Snippets from “The Writer’s Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House”
Just in case Monday's post didn't send you scurrying to Tin House to order a copy, here's a taste of what's inside.
Rick Bass
Rick Bass, "When To Keep It Simple": An observation on that first draft that I'm taping to my fridge:
Don't be afraid in an early draft to overwrite and to swing for the fences with every sentence, every thought, every emotion. As a writer -- not a reader, but a writer -- remember that you are granted infinite drafts in which to try to get it right.
Chris Offutt
Chris Offutt, "Performing Surgery Without Anesthesia": Some common-sense observations on how to move from crafting the first draft to revising (not polishing) it.
In order to have something successful to revise, you must make yourself vulnerable on the page, particularly in the first draft. The more you make yourself vulnerable -- you make yourself personably vulnerable -- the more you're going to care about what you're doing (and if you don't care about it, you may as well hang it up) and the more you're going to reach the reader. If you make yourself vulberable, that vulnerability will translate into empathy -- reader empathy. So if you've done the first part of the job correctly, you are emotionally engaged at a deep level with the first draft and there is no way you can go back into it and revise successfully because you care too much about it, you're too engaged.
What to do? Step away. Fix surface errors, print out the story, and file it away for a few weeks or months. Then start writing something else.
I'm always working on multiple projects--this serves the overall work. It's not because I can't finish anything or I'm unfocused. When I start another story and become emotionally engaged with that one, then I can return to the earlier ones and look at them on their own terms.
Susan Bell
Susan Bell, "Revisioning The Great Gatsby": Discussion of how Fitzgerald -- with developmental guidance by Max Perkins -- edited The Great Gatsby.
Organization and clarity do not dominate the writing process. At some point, though, a writer must pull coherence from confusion, illuminate what lives in shadow, shade what shines too brightly. Gatsby is the cat's meow case study of crossing what Michael Ondaatje calls "that seemingly uncrossable gulf between an early draft of a book... and a finished product" -- in other words, editing.
Fitzgerald, Berg writes, "is generally regarded as having been his own best editor, as having had the patience and objectivity to read his words over and over again, eliminating flaws and perfecting his prose." But The Great Gatsby would be a different book, and very possibly a lesser one, without Perkins's counsel. Many consider editing as either the correction of punctuation (copyediting) or the overhaul of a book such as Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel. The editing of The Great Gatsby sits between these extremes--a testimony to a wrter's discipline to edit himself and his wisdom to let himself be edited by someone worthy: that is how he crossed the gulf.
Dorothy Allison
And from Dorothy Allison's stunning essay on "Place": a Battle Cry and Lover's Coo to get you to think deeply about place, setting, and context.
I cannot abide a story told to me by a numb, empty voice that never responds to anything that's happening, that doesn't express some feelings in response to what it sees. Place is not just what your feet are crossing to get to somewhere. Place is feeling, and feeling is something a character expresses. More, it is something the writer puts on the page--articulates with deliberate purpose. If you keep giving me these eyes that note all the details -- if you tell me the lawn is manicured but you don't tell me that it makes your character both deeply happy and slightly anxious -- then I'm a little bit frustrated with you. I want a story that'll pull me in.
And this:
Place is people.
Place is people with self-consciousness.
Place is people with desire.
"Place" is a must read.
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