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Zoshchenko’s Unstable We: The Tension of Collective Plurals in Soviet Fiction | by Alina Stefanescu

November 30, 2020 By Grist Journal

1.

Mikhail Zoshchenko was born in Poltava, in present-day Ukraine, to a Ukrianian father and a Russian mother. He wrote primarily in Russian. His short story collection, The Galosh​ and Other Stories​ (London: Angel Books, 2000), has kept me company during the estrangement of Trumplandic pandemic. At the heart of Zoshchenko’s work is the role of satire and its relation to political dissent, or rather, the precise point at which satirizing a society becomes a critique of the state itself. Because I am deeply interested in satire as critique of current American culture and governance, I want to provide context for Zoshchenko’s brilliance and his stakes in the skin of the Soviet game. 

2.

In the 1920’s, the USSR was a country between gernes. Bolsheviks won the battle over governance, but no one knew what that meant yet. It was a middling time, easier to describe in retrospect. Lenin’s New Economic Policy acknowledged the need for gradualism in order to create a proper Soviet proletariat. A simulacra of liberalism and market exchange was permitted while official decrees and statements criticized the culture of bourgeois materialism. NEP was a practical strategy, both pedagogic and economic, buying time for the institutionalization of drastic social change. Poets like Vladimir Mayakovsky became literal poster-boys for the mocking of petty-bourgeois socialization; Mayakovsky’s popular posters scoffed at mechchenstvo​, or lack of devotion to revolutionary ideals. 

The role that writers would play was being negotiated. Tracing the history of satire through the early Soviet period gives us a sense of how language implicates–and is implicated by–constructions of power. Under NEP, satire was permitted and not censored.

Entertainment included laughter, mockery, and served as a unifying force and release valve for social pressure. But there were rumblings from Soviet critics even then. Those critics insisted that satire wasn’t necessary after 1923, since the establishment of the Soviet Union addressed social ills legally and correctly. What “correctly” meant would be an ongoing dispute throughout the Soviet period. 

3.

The concept of kulturnost​, translated by Jeremy Hicks as “living properly,” referred to civilized behavior, social norms, hygiene, and manners. But what does it mean to behave​ correctly​ in a revolutionary time when the scriptures of Marx do not apply to the situation on the ground? Like fundamentalist pastors, Soviet leaders and theorists became divining rods for unquestionable dicta, interpreting textual scripture from a position of expertise and authority, thus turning alternate interpretations into secular forms of heresy and crimes against the state. The line between propaganda and literature or entertainment does not exist for those who rely on texts as avenues to revelation.

In Zoshchenko’s stories, the characters consistently trespass a blurry, evolving kulturnost​ that consists of technical, uncertain words increasingly used at Party meetings and in media. To the extent that they attempt kulturnost​ by use of new language, they wear it awkwardly, extraneously, like a cheap, one-size-fits-all costume. 

Although his work was seen as satire, Zoshchenko insisted that it was didactic, and the humor was a side-effect rather than the intention. Zoshchenko considered himself a rationalist, and the question remains: what was his satire teaching? In 1927, he described what he did as a “parodying,” adding that he was standing-in for the proletariat writer who didn’t yet exist. The proletarian writer question was eventually resolved by the formulation of Socialist Realism, but the 1920’s remained marked by an open space where new terminology coexisted with economic shortages. 

4.

The feuilleton​, an elaboration of topical factual material, had emerged as a popular genre, facilitated by the rise of the printing press. Zoshchenko transformed the feuilleton by localizing with the Russian storytelling mode known as skaz, ​​in which the narrator is another character. As a narrative style, skaz was popularized by Nikolai Gogol and Nikolai Lesvov. Using satire to make ideology the locus of conflict in community life revealed the existential nature of early Soviet life. A generalized utopia which exists in both future and present tense–a temporality never quited resolved by Soviet theorists–is tested in the actual banality of human lives, where abstractions don’t map the characters’ experience of the world. The question of trust and loyalty enters at the level of individual experience: should one trust what one knows by experience or what one believes according to official experts? In a sense, Zoshchenko gets away with satire because the characters always defer to the ideology, which makes it hard to call it a social critique. 

5.

Svetlana Boym notes that “authoritarian and totalitarian regimes favor a resacralization of the public realm.” In this new sacred space, literature and arts are means of propaganda or socialization into the sacred ideal of revolutionary spirit. Rival discourses and “unsanctioned performances” are seen as competitors for truth, a threat to the sanctity of the state in its new positioning as vanguard of the global communist revolution. The disappearance of private life, the sense in which surveillance turns even the intimate into public space, foregrounds spectacle. Stalin’s emphasis on enforced attendance mass festivals as galvanizing events is inseparable from the development of what Boym calls “the secret spaces of fear” internalized by Soviet citizens. 

The new binary of “sanctioned” vs. “unsanctioned” art guides writers and artists during this time when state sanction begins to determine publication, membership in the Writer’s Union, and ideological correctness. The state destroys the Church in order to replace it as the primary vehicle of moral correctness, the authority on good behavior, the seat of judgement before the tribunal of Hegelian History. By 1930, political needs led to the shutting down of satirical presses. Comedy became suspicious; mockery became dangerous as reverence for the regime took precedence. Zoshchenko’s writing voice lost official sanction.

6.

And so the end of ambiguity arrived, as it often does, with war.  As World War II unwound, Stalin came to believe that ambiguous satires were dangerous for Soviet readers. Like many silenced writers, Zoshchenko turned to children’s stories to escape the censors, and even wrote a youth-directed series about Lenin. But when his satirical short story, “The Adventures of a Monkey” was published in a 1946 literary journal, it led to harsh. Andrei

Zhdanov, the Communist Party spokesman on cultural matters, read the story as a satire of Soviet life which suggested it was better to live in a zoo cage rather than the city. Zhdanov attacked it in his own literary mode, by using the new genre of party resolutions (I swear Party Resolutions are a genre that deserves more attention). In the Party Resolution of 1946, he called the story slanderous and deviant. Zoshchenko was attacked alongside Akhmatova in bitter, hyperbolic language. 

As a result, Zoshchenko was expelled from the Writer’s Union. Public ostracism and persecution broke his will to write, since he believed that his task as a satirist and proponent of rationalism was to educate Soviet readers. Zoshchenko found it nearly impossible to publish anything until after Stalin’s death in 1953, when he underwent a slight, informal rehabilitation.

This informal rehabilitation enabled a soft return to the public scene. In May 1954, a group of English students met with him and Akhmatova. The students asked if they agreed with the Party Resolution condemning their word. Akhmatova managed a yes – her son was a prisoner in a gulag at the time – while Zoshchenko announced that he did not. As a veteran soldier, Zoshchenko took special issue with the accusation of cowardice which suggested he had avoided the Leningrad blockade. 

When Soviet officials ordered Zoshchenko to retract his public objection to the Resolution, he refused. This ended his life as a writer in the USSR. He died four years later, problematic to the end. 

 Here is a dry table of the events in my life: Arrested – 6 times,  sentenced to death – 1 time, wounded – 3 times, committed suicide – 2 times, got beaten up – 3 times.

In this short bio, we can see how Zoshchenko’s satire mobilizes Orwellian doublespeak to encode, for example, his double condemnation by Soviet officials as forms of suicide, the writer killing himself. 

7. 

I want to look closely at Zoshchenko’s early short stories in order to understand how satire becomes threatening to totalitarian and authoritarian regimes. Each of these stories runs from one to three pages, using brevity and compression in ways that are instructive for flash fiction writers. 

In flash, the title does a lot of work in setting tone and insinuating conflict. Zoshchenko’s short titles often set up a sort of intimate, conversational banality that feels contemporary. Using newspapers for themes and content, Zoshchenko estimated that thirty to forty percent of his stories were based on news articles and letters to the editor about social problems, including the housing shortage and fights breaking out over lack of personal space. The titles tell the reader what conflict to expect by framing each tale in light of its new vocabulary. “Economy Measures,” for example, evokes a new economic drive announced by the Communist Party. His use of titling is a stunning expansion of intertextuality, including official speeches, party meetings, new party directives, and ordinary letters from citizens. And “Does A Man Need Much?” brings Russian history to bear on the contemporary in referencing Lev Tolstoy’s didactic essay, “How Much Land Does A Man Need?” (first published in Intimate​ Tales for the People​, 1886). 

The skaz ​​narration technique, where characters and narrator tell the story in conversation, deploys rich language, common expletives, and a collective we. ​While Lestov’s We tends to be the We of the village or peasant folk-life, Zoshchenko’s We includes the new urban pre-proletariat population. It is a shaky We, an unstable We, and a fascinating one. One could argue that Soviet readers were being introduced to the language of revolution through these stories. Zoshchenko centers the emerging class-conscious verbiage through constant reference to these words in such compressed space. 

Individual characters are not always given proper names. Instead, we meet a five-man commission, a timekeeper, a Housing Manager, a Hero of Labor, Nepman, proletarians, an efficiency manager, various specialists, minorities, parasites, militiamen, thieves, emancipated workers, lecturers, citizens, witnesses, relatives, and victims. The use of these words which determine class status reveal the tension of the Soviet We, best represented in the consistent, mandatory use of Comrade as address. The brevity and sharp syntax creates a snappy, brisk pace made comfortable by occasional colloquialisms and street talk.

8.

The sense in which these stories are conversant with–and reflective of–current events makes them accessible while putting the author in an increasingly vulnerable position as censorship is institutionalized. Insults borrow directly from official Soviet directives describing the proper​ ​ citizen. The average asshole is now the “bourgeois bastard”; the transient man is automatically a thief; the unemployed is a “a parasite”; the disabled is an “invalid”; the thinker is an “obscurantist.” Zoshchenko’s fiction internalizes these new hierarchies of status by allowing characters to use them as common insults. (It is interesting to note the large role that exorbitant hyperbolic language played in official Soviet communications, since Zoshchenko borrows this effect in his stories. As does Trump for his stadium narrations.)

“Monkey Language” reports a dialogue between two men employing foreign words like quorum and plenary overheard at political meetings, but their inability to understand the words they are using becomes a feature of alienation from language rather than shared community.

“A Speech About Bribery” makes fun of the foreign, hyperbolic words of an Engineer Line Manager announcing to railway workers that the incredible “evil” known as bribery “has been reduced by fifty percent.” And then pontificating his belief that it should be executable, a crime just after murder. These moral pronouncements at party meetings combine with statistics and percentages, calculations that demonstrate how the Soviet state is accomplishing and measuring its results on the ground. Zoshchenko’s use of the “Speech” as a form for short fiction was satirical until it became the actual social script for CP unity and loyalty. I think of Trump’s Republicans and their blindered loyalism. I think also of corporate culture’s constant measuring and how this has combined with evangelical numeration of souls saved, etc. I think there are so many ways to learn from Zoshchenko’s narrative style in the present.

9.

At a time when ideology attempted to do away with petty bourgeois habits of materialism and status-seeking, we see how those very habits become all the more important and pivotal, institutionalized in the new form of government. Even love is aromantic, concerned with material things, with the theft of coat or galoshes, as we see in the story of a lover walking his girl home at night, where the trope of romantic revelation is subverted by a street robber. In “Love,” the lover’s dejection is not over saying goodbye to the lover:

“I walk her home, and I lose my property. So that’s how it is.”

This foregrounding of property as a both a word and an identity undermines the sentimental context. Throughout his stories, one discovers repetitive objects, most of them marked by scarcity, creating a new economy of value, including fur coat, galoshes, rubbish, matchbox, partition, communal apartment, lamp, property, overcoat, sheepskin hat, napkins. As objects grow more difficult to procure, conflict develops between friends and family. The objects seem more important than people, an ironic turn for a People’s Republic. In this, Zoschenko seems prophetic, laying the cognitive groundwork for a society in which citizens eventually offer their brothers’ lives to secret police in return for a summer vacation. The market for misinformation and gossip flourished in the Soviet Union. And because it was legal and normalized, citizens learned to adapt and participate in ways that suited their personal self-interest.

10.

In “A Dogged Sense of Smell,” published in 1924, Zoshchenko creates a tapestry of social guilts and recriminations. It begins with a narrator and a conversation:

“Comrades, you know they can do amazing things with science these days, incredible!”

The science here refers to how dogs can be trained to detect robbers and criminals. The narrator marvels over these new “militia-sniffer dogs,” and then recounts how a friend sought help from police who then used one of these dogs to find a coat thief. Instead of finding the thief, the dog focused on an old lady, hounding her until she confessed to stealing five buckets of yeast and a vodka-still. The dog then hounds the Citizen Chairman of the House Committee, who surrenders, saying: “Kind people, class-conscious citizens…Tie me up.” The dog begins grabbing people at random, and all confess to various crimes like losing funds at gambling or hitting their wives with an iron. 

Citizens profess their own guilt in a symphony of petty bourgeois self-loathing, a performance of mass self-flagellation that resembles much of what occurred under

Stalinism during show trials, and what became characteristic of Party meetings across the Iron Bloc. 

In a criminal system run by dogs, everyone is guilty. Everyone must stick to the script of self-denunciation in order to survive. And what feels more relevant, somehow, than the last sentence, the way Zoshchenko ends this 3 page story with the narrator locking himself in his room, considering what he might have said or confessed, finally concluding:

“Comrades,” I would have said, “I am the worst criminal of all: though I didn’t touch the fur coat, I take advances from magazines, publish the same story twice, and all the rest of it. Beat me, wretch that I am.”

We see a similar theme in “A Hasty Business,” where a character says: 

“As yet, we don’t know what my husband’s got caught for. But one things for certain, they’ll find something or other. Everyone’s done something, and we’re all skating on thin ice. But can they really give you capital punishment for that?”

Note how Zoschenko’s sentences are not connected by logical sequence so much as “and” or “but.” Nothing makes sense and yet there is an order to it. His syntax shifts between long-winded speechification and staccato-like phrases or exclamations which lack a verb. In using the wrong words, characters heighten an atmosphere of absurdity that distorts speech and twists it to fit the lexicon.

What is the difference between piety, loyalty, and devotion? The performance of loyalty requires this piety, these rituals, which became verbal. As Soviet citizens, writers were expected to use revolutionary language which often felt (and was) foreign. Zoshchenko references these new forms continuously in the intertextual engagement of party directives and propaganda. Does he do this intentionally to estrange Soviets from their language? I’m not equipped to answer that. But I can note these new forms include criminal reports, court summons, speeches, legal redress, “economy measures,” foreign telegrams, cultural reports, and legal words, among others. 

Zoschenko interrogates agency by making it seem random, unpredictable, and absurd. The word “accident” is often used to describe an event while destabilizing its veracity. Holidays include “an ex-saint’s day,” revealing how characters internalize censorship of religion. The word “respectable” feels meaningless and silly in the context of its descriptor (i.e. “respectable tray”). “Social status” is referenced by characters as both a threat and a concern, creating a seam of obscurity in which Soviet citizens flounder, sink, swim, drown. When looking to explain things, characters don’t actually do the work of thinking through an explanation; instead they defer to official statements, labeling something as “a question of culture.” One gets a sense of how discussion and thinking ceased in the USSR. 

Zoshchenko’s careful attention to language included using expressions and idioms that suggested irony of circumstance (see a little bit of an incident, slight mistake, achievement) and/or created tension through defamiliarization by foregrounding the collective We. Reading “unanimous shouts” and “chorused” gives us the performance of We-ness without the emotional or other-regarding content. 

11.

The danger of satire is that it makes the sacred vulnerable; it profanes the pedestal of power. If writers exist to create a script for statecraft, then mockery is unacceptable, especially when the country’s ego is conflated with that of the leader. In an essay exploring Bertolt Brech’s reliance on satire, Walter Benjamin said something which demonstrates the inherent risk of satire for writers:

The satirist confines himself to the nakedness that confronts him in the mirror. Beyond this his duty does not go.

When the distance between the self in the mirror and the social collective collapses, when human rights play second fiddle to the interests of the state, the satirist’s mirrored gaze is untenable. 

Notes & Sources: Much of the information about Zoshchenko’s life came from Jeremy Hick’s excellent introduction to this translation of the short stories, see The Galosh and Other​     Stories​. Translated by Jeremy Hicks. Overlook Press, 2009.  For more on Zoshchenko’s stylistic innovations, see emotions that are subverted or turned: jealousy as a petty bourgeois state, generosity, conscious, honesty, abstract state, etc. For Benjamin on Brecht, see Benjamin, Walter., et al. Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings,​     Mariner Books, 2019, particularly “Brecht’s Threepenny Novel,” where Benjamin also theorizes that Marx set the tone for this distance between writer and subject. For references to Boym, see Boym, Svetlana. Another Freedom: the Alternative History of an​          

Idea​. University of Chicago Press, 2012. (pp. 68-72). For short biography authored by Zoshschenko, see Russiapedia, “Mikhail Zoshchenko”

https://russiapedia.rt.com/prominent-russians/literature/mikhail-zoshchenko/.  Accessed 24​ Sep. 2020.

Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her partner and several intense mammals. Her writing can be found in diverse journals, including Prairie Schooner, North American Review, FLOCK, Southern Humanities Review, Crab Creek Review, Virga, Whale Road Review, and others. She serves as Poetry Editor for Pidgeonholes, Poetry Editor for Random Sample Review, Poetry Reviewer for Up the Staircase Quarterly, and Co-Director of PEN America’s Birmingham Chapter. She was nominated for 5 Pushcart Prizes by various journals in 2019. A finalist for the 2019 Kurt Brown AWP Prize, Alina won the 2019 River Heron Poetry Prize. She still can’t believe (or deserve) any of this. More online at www.alinastefanescuwriter.com.

Filed Under: Community, Essays

The Issue of Race in Writing | by Cynthia Robinson Young

October 27, 2020 By Grist Journal

On Being Intentional

Here is an interesting confession: I have always assumed that any books a teacher assigned in any kind of class, no matter what the subject, unless is was a designated class on race, the author would be white, and it would be probably be about white people. The subject of race was always contained within the definition of the course.  If the teacher was Black, then all bets were potentially off, although I still thought it safe to assume the authors would be white if English literature was the subject.  And I wasn’t the only one who held this assumption. In my first semester in a graduate creative writing program, I took a class on poetry with an African American professor who assigned a poetry collection by Nikki Giovanni. I was not surprised that he had chosen a Black poet, but the fact that he had chosen a woman was impressive, exposing my prejudice that as a male poet, I assumed he might lean more toward choosing other poets like himself.  But that wasn’t the concern of the rest of the class, in which were two other women of color. Looking back, I hope that the student who raised her hand with a question just represented herself and not any of the other white male and female students when she asked the professor, “Why are we reading a Black poet?”

Looking back, all this student did was expose what she had been educated to believe: in a general education about poetry that hasn’t been listed as “Other”, the poets would be “universal.” The professor’s answer was succinct and priceless. He answered calmly and unruffled; it was a class viewing the craft of poetry through the lens of Zen Buddhism after all.  So, in a voice just above a whisper, he said, “Because I said so.”

Taking the class revealed even more as the craft of writing pertains to race. Even the professor’s first poetry assignment was controversial. When he asked the class to write a political poem, students were in a flurry in the class a week later, as they talked about the difficulty of the assignment amongst themselves before the professor entered the room. I was both interested in their struggle and confused. I realized then that pretty much everything I write is political. It isn’t intentional. I thought it was life. So when I read this excerpt from David Mura’s essay, “The Search for Identity” in A Stranger’s Journey, I thought this might be why. He writes:

When a person comes from a family or a group that has been marginalized, when she is one of the “subalterns,” the silence such a person confronts about herself and her experiences within the greater culture is a political condition. In such cases, the very act of writing about herself and her experiences becomes a political act.

It was interesting to note that the other women of color in the class also wrote from their experience in being women of color. Their poems were authentic and moving, therapeutic poems of discovery of another layer of racism they had experienced.

It is unfortunate that professors have to be intentional if they are to include writers of color in the assigned reading of even contemporary literature, and unfortunate that it is questioned when they do it, and assumed to be “normal” when they don’t. One of my three classes on magical realism and fairy tales did not include one author of color, even though that is the main genre I enjoy reading and so I know that many works, such as those of Louise Erdrich, Isabel Allende, Octavia Butler, and most recently, Ta-Nehisi Coates with his book, The Water Dancer. But I am thankful for my professors who are intentional, because in doing so, they are truly educating the students deal with the reality of racism in terms we have not been challenged to even consider.

The scope of the issue of race in writing is vast. In this essay, I don’t think I can cover all the nuances of the impact of race, and how it affects the craft, but I would like to begin the dialogue as I attempt to explore some of the ways race impacts the craft of writing, and two writers, Toni Morrison and David Mura, who have pondered this issue.

Toni Morrison began to explore the impact of white superiority is portrayed in literature in her nonfiction book, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, and expanded some of those ideas even more, theories which served as the basis of The Origin of Others, where she also wrestles with the question of what it even means to be a writer of color, and all of the implications.  David Mura, building on Morrison’s insights, offers a unique approach to race in his book, A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity, and Narrative Craft in Writing.  I will then explore how these ideas are employed in Morrison’s novel, Sula. My goal in writing this paper is to explore the depth of how race has not only influenced our reading of literature, but how it influences our writing, and, in understanding the role of race, to be more intentional in using the craft of writing about race to inform how it is a craft that must be acknowledged and considered, as well as how I can use this knowledge in my own writing of my novel.

White Superiority in American Literature

Until recently, little thought was given to the label, “white superiority”, as it was reserved for those who openly identified with the Ku Klux Klan, the White Citizen’s Council, and Nazism and its followers. But the term seems to have taken on a new life as it has been redefined. Whereas it previously was defined in the narrow term of white people who believe that the white race is the smartest and most civilized and thus should have control over all races because it is the gift of white people to be the brightest and best, the broader definition is more based on the reality of what white superiority looks like, what the culture of whiteness looks like, which includes privileges that people of color do not have access to. In literature it appears in different forms. It is interesting to note what Morrison says white writers use as shortcuts in their writing—black images and black stereotypes. In Playing in the Dark, she notes, “I do not have quite the same access to these traditionally use constructs of blackness. Neither blackness nor ‘people of color’ stimulates in me notions of excessive, limitless love, anarchy, or routine dread. I cannot rely on these metaphorical shortcuts because I am a black writer struggling with and through a language that can powerfully evoke and enforce hidden signs of racial superiority, cultural hegemony, and dismissive ‘othering’ of people, language which are by no means marginal or already and completely known and knowable in my work.  It is troubling that white writers can just throw a Black character in their novels and trust that the reader will make stereotypical assumptions unquestioning the truth of these assumptions is troubling, but it has been the experience of all readers who read novels such as these. Here is an example of writing not what you know, but who you know. And if the writer doesn’t know, s/he must either avoid writing about them, or find that trusted “other” to vet his/her works. In Sula, Morrison has a plethora of characters, and all of them are individuals. Morrison says, “…my vulnerability would lie in romanticizing blackness rather than demonizing it; vilifying whiteness rather than reifying it.”  What was Morrison’s struggle in having Sula be a Black woman who was promiscuous in the eyes of the townspeople, when that is a stereotype of Black women?  The example lies in the depth of characterization of Sula:

“Sula was completely distinctly different. Eva’s arrogance and Hannah’s self-indulgence merged in her and, with a twist that was all her own imagination, she lived out her days exploring her own thoughts and emotions, giving them full reign, feeling no obligation to please anybody unless their pleasure pleased her. “

 She is written as a complex character who does what she wants. It therefore makes sense that she acts as she does. Sula isn’t defined by her race or her sex, but by her personality. Nell is a Black woman, as is her mother, Helene. Neither of them have the personality to act as Sula did. Part of the craft of writing about race is the ability to see that characters are people first. How many writers, Black or white are willing to struggle with writing real characters that represent truth versus the politically correct truth of the moment? It is also interesting to note that white readers can bring their own ignorance of race into their reading of a book like Sula.  in a recent class, when a white graduate student who had not heard of Toni Morrison until she read the novel, Sula, asked the class if we thought that the character was lying in this scene when Nell is talking to Sula on Sula’s return:

“Tell me about it. The big city.”
“Big is all it is. A big Medallion.”
“No. I mean the life. The nightclubs, and parties…”
“I was in college, Nellie. No nightclubs on campus.”

(Morrison 99)

It was quickly pointed out by other white students that on page 121, Morrison writes that Sula “had lied only once in her life—to Nell about the reason for putting Eva out, and she could lie to her only because she cared about her”, while the two African American women students were sitting in the class speechless, trying to process what was actually being implied in the white student’s question.

Another part of white superiority is the assumption that all of the readers will be white, so there won’t even be any offence taken by Black readers because there won’t be any! This brings up the subject of universalism in writing. In Playing in the Dark, Morrison states, and Mura repeats her statement in his book the idea that,

“For reasons that should not need explanation here, until very recently all of American fiction has been positioned as white. I am interested to know what that assumption has meant to the literary imagination. When does racial ‘unconsciousness’ or awareness of race enrich interpretive language, and when does it impoverish it? What does positing one’s writerly self, in the wholly racialized society that is the United States, as unraced and all others as raced entail? What happens to the writerly imagination of a black author who is at some level always conscious of representing ones’ race to, or in spite of, a race of readers that understands itself to be ‘universal’ or race-free? In other words, how is ‘literary whiteness’ and ‘literary blackness’ made, in what is the consequence of that construction?”

This statement first addresses the subject I mentioned in the beginning of the paper– how an educator can fill a syllabus of assigned readings that only represent white writers and not realize the white superiority that is implied to do so, as well as what it teaches the white students who will leave the classroom not even considering reading the work of writers of color because they only read “universal’ writing versus books written for Black readers? Mura goes on to say, “While white writers have not traditionally had to imagine a reader of color, writers of color have always been cognizant that their work would be judged and interpreted by white readers.”

To be sitting in an English class on African American Women writers with English graduate students who have not read anything by Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, or even heard of these writers that have been the core of my literary sustenance astounds me, and begs the question, what have they been reading? And why have I read all of the books they’ve read? Mura calls this “racial segregation of reading and learning.”

The statement also addresses the idea that as an African American writer, to be successful I must write to a universal audience; that every readers won’t be able to my work because if I mention race, if there are Black characters, then it won’t be accessible. What it actually is, is code for the white superiority of reading; that if it’s not written for white people, it’s not going to be commercially successful. No African American writer is going to challenge that, even if they decide it doesn’t matter to them. Our prime example is Toni Morrison’s two books, The Bluest Eye, and Sula. Before Oprah’s Book Club, which appealed to white America so much that anything Oprah recommended became a best seller, most of white America had not heard of Toni Morrison. The rush in popularity of her books produced a repackaging and printing of her books and catapulted her to stardom, Oprah’s Book Club became synonymous with “universalism”. If Oprah told white America to read a book written by an author of color, it was “safe”, it was accessible, and it was appealing.

Is There a Way to Not Write About Race?

David Mura presents an interesting contrast between the basic assumptions white writers and writers of color bring to their writing (and reading). To summarize: for whites, the default race for the characters is white unless stated so to mention race turns the work into a racial/political piece; there is no indication of how any characters of color view the white characters so there is no lens of race to judge the work—it’s race-less. For writers of color, if the characters are not white, they must be labeled; the writer must make a decision about the way these characters are seen because we are aware of the stereotypes that will projected if we don’t; the lens of race “is essential to understanding…the way the writer views her characters and the larger society.”

This reminds me of how most African Americans are raised; we never represent ourselves, but rather a whole race. I was always aware and envious that my white friends could be themselves, and all white people weren’t judged by how they acted, how they dressed, how they spoke. And here it is again in writing, where white writers are free to just write whatever and assume everyone will find it accessible and race free. In the introduction of Sula, Morrison discusses the burden put on Black writers as she experienced it with her novel. “If the novel was good, it was because it was faithful to a certain kind of politics;…the judgement was based on whether ‘Black people are—or are not—like this.”

Morrison, always aware of, and always trying to be intentional and purposeful in her writing, starts Sula off with what she called a “lobby” (Morrison xv) which served as a gentle entrance for whites to enter her novel. She says of the later novels, that they “refuse the presentation, refuse the seductive safe harbor; the line of demarcation between…them and us.”  Morrison notes how Black writers don’t possess “privilege” in America of not wrestling with this question. In her essay, “The Color Fetish” in The Origin of Others, she writes, “I became interested in culture rather than skin color; when color alone was their bête noire, when it was incidental, and when it was unknowable, or deliberately withheld. The latter offered me an interesting opportunity to ignore the fetish of color as well as a certain freedom accompanied by some very careful writing. In some novels I theatricalized the point by not only refusing to rest on racial signs but also alerting the reader to my strategy” (Morrison 49),

With this idea in mind, she later writes the novel, Home, as her attempt to write with the freedom white writers have, with no mention of race at all. In Home, there is no “colored storekeeper” or “white doctor”. Instead she uses Black codes to indicate to the reader what the race is, and what it would look like through the lens of the characters. It is a story of a brother named Frank Money who, after leaving the Army, travels across the country to find his sister, Cee in Georgia. The novel opens with Frank, needs to escape from the hospital he was being held prisoner in. he remembers seeing an AME Zion church, where the pastor tells him, “They must have thought you were dangerous. If you was sick they’d never let you in.”  These were three clues that the protagonist is Black. There is even a description given of him as a “young, hale, and very tall veteran” but that is all.  When the AME pastor goes to help Frank in his quest to get to his sister in Georgia, he does something that only a Black person would know about. “Reverend Maynard gave him helpful information for his journey. From Green’s traveler’s book he copied out some addresses and names of rooming houses, hotels where he would not be turned away.” There are other little references, such as this exchange in a diner that one of the Red Caps recommended, when someone asks Frank where he’s headed.

“Georgia?” the waitress shouted. “I got people in Macon. No good memories about that place. We hid in an abandoned house for half a year.”
“Hid from what? White sheets?”

It was interesting to study the craft that Morrison employed in this strategy of being consciously mindful of culture and codes versus race. It was therefore disappointing when Morrison said, “…I was so very successful in forcing the reader to ignore color that it made my editor nervous. So, reluctantly, I layered in references that verified Frank Money, the main characters, race. I believe it was a mistake that defied my purpose.”

Regardless of the outcome for Morrison, and as skillful as she was as a writer, I would like to attempt to employ these ideas in the novel I’m writing, a story of how generations of women try to cope with loss that began with the loss of their African homeland to the loss of their ability to control their lives. Through their stories, they try to help the next generation. My intention in my novel is to people the work with both white and Black characters. But now I’m wondering if all of the characters should be only African and African- American, exploring the craft of using codes or cultural references, and leaving out any whites. However, that might not be historically or culturally realistic, especially since whites are pivotal in how the family got to America in the first place, and why they thought they needed magic to survive. As was pointed out in Home, white people seem to touch every aspect of Black lives, whether we choose to acknowledge them or not. They are always in the background impacting the lives of Africans and African-Americans, and to ignore that is to not tell the truth, and it really would be a novel of magical realism.

Works Cited

Morrison, Toni. Home. Random House, 2012.

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, 1992.

Morrison, Toni.  Sula. Random House, 1973.

Morrison, Toni. The Origin of Others. Harvard University Press, 2017.

Mura, David. A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity, and Narrative Craft in Writing, the University of Georgia Press, 2018.

Cynthia Robinson Young, an adjunct professor of Special Education at Covenant College, is also a graduate student at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga. Her work has appeared in journals including The Amistad, Rigorous, The Ekphrastic Review, and Freedom Fiction. She was the Poetry Editor for the 2020 issue of Catalpa: a magazine of Southern perspectives, and named Finalist for her poetry chapbook, Migration, in the 2019 Georgia Author of the Year Awards in her category. 

Filed Under: Community, Craft, Education, Essays

Heartwood | by Kimberly Hoff

September 30, 2020 By Grist Journal

It’s strange, how love evolves. I once worked on a New England mountain, and it was my job to tell its stories. My favorite story to tell was one of large swaths of forest where the trees had never been cleared by humans – the story of its old growth forest. This is not a story shared by many mountains in the northeast; and with its telling, I needed to share a deep understanding of how that old growth came to be, what challenges it had overcome, which struggles it had yet to face. And so I immersed myself in the forest and its history.

My first several months working at the mountain, I hiked a single route dozens of times. I hiked it during work hours, of course, but I also headed there on more than a few of my days off.  In those first months, I became infatuated with the mountain and its old growth forest. I learned its every rise, curve, and valley by heart. My fingers grazed the tips of pine needles; my hands pressed into bark and moss and lingered on rocks. I wanted to spend all my free time with it, to touch it, listen to it, breathe it in.

I read the landscape to myself over and over, and I told my love story of the old growth forest to the visitors who came to hear it:

~

On the mountain’s south side, the morning sun falls like a fresnel, washing a stage in light. It drenches the summit and cascades over the lower slopes, trickling through the branches of the trees. There’s a trail that starts on those lower slopes and takes hikers through every stage of forest succession, passing through a wooded timeline of New England’s forest history.

My first easy steps carry me up from the bottom of the well-trampled trail, and pebbles skitter under foot, especially when the ground is dry. Soon the grade sharpens; my steps come more slowly (and my breath more quickly), as my boots scuff over talus, legs reaching to carry me from rock to rock. Past the spot where these old boulders have come to rest, the journey upward continues through a mixed forest of white pine, red maple, and red oak. The sun dapples the brown forest floor, and last season’s dried maple leaves shush themselves under my feet. Bursts of scent penetrate the air: one breath pine needles, the next decomposing leaves. I am surrounded by a mid-succession forest of straight, tall trees – red maple, red oak, hop hornbeam – their tops racing each other to the sun. They are a hundred years old at best. There are also remnants of the earlier, pioneering forest that began its life when this area was only meadow, the byproduct of clearcutting and of farmland that was eventually abandoned. A few gray birch stragglers and tiny pockets of more white pines persist. Splotches of juniper bush drop hints of a previous livestock pasture. An aged black cherry stands alone where once it had companions. A patch of stump-sprouted, multi-trunked red maples gird themselves on either side of the trail, testifying to a time of logging, a history of human disturbance. The trees compete for sunlight, water, and nutrients; some of them inevitably fall. But where one tree falls, a patch of sunlight is created; and new sun-loving trees, whose seeds have waited for just the right moment, germinate and rise. With time, the meadow has become forest, and the forest constantly transforms. Here, death and life continually trade places in their own mutually symbiotic relationship, the one both needing and supporting the other.  A breeze wends its way through the amply spaced trees, reaches out to drift over my skin, and riffles my hair. A knocking sound echoes through the forest as a woodpecker opens its pantry.

I walk upward on the mountain and backward through forest time, soon arriving at a stone wall built by farmers two centuries ago, whose hands crafted this igneous barrier with granite cycled up from the mountain’s very core. Despite its aging structure, the wall reaches out to the east and to the west, gathering up the forest-that-now-is with the memory of the farmland-that-once-was. A single foot stride over its width sweeps me into a thick, hushed world where the tree canopy is dense, nearly impenetrable by sunlight. Here, the forest floor is padded with an almost-black soil that gives nutrients and moisture to wildflowers in spring and to trees of all ages and stages of growth – mature white ash, green ash, and striped maple. American beech and sugar maple have found their place here too  – shade-loving trees that appear later in a forest’s development. There are still red oaks and red maples, but they are no longer the dominant species. Downed trees in various stages of decay are scattered throughout – those that gave way to their competition or came down after an event that proved too much for them – perhaps a hurricane; a blizzard; or a heavy, root-drowning rain. However they fell, they now feed the soil and remain a part of the earth around them. Some have become nurse logs, cultivating new trees that thrive in this compost of an earlier time. A few standing snags – ragged, decaying toothpicks – are poking into all this green and providing habitat for insects and birds. This robust, late succession forest is still changing, even in its climax stage.

Peering ahead, I can see that the rich, mesic forest floor extends for many yards then rises up to a sharply graded slope, bedrock bulging from its forested surface. There, in the rock, above and around me, gnarled sugar maples preside. Their broccoli-shaped tops have formed slowly over time and reveal their age, like the hunch of a back, the bend of an arthritic hand. Their lumpy, gray trunks glow faintly in the low light of the forest, distinguishing them from all the other trees. Recognizing one old growth sugar maple in this wooded pastiche makes the others readily noticeable. They shine from their thrones all along the steep bank in front of me. These sugar maples are two hundred years old, maybe even older – nearly unheard of in New England due to our history of logging and clear cutting for agriculture. Farmers left these trees alone: the task of removing them and farming the craggy, abrupt incline was insurmountable. To loggers, these trees were not just inaccessible, but undesirable: the trees aren’t very tall or wide, having lived their lives on this steep, rocky, well-drained slope. Their roots have held tightly and delivered what they need to survive, but their growth is limited, their trunks misshapen. And so their imperfections have been their greatest asset. Left behind by humans, the sugar maples are now the elders in this dynamic stand of old growth forest, where a sense of history fills the air. Where the forest hums, buzzes, chirps, scratches with life.

I stand in the middle of this place and breathe in the musk of damp soil, leafy detritus, decaying logs. The old growth canopy shades and cools me. Silence and sound have gently become one. In this place, decay and vibrancy are partners who have forged a pocket of survival despite the odds.

~

Sometimes though, the odds are the victorious ones, and a love story has to change. It was the last week of my work season, the early morning of a bright, sun-washed day that beckoned me to the trail I had by now fallen in love with. Halfway up, a woman’s arms flashed in the otherwise still morning, her white sleeves begging me. Her desperate scream, “Can you help us?” punched a hole in the forest.

Eons passed in the few seconds it took me to reach the couple – one of them frantic, the other as quiet as the forest. He was flat on his back, bald head beaded with sweat, his rounded belly encased in a blue short-sleeved t-shirt. A sweat stain formed a “v” over his chest. Pale white legs poked out from his black shorts. The last thing I noticed was his face – white beard, gray skin. His eyes were open, I think, but I don’t remember their color. The only color I remember against the face-scape of gray and white was the red trickle seeping from the corner of his mouth, which was dropped open. His wife had tried to help him first, all alone out here in this old growth forest that had called to them that morning, just as it had called to me. Her white sleeves had signaled her surrender.

The next few, several, many minutes dripped by amidst pulse-searching, chest compressions, counting, breathing, the backdrop of a 9-1-1 call, and his wife’s mantra of “You can do it. Please, you can do it.” I don’t know if she meant it for her husband or for me. When help arrived, I watched through a hazy curtain as they brought out their defibrillator, pulled up his shirt (I had forgotten to pull up his shirt), placed the sticky pads on his pale chest and abdomen. I stood there, pinky fingers tingling, adrenaline surging then draining away. Someone asked if I was ok, and the question shamed me. I wasn’t the one who needed attention. I sat with the man’s wife on the stone wall. Together, we looked on as they tried everything they could.

He died there – surrounded by old growth forest – this person I had never met before and would never see again. Probably, he had died even before I saw the flailing arms or the gray face. Even before I didn’t notice the color of his eyes. That was it, this finality in a place that had seemed infinite. This place where old growth sugar maples stand crookedly on the side of the mountain. Where death and life so easily trade places.

~

The first time I hiked back up to my spot of old growth forest after he died, just a few days later, it was raining. Watery pellets knocked on my cap and rolled off the visor. Raw, damp air penetrated my jacket. My hands failed to do anything but hang by my sides as rain trickled down my jacket sleeves, pooled into drops at my fingertips, then surrendered to the ground. I looked at the place I had come to dozens of times, but this forest couldn’t prove its identity to me. Despite their familiarity, the rocks and trees were impostors. The old sugar maples stood still, waited. But I didn’t want to touch them. I didn’t even want to look at them. The rain drummed on, unaccompanied. Everything around me sagged. I looked up into the gnarled arms of those woody survivors, and I was clear-cut, heartwood exposed and seeping.

Abandoned, I turned my back, stepped away from the stone wall’s embrace, and walked down the trail, eyes on my feet and the muddy path in front of me. The forest collage had rearranged itself. Here, life. There, death.  Here, beauty. There, anguish. My science told me that it wasn’t a contradiction for death to take place here, under this canopy of survivors. It happens every day and makes the forest what it is. But this death didn’t belong here. Because it had a name and a voice. Because it had a grieving wife. Because I had witnessed it, had been tossed around with it. This death was not ecological; it was personal.

~

An abandoned meadow does not stay bare for long. A pioneer tree germinates when the time is right and the conditions allow. Two weeks later, after an early-season storm, I tried again. I approached the mountain from a different side, chose a new route. I hiked up into another patch of old growth forest, this one made up of hemlocks, some nearing three hundred years old. The evergreen branches of the younger trees, heavy with October snow, bowed down to the trail and sheltered the forest floor all around me. I was jolted awake as crisp air filled my lungs, and the world gleamed with winter. I hiked for hours, alone on snow-muffled trails. I wasn’t healed, but the mountain had pried me open and made its way back into the abandoned places.

Sun-loving pioneer trees grow taller; and under their branches, shade-tolerating trees grow in. Forest eventually fills the land. Now and then a tree falls, but a patch of sunlight is created, and a new tree is given space to rise. Despite the clearcutting, despite the storms, some trees remain standing, scarred but strong. The old growth forest continues to change, but it remains one with its mountain.

The darkness of that day faded, became bearable. And in the years since he died, I have been able to go back to the old growth forest beyond the stonewall again and again. Sometimes, the memory still crashes down on me, but I understand that I couldn’t stop death from happening even though I did everything I could. For me, the story of the forest has become more real. And so has my love for it. It’s not just sighs of contentment. It’s also the sharp intake of breath, the gasp for air, the long, slow exhalation. And I think, this is the hardest part of loving – to love past contentment, to love beyond beauty, through anger, despite doubt. But still, triumphantly, to love.

 

Kimberly Hoff is an environmental educator and a nature essayist who currently lives in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts. She has been published in Northern Woodlands Magazine and in Explore! (Mass Audubon’s member magazine).

Filed Under: Craft, Essays

The Flowers of Afterthought: Premises and Strategies for Revision by David Jauss

February 3, 2020 By Grist Journal

I’ll begin this essay with an admission that I fear won’t surprise many of my readers: I have little or no talent for writing.  Nothing (not even the simple sentence you just read) comes easily to me.  Whenever I’ve taken part in timed writing exercises—which, for the record, I loathe—I produce a few clumsy sentences while virtually everyone around me writes pages of glittering prose.  It would take me a week to write something half as good as what others can write in ten minutes.  But although I lack natural writing talent, I do have a talent—or at least an aptitude—for rewriting, and I owe whatever small success I’ve had as a writer to it.  I love what Bernard Malamud called “the flowers of afterthought,”[i] the discoveries, both large and small, that transform a barren patch of land into a garden.  I revel in those afterthoughts, spending months and occasionally even years revising a story, poem, or essay before submitting it for publication.  And speaking of stories, poems, and essays, my goal in this essay is to pass along practical strategies for revision that I and others have found useful in all of these genres, although most of my references will be to fiction.  But before we turn to these strategies, I’d like to discuss ten premises that I believe should guide us as we practice the art of revision. 

PREMISES

1.  First Thought, Worst Thought

Beginning writers sometimes buy into Allen Ginsberg’s mantra “first thought, best thought”[ii] and assume that revision will only make their work worse.  (Lucky for us, Ginsberg didn’t follow his own advice; as the facsimile edition of his various drafts of Howl reveals, that poem underwent numerous and extensive revisions.[iii])  Me, I’d argue that our first thought is the worst thought.  If, for example, we write the words flat as a, our first thought will most likely be to write pancake next, but if we choose that word, we’re guilty of a cliché.  The same principle applies to all other aspects of literature: if we don’t reject our first thoughts, we’ll end up with red-haired characters with fiery tempers; plots in which boy meets girl, boy loses girl, and boy gets girl again; rhymes like love / dove and June / moon; and potted themes like “love conquers all” and “crime doesn’t pay.”  And just as our first thoughts tend to be our worst thoughts, so too our first drafts tend to be our worst drafts.

Hemingway once said “The first draft of anything is shit,”[iv] and I believe that’s true.  But revision can turn that shit to gold.  Many great works of literature were rewritten numerous times.  I’ll give you a long list of examples later, but for now, let me just point out that Tolstoy wrote five separate drafts of Anna Karenina, each significantly different from each other.[v]  As Edward Dahlberg said, “Books are not written; they are rewritten.”[vi]  And if our first drafts seem shitty, we shouldn’t let that fact discourage us too much.  As the songwriter Mike Smith has said, “When your work seems terrible, you should be grateful, because it proves you still have taste.”[vii] 

2.  Revision Is Play, Not Work

In Homo Ludens, his classic study of the play-element in culture, Johan Huizinga argues that play is at the heart of all human activity and therefore Homo ludens—ludens being Latin for playing—would be a more accurate name for our species than Homo sapiens.  “All poetry is born of play,”[viii] he says, and I’d argue that the same is true of any mode of writing that is imaginative rather than expository or journalistic.  The word play might suggest a lack of seriousness, but whereas “seriousness seeks to exclude play,” Huizinga says, play “include[s] seriousness.”[ix]  Indeed, “serious play” is perhaps the best short definition of literature I can think of, akin to Frost’s definition of poetry as “play for mortal stakes.”[x]  And while we associate play with childhood, play is not mere “child’s play.”  Huizinga believes that play is the highest expression of the adult imagination, and I agree.  So does a fellow named Nietzsche, who said that “A man’s maturity” consists of “having rediscovered the seriousness that he had as a child at play.”[xi]

Perhaps the characteristic of play that is most pertinent to writing is the disproportionate relationship between effort and return.  If we approach writing as play, we are willing to put in the maximum amount of effort for a minimal amount of return; we’re willing to write dozens, maybe even hundreds, of pages to get a handful of keepers.  But if we approach writing as work, our goal is to receive the maximum amount of return for the minimum amount of effort; we want every page we write to be a keeper.  We often hear writers praised for their work ethic, but what writers really need is a play ethic.  If we approach revision as work, we’re not in the right frame of mind to create anything of value.  “Rewriting,” Robert Olen Butler maintains, “is redreaming.”[xii]  No matter if we’re writing our second, third, or fiftieth draft, we should be employing the same playful, imaginative process we used to produce our first draft. 

It’s important to note that approaching revision as play doesn’t mean it’s going to be nothing but fun.  Like any form of play, frustration is an essential element of it.  If there’s no impediment to serving an ace, hitting a home run, or writing a stellar sentence, there’s also no pleasure.  And writing involves a nearly infinite number of impediments.  Solving one problem often creates another—and when that problem is resolved, it, too, creates another.  Anne Lamott was right to compare revision to putting an octopus to bed.  “You get a bunch of the octopus’s arms neatly tucked under the covers,” she says, “but two arms are still flailing around.”  And when “you finally get those arms under the sheets, too, and are about to turn off the lights,” that’s when “another long sucking arm breaks free.”[xiii]  In revision, we need to expect, even welcome, many long sucking arms.

3.  Revision Is Not a Separate Stage in the Writing Process

Edgar Allan Poe famously advised writers to imitate “the old Goths of Germany … who used to debate matters of importance to their State twice, once when drunk, and once when sober.”[xiv]  The implication, of course, is that the writing process has two distinct and diametrically opposed stages, the first wildly enthusiastic, spontaneous, and creative and the second highly restrained, thoughtful, and critical.  Hence many writers think they’re supposed to turn off their left brain while writing their first draft, then turn off their right brain while they revise it.  They slop down a first draft, then try to salvage it with their intellect.  As Catherine Brady notes, “Despite all the advice books that recommend settling for a sloppy first draft and trusting to revision, a practice of indifference toward” the quality of our writing in our first draft will inevitably lead to a sloppy revision.  “One sentence leads to another,” she says, “and a bad sentence leads to another like itself.”[xv]  

So we should write and revise both drunk and sober, alternating between left brain and right brain.  As Jesse Lee Kercheval says, the rhythm of writing is “rather like marching: left brain, right brain, left brain, right brain.  Your critical sense alternates with your creative sense.”[xvi]  Thus, she adds, “it’s an artificial distinction to think of revision as a separate stage in the writing process.  When I am writing a short story or chapter, I am revising all the time.”[xvii] 

In short, revision takes place during all of the drafts we write, including the first.  Many, if not all, of the strategies for revision I’ll discuss in this essay could be employed in the first draft as well as in any subsequent draft. 

4.  Revision Is a Collaboration Between Our Conscious and Unconscious Selves

Just as the revision process alternates between our left and right brains, it alternates between our conscious and unconscious selves.  In an essay on the role the unconscious plays in creativity, Oliver Sacks recounts an experience the French mathematician Henri Poincaré had in 1880.  For fifteen days Poincaré worked intensively on a complex mathematical problem, then his labors were interrupted by a lengthy trip, during which he forgot all about the problem—at least consciously.  One day late in his trip, he stepped onto an omnibus and the solution to the problem popped into his head.  This “sudden realization,” Poincaré wrote, was “a manifest sign of long, unconscious prior work.”[xviii]  This and other similar incidents in Poincaré’s life convinced the great mathematician that, as Sacks says,

there must be active and intense unconscious activity even during the period when a problem is lost to conscious thought, and the mind is empty or distracted with other things.  This is not the dynamic or “Freudian” unconscious, boiling with repressed fears and desires, nor the “cognitive” unconscious, which enables one to drive a car or to utter a grammatical sentence with no conscious idea of how one does it.  It is instead the incubation of hugely complex problems performed by an entire hidden, creative self.[xix]

And this hidden, creative self is our wiser self.  As Poincaré said, “The subliminal self … knows better how to divine than the conscious self, since it succeeds where that has failed.  In a word, is not the subliminal self superior to the conscious self?”[xx] 

As Poincaré’s experience suggests, an essential part of the creative process is to stop thinking consciously about the work so it can incubate in our unconscious.  Hemingway certainly agreed; he advised writers not to think about their stories when they weren’t actually writing them.  “That way your subconscious will work on it all the time,” he said.  “But if you think about it consciously or worry about it you will kill it and your brain will be tired” when you return to your writing desk.[xxi]  Not thinking about your story is not easy.  As Andre Dubus said, it’s “as hard as writing, maybe harder; I spend most of my waking time doing it.”[xxii]  We all want to solve our story’s problems, so it’s difficult to turn our conscious thoughts off and let our unconscious do its work.  But if you do this, the solution will often pop into your mind, seemingly unbidden, at a later time.  As Einstein said, “I think 99 times and find nothing.  I stop thinking, swim in silence, and the truth comes to me.”[xxiii]

While we need to acknowledge the primacy of the unconscious self, we also need to remember the all-important role the conscious self plays in generating the unconscious work.  As Poincaré stressed, the unconscious work “is possible, and of a certainty it is only fruitful, if it is on the one hand preceded and on the other hand followed by a period of conscious work.”[xxiv]  Intense conscious labor forces problems into the unconscious, which then solves them days, weeks, months, or even years later.  We aren’t always aware of the source of these solutions, or even of the fact that they are solutions—they don’t always arrive as “sudden realizations”—but if we put in the requisite conscious labor, we can trust the unconscious to supply what we need.

Peter Markus has said, “I always tell my students that the story is smarter than you, that it knows where it wants to go.”[xxv]  But it’s not really the story that’s smarter than we are; it’s our unconscious self that is smarter than our conscious self, and we need to recognize the hints and clues it weaves into our drafts, to intuit what our deeper self wants us to write.  The principal goal of revision, then, is to discover in what we have already written what we should have written.

5.  Revision Is a Quest for Meaning

We tend to think of revision as primarily, if not solely, an aesthetic matter, something we do to improve the work’s literary value, and as a result we tend to read our drafts with an eye toward aesthetic enhancement.  But revision is not merely a quest for aesthetic perfection; it’s also a quest for meaning.  Tolstoy didn’t revise Anna Karenina repeatedly merely in order to polish its prose; as the substantial differences in plot and characterization in his five separate versions reveal, he was searching for his novel’s meaning.[xxvi]  Robert Olen Butler sums it all up succinctly:  “The point of revision is to find meaning.”[xxvii]  Obviously, we can’t do this if we think we already know what our story means.  Hence, as Jane Smiley says, “The first idea you need to give up when you begin to revise is that you know what this story is about.”[xxviii] 

The main reason we don’t always, if ever, know what our story is truly about is that the writing process is a collaboration between our conscious and unconscious selves, and by definition we are unaware of our unconscious intentions.  Given the role the unconscious plays in the creative process, it’s inevitable that our stories come out differently than we consciously intended.  All too often we consider this difference a failure that needs to be corrected in revision, and so we struggle in draft after draft to make the story come out the way we initially intended when what really needs revision is our initial conception.  If a story turns out differently than we intended, that’s a sign that our unconscious self wants to write a different story. 

For me, then, the first step in revision is to try to see what the story is doing to subvert my conscious intentions for it.  I look for details, characters, and scenes that in some way contradict or ignore my intentions.  I consider them clues to the story that I, deep down, really want to write.  The more we try to impose our initial conscious intentions on the story, the more we delay our discovery of what truly brought us to the material at hand—and thus our discovery of our work’s meaning.  So my advice is to set aside, as much as possible, your conscious intentions when you look at what you’ve actually written.  As T.S. Eliot says, between the idea and the reality falls the shadow,[xxix] and the shadow is where the story is.

In order to discover the story within the shadow, the real story underlying the original draft, we have to be open to discovering new meanings, especially meanings that contradict our original intentions, and to do that we sometimes have to write several additional drafts that may well be no better than the first one and might even be worse.  We like to think of revision as a way of heightening the virtues and eliminating the vices of our initial draft—and that of course is our ultimate goal—but revision is often far messier than that: it’s a plunge back into the material, and it can roil up everything.  It can be depressing and discombobulating as hell, but it can also be exhilarating, because it’s the only way we can find what’s at the hidden heart of our original effort.  And finding that hidden heart, that previously unconscious meaning, should be the principal goal of revision, one more important even than aesthetic improvement.  Saul Bellow said the revisions that made him happiest were not “stylistic” revisions but “revisions in my own understanding.”[xxx]  And that kind of revision can only result from discovering your meaning. 

6.  You’re Not Just Revising Your Work, You’re Revising Yourself

As Bellow’s comment suggests, what we’re revising is not just a story and its characters; we’re also revising our opinions and beliefs—and therefore we’re revising ourselves.  As the obsessive reviser William Butler Yeats said,

The friends that have it I do wrong
When ever I remake a song,
Should know what issue is at stake:
It is myself that I remake.[xxxi]

George Saunders echoes this point when he says that revision makes him “better than I am in ‘real life’—funnier, kinder, less full of crap, more empathetic, with a clearer sense of virtue, both wiser and more entertaining.”[xxxii]  However “laborious” and “obsessive” revision may be, he adds, it becomes “addictive” when you discover that it can create “a better version of yourself.”[xxxiii]  And creating a better version of ourselves just may be the single most important reason to revise. 

7.  Don’t Trust Your Brother, Trust Your Own Bad Eye

While it’s always wise to consider the advice your teachers, workshop classmates, and friends offer you, there’s nothing more deadly to the creative process than following someone else’s suggestions for revision as if they were instructions.  As I see it, my job as a teacher is to tell my students as honestly and clearly as possible what I think they should do to improve a story, and their job is to sift through that advice and decide what, if anything, will help them achieve their vision.  In his Nobel Lecture, Alexander Solzhenitsyn urged writers to follow the advice of the Russian proverb “Don’t trust your brother, trust your own bad eye.”[xxxiv]  Your teachers, classmates, and friends may have your best interests at heart, and you may be all too painfully aware that you don’t see your work clearly enough, but ultimately all we have as writers is our instinct about what is right for our story and what isn’t. 

This is not to say that we’ll always be right, of course.  As Janet Burroway has said, sometimes the advice “you resist the hardest may be exactly what you need.”[xxxv]  But I’d argue that you should follow your instincts nonetheless.  If someone’s advice feels right, adopt it.  If it doesn’t, don’t.  You may eventually realize your instincts were wrong, but if you assume from the start that they are and robotically follow the advice you receive, your chances of becoming a better writer are greatly diminished.  Bum Phillips, the former coach of the Houston Oilers and the New Orleans Saints, once said there were two kinds of football players who weren’t “worth a damn”—the kind who never does anything he’s told and the kind who does everything he’s told.[xxxvi]  Be sure you don’t become either kind of writer.

8.  A Work Is Never Finished

Paul Valéry once said, “A work is never … finished, for he who made it is never complete.”  W.H. Auden translated this comment as “A poem is never finished; it is only abandoned,”[xxxvii] but Valéry actually said nothing about abandoning a work.  Rather, he stressed the almost infinite possibility for revising and improving it.  He said that “the power and agility [the writer] has drawn from [writing the work] confer on him … the power to improve it” and that each draft he writes teaches him how to “remake it”[xxxviii] yet again.  A writer might abandon a work, true, but if so, it’s not because the work can no longer be improved.  Ultimately, Valéry argues that both a work and its author are works in progress, and neither are ever truly “complete.”  And if that’s the case—and I believe it is—we should feel free to revise our work throughout our life. 

Some writers disagree.  They argue that the revision process should end when a work is published, not when we stop breathing.  Richard Hugo disparaged writers who revise old work, calling them “time effacers” because revision inevitably distorts who they were and what they felt and thought at a certain time in their lives.[xxxix]  And likewise, Mark Doty says he doesn’t revise any of his published poems because “There’s a certain degree of respect you have to give to the person you were then, to the fact that you made a shape out of experience and language that stood for something about that hour in your life.”[xl]  Me, I don’t think the purpose of a work of literature is to be a snapshot of who I was at a given time.  All I’m concerned about is the quality and meaning of the work itself.  I’m with good old “spontaneous” Whitman, who revised the poems in Leaves of Grass throughout his life, producing nine vastly different versions of the book in the thirty-seven years between its first publication and his death, and I’m also with Proust, James, and Yeats, all of whom likewise revised their work after it was published.  I feel a responsibility toward the work I’ve written, and toward the people who may one day read it, and so I want to make my work as good as I can.  And if that means returning to it years after it was published and revising it significantly, well, I’m more than willing to do that.  Since time plans to efface me, I don’t feel the least bit guilty about effacing as much of it as I can.

9.  Revision Can Be (Too) Seductive

While revision is, as Malamud said, “one of the exquisite pleasures of writing,”[xli] and while a given work can be revised and improved virtually infinitely, it’s important to keep in mind that revision can seduce us away from generating new work.  As Will Allison has said, “For me, revision is the most satisfying aspect of writing and the most seductive form of procrastination.”[xlii]  We need to make sure we’re continuing to revise for the right reasons, not merely to avoid the difficult task of launching into the blank page and writing something new.

10.  You Can’t Step into the Same Revision Twice

Eudora Welty once said, “Every story teaches me how to write it, but not the one afterward.”[xliii]  Similarly, each story teaches us how to revise it, but not how to revise the next story.  As George Saunders has said, “It feels like every story has … its own necessary revision process.”[xliv]  As we turn to a survey of fourteen revision strategies, please keep in mind that the revision process will of necessity be somewhat different for each story.

STRATEGIES

I.  PREPARATION

1.  Defamiliarize Your Draft

The more familiar we are with the words on the page, the harder it is to recognize how they should be changed.  So the first step of any revision should be to defamiliarize your draft.  The ideal way to do this is to let a significant amount of time pass before you look at it again.  This not only gives your unconscious self the time it needs to work on the problems your conscious self has overlooked, it allows you to read the work more like a reader than an author.  Andre Dubus III recommends that we wait “at least six months” before reading our draft.  “Have two seasons go between you,” he says.  “And then when you pick it up and read it, you actually forget some of what happens in the story.  You forget how hard it was to write those twelve pages.  And you become tougher on it.  You see closer to what the reader is going to see.”[xlv]

But what if you’re a student and have a story due in two weeks, not six months?  How can you defamiliarize your draft in that little time?  I suggest you print it out in a different font, preferably one you think is ugly.  And if that doesn’t do the trick, I suggest you also try printing it on different-colored paper or with different-colored ink. 

Another approach is to tape record your story.  Most people hate to hear their tape-recorded voice, so if you listen to a tape of yourself reading the story, you’re almost certain to hear things you’ll want to change. 

And one other possibility: do the equivalent of putting your iPod on Shuffle: read and revise paragraphs or scenes of your story in random order.  If you intentionally eliminate the story’s narrative arc, you can focus more intently on its parts, and what would otherwise be all too familiar just might seem unfamiliar, even new.

2.  Look for Clues to Your Story’s Meaning

Once we’ve defamiliarized our draft, we’ll be better able to discover its meaning.  As I said earlier, the first thing I do when I revise is look for details, characters, and scenes that in some way subvert or ignore my conscious intentions.  I consider them clues to the story my unconscious self wants me to write, as opposed to the one my conscious self intended. 

In my early years as a writer, I automatically cut anything that didn’t seem to fit my intentions.  Then something Eudora Welty said made me realize that was a mistake.  She said, “It’s strange how in revision you find some little unconsidered thing which is so essential that you not only keep it in but give it preeminence when you revise.”[xlvi]  Her comment led me to interrogate each seemingly “unconsidered” or inessential aspect of a draft, trying to discover if it were a clue to something essential about the story.  We may not have a conscious reason for including a certain detail, but we often have an unconscious one, and a major part of the revision process is discovering what led us to include details that don’t seem to serve any clear purpose.  I suggest you not cut these extraneous-seeming details, at least not until you’ve fully explored their possible significance.  Those “little unconsidered things” are our unconscious self’s way of telling us to consider something, and sometimes it’s the detail that seems most extraneous that holds the story’s deepest and most important secret.  Our drafts are like treasure maps, and the “little unconsidered things” are often clues to the location of the buried treasure.

II.  EXPANSION

The process of discovering our story and its meaning continues throughout every draft we write, but once we’ve scoured our initial draft for clues to what the story is truly about and have a fairly clear understanding of our story’s meaning, we can begin revising in earnest.  The temptation is to go through our story line by line, deleting this, adding that, and changing the wording here and there, and while this approach almost invariably leads to an improved draft, the result is not a true revision; it’s just a premature editing job.  “Revise” means to “re-see,” and to re-see our story we have to do more than just edit what we’ve already written; we have to imagine what we haven’t yet written. 

Revising a story is a bit like playing an accordion: just as you have to expand and contract the bellows of an accordion to make music, you have to alternate between expansion and contraction in order to create a story.  Most talk about revision focuses on contraction, but unless you begin the revision process by expanding your story, you may not discover what you need to contract.  As Lee Martin has said, “I find that the first revisions I make often center on an opening up of aspects of the piece that are under-developed or not developed at all. … I keep asking myself what the piece hasn’t yet said.  I keep poking at the character relationships and the plot to see what might surprise me.”[xlvii]  Only after he feels he’s discovered what’s missing does he start to think about what he can leave out.  We’ll look at ways to compress shortly, but for now, here’s some advice for expanding.

3.  Revise Blind

In my experience, the single most helpful strategy for revision is to revise blind—that is, without looking at your previous draft.  As Peter Selgin has said, “Old words can block fresh insights,”[xlviii] so if your story isn’t working, I suggest you rewrite it—or at least the problematic parts of it—without looking at your old words.  Try to forget what you already wrote and reimagine it.  After you’ve finished, compare the original and the revision to see what you’ve lost and gained (usually it’s not all one or the other) and mix and match the two versions to create a new version.  Don’t do this just once; do it as many times as necessary until the story feels right to you.

If you need any further encouragement to try this approach, consider the fact that D.H. Lawrence wrote Lady Chatterley’s Lover three times, each time beginning from scratch and without “referring to the existent versions.”[xlix]  If this approach is good enough for Lawrence, I think it ought to be good enough for the rest of us.

4.  Write Outside the Story

Another way to discover how to expand and deepen a given scene without looking at what you’ve already written is to write “outside the story” awhile—in other words, write something that you don’t intend to use in the story but that might help you better understand your characters and plot.  Elizabeth Libbey recommends writing outside the story as a way “to return to working inside it,” and she suggests various ways of doing this, including “exploring the inner life of your main character through diary entries, letters, dreams, or lists” and writing “a scene that occurred before the beginning of the story” or after it ends.  Referring to Hemingway’s famous theory of omission, she says, “Even if you don’t use this material in the story, it will, as Hemingway said, make itself felt.”[l]

Often, a scene I’ve written won’t work because the protagonist is the only character in it that I even somewhat know, so I’ll rewrite the scene from the point of view of one or more of the other characters in the scene.  I do this not because I intend to change the story’s point of view (though I keep that possibility open) but because I want to get to know the characters well enough to make the scene work.  Once I have a better idea of what they’d say, do, and think, I can generally go back to the original scene and make it stronger.

5.  Slow Down Where It Hurts

All too often, we skip over, speed through, or summarize our stories’ most dramatic moments.  We do this partly out of a legitimate fear of melodrama but mostly, I suspect, out of a desire to avoid depicting our characters’ emotional pain.  In life, avoiding conflict and pain is usually a virtue, but in fiction, it’s always a vice.  Fiction thrives on the torqueing up of tension, not the avoidance of it.  So, as Steve Almond wisely says, we should “Slow down where it hurts”[li] and allow not only our characters but our readers and ourselves to experience the pain.  The moments that hurt the most are the moments that most deserve expansion.

6.  Write Vertically

In his essay “The Habit of Writing,” Andre Dubus talks about writing “horizontally” for his first twenty-five years as a writer, trying to get from point A to point Z in a draft as quickly as possible, then going back to revise it five or six times.  His goal during those years was to write five pages per day, but one day while working on his story “Anna,” he began writing “vertically,” trying, as he said, “to move down, as deeply as I could” into whatever moment he was writing about and capture all of his character’s thoughts and physical sensations.  Instead of five pages a day, he wrote just one or two, but slowing down allowed him to discover his story faster and finish it in fewer drafts.[lii]  If there’s a moment in our draft that feels underdeveloped or unexplored, we should follow Dubus’s lead and try to write it “vertically” instead of horizontally.  In short, sometimes we need to slow down even where it doesn’t hurt.  And sometimes by slowing down we discover a hurt we’ve overlooked.

7.  Take Out the Highlighters

As Flannery O’Connor once said, a scene doesn’t come to life unless it evokes at least three of the five senses.  “If you’re deprived of any of them, you’re in a bad way,” she said, “but if you’re deprived of more than two at once, you almost aren’t present.”[liii]  To make sure your readers will be present in your scenes, go through your story and highlight each of the five senses with a different color, and if you find a scene evokes fewer than three senses, add more sensory details.

Also, writers tend to belong to one of two camps—the eye-oriented or the ear-oriented—and both camps tend to over-rely on two of the four principal modes of narration and under-rely on the other two.  Eye-oriented writers over-rely on action and description, and ear-oriented writers over-rely on dialogue and thought.  In life we are all pretty much continually talking, thinking, acting, and perceiving the world around us, so fiction that weaves these four modes together with relative balance tends to best replicate life as we experience it.  To achieve this balance, eye-oriented writers often need to expand their scenes by adding dialogue and thought, and ear-oriented writers often need to expand theirs by adding action and description.  I suggest you go through your scenes and highlight each of the four modes with different colors, so you can see which modes you overuse and which you underuse. 

8.  Employ Oppositional Thinking

Expansion is not only literal; we don’t just need to expand our scenes, we also need to expand our characters, make them as round and life-like as possible, and I think oppositional thinking is the key to doing this.  As Janet Burroway says, to create three-dimensional characters we need to put at least one of the four modes of narration into opposition with the others.[liv]  A character who talks, thinks, acts, and looks confident is a one-dimensional stereotype, but if he talks, acts, and looks confident but thinks insecure thoughts, he instantly becomes more complex.  And if we put a single mode of narration into opposition with itself—if the character believes in God one moment and another moment is racked with doubt—he becomes even more complex.  The more contradictions a character contains, the more complex and compelling he becomes.

Oppositional thinking can also help us expand the significance of our plots.  When you revise a story, ask yourself at every significant moment of the plot “If the character did, said, or thought the opposite thing here, how would the rest of the story change?”  If you write a “counter-version” of a key moment of your story, you can often find a larger and more compelling story than the one you originally intended.  Jonathan Raban reports that Robert Lowell followed this strategy often:  “His favorite method of revision,” he says, “was simply to introduce a negative into a line, which absolutely reversed its meaning but very often would improve it.”[lv] 

So if you decide you took a wrong turn at some point in the story, I suggest you try reversing whatever happened at that point, then try to discover what would happen next.  I’ve done this in many of my stories, and rightly or wrongly, I think it’s improved them.  And I’m a rank amateur when it comes to oppositional thinking.  I’ve changed old characters to young ones, and vice versa, and turned weddings into funerals, but other writers have taken oppositional thinking a lot farther in their revision process.  Tobias Wolff, for example, has even changed the sex of several of his characters.[lvi]

9.  Fine-Tune Your Soundtrack

I wholeheartedly second Stuart Dybek’s advice that we “try for the impossible: to make the piece of writing itself have its own interior soundtrack, one that a reader who listens might almost detect.”[lvii]  We should be creating this soundtrack during our initial draft too, of course, but in the early stages of the process we are often distracted by matters of characterization and plot and so don’t give the music of our prose the full attention it deserves.  In revision we can, and should, take the time to expand and fine-tune our story’s soundtrack.

We should ask ourselves if the sounds we’ve chosen—the consonants and vowels of our words—are appropriate for the mood we want to create.  If we’re after a calm, serene mood, a preponderance of hard, plosive consonants like b, d, g, k, and t will work against that mood.  If we want to put the reader on the edge of his seat with terror, we should avoid using relatively soft, soothing consonants like l, m, n, and w.  According to the poet John Frederick Nims, vowel sounds are even more important than consonants for creating our soundtrack.  He thought vowels were so inherently musical that he created the following “vowel scale,” arranging the vowels on a musical staff according to the frequency of their sounds.[lviii] 

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If we want to convey a happy, excited, intense, agitated, or fearful mood, we should use, wherever possible, words with “alto” vowels—words like cry, yea, and eek.  Conversely, if we want to convey a somber, dejected, or depressed mood, we should use words with “bass” vowels—words like gloom, moan, lost, and frown. 

If you don’t believe Mr. Nims or me, maybe you’ll believe Keith Richards.  Here’s what Keef says on this subject:

[Mick and I] also composed using what we called vowel movement—very important for songwriters. …  Many times you don’t know what the word [you’re looking for] is, but you know the word has got to contain this vowel, this sound. … There’s a place to go ooh and there’s a place to go daah.  And if you get it wrong, it sounds like crap.  It’s not necessarily that it rhymes with anything at the moment, and you’ve got to look for that rhyming word too, but you know there’s a particular vowel involved.[lix]

We also need to pay close attention to the rhythms created by the placement of stressed and unstressed syllables in our sentences and, even more, the rhythms created by the variations in our syntax.  Syntax and music are very closely related—and I mean that literally.  As Ellen Bryant Voigt has pointed out, neurolinguists have discovered that the brain’s “syntax centers” are “adjacent to where we process music.”[lx]  Pascal said, “Words differently arranged have different meanings, and meanings differently arranged produce different effects”[lxi]—and to a large extent those effects are musical.  But all too often we over-rely on one pet sentence structure and that compromises the rhythm of our soundtrack.  If we overuse short simple sentences, for example, we create an overly choppy, staccato rhythm, and if we overuse long, periodic sentences, we can create a sense of stasis, of treading linguistic water, that hinders the story’s narrative momentum.  One way to find out if you’re relying too much on certain sentence structures is to take out your highlighters again and highlight your simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex sentences with different colors.  I also suggest highlighting left-, mid-, and right-branching sentences to see which ones you overuse.  And once you’ve identified problematic sentences and passages, you can combine or divide sentences to create rhythms that are both more various and appropriate to your story’s soundtrack.

Just as we need to pay attention to the rhythms of our sentences, we also have to pay attention to the tempo of our scenes and chapters.  Milan Kundera says that parts of his novels “could carry a musical indication: moderato, presto, adagio, and so on.”  He describes Part Five of Life Is Elsewhere as having “a slow, tranquil … moderato” pace, and Part Four as having “a feeling of great speed: prestissimo.”[lxii]  Tempo is a complex thing with many variables, but it is largely defined by the relation between the length of a given passage and the amount of “real time” it covers.  When Proust recounts a three-hour-long party in a leisurely 190 pages of In Search of Lost Time, the tempo is lento to the nth power, and when he dispatches an entire decade in one whiplash-inducing sentence, it is as prestissimo as prestissimo can get.[lxiii]  So look at the relationship between the length of your scenes and the “real” time they cover, and if the tempo seems too slow or too fast to create the feeling you’re after, adjust the tempo accordingly.

III.  CONTRACTION

To go back to my accordion analogy, once we’ve expanded the bellows, we need to compress them to make music.  As Lee Martin has said, “Experience has taught me that sooner or later during the additive part of the [revision] process, something will click, and I’ll know the piece more fully than I did when I first began writing it.  It’s that click that then gives me permission to start subtracting, cutting anything that doesn’t belong, anything that slackens the pace, anything that bloats the narrative, anything that makes the language vague and loose.”[lxiv]

As we’ll discuss later, writers tend to write hundreds, even thousands, of pages in the process of producing their work.  They do so, Anthony Doerr points out, because “It takes time to learn how much you can get away with not saying.”[lxv]  In order to discover our characters and plots and their meanings, we always have to write a lot more than the reader needs to read, and a major part of revision is deciding what the reader needs to know as opposed to what we needed to write.  But once we’ve discovered what Martin calls “the heart of the piece,”[lxvi] we can begin to cut anything that that is superfluous to conveying that heart. 

10.  Revise as if You’ll be Charged by the Word, Not Paid by It

It’s almost impossible to read an interview with an author that doesn’t include the admonition to cut, cut, cut.  Truman Capote said, “I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil”[lxvii]; Vladimir Nabokov said, “My pencils outlast their erasers”[lxviii]; Peter De Vries said, “When I see a paragraph shrinking under my eyes like a strip of bacon in a skillet, I know I’m on the right track”[lxix]; and Isaac Bashevis Singer said, “The wastepaper basket is a writer’s best friend.”[lxx]  And authors regularly tell us what to cut, too.  Chief on the hit list are adjectives and adverbs.  “The adjective is the enemy of the noun and the adverb is the enemy of the verb,” Voltaire purportedly said,[lxxi] and Chekhov, Twain, and numerous other writers have likewise urged us to cut adjectives and adverbs.  But of course none of these writers recommended we cut all of them.  Twain famously said, “If you catch an adjective, kill it,” but he not-so-famously added, “No, I don’t mean utterly, but kill most of them—then the rest will be valuable.  They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are far apart.”[lxxii] 

And there’s one other thing that everyone agrees we must cut: our best writing.  Virtually everybody who’s ever commented on revision has quoted Arthur Quiller-Couch’s famous injunction “Murder your darlings” (and virtually everybody has also falsely attributed this quote to a more famous author).[lxxiii]  But of course you shouldn’t murder all of your darlings any more than you should kill every adjective. 

In any case, there’s a way to murder our darlings that allows them to be resurrected to serve another story.  Benjamin Percy says he keeps what he calls a “Cemetery folder.” “In it,” he says,

 I have files—tombstones, I call them—with titles like “Images” or “Metaphors” or “Characters” or “Dialogue.”  Into these I dump and bury anything excised from a story.  For some reason, having a cemetery makes it easier to cut, to kill.  Perhaps it’s because I know the writing isn’t lost—it has a place—and I can always return to the freshly shoveled grave and perform a voodoo ceremony.[lxxiv]

So sometimes a writer’s best friend is a cemetery folder, not a wastepaper basket. 

11.  Purge Your Superfluities

Michelangelo, who knew a thing or two about beauty, defined it as “the purgation of superfluities.”[lxxv]  He clearly believed that less is more.  Some writers, however, think more is, well, more, and they’d rather give us the entire iceberg, not just the one-eighth of it that Hemingway recommends.  In the debate about whether writers should be putter-inners or taker-outers, I cast my vote for Fitzgerald, who preferred taker-outers, not Thomas Wolfe, who defended his putter-inner instincts in a famous letter to Fitzgerald.[lxxvi]  There are of course many great writers who were putter-inners—Wolfe mentions Cervantes, Sterne, Dickens, and Dostoevsky and we could easily add many others to the list—but I believe their works would be even greater if they’d purged more of their superfluities.  Mark Twain, despite being a bit of a putter-inner himself at times, would have taken Fitzgerald’s side in this argument.  As evidence, I offer his wryly ironic one-sentence critique of the everything-but-the-kitchen-samovar approach that Tolstoy takes in War and Peace.  “Tolstoy,” he complained, “carelessly neglects to include a boat race.”[lxxvii]  I hope all of you will carelessly neglect to include not only boat races but anything else equally superfluous.

12.  Play a Cutting Game

To achieve a leaner draft, Janet Burroway recommends we “play a cutting game” and shorten our draft by some arbitrary amount.[lxxviii]  Sarah Stone and Ron Nyren are a little more specific; they say “Imagine that the editor of your favorite magazine has called up and said, ‘I’ll take it, if you can make it 20 percent shorter.’  See if you can meet this challenge without harming the story.”[lxxix]  I’d go one step further: play this game more than once.

13.  Downsize Your Cast of Characters

Stone and Nyren also advocate downsizing your cast.  “Examine the characters in your story, major and minor,” they advise, and “consider the story without each one.”  Obviously, if two characters are performing the same function, one is expendable.  And if one character’s actions or dialogue could “be appropriately assigned to another character,” you could give the first character a pink slip.  And if you have “two underdeveloped characters,” they suggest combining them to “form a [single] complex character.”[lxxx] 

Jesse Lee Kercheval also has a valuable suggestion: “Count lines to see if the space the characters take up is proportional to their importance in the story.”[lxxxi]  I’ve found in my own initial drafts that some of my minor characters take up almost as much space as my protagonist, and that fact led me not only to recognize the story’s lack of proportion but also my failure to explore the central character as fully as I should.

14.  Start Later and End Earlier

Chekhov said, “Once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end.”[lxxxii]  All too often beginnings are little more than throat-clearings.  We hem and haw for a few pages, then the story truly starts.  As Kurt Vonnegut advises, we should “throw away the first six pages … all the reader really wants is for the story to get started as soon as possible.”[lxxxiii]  Chekhov goes even further; he says, “Rip out the first half of your story; you’ll only have to change the beginning of the second half a little bit and the story will be totally comprehensible.”[lxxxiv]

And whereas openings tend to be unnecessary throat-clearings, endings tend to be unnecessary explanations or clarifications.  The real ending of a story, the ending that implies all that follows it, often occurs a paragraph or a page or even several pages earlier.  A good ending reverberates with what is unsaid, unexplained, but nonetheless deeply conveyed.

IV.  RINSE AND REPEAT

Revision is best understood as a singular term for a plural process.  After we finish a revision, we need to begin the process again by once more defamiliarizing our text in order to continue discovering our meaning and to judge more accurately what needs further expansion and contraction.  As I’ve already mentioned, Tolstoy wrote five separate versions of Anna Karenina and D.H. Lawrence wrote three separate versions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.  (All three versions of Lawrence’s novel have been published, in case you’d like to compare them for insight into his revision process.[lxxxv])  Here are some other examples of writers who felt the need to “rinse and repeat” numerous times.

Frank O’Connor said, “Most of my stories have been rewritten a dozen times, a few of them fifty times.”[lxxxvi] 

Leo Tolstoy spent a year writing fifteen drafts of the opening thirty-page scene of War and Peace.[lxxxvii] 

Ernest Hemingway rewrote the first part of A Farewell to Arms “at least fifty times”[lxxxviii] and wrote thirty-nine drafts of its final page.[lxxxix]

Dan Chaon typically writes more than a hundred pages in order to produce a fifteen-page story.[xc]

Andre Dubus spent fourteen months writing his story “Waiting.”  It was more than one hundred pages in early manuscript form, but when it was published in The Paris Review, it was only seven pages long.[xci]

Isaac Babel wrote twenty-two separate versions of his story “Lyubka the Cossack.”  All told, he wrote over two hundred pages to create a six-page story.[xcii]  

Gabriel García Márquez once used up five hundred sheets of paper in the process of writing a fifteen-page story.[xciii]

James Thurber wrote fifteen complete drafts of his story “The Train on Track Six,” composing a total of 240,000 words in the process of creating what was eventually a 20,000-word story.[xciv]

Charles Johnson wrote more than 3,000 pages in the process of writing his 210-page National Book Award-winning novel Middle Passage.[xcv]

Gustave Flaubert wrote 4,561 pages in the process of writing his 400-page novel Madame Bovary.[xcvi]

Tolstoy wrote over 7,000 pages in the process of writing his 450-page novel Resurrection.[xcvii]

One caveat to the “rinse and repeat” mantra: As Toni Morrison has said, “I’ve revised six times, seven times, thirteen times.  But there’s a line between revision and fretting, just working it to death.  It is important to know when you are fretting it; when you are fretting it because it is not working, it needs to be scrapped.”[xcviii] 

If you’re truly revising, not fretting, you should wait until you feel you can’t improve the work further—at least at this stage of your writing life—before you submit it for publication.  In his Ars Poetica, Horace advises waiting nine years before publishing, just to make sure your draft is truly the final one,[xcix] but I doubt too many of us would be willing to take his advice.  Me, I think if all you’ve been doing for weeks is taking out a comma in the morning and putting it back in the afternoon, I think your work’s ready to go out into the world, hat in hand, and knock on editors’ doors. 

CONCLUSION

I hope some of the premises and strategies I’ve discussed help you improve your work.  But my main advice is to cultivate perseverance.  As the Japanese proverb says, “Fall seven times, stand up eight.”[c]  And I also urge you to keep in mind what Will Shetterly has said is the greatest thing about revision: “It’s your opportunity to fake being brilliant.”[ci]


NOTES

[i] Bernard Malamud, Interview by Daniel Stern, Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Sixth Series, ed. George Plimpton (New York: Viking, 1984), 167.

[ii] Ginsberg credited the motto “First thought, best thought” at various times to William Blake, Jack Kerouac, Ghögyam Trungpa, and others.

[iii] Allen Ginsberg, Howl: Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript, and Variant Versions, ed. Barry Miles (New York: HarperCollins, 2006).

[iv] Ernest Hemingway, quoted in Arnold Samuelson, With Hemingway: A Year in Key West and Cuba (New York: Random House, 1984), 11.

[v] C. J. G. Turner, A Karenina Companion (Wilfrid Laurier U Press, 1993), 13.  

[vi] Edward Dahlberg, The Carnal Myth: A Search into Classical Sensuality (New York: Weybright & Talley, 1968), 11.

[vii] Mike Smith, quoted in XXX, “As It Turns Out, George Saunders Loves Revision Too,” UCWBling, Feb. 4, 2013. http://ucwbling.chicagolandwritingcenters.org/george-saunders-writing-advice/

[viii] Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Mansfield Centre, CT: Martino Publishing, 2014; reprint of New York: Roy Publishers edition of 1950), 129.

[ix] Ibid., 45.

[x] Robert Frost, “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Lathem (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969), 277.

[xi] Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, tr. Marion Faber, Oxford U Press, 1999, 94.

[xii] Robert Olen Butler, From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction, ed. by Janet Burroway (New York: Grove Press, 2005), 38.

[xiii] Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1995), 93-94.

[xiv] Edgar Allan Poe, “Letter to B—–,” Selections from the Critical Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Frederick C. Prescott (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1909), 1-10 and 323-325.

[xv] Catherine Brady, Story Logic and the Craft of Fiction (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2010), 169.

[xvi] Jesse Lee Kercheval, Building Fiction: How to Develop Plot and Structure (Madison: U of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 131.

[xvii] Ibid.

[xviii] Henri Poincaré, “Mathematical Creation” (excerpt from his autobiography), tr. by George Bruce Halsted, in The Creative Process: A Symposium, ed. Brewster Ghiselin (New York: New American Library, 1952), 38.

[xix] Oliver Sacks, “The Creative Self,” The River of Consciousness (New York: Knopf, 2017), 144.

[xx] Poincaré, 39.

[xxi] Ernest Hemingway, By-Line: Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades, ed. William White (New York: Scribner, 1998),216.

[xxii] Andre Dubus, “The Habit of Writing,” in On Writing Short Stories, ed. Tom Bailey (New York: Oxford U Press, 2000), 90.

[xxiii] Alfred Einstein, https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/842695-i-think-99-times-and-find-nothing-i-stop-thinking

[xxiv] Poincaré, 38.

[xxv] Peter Markus, “How to End,” https://www.writingclasses.com/toolbox/articles/how-to-end

[xxvi] C. J. G. Turner, A Karenina Companion, 13.

[xxvii] Butler, 58.

[xxviii] Jane Smiley, “What Stories Teach Their Writers: The Purpose and Practice of Revision,” in Creating Fiction: Instruction and Insights from Teachers of the Associated Writing Programs, ed. Julie Checkoway (Cincinnati, OH: Story Press, 1999), 248.

[xxix] T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men,” The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1971), 58.

[xxx] Saul Bellow, quoted in Maggie Simmons, “Free to Feel: Conversation with Saul Below, Quest, Feb. 1979, 31-35; reprinted in Conversations with Saul Bellow, ed. Gloria Cronin and Ben Siegel (Oxford: U Press of Mississippi, 1994), 165.

[xxxi] William Butler Yeats, Untitled poem, Yeats’s Poems, ed. A. Norman Jeffares (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), 713.

[xxxii] George Saunders, https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/8885.George_Saunders?page=9

[xxxiii] George Saunders, quoted in Adam Vitcavage, “George Saunders Likes a Challenge,” Electric Literature, Feb. 14, 2017.  https://electricliterature.com/george-saunders-likes-a-challenge-bb92c31fc8b40

[xxxiv] Russian proverb, quoted in Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Lecture, tr. by F.D. Reeve (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972).

[xxxv] Janet Burroway, Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft (New York: Longman, 2003), 228.

[xxxvi] Bum Phillips, https://www.sbnation.com/nfl/2013/10/19/4855684/bum-phillips-quotes

[xxxvii] W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage, 1991), xxvi.

[xxxviii] Paul Valéry, “A Poet’s Notebook,” in The Poet’s Work: 29 Poets on the Origins and Practice of Their Art, ed. Reginald Gibbons (U of Chicago Press, 1989), 173-74.

[xxxix] Richard Hugo, from a conversation with the author in the fall of 1980.

[xl] Mark Doty, quoted in Jona Colson, “Mark Doty: An Interview,” The Writer’s Chronicle, Vol. 44, No. 1 (Sept. 2011), 20.

[xli] Malamud, 167.

[xlii] Will Allison, “Throw Up, Then Clean Up,” Rules of Thumb: 73 Authors Reveal Their Fiction Writing Fixations, ed. Michael Martone and Susan Neville (Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest Books, 2006), 234.

[xliii] Eudora Welty, quoted in “A Conversation with Susan Neville,” Story Matters: Contemporary Short Story Writers Share the Creative Process, ed. Margaret-Love Denman and Barbara Shoup (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 358.

[xliv] George Saunders, source unknown but Saunders confirmed the authenticity of the quotation in a Sept. 3, 2019, email.

[xlv] Andre Dubus III, “The Case for Writing a Story Before Knowing How It Ends,” by Joe Fowler, theatlantic.com/entertainment/print/2013/10/the-case-for-writing-a-story-before-knowing-how-it-ends/280387/

[xlvi] Eudora Welty, Conversations with Eudora Welty, edited by Peggy Whitman Prenshaw (New York: Washington Square Books, 1984), 346.

[xlvii] Lee Martin, “The Addition and Subtraction of Revision,” https://leemartinauthor.com/2018/01/29/addition-subtraction-revision/

[xlviii] Peter Selgin, “Revision: Real Writers Revise,” in Gotham Writers’ Workshop, Writing Fiction: The Practical Guide from New York’s Acclaimed Creative Writing School, ed. Alexander Steele (New York: Bloomsbury, 2003), 218.

[xlix] Ibid.

[l] Elizabeth Libbey, “Writing Outside the Story,” What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers, ed. Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter (New York: HarperPerennial, 1991), 164.

[li] Steve Almond, This Won’t Take But a Minute, Honey: Essays (Boston: Harvard Bookstore, 1995), 17.

[lii] Dubus, 92-93.

[liii] Flannery O’Connor, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1981), 69.

[liv] Janet Burroway, Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, 5th ed. (New York: Longman, 2000), 139.

[lv] Jonathan Raban, quoted in Ian Hamilton, Robert Lowell (New York: Vintage, 1983), 431.

[lvi] Tobias Wolff, “A Conversation with Tobias Wolff,” in Margaret-Love Denman and Barbara Shoup, Story Matters: Contemporary Short Story Writers Share the Creative Process (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 476.

[lvii] Stuart Dybek, interview with Jennifer Levasseu and Kevin Rabalais in Glimmer Train Stories, Issue 44 (Fall 2002), 88-89.

[lviii] David Mason and John Frederick Nims, Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry, 5th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005), 154-155.

[lix] Keith Richards, Life (New York: Back Bay Books, 2011), 267.

[lx] Ellen Bryant Voigt, The Art of Syntax (St. Paul, MN:  Graywolf Press, 2009), 8.

[lxi] Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. and tr. Roger Ariew (Cambridge, MA:Hackett Publishing Co., 2005), 192.

[lxii] Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel (New York: HarperPerennial, 2000), 88.

[lxiii] Gérard Genette, “Time and Narrative in A la recherché du temps perdu,” in Essentials of the Theory of Fiction, ed, Michael J. Hoffmann and Patrick D. Murphy (Durham, NC: Duke U Press, 1988), 284.

[lxiv] Martin, “The Addition and Subtraction of Revision.”

[lxv] Anthony Doerr, “Manufacturing Dreams: An Interview with Anthony Doerr” by Richard Farrell, Numéro Cinq, Vol. III, No. 1 (Jan. 2012), http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2012/01/13/manufacturing-dreams-an-interview-with-anthony-doerr/

[lxvi] Martin, “The Addition and Subtraction of Revision.”

[lxvii] Truman Capote, Conversations with Capote, ed. Lawrence Grobel (New York: New American Library, 1986), 205.

[lxviii] Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), 4.

[lxix] Peter De Vries, quoted in Leonore Fleischer, “De Vries on Rewriting,” Life (Dec. 13, 1968), 18.

[lxx] Isaac Bashevis Singer, quoted in Morton A. Reichek, “‘Yiddish,’ says Isaac Bashevis Singer, ‘contains vitamins other languages don’t have,” New York Times (March 23, 1975), 228,

[lxxi] Voltaire, quoted in Thomas Kennedy, Realism and Other Illusions: Essays on the Craft of Fiction (Portland:Wordcraft of Oregon, 2002), 122.

[lxxii] Mark Twain, March 20, 1880, letter to D.W. Bowser, in Mark Twain’s Notebooks: Journals, Letters, Observations, Wit, Wisdom, and Doodles, ed. Carlo De Vito (New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2015), 58.

[lxxiii] Arthur Quiller-Couch, On the Art of Writing (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2006; reprint of 1916 edition), 203.

[lxxiv] Benjamin Percy, “Home Improvement: Revision as Renovation,” in Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction (St. Paul, MN:  Graywolf Press, 2016), 165-166.

[lxxv] Michelangelo, quoted in Wordsworth Dictionary of Quotations, ed. Connie Robertson (Ware, Hertfordshire, UK: Wordsworth Editions, 1998), 275.

[lxxvi] Thomas Wolfe, July 26, 1937, letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, in The Sons of Maxwell Perkins: Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and Their Editor, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli and Judith S. Baughman (U of South Carolina Press, 2004), 258.

[lxxvii] Mark Twain, quoted by Richard Bausch in an interview in Glimmer Train Stories (Spring 2000), 129.

[lxxviii] Burroway, Imaginative Writing, 225.

[lxxix] Sarah Stone and Ron Nyren, Deepening Fiction: A Practical Guide for Intermediate and Advanced Writers (New York: Pearson/Longman, 2005), 214.

[lxxx] Ibid.

[lxxxi] Kercheval, 136.

[lxxxii] Anton Chekhov, quoted in Valerie Miner, “Revising Revision,” Rules of Thumb: 73 Authors Reveal Their Fiction Writing Fixations, ed. Michael Martone and Susan Neville (Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest Books, 2006), 132.

[lxxxiii] Kurt Vonnegut, “How to Get a Job Like Mine,” quoted in Tina Zambetis, “Author Vonnegut tells fans how to get a job like his at speech,” Daily Kent Stater, Vol. 56, No. 109 (April 19, 1983), 9.

[lxxxiv] Anton Chekhov, quoted in A.B. Derman, “Compositional Elements in Chekhov’s Poetics,” in Anton Chekhov’s Short Stories, ed. Ralph E. Matlaw (New York: Norton, 1979), 302.

[lxxxv] D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (New York: Penguin Classics, 2010) and The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge U Press, 1999).

[lxxxvi] Frank O’Connor, The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publishing, 2004), 211.

[lxxxvii] Jeff Wells, “18 Novel Facts about War and Peace,” Mental Floss, Sept. 9, 2018 https://mentalfloss.com/article/85834/18-novel-facts-about-war-and-peace

[lxxxviii] Ernest Hemingway, quoted in Arnold Samuelson, With Hemingway: A Year in Key West and Cuba (New York: Random House, 1984), 11.

[lxxxix] Ernest Hemingway, “The Art of Fiction No. 21,” interviewed by George Plimpton, The Paris Review, No. 18 (Spring 1958).

[xc] Benjamin Percy, “Home Improvement: Revision as Renovation,” in Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction (St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2016), 165. 

[xci] Joshua Bodwell, “The Art of Reading Andre Dubus,” Poets & Writers (July/August 2008), 22.

[xcii] Ruth Almog, “The Right Words, the Last Words,” Haaretz, Oct. 18, 2002, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/the-right-words-the-last-words-1.31065   

[xciii] Gabriel García Márquez, quoted in Marlise Simons, “Love and Age: A Talk with García Márquez,” The New York Times Review of Books, April 7, 1985.

[xciv] James Thurber, The Paris Review Interviews, II, ed. Philip Gourevitch (New York: Picador, 2007), 22.

[xcv] John Williams, “‘Middle Passage’ at 25,” New York Times, July 10, 2015.

[xcvi] Brigid Grauman, “Madame Bovary goes interactive,” Prospect Magazine, May 2009.  http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/madamebovarygoesinteractive

[xcvii] Korneliĭ Zelinskiĭ, Soviet Literature (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1978), 185.

[xcviii] Toni Morrison, The Paris Review Interviews, II, ed. Philip Gourevitch (New York: Picador, 2007), 361.

[xcix] Horace, Ars Poetica, lines 389-391, tr. by A.S. Kline, https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/HoraceArsPoetica.php

[c] Japanese proverb, quoted in The Poet’s Notebook: Excerpts from the Notebooks of 26 American Poets, ed. Stephen Kuusisto, Deborah Tall, David Weiss (New York: Norton, 1997), 26.

[ci] Will Shetterly, http://www.azquotes.com/author/38377-Will_Shetterly

David Jauss is the author of four collections of short stories, including Glossolalia: New & Selected Stories and Nice People: New & Selected Stories II, two volumes of poetry, and the essay collection Alone With All That Could Happen (reprinted in paperback as On Writing Fiction). His stories have won the AWP Award for Short Fiction and National Endowment for the Arts and Michener Fellowships and they have been reprinted in the Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Award, and Pushcart Prize anthologies. He teaches fiction writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts and is completing a new collection of essays on the craft of fiction titled The World Inside the World.

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