Every single day. Also, questions for Lydia Davis

There's another aspect of my current novel revision that I didn't mention in the previous post, but which has come to seem very important to me over the past ten (bloggingless) days. In the past, especially when I have been teaching, I have tended to revise in four-hour blocks of time only on days when I could set four hours aside. This generally equated to three days a week of rather fast-paced work, which I accomplished in the service of some deadline (usually arbitrary) that I imposed upon myself.

This time around, I have changed two things. One, I have no deadline ("sometime next year" is all I have told anyone) for finishing. And two, I am working every single day. This includes, say, Tuesdays, when I have, ideally, six hours to make real progress, as well as Wednesdays, when I get up at 5 and have perhaps a single hour.

What I am finding is that the one-hour sessions might well be as important as the six-hour ones--sometimes more so, even if very little (or even no) writing gets done. The key seems to be to do something every day, to keep my mind from straying too far from the book. I've written here before about the difficulty of holding an entire novel in one's head at once--it is possible for some people, and I feel I've been able to do it every now and then. But it is hard, and the more time you spend away from the thing, the more you need to recover when you return.

This method--work daily, even if it's only time enough to stare at the screen and think--is quite revalatory. I feel more connected to the book, even when I'm not really accomplishing anything substantive. We shall see if it pans out in the end.

Finally, the great Lydia Davis is coming to Cornell this week, and I will be posting my podcast interview with her here on Thursday. If there's anything you're dying to ask her, post it in the comments, and I will try to throw it into my interview.

photo: raccoons watching me work the other day.

How you fool yourself into revising

Happy New Year! We're back on task after a holiday vacation--here's wishing all of you a great year of reading, writing, teaching, and whatever else you do.

I just sent a novel draft to my literary agent--maybe and maybe not the version that will make its way to my editor, and certainly not the one that (with any luck) will see eventual publication. This is the third draft of this book--the first I finished in August, the second was a fast rewrite to give to Rhian. (That's it there, in the photo.)

Rhian's comments were fairly exhaustive, and during the semester I made myself a long list of changes, cuts, and additions to work on over break. The day after the last day of class, I dug in, and when I handed my grades in I started writing and revising as fast as I possibly could.

Rhian often says that I work too fast, and she's probably right. But every revision, I think, is a compromise between what you know you have to do, what you aren't admitting to yourself that you have to do, and how long you can bear to do it. I'm a fairly aggressive reviser, but I do it best in bursts of a few weeks--I have to declare completion in order to relax, so that I can gather energy for the next sortie. In my case, there will probably be another draft after my agent sees it, and then (again, with luck) several more with my editor. The result of this is that I'm always showing people inadequate versions of things--but for some reason I need to hear somebody else tell me when I've failed. I don't seem to have the strength to tell it to myself.

In any event, here's to a couple of weeks of nothing--a good way to start 2010, I think.

Why revision is necessary

I'm kinda stuck on this subject right now, since I'm in the middle of this big novel rewrite, and I am not thinking about much else for a change. But I never cease to be amazed how much of the important work in a novel--more so, perhaps, than a story--happens in, say, the fifth or sixth draft.

I may have posted here before about my perennial experience writing a first novel draft--I cruise along like a bastard for about 150 pages, and then I screech to a halt. Why? Because that's when I finally begin to realize what novel it is I'm trying to write, and it's never the one I've been writing--it's this other one. So the rest of the manuscript is the "right" one, and draft #2 is always about going back and fixing the first 150 pages so that they're actually part of the same novel as the rest.

Draft three is about polishing draft two. Then I pass it around to people--Rhian, Ed, Bob, Brian--and get their opinions. Then I sulk for a couple of weeks (sometimes many months) and decide who to listen to and who not to. Then I write draft number four.

At this point, I'm beginning to discover the stuff that will later hold the book together. Images, themes, recurring secondary characters; familiar turns of phrase, evolving narrative flourishes, parallel plot twists. Today, deep in draft four, I found myself pulling a neat fast one--a prop that figures prominently in a flashback episode late in the novel, I ended up planting earlier on, without explanation. Suddenly there's a line drawing those two parts together, when before there was none. And I spent yesterday eliminating a character and repurposing some of her scenes--one appears in a dream, and another is taken over by somebody else. It turns out I didn't need her after all--in fact, she was all wrong for the book (as Rhian warned me, early on). I will probably end up cutting the dream, even.

Draft five will be another major overhaul, most likely, in the wake of another peer review, and then draft six will go to my agent. Should the thing be accepted by a publisher, I'll do draft seven under an editor's pen, draft eight in the wake of a copyedit, draft nine in loose galleys, and draft ten in bound galleys. And probably another one will sneak in there, somehow--maybe my agent will have some ideas, too.

That's one draft of new writing and nine or ten of revision. The new writing takes six months. The revisions take a year and a half, at least. This is where the pile of pages turns into an actual book. Up until then, it's just a good idea that I ruined by trying to actually write it.

The Fog of Revision

I don't know how it is for other writers, but for me, there comes a moment in every new draft of a book where everything just begins to run together, and every sentence appears equally good, or more likely, equally bad, and no edits make any sense anymore. One's ability to make simple decisions begins to wane, and the infinte number of possible arrangements for a given sentence all present themselves at once, and suddenly the entire concept of expressing oneself via the written word seems deeply flawed, on account of its horrible imprecision.

That's where I am right now, with this novel I'm writing, and I actually feel it's going well. I had been planning on posting yesterday--it was officially my turn--but shirked my duty, as the task felt akin to doing brain surgery with a broadsword. In fact, I can't believe this post has lasted so long! Does this make any sense? Hello? Is this thing on?

While I have you, let me refer you to an article posted in a recent comment by Amy Palko--it's from The Guardian and is about a 92-year-old man who is only now learning to type. I've added Amy's blog to our roll--thanks for the tip! She's presently got a post up featuring paintings of women reading, hubba hubba.