‘He needs approval of his work by others in order to be reassured that the vision of life he believes he has had is a true vision and not a self-delusion, but he can only be reassured by those whose judgment he respects.’ WH Auden in “Writing”
I’m
not very prolific when it comes to submissions. Most of my submissions have
been half-baked ideas or revisions sent before their time. Thanks to two years
of living in Peru, life has slowed to a glacial pace. which makes for
interesting lessons in patience. It also gives me a lot of time working on my
writing. I do more revising than ever. My
latest piece, for instance, was an exercise in what Lynn Emanuel, author of Then,
Suddenly, calls literary fluency.
“(Mistakes) are a kind of
rupture, and out of that rupture can grow all kinds of interesting things,” she
said on Vernon Lott’s documentary Bad Writing.
“They are the sign of something… of an ambition that you have…or a way of
writing that you want to move into that you haven’t yet. Sometimes they are a
kind of critique of your own fluency.”
MR
Moving
into that kind of writing first requires courage. For me that meant asking a
new fiction-writer friend and Pushcart Prize nominee, whom I’ll call MR, to
look at a draft over the holidays. That allowed me the pretense of patience, if
not the ability to gain some distance from the piece. When the last shreds of
confetti and fireworks wrappings were swept away, I read MR’s critique. There was a change of diction
here. A compliment there: “You have a clear vision for this piece, and the
prose is solid.” Then the constructive part came: “(I)t reads like an excerpt,
and not a stand-alone.” He suggested a solution to the piece’s greatest
problem: Change from a double to a single narrative arc. He was spot on. I was
thrilled. Especially because he offered
a look at a later draft.
Fueled by desire to see the
thing published, I set out to work revising it. Slash. Dash. Tighten. Tweak. I
implemented his changes and sent it back to him. I felt proud of the piece.
Just like when my Spanish proved fluid enough to travel solo around Peru for 10
days. My ego wasn’t inflated for long after that trip or upon receiving MR’s
second critique. My Peruvian colleagues called me out on my hubris, pushing me
into uncomfortable territory with phrases and verb tenses. MR revealed that I
wasn’t so fluent in writing either.
“There’s too much back-story
and exposition. The story posits more questions than it has time to address…
Tone down the exposition and let your eye for description and sense of place
guide the narrative. The protagonist’s guilt is poignant and complicated, and
deserves more attention,” he wrote.
Who's Story Is It?
My heart plummeted. MR’s red
and green edit marks burned into my head. Bloody hell, I thought, that’s not a
critique; that’s the work of Edward Scissorhands. Is this my work or is he
turning it into his own? Was it the genre difference, was it my feminine voice,
was he just high on himself for having been published in enviable places? Irritation skewered my concentration. I just
wanted to bandage my piece back together and shove it into editors’ hands, see
the damn thing published. Instead I sought refuge in cyberspace.
Fellow writers told me when to stop listening to critiques
and start listening to my instinct. A humorous piece on revision addiction and another on beta readers
distracted my fingers from fumbling with my piece’s structure and characters, narrative arc and tone. In Bad Writing comic writer David Nadelberg
slowed my spinning mind. “It’s not about ‘Do you care enough about an idea to
write it?’ It’s about ‘Do you care enough about it to rewrite it?’”
Hold on. Rewrite. Do I care
enough to rewrite it? That brought everything back round. I had asked for MR’s
input. I had yearned for that level of input. Wasn’t that what I needed in
order to forge head?
Still My Story
I sat back from my computer. Listened
to the voice whispering within to check my patience. I’d practice patience
then. Take the weekend off and gain yet more distance from the piece.
Monday rolled around and so
did another look at MR’s second critique. This time I saw that he hadn’t
shredded my piece. He had acted like a bonsai master. I implemented most of his
suggested changes— and made new discoveries of my own. I polished that draft
until it spoke. It may not earn me a Pushcart, but it’s fluent enough to
comfortably travel into an editor’s hands.
*****
Nichole L. Reber is likely taking a break from writing
by watching a baseball game as you read this. Talk with her about nonfiction
via Twitter, chat about publishing
on Facebook, or read
about her travels on her blog.
*****
Follow Not Bob on Twitter @robertleebrewer
*****
Check out previous Not Bob posts:
. It ended up in the circular file, of course, but over the years, I have developed many stories that I just have to write down. I'm not in this to make money but to entertain readers. I'm an avid reader myself as well as a reviewer--today, it's a reader's market.