. . . if he knows well what he meant to do,
this knowledge always disturbs his perception
of what he has done.
Paul Valéry
A friend of mine, in the tenth and final year of writing a novel that would eventually win him the Rome Prize, was squirming as he made his way to the finish. While I wasn’t worried about him—a writer generates anxiety as a lamp does heat—one of his anxieties startled and fascinated me. It did not have to do with an unwieldy chapter or concept. It resulted from the distance between the type of book he had set out to write and the type of book he had, in fact, written.
A passionate reader of irreverent forms of literature, Eli Gottlieb had set out to write a radical book. He loved the intricate narrative mechanisms of works by writers from James Joyce to John Hawkes, and he had wanted to write a book that would exude a kindred lack of convention. His book would perhaps be difficult to read, he knew, but it would be understood by a literary elite, and that would be enough.
What he wrote, however, was a novel that broke no conventions narratively, and adhered instead to classic linear storytelling. His natural irreverence could be discerned, not in the formal aspect of the book, but in the voices of its characters.
The book’s subject was the life of a family in suburban New Jersey, set off track by a developmentally disabled son. It was the story of two brothers, of a mother and her sons, of an alienated married couple, of a woman both loopy and shrewd trying to cope with life’s traumas and disappointments. Though the subject itself had all the makings of melodrama (most subjects do), Gottlieb created an iridescent novel of character and wit: more Charles Dickens than Joyce, more Saul Bellow than Hawkes, but above all his own. Here is how The Boy Who Went Away begins:
I first noticed something strange happening to my mother six months earlier, in the motionless days of January. During a cold snap that turned everything the hue of smoke, her clothes suddenly began to grow bright, vivid, as if powered by a secret store of summer brilliance. Although it was frigid outside, her skirts shrank upward above the knees, while the heels of her shoes grew downward into spikes curved like the teeth of animals that made a rackety, military clatter on the floors of our house. I was sick with the flu for two weeks straight, and I noticed that with my father gone to work for the day, she would sometimes go upstairs and spend an hour carefully penciling freshness into her face—and then, to my amazement, leave on a long “run to the store.” She seemed energized at strange times of the day, sparked into excited conversation by a random headline, a snatch of music on the Magnovox, or the blue of two jays she’d spotted tussling over seeds in the snow of our backyard. Bouncing as she walked, she would sometimes, for no obvious reason, come up to me and interrupt what I was doing to ask, “Front and center, Sweetness, how are you?”
One could argue that a simple structure was needed to show off the book’s ranging wit and layered psychology. A simple room allows you to pay attention to its spectacular views, while one that is decorated lavishly may distract from them. An avant-garde form might have competed with, rather than supported, the novel’s swivel-hipped humor and expansive heart. Might have. Might not have. We won’t know what it would have been written differently, but we do know the book was successful written as it was. Measures of success are debatable—to finish a manuscript is a success. But Gottlieb’s triumph is hard to dispute: If success means the author is satisfied with his work, Gottlieb was. If success means a book finds an appreciative audience, Gottlieb’s did: his novel was, contrary to his original expectations, eminently readable, and loved by many more than a literary elite. The Boy Who Went Away was enjoyed by intellectuals (The American Academy of Rome) and nonintellectuals (my mother) alike.
Gottlieb had imagined his work sounding a certain way even before it was written, but as he wrote, he began to recognize and slowly accept that this story needed to be told on its own terms, not his. As novelist Jim Lewis puts it, “I stopped writing the book that I wanted to write, and wrote the one the book wanted to write.” An editor, and a writer editing himself, must treat a work on its own terms. “The process is so simple,” Max Perkins once told a crowded room of acolytes. “If you have a Mark Twain, don’t try to make him into a Shakespeare or make a Shakespeare into a Mark Twain. Because in the end an editor can get only as much out of an author as the author has in him.” The wise editor is agile and open, and never tries to turn a manuscript into something it is not meant to be. The wise writer, likewise, remains open to his work, and refrains from imposing an inorganic idea on it.
There are other books in Gottlieb that may coincide with his original conception of an avant-garde novel. If they do, it will not be simply because he wills them to, but because the material and moment call for it.
How did Gottlieb discover what his book wanted to be? How do you close the gap between an ideal you imagine for your text and the reality of the text that faces you? We all have writing or writers we admire and aspire to. It is not easy to abandon your ideal in order to accept what you perceive, at first, as your own meager self. It can take time to hear the power of your own voice, and until you do, you may keep hoping that you sound like George Eliot or Djuna Barnes, Stephen King or David Halberstam. Trying to sound like so-and-so is a fine exercise when you’re building your chops, but once you start your work in earnest as a relatively mature writer, it is literary suicide. To write falsely is not to write at all.
An editor, a good one, reads to discover a new voice: a fresh sound in the ear, an as yet unmapped route to a particular emotion or thought. Surprise is the editor’s drug of choice. A writer needs to relish the surprise of his own voice just as an editor does. Imagine: you read your draft, and as you move along, you have an uneasy sensation that it doesn’t sound like anything else you’ve read. This may be because it is not working. But another possibility must be considered: your writing may sound strange to you because it is truly yours and no one else’s; its strangeness is an indication of its honesty. In this case, you have hit your stride. The awkward will become familiar as you commit to it, trust it, exploit it.
The veteran will suffer the same disorientation as the novice if he makes his text truly new. He will step beyond what he already knows and risk not recognizing his own voice. The difference between the veteran and novice, besides a mastery of craft, is confidence—or the possibility of confidence: the veteran might remember from previous experience that whatever is flawed can be fixed—more or less and with time; if it can’t, it is not just flawed but inadequate, and deserves to perish, whether it weighs in light at thirty pages or heavy at three hundred. Under the veteran’s feet is the floor of accomplishment, whereas the novice is walking on air.
But despite past achievements, the veteran can also become demoralized by his troublesome text. “Every writer I know suffers from the despondency of looking at his material,” says D. S. Stone, a veteran screenwriter and journalist. Calmly or not, then, the author strains to see his work clearly, diagnose it, and begin revising. “The quality an artist must have,” said Faulkner, “is objectivity in judging his work, plus the honesty and courage not to kid himself about it.” Faulkner confessed, “I have written a lot and sent it off to print before I actually realized strangers might read it.” It is fair to say that all writers—seasoned or not, steady or panicked—lose perspective.
So how can you tell if your writing is a gem or a trinket? There is, of course, no simple answer to this. You must achieve a transparent view of your material that derives from having emotional and psychological distance from it. With distance, you will be able to see what Gottlieb calls “the nervous system of the words in space”—how your words link together, what keeps them alive and how each affects another. The challenge is both physical and metaphysical. The metaphysical distance you get from your work will depend largely on your physical choices for it: to reread as you write or not; to leave your desk or not; to use a computer or not, and so on.
One distancing technique is to physically leave your desk without sneaking pages into your bag. This sounds easy, but any serious writer who has tried it knows that leaving your draft alone presents a profound challenge.
You could also rethink the virtue of rereading as you write. What would happen if you didn’t allow yourself to go back to check your output, and only forged forward? You might not need a drastic rupture from your work at the end. You would have created an ongoing distance between you and your work; and your eyes, still fresh, would see pretty well as they read a finished draft.
“The greater the distance,” writes W. G. Sebald in The Rings of Saturn, “the clearer the view: one sees the tiniest of details with the utmost clarity.” Distance allows you to see your work. Different writers use different methods for attaining it. It is worth trying some of them—even, and perhaps especially, if they are initially uncomfortable. An alien method may rattle you awake to suddenly see an unfortunate aspect of your work that you have been avoiding.
THE PRINTOUT
A year after leaving a job as a full-time editor, a friend of mine found herself in Hanoi, where she began a novel. On her return to New York, she continued to write. The writing went well and not so well. The exuberance of exploring a new idea and voice propelled her. Some fine concepts were put into place and some fine phrasing seemed to write itself onto the page, as she was so loose and open; it was the beginning, and anything looked possible if she could stay the course.
Soon enough, however, she was producing fewer and fewer pages and feeling more and more muted. At one point, she realized she had been rereading and reworking the same two pages for six days. She had become obsessed with getting each page “right” before going on to the next. One day her husband suggested, ever so gently, that she stop tweaking each sentence to perfection as she went. “Yes, you’re right,” she said, and kept tweaking. A week later, he told her, gently but more firmly, “You really should stop rereading and redoing so much as you write.” She nodded, and then once again ignored him. She now felt as if she were writing with a noose around her neck. Her husband knew what she was not ready to know: the professional editor in her had usurped the writer.
On the second trip to Hanoi, she brought her computer and a flimsy portable printer, which she could not get to print. Dismayed, she sat in her guesthouse room and wrote. On the fifth day she rejoiced. She could not print, so had no pages to reread and mark up. Forced by circumstance, she had written freely for days on end, rarely thinking about how it sounded. For the next three weeks, printerless, she concentrated on story and characters, not language, and felt liberated.
Many writers, like the one above, need to trust their language more from the start. They need to massage their story and characters (fictional or not) into being early on, and adjust their language later. To constantly print out, reread, and perfect your prose is usually a trap: after a month of writing, you often have perfectly laid out phrases that say very little, because you paid attention to their sound far more than their purpose.
We sometimes take the art of storytelling for granted. Stories—with their inevitable descriptions of family and friends—abound in daily life, at a dinner table or coffeehouse, for instance. But our daily narratives are more or less fragmented, only rudimentarily shaped. Although easy to tell them over a beer, it is hard labor to turn them into cohesive, dramatic writing. Natural bards exist, but they are not necessarily the best writers. Jack Kerouac was an exception. He constructed full stories in his head; he then wrote them quickly, faced only with the challenge of which words to use. He had already understood how the story would evolve. “You think out what actually happened,” he once told The Paris Review, “you tell friends long stories about it, you mull it over in your mind, you connect it together at leisure, then when the time comes to pay the rent again you force yourself to sit at the typewriter, or at the writing notebook, and get it over with as fast as you can . . . and there’s no harm in that because you’ve got the whole story lined up.” This is hardly a universal model.
A great many authors determine the full shape of their stories as they write, not before. Story and characters make themselves clear as they unfold and move about. A narrative often follows a character’s movement, instead of guiding it, so you cannot know your story perfectly at the start. Characters, like people, need freedom to err and rebound as they move forward. But if, when you write, you constantly check to make sure what you’ve done is good enough, you interrupt the élan and error your characters need to become good enough. You stymie your story before it can take flight.
Hanoi induced my friend’s cure. She learned that if she didn’t watch it, she would edit her writing into a lifeless specimen of overworked sentences, foreshortened story, and stunted characters. Editing is not writing, even if writing consists largely of editing. Indeed, premature and obsessive editing will destroy writing. For most, it is only with an unedited flow of imagination that there is anything worth revising in the end.
THE PEN
Judith Freeman is emphatic about sustaining a flow of imagination when she writes. By handwriting her novel Red Water, Freeman found detachment in the act of writing itself, not simply at the end of the draft. In the past, typing into a computer had made the writing process choppy. The flow of her imagination was continually blocked by frequent checking of sentences, paragraphs, words. By the end of a first draft, she would feel confused and drained by the continual rereads and minor adjustments she’d made along the way, and she would need a dramatic break from the text to see it clearly.
Freeman wanted to try another path to clarity: longhand. “When writing longhand,” she explains, "the brain and the hand are connected. Once you begin to let an idea unfold, you keep unfolding it. Ink flows, ideas flow with it. When writing longhand, I am not tempted to constantly go back, scroll up, stop and reread. When you type, especially into a computer, you don’t give your imagination the chance to really follow things through."
Clean and professional-looking, the typed page can induce the illusion that the sentences on it are finished and ready to be inspected. It is impossible to make that mistake with a hand-scrawled notebook. Moreover, the scroll mechanism of the word processor was a gilded invitation to Freeman’s inner censor. Without the scroll, without clean type, Freeman relinquished her grip on her text. At the end of a draft, her words were essentially new to her. She hadn’t read them to death by then, but just recorded them directly from her imagination. Or to use writer Albert Mobilio’s phrase, it was “as if [her] hands were the actual agents of composition.” After she had finished the handwritten draft, Freeman transferred it from her notebooks into her computer, then used the ease of a computer processor to edit further drafts.
Not everyone will be willing or able to write in longhand. Using a pen will seem too anachronistic, quaint, and above all, inefficient. But don’t form rash conclusions before you give it a try. Freeman proved that longhand can be as or more efficient than a word processor. Her editor made far fewer suggestions on Red Water, for instance, than on her previous computer-written manuscripts. For Freeman, there were three advantages to longhand: (1) Slowing down in the writing stage made her first draft more thought-out. (2) Because she didn’t constantly reread as she wrote, her first reread was fresh; so she saw more clearly and more quickly what needed adjustment. (3) The kinetic link from a writer’s mind to ink to page seemed to make Freeman’s first draft truer to what she wanted, so there were fewer changes than usual. Freeman credits the pen with her ability to see her manuscript clearly and edit it well herself before handing it to an editor.
Whereas Freeman gave up the computer to write more fluidly, D. S. Stone, who uses one, says, “I never reread what I’m working on while I’m working on it. The less I look at [my writing], when it is time to edit it, the fresher I am.” He follows Freeman’s dictum, but goes at it differently. Stone has taught himself, after years of application, to type with a flow reminiscent of Freeman’s longhand. The potentially alienating machine that divides hand from word does not disturb him. “You do the thing and get it done,” he says, the ultimate pragmatist.
Echoing Stone, Jonathan Franzen says "I’ve learned to avoid rewriting on the computer screen until I have a complete draft of a section or chapter. By then, a good deal of time has passed, and I can see the pages more clearly. Generally, if I find myself trying to achieve perspective prematurely . . . it’s a sign that the section isn’t working and that I don’t want to admit this to myself."
To avoid rereading as you type, try writing with a pen. If you resist writing with a pen, try harder to resist the scroll mechanism on your computer.
THE CLOCK
Once Stone has finished his draft, he will not allow more than a day to pass before rereading it. Stepping back for more than a day allows him to ruminate on other projects and thereby lose interest in the one at hand. Momentum is more important to Stone than the extra perspective he might gain from a long break. He believes that every piece of writing has an internal clock: “there is a certain amount of time allotted to a piece before you lose sight of your instincts, of what you’re trying to say; and [when you work on something for too long] another part of you comes out that’s meaner, more unpleasant.” An attuned, compassionate self-editor exists within Stone, that, Cinderella-like, disappears after the hour is too late.
Writers disagree on how to banish the inner censor, but all would agree that banish it they must. Every writer has to discover his best protection from a rapacious internal judge.
THE BIG BREAK
Albert Mobilio, writer (Me with Animal Towering) and fiction editor of Bookforum, has learned to accommodate his obsession with polishing: "I tend to revise a lot while writing. I used to throw away a dozen sheets with first sentences; now I just type over and micro-revise constantly."
To make substantive changes in his rich, pellucid prose, he waits days or weeks, but notes that deadline work often precludes the luxury of a breather. Gottlieb, like Mobilio, writes and edits with a jeweler’s eye for minuscule linguistic details, and at the same time develops the larger design. The two writers agree that the longer the break at the end of a draft, the better. They take weeks off, when possible, to more clearly see the big picture.
Make a choice. Choose to write in longhand, on a manual typewriter, or on a computer; do not submit to one, as if it were an inevitability. If obsessive rereading is impeding your progress, stop printing hard copy for a time. If, conversely, you like to edit the details along the way, securing each bezel before you set another stone, take a sizable break at the end of your draft before you reread and diagnose what more it needs. In short, if you achieve distance along the way, you’ll need less at the end; if you do not achieve distance along the way, you’ll need more at the end.
On principle, check your impulse to reread and revise at every turn. You will benefit doublefold: your imagination will have room to stretch out, and your brain will be fresher when called on to edit. But for some, it will be unnatural to wait. No method is incorrect. If you keep working, every method will lead you to a finished manuscript. Try, however, to find the one that works for, more than against, you.
THE SPOKEN WORD
Bradford Morrow speaks of reading one’s work aloud with the fervor of the religiously converted. “There are things that the ear sees that the eye can’t hear,” he says. Writer (Ariel’s Crossing) and editor of Conjunctions magazine, Morrow did not always recite his own words to himself. But after having written a few novels, he tried it and found that reading aloud was a prime tool for gaining perspective.
Reading one’s work aloud is hardly a new idea. From Homer to the Norse epics, stories were told, not read; and through the telling they were edited. Before the fifteenth century, authorship and therefore editing were necessarily communal. Without a printing press, bards and the public itself were the writer’s distribution service. A story was a direct gift to the community, and as it was shared aloud, retold and retold, the story transformed into something other than the author’s original.
We cannot know what changes were made orally, since they were not recorded. We can, however, bear witness to some shocking changes made when pioneer publishers—still influenced by a recent culture of bards—made freewheeling edits. In the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson, acting as textual critic, discovered that the line in Shakespeare’s Hamlet “In private to inter him” had originally been “In hugger mugger to inter him.” The latter had been considered inelegant and got the editor’s ax. Johnson replaced the original passage, defending his move: “That the words now replaced are better, I do not undertake to prove: it is sufficient that they are Shakespeare’s.” Johnson argues for the integrity of a single author’s work: “If phraseology is to be changed as words grow uncouth by disuse, or gross by vulgarity, the history of every language will be lost; we shall no longer have the works of any author; and, as these alterations will be often unskillfully made, we shall in time have very little of his meaning.” Johnson’s was a modern view, in keeping with a future he could overhear before it spoke. Today we place a tremendous value on the original text written by the author alone.
Now that stories are the reflection of a single author, not an oral community, editing occurs in the writer’s or editor’s office, not, hip-hop aside, on the street corner. If the very zeitgeist of writing has changed, one aspect of it hasn’t. Reading aloud was an editing tool then, and still is. “It’s almost impossible,” V. S. Naipaul told an interviewer, “to read one’s work. One can never read it as a stranger.” To alleviate the problem, he added, “I’ve always read my day’s work aloud.” Naipaul would read aloud to himself. Some find it more useful to read aloud to a friend—another person’s presence can make certain writers climb farther outside themselves to see their work from a distance, from where it always appears clearer.
As far back as the first century a.d., writers understood and wrote about the editorial value of reading work aloud. Public readings, fashionable in that time, “were meant to bring the text not only to the public but back to the author as well,” writes Alberto Manguel in his superb book A History of Reading. Pliny the Younger “sometimes tried out a first draft of a speech on a group of friends and then altered it according to their reaction,” writes Manguel. In ancient Rome, reading aloud involved a precise etiquette in which listeners were, he notes, “expected to provide critical response, based on which the author would improve the text.” Readings could be for a small group of friends or for a large anonymous public. Or as with Molière in the seventeenth century, who regularly read his plays aloud to one person, his housemaid. Nineteenth-century novelist Samuel Butler elucidated in his Notebooks:
"If Molière ever did read to her, it was because the mere act of reading aloud put his work before him in a new light and, by constraining his attention to every line, made him judge it more rigorously. I always intend to read, and generally do read, what I write aloud to someone; anyone almost will do, but he should not be so clever that I am afraid of him. I feel weak places at once when I read aloud where I thought, as long as I read to myself only, that the passage was all right."
Public readings are still useful these days for both publicity and editing—though most contemporary writers will not display the malleability of their writing. They read it as if it is set in stone, and later, in private, jot down the weak points that their reading out revealed to them. But one need not risk public humiliation to gain the editorial benefits of reading aloud. For as Butler explains, it is “the mere act” of reading aloud that aids; it is not the audience’s critique, but the author’s revitalized attention to his words through uttering them and hearing them uttered that brings clarity.
Mobilio learned the hard way: “I’ve had the experience of giving readings and wincing at sentences that seemed freshly askew to me as they rolled off my tongue. This led to making in medias res edits that only broke my flow and furthered my dismay.” He therefore began a reading series, as it were, in the privacy of his own home, with no one but himself in the audience. He is able to become on his own a pseudostranger, like the “stranger” Naipaul wishes to become for himself. “The best way to change places with your imagined reader,” says Mobilio, “is to read out loud and really hear your own too familiar words; enunciation makes their jostle or flow, sense or silliness palpable as touch.”
Intoned, your text becomes dynamic, whereas inside your head it was still; the clunky or obtuse parts fall out like so many bolts that weren’t well fastened, and couldn’t be detected until you started to speak.
When you first recite your words to yourself (or anyone else), the peculiar sound of your own voice and the familiar sound of your words might combine to disorient you. Feeling awkward may dull your execution, and make it impossible to know if it is your text or your reading that is flawed. So while you do not need to ape your story in dramatic relief, it helps to read with conviction.
You might try two variations of reading aloud that I learned from my students. One, record yourself and play it back. Two, get a neutral friend or family member to read your text to you. (Family members are by definition not neutral, but you may know the rare one who can surmount, or at least silence, his prejudices for thirty minutes. One student prefers that a philistine read her work to her—she does not want to be seduced by the dramatic inflections a literary reader might impart.) To hear your words in a strange voice will instantly divest you of them. They will seem to belong to the reader, not you, and this will help you hear them better.
THE FONT
W. H. Auden used to say, rather pungently, that he could only truly “see” a poem once it’s typed because “a man likes his own handwriting the way he likes the smell of his own farts.” Type creates a famously useful distance between the writer and his words. But most contemporary writers are inured to type, having seen their manuscript take shape in it from the start. Non-handwriters need a new device to make their work look new.
Jim Lewis discovered that going from Times Roman to Helvetica kicked the complacency out of his eye. What the eye sees newly, so does the brain. At the end of a draft, Lewis prints out his manuscript in an alternate type font. Try it on one paragraph. The shift in perspective can be dramatic.
THE ENVIRONMENT
Writer Tom McDonough, author of Light Years, suggests changing your surroundings to edit. Read your work someplace other than where you wrote it. A change of venue freshens the spirit; why wouldn’t it freshen the mind’s critical eye too? You might arrange for a short stay at a friend’s house down the road or in another city. You might bring your draft to another country. If you wrote at your office desk, the kitchen table might be a better place for editing.
McDonough has edited while traveling with great success. “When your environment is different, and your activity is different,” he says, “you bring this thing with you that’s looked the same for so long, and it looks different, too.” You could take this idea one step further and change your daily habits as well as geography. Edit at night, for instance, instead of in the day. If you always wait for a clear few weeks to edit in, try editing instead alongside another job. McDonough decided to edit his novel Virgin with Child, for example, at night after working all day as a cinematographer, instead of the usual at home between jobs. Making money and working hard hours put him, he says, in a “pragmatic mindset”; he had no time or inclination to indulge himself or his prose.
THE RELEASE
Once you let it out of your protective grasp, your manuscript loses the seductive patina that, because it has been fondled so much, settled on it. Suddenly it appears garish without the soft gleam lent by your continual touch, or by the possibility of your touch, which is just as powerful as the touch itself; just knowing you can get at the thing again reassures you and makes your work look better to you. When we edit, we see our manuscript through a split lens: through one half, we view what is really there; through the other, what could be. The bifocal mind is a wishful mind and skews the work’s potential for greatness into greatness itself.
When you get the manuscript out of the house, you temporarily put a lid on potential. The process stops. The manuscript has become, it is no longer becoming. A subtle but serious psychological shift occurs in the author: he sees his work through a single lens now, the one that shows him what is really there.
Sending out your manuscript to an agent or editor can be the most terrifying and cruelest of methods for gaining perspective. But it will, without fail, get you to see your words through a stranger’s eyes. Because after you send it you will not be able to keep from rereading it, and from trying to put yourself in your reader’s mind. From this leap of imagination, you will learn a lot about your text.
One writer I know had his agent send out a “finished” section of his novel, in an attempt to sell it. The day after it went out to publishers, he reread it. In a cold sweat, he telephoned the agent and, after some debate, demanded that she retract the submission, which she did. He had seen it, all of a sudden, from the perspective of a stranger—the editors who were about to read it—and he knew, as he hadn’t been able to know until then, that it was all wrong. It isn’t always another person’s critique that helps you see your manuscript clearly (your reader may be dead wrong). It is the very fact of sending the work out that forces you to look at it differently.
I am not encouraging you to go to the post office tomorrow to send off unfinished work. But if you feel very close to having finished, and you cannot go any further, then you may want to risk it. But it really is a risk. If an agent or editor doesn’t like it, it will be hard to get a second read from him later.
The best alternative is to send it to a friend. You will benefit in a similar but not as stark manner. You will have to sift through your intimate knowledge of your reader to find the part of him that is somehow still a stranger—it is the stranger in your friend who counts, and with whom you will identify when you reread the work. Eventually, when you hear from your friendly reader, keep in mind his personal agenda and taste; filter his comments through your knowledge of his prejudices (including his predisposition to like whatever you do). But in the end, it isn’t his response that really matters here. The mere fact that he is in possession of your text could help you achieve a fresh perspective on it.
THE INNER CENSORATE
Another trick for seeing the text through someone else’s eyes—without the risk of letting it out of the house—is what Auden called the Inner Censorate. Think of specific people you are writing to; pretend you are reading your text through their eyes. According to Auden, this watchdog organization “should include, for instance, a sensitive only child, a practical housewife, a logician, a monk, an irreverent buffoon and even, perhaps, hated by all the others and returning their dislike, a brutal, foul-mouthed drill sergeant who considers all poetry rubbish.”
Writer Luc Sante (Low Life) has used the technique: “I’ve always relied on an internal Censorate composed of people I know and people I’ve met who made a certain kind of impression on me. I read my work through the eyes of people of very different temperament and taste, always including a genuine poet, a very intelligent person with no formal education and no patience with literary posturing, and someone who knows more about the subject than I do.”
The Censorate is the monitor that tells you when you’ve gone too pedantic, flat-footed, or vague. However, you should not create an Inner Censorate unless you are capable of quieting the din of its often conflicting voices and returning to your individual sense of what works. Beware of the temptation to pander. If your Censorate overtakes you, stop listening to it altogether.
Wait until the end of a draft before you turn to your Inner Censorate. This editing technique should never interfere with writing itself.
THE CONVERSATION
A gallerist called me with a job. I was to edit an essay by art critic Neville Wakefield, whom I had edited before. A week later we sat in his office and, via a rich conversation that often turned into debate, addressed my questions about his text. We each held a copy of the edited manuscript. I queried and commented. Wakefield answered and asked his own questions. Once we were both satisfied with an alternate phrasing, he typed it into his computer.
This kind of collaborative revision will not work for some writers who need to reflect at length and privately on their final version. But for many, conversation can be a marvelous tool for revision. It is especially helpful for magazine writers who face tight deadlines and have no time to step away from their draft. The mutually active editorial conversation demands high concentration from both parties, and a relinquishment of ego. A writer whose words are priceless possessions to be protected from what he perceives as an editor’s insensitive hand should not try it. A writer like Wakefield, who wants to communicate his ideas more than cling to his words for the sake of it, will benefit. When there is a gap between what he means to say and what he has said, for example, Wakefield permits a respectful editor to help him modulate the text to close that gap.
Here is how it worked with Wakefield and me:
To familiarize you with his writing, it helps to think about art criticism at large, where empty rhetoric abounds. A few critics, though, write complex prose that says something. Wakefield is one. His rhythmic improvisations and verbal flourishes continually return to a rigorous central argument, where understanding is visceral, not simply intellectual.
The main point of his essay, when I received it, was hard to understand. He was writing about Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama’s New York pictures from 1971, which were radical for the time. Grainy and indistinct, they were more like sensations than photographs. Wakefield had written a piece to evoke, not describe or explain, these pictures. The piece began as if it were the continuance of something that had begun before, and ended as if it kept going after the reader left. The fragmented, fugitive feel of the prose matched the fragmented, fugitive feel of the images. Nonetheless, the piece kept sliding away from me as I read it; a clarity of purpose was missing; and besides, I couldn’t readily tell who was doing what, which left me, in the most pedestrian sense, confused.
His first lines originally read:
"Dark with something more than night, New York 1971 is a city of shadows, caught in the radar sweep of a vision that obliterates as it reveals. Taken without heed to the accepted protocols, the chance condensations of light mix evidence with abstraction. Like that radar sweep that obliterates as it reveals they go against the grain of tradition. They record less the monuments that loom all around, than the transient ephemeral social architecture that fills the intermittent spaces—"
How far could Wakefield go with imprecise references before his reader would feel lost and lose interest? Moriyama’s photographs were imprecise, but an essay functions differently from a photograph. Imprecision, in literary matters, dulls or befuddles the reader. My task was to help Wakefield make his piece more accessible, without relinquishing its affective mimicry of Moriyama’s shards and shadows. To be of help meant to respect the poetry of the essay, so that the reader’s understanding would be sensual as well as intellectual—or as poet Ann Lauterbach puts it, understanding would come “thru the agency of a musical syntax, where what can be apprehended as sense and what can be apprehended beyond sense are inseparable.”
I asked the writer if he would shorten the first sentence to make it more inviting; it held too many different and elusive ideas for the reader to grasp right off. I also suggested building up to its swirling rhythm. I asked whose “vision” it was in the first sentence. Wakefield realized this was unclear, but he didn’t want to mention Moriyama’s name at all in the piece so he cut the vision part out. I suggested that “Taken” in the second sentence was ambiguous. He replaced it with “Shot,” which referred more clearly to making photographs. “The chance condensations of light” became “these chance condensations of light”: now they would refer to a particular set of pictures. “Radar sweep” in sentence three repeats without good reason “radar sweep” in sentence one. Wakefield chose to keep the later one. I asked him to pinpoint the meaning of the radar sweep in this essay; it seemed to have loose threads that were catching on other ideas and tangling them all up. So he separated one idea from another, and in the process let one drop. I thought “transient ephemeral social architecture that fills the intermittent spaces” was adjective heavy—especially with these academic sounding adjectives. He tossed out “transient” and “ephemeral” and put “intermittent” in their place. And so on.
Here is our edited version:
"Dark with something more than night, New York 1971 is a city of shadows. Shot without heed to the accepted protocols, these chance condensations of light mix evidence with abstraction. Like the radar sweep, they obliterate as they reveal. They record less the monuments that loom all around, than the intermittent social architecture that fills the spaces in between—"
The photographer’s images of New York, and the writer’s evocation of them, still meld; we simply follow Wakefield’s meaning more clearly now.
The two-person editorial conversation, even if you don’t use it, is a good model for an internal editorial dialogue. The push and pull of a dual exchange can be replicated inside one writer’s mind.
Mark up your text like an editor would, and go through each query more or less systematically, hashing out with yourself each ambiguity or conundrum.
THE HANG-UP OR LAY-OUT
Twenty-five years ago, I visited an artist’s colony set in the woods of southern France. From that visit, I kept the memory of a string that stretched across the length of one poet’s studio. He had hung his poems up, like a recent load of laundry, and read them standing or pacing around. The sight of paper sheets waving in the breeze made an impression on me, and I knew I’d have to try it. A few years later, I strung a line through my New York apartment and hung up my pages. I have had a cord strung across my workspace ever since.
There are many benefits to the line method. There is the increased alertness you feel when you read on your feet, as well as the disorientation—we’re not used to reading upright, and the novelty of it helps make our material feel new.
Also, to read pages horizontally is quite different from reading them in a stack, where you see only one page at a time. You can see proportions better when you read across, page to page to page, glancing back and forth, and stepping back to take in a view of the whole typographic design of a chapter. You will more easily see whether you’ve used too many tiny or lengthy paragraphs in one area. If you have a specific concern, use a highlighter or the bold key on your computer to make it stand out, then hang the pages up and observe where the color or bold type is either dense or absent—this may tell you if there is too little of one person, for instance, too much of one verb, too little dialogue, or too much of a leitmotiv.
On hearing of the laundry-line method, Laura Kipnis, author of Against Love, said, “O no, I could never do that. I have to lay it all out on the floor.” She walks or crawls around on top of her pages, reading and moving them as pieces of a puzzle.
Jim Lewis tapes his pages to the wall. He will print his manuscript out in a tiny, unreadable font size, so he can hang the entire book up. He will look at it like a painting or a map, searching for topographical imbalances.
Whichever way you choose—cord and clips, wall and tape, or floor—it can be valuable when you edit to look at your manuscript’s topography.
:
Perspective meant one thing for Eli Gottlieb, another for Neville Wakefield. Gottlieb needed to gain perspective on the true nature of his novel, whereas Wakefield knew what kind of essay he wanted to write, but needed perspective on the words and syntax he had used to write it. Gottlieb questioned the whole, that is, and Wakefield the minutiae. For the novelist, some of the above listed methods helped, including the “big break.” The critic, cornered by a deadline, could not take a big break. “Conversation” served Wakefield instead. Perhaps his essay demanded less distance than Gottlieb’s fiction. Fiction’s lack of guidelines in the external world can make its achievement exceedingly hard to assess. In any genre, though, perspective refers to the whole body of a text and its microscopic details. Depending on the kind of writer you are, and the situation you are up against, use the appropriate method to find perspective on your writing.
We will always need outside readers to see what we, on our own, cannot. But the ideal reader is not always around when you need him, and so depending on him is risky. Without an editor to give you a professional opinion, you must depend on yourself. Patience is key: do not be in a big hurry to finish. Give yourself time to be wrong and, then, eventually come round to understanding what’s right. In her journals about making art, painter Agnes Martin writes: “defeat is the beginning, not the end of all positive action.” With time, and editorial technique, we will discover, on our own, the difference between the piece we intend and the one we must write; between what we think we are supposed to do, usually to satisfy some false idea of what others want from us—in Gottlieb’s case, to be avant-garde—and what we need to do. Perspective may seem impossible to achieve, but achieving it is essential.
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Excerpted from The Artful Edit by Susan Bell. Copyright (c) 2007 by Susan Bell. With permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
