Today’s Writing Music: “I Don’t Like the Man That I Am” by Pete Molinari
Today’s Reading: On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of our Unled Lives by Andrew H. Miller
Some writers absolutely love revision. This makes sense to me, although I almost never feel this way. In theory it should be one of the most rewarding points in the writing process, where an unwieldy, messy rough draft at last becomes a beautiful work of powerful art. In revision, we’re told, we add by subtraction. According to Hemingway and his iceberg theory, the story on the page should be just a fraction of the whole. Tighten. Compress. Cut cut cut! As if the initial story is only Michelangelo hauling that block of marble over to the pedestal. Then, revising, chipping away everything that isn’t The David. For many it’s an appealing vision—but not for me.
For me, revision can be agonizing. I have a much easier time sitting down and letting the words flow onto the page. This is the fun part, like charging ahead into a cavern with my lantern, exploring one tunnel and then the next, going as far out as I can. At night I lay awake fantasizing over the next day’s work: a new scene, a chance encounter, a bit of dialogue… somehow it never feels like making choices, thinking and listening for that click when the idea is just right. When it comes down to it, I can get swept up in this part and (to go back to my earlier post on conning one’s self) I feel a kind of sudden confidence that this idea is good, that scene is funny, those characters are alive, etc. Why, then, would I want to go back and undo all of it?
But I have to, of course. As much as I wish revision wasn’t necessary, the truth is that it is just the part where I struggle most.
I have to second-guess all of those formerly sure-feelinged choices. Is that character really necessary? (No, but I love him!) Is this word too long? (Yes, but I love it!) And the opening description—too much? (Maybe, but it’s beautiful!) Ahem. Does this scene move the plot along? (Well, no, but it does introduce theme… maybe?)
My wife (a professional editor & often my first reader) can attest to the agonized noises that come out of me when she hands me back a manuscript that she’s covered in deletions and question marks. And the thing is, she’s always right—as much as I moan and groan in those initial moments, the end-result is inevitably far better when I take her advice. The 6000 word version of the story is better than the 8000. And that original, 650 page draft of my second novel? We can all be grateful that an editor helped me cut about 200 pages out of it. (Thank you Beena!)
“Kill Your Darlings,” we instruct every young writer, at some point. Usually the edict is misattributed to Ernest Hemingway, our American ur-Minimalist, though I’ve seen the words put in Faulkner’s mouth as well (by people, I’m guessing, who never read Absalom, Absalom?) Sometimes it’s said to have been Wilde, sometimes Chekov.
But as far as I can tell it’s real origin is a 1913 Cambridge lecture by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch:
If you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.
I know I first came across the imperative as a young writer in Stephen King’s book, On Writing, which is still a classic and often read by my own students.
“Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”
The idea, carried by both statements, is that it is precisely the writing that you the writer love most that has got to go.
Cut it. Delete it. Murder it! Kill it (three times). You are just an “egocentric little scribbler” after all. What do you know?
After Hemingway, the writer best known for modern minimalism is probably Raymond Carver, author of famous stories like “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” where a group of middle-aged suburbanites sit around a kitchen table drinking gin and discussing love (as you do).
The title story begins this way:
My friend Mel McGinnis was talking. Mel McGinnis is a cardiologist, and sometimes that gives him the right.
The four of us were sitting around his kitchen table drinking gin. Sunlight filled the kitchen from the big window behind the sink. There were Mel and me and his second wife Teresa—Terri, we called her—and my wife, Laura. We lived in Albuquerque then. But we were all from somewhere else.
This is a decent sample of Carver here. Simple (even blunt) prose, few adjectives, short words. There’s a sense of voice, but it’s a plainspoken one. Lots of iceberg here left off the page—where are they from? What happened to Mel’s first wife? Why are they all drinking gin in the kitchen? What does being a cardiologist have to do with the right to dominate the conversation?
Some of these questions will get answered as the story goes along, but most won’t. We’re just meant to feel them, and the space around them, as we go, with what’s unsaid becoming almost as important as what is.
And I don’t hate it. I like it, in fact. I like writing this way sometimes myself—and it is not easy, I’ll add, to make something look this clean. It’s much harder than I wish it was. I think this kind of writing remains one very important mode in which to work… but I don’t think it is the only one or always the best one. I don’t think it’s the end-all-be-all.
And if is treated as such by serious writers and critics, and often taught as such to our beginning writers in writing programs—I have a problem.
For one thing, in recent years, more has come to light about the role that Carver’s editor, Gordon Lish, played in his writing process—that Lish at times made extreme cuts and changes to Carver’s work. That Carver sometimes called him in tears, begging him to change things back again. (Never have I related to RC so badly!) Lish has claimed in interviews that without these edits the style Carver is so known for would never have existed—and perhaps rightly so. Carver’s estate has even gone so far as to release the “original version” of the collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, under Carver’s desired title, Beginners.
Comparing the title stories is wild. I wish I could go through the alterations, point by point, here, but that would turn this post into a book in and of itself. Readers can check out the original version, “Beginners” (the story) here. Compare the opening, and it doesn’t seem so bad:
My friend Herb McGinnis, a cardiologist, was talking. The four of us were sitting around his kitchen table drinking gin. It was Saturday afternoon. Sunlight filled the kitchen from the big window behind the sink. There were Herb and I and his second wife, Teresa—Terri, we called her—and my wife, Laura. We lived in Albuquerque, but we were all from somewhere else.
Weird, maybe, that Lish would change “Herb” to “Mel” but, OK, maybe it does sound better. But adding (from nowhere) that line, “Mel McGinnis is a cardiologist, and sometimes that gives him the right.” is pretty major. Otherwise, it is just the last line there that’s broken in two. OK, fine.
But the ends of the stories are wildly different. Lish’s version goes like this:
Mel turned his glass over. He spilled it out on the table. "Gin's gone," Mel said. Terri said, "Now what?" I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone's heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.
Haunting. Tight. Maybe one of the most famous endings to a story in that part of the 20th century, and it probably deserves to be.
But it surprised me to find that Carver’s original version, “Beginners” has about a full page that follows the “gin’s gone” moment, in which we find out all kinds of things, including that Mel gave his second wife an abortion. The narrator eats salami and goes outside to look at the swimming pool. He consoles Terri. They talk about suicide. Then this ends the story:
I kept looking at the women at the table. Terri was still crying and Laura was stroking her hair. I turned back to the window. The blue layer of sky had given way now and was turning dark like the rest. But stars had appeared. I recognized Venus and, farther off and to the side, not as bright but unmistakably there on the horizon, Mars. The wind had picked up. I looked at what it was doing to the empty fields. I thought unreasonably that it was too bad the McGinnises no longer kept horses. I wanted to imagine horses rushing through those fields in the near-dark, or even just standing quietly with their heads in opposite directions near the fence. I stood at the window and waited. I knew I had to keep still a while longer, keep my eyes out there, outside the house, as long as there was something left to see.
It’s a stunning passage, and a whole different mood than Lish had left us with. There’s so much more beauty, and awe, and holiness in all this something that there is, I’m sorry, in the nothing that we get in the final edit. Lish leaves us with a void, a near hopelessness. Like it or not, it doesn’t carry Carver’s artistic intent at all.
Carver’s ending is messier, yes. But also fuller, more hopeful, and softer. Personally, I’ll always prefer it, and I’ll always wonder how much more lyricism, light, and life we’d have seen in the next twenty years of American fiction if we’d known Carver’s true intentions, and modelled a generation’s worth of fiction on that instead.
In Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg has this to say about revision in her chapter, “Go Farther”:
“Push yourself beyond when you think are done with what you have to say. Go a little further. Sometimes when you think you are done, it is just the edge of beginning. Probably that’s why we decide we’re done. It’s getting too scary. We are touching down onto something real. It is beyond the point when you think you are done that often something strong comes out.”
Look—editors are important. I’m married to one. We should listen to what they tell us. But their job is to point out problems in the text, and help us work out ways of fixing them. Cutting isn’t always the only, or best way. Does that mean you leave everything in its raw first draft form? Of course not. But what if we think about editing as a process of addition by addition, instead of addition by subtraction?
By all means, kill off what you don’t care about, but leave those darlings be. If they’re not working right yet, then make them work right. Follow the artistic instincts that led you to make them in the first place.
R.O. Kwon put this better than I can in a recent Catapult essay: “A Case Against Killing Your Darlings”:
The phrase “kill your darlings” is a lifelong foe. I’ve never quite understood it, prevalent as the idea can be. I take the injunction to mean I should get rid of the best parts of what I’m working on: the lines I feel especially alive while rereading, the metaphors so bewitching it seems possible I, too, along with the language, might be transfigured.
To which I say: fuck, no. Absolutely not. Why would I cut, let alone kill, that which most delights me?
I refuse, so here’s what I believe: I want any novel I write to be full of darlings. If possible, all darlings.
Perfect. No notes. This is 100% my writing philosophy. Who doesn’t want a book full of darlings? Make every sentence a wonder. Use words that surprise and delight, no matter their length or plainness. We’ve only got eight parts of speech to play with—why sacrifice adverbs just because the Kansas City Star Style Guide told a young reporter named Ernest Hemingway to slash them all, over a hundred years ago? It urges against “extravagant” adjectives and “superfluous” words… well, you decide what’s superfluous and what isn’t. Let’s have some goddamn extravagance once in a while if you want. Everything doesn’t always have to be economical—a book isn’t a Motel 6 (or at least it doesn’t have to be). Why not have your reader stay in the page-equivalent of the Four Seasons instead? A minimalist’s book doesn’t cost any less than a maximalist’s.
You’re the writer. Let your egocentric little scribbler’s heart sing, and fuck the haters.
Cut what needs to go, then replace it with something even better.
Better can mean bigger, truer, more original, less plain, more dazzling.
In other words, fight for your darlings.
And as always, have fun.
Writing Towards the Fun #8: I’m borrowing this week’s writing challenge from John McPhee’s book about nonfiction writing, Draft No. 4. In the book he describes how he puts a piece together, including making cuts and on. But in his process, the final draft, the fourth draft, is where he goes bigger. Here’s how:
Take a piece of your writing and print it out. With a highlighter, find a few words on each page that are dull and unexciting. Look these up in a dictionary—not a thesaurus, McPhee advises, because what we want are not just synonyms but deeper understandings of definitions and shadings of meaning. So use a dictionary, look up the words one at a time, and see if you can find some better alternatives.
Instead of a river’s “shoreline” is it more accurate to call it a “batture”?
Instead of “pear-shaped” is it more leaf-like and “obovate”?
Instead of “slanted” is it “bevelled”?
Instead of “bouncing” did the ball, in fact, “carom”?
Instead of things being “linked” are they “concatenated”?
(These are all examples I took from McPhee’s essay “The Orange Trapper”)
The idea here isn’t just to use odd words for the sake of using odd words—but to get something even more precise, even more interesting, than what was there before.
See if you can find three, or even five, per page and watch how much more interesting your story becomes!
Love this piece. I'm going to be chanting, "A novel isn't a Motel 6," for a long time. Trusting our original instincts is harder during the revision process. Thanks for the reminder to listen more closely.
Yes. Yes. Yes. Inspiring! Thank you!