reading of it with a famous American poet named David Baker and 15 other students. I knew my Italian wasn’t sufficient to tell her that even though I make my living as an editor, I decided to spend my vacation also working with words and deadlines.

I watched VH1’s storytellers last night. It’s a show I’d never sought out because I figured it would be hokey. But I was flipping channels and stopped on the episode with Bruce Springsteen. It was magnificent. I loved how he deconstructed his songs, bit by bit and then afterwards he would say something like, “Do you think I was thinking all these things while I was writing these songs? Well, I wasn’t, but I was feeling them.” His point was that at some point this is where you come to in your craft–where it is FELT, as opposed to KNOW.

Whether you like Bruce Springsteen or not (I happen to), I’d urge you to watch this episode because I’m certain, you’ll find some validation in your process of thinking, of crafting.

Often I must go back to my basics; to learn again before I move forward.

William Zissner’s On Writing Well is a great book to read, especially when you are working on revision. Of course, it’s meant to be for writing nonfiction, but I find the sound and practical advice fits any sort of writing.

Here is what I needed to read today:

Clutter takes more forms than you can shake twenty sticks at. Prune it ruthlessly. Be grateful for everything you can throw away. Re-examine each sentence that you put on paper. Is every word doing new and useful work? Can any thought be expressed with more economy? Is anything pompous or pretentious or faddish? Are you hanging on to something useless just because you think it’s beautiful? Remember Thoreau:

Our life frittered away by detail…. Instead of a million count half-a-dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumbnail…. Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito’s wing that falls on the rails.

Simplify, simplify.

I have been asked to be a feature reader at the Dire Literary Series on May 5th in Cambridge, MA.

I don’t yet know what I’ll be reading and I realize this is still two months away, but if you live in the area, please mark your calendars as I’d love to see you there.

More details to follow as the date approaches…

Okay, I know my friend Robin is going to think I’m a big loser but I can’t help it, I’m an Idol-holic. I missed the show last night but first thing this morning I went to the web site to see who My Top 12 are and I’m stoked to see my favorites made it!

There you are, Taylor.
I see you, Elliot.
That’s right, Chris.
Uh huh, Paris.
You go, Bucky.
Bring it, Mandisa.

p.s. I like Bucky’s answer about who he would thank first the best.

What is your relationship with your characters? Now, mine is distant, chilly, neglectful. I’m working on something mechanical and so this instant they are a nuisance to me. I am aggrieved that it is so.

Here is what John Berger says in one of my favorite books And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos:

What separates us from the characters about whom we write is not knowledge, either objective or subjective, but their experience of time in the story we are telling. This separation allows us, the storytellers, the power of knowing the whole. Yet, equally, this separation renders us powerless: we cannot control our characters, after the narration has begun. We are obliged to follow them, and this following is through and across the time, which they are living and which we oversee.

The time, and therefore the story, belongs to them. Yet the meaning of the story, what makes it worthy of being told, is what we can see and what inspires us because we are beyond its time.

Don’t know if you’ve been following the story of the Colorado teacher whose student taped him making comments about George Bush or not, but I would urge you to read this excellent piece–Apparatchik In America – The Colorado MP3 Teacher Trial, by Stephen Elliot:

Here is something else you might not know. If you like George Bush then you love Ronald Reagan. Do you know how much Ronald Reagan hated the communists? Ronald Reagan was a simple man and he based his entire life around being anti-communist. And do you know the most infamous communist was Joseph Stalin and among Stalin’s more infamous acts was his encouragement of children to denounce their elders for speaking against the state whereupon they would be arrested and sent to concentration camps and die. Children like you were heroes under Stalin. You would have been feared. Under Stalin you would have been great.

What an absolute treat, and delight, and what perfect timing for me to read Ellen Meister’s Wednesday Essay on Jordan Rosenfeld’s blog:

Show me a writer who’s 100% confident in his or her work, and I’ll show you a dreadful writer. I think it’s the nature of what we do that makes us second guess our own judgment.

Today it is time for some George Orwell, taken from his essay “Why I Write“–which is mostly about the struggle of finding the balance between message and aesthetic quality but also shows us the struggle of the artist in general–the pain that comes with the passion.

I initially found this essay in the book Eight Modern Essayists–great essays in this one for sure and I would urge you to buy yourself a copy because you won’t regret it as it also contains essays by E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, E.B. White, James Baldwin, and Joan Didion.

Here is what I needed to read today:

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.