Shitty First Drafts vs. Long Walks

There is the philosophy of writing that says, "Don't edit as you write. Turn all censors off. Enter your dionysian self and write with abandon. Eventually you will get in the zone. You will see with the third eye." Which may be true. It goes without saying that the hundreds of pages you write along the way should end up in the trash pail. And who's to say that a long walk wouldn't have gotten you to the same place just as fast or faster and without the waste of paper?

My Heroes & Me

I've always had heroes. As far back as I can remember. At less than four years old I owned a special shirt, blue with red and white stripes. It was my Popeye shirt. I wore it to a frazzle, until there was nothing left of it but blue striped rags and threads. Without saying a word my mother threw it in the bin of rags she accumulated for my father, who used them in the Building, the laboratory at the base of our driveway where my Papa invented machines for measuring thickness and color. When I next saw my shirt I hardly recognized it, its fibers soaked with a muddy gray mixture of solvent and metal dust. I might never have spoken to my mother again, except that I needed her to draw those fat triangular S's onto my T-shirts so I could jump off tree limbs and play Superman—another hero of mine.

We're talking early nineteen-sixties here. Kennedy had just been inaugurated, sworn in hatless on a sunny, cold winter's day. Kruschev had already pounded his shoe and threatened to bury us. In school we practiced our "duck and cover" drills, with me as eager to protect Jill B. from nuclear fallout as Wesley Conklin was eager to have me look up her skirt (she sat at the desk in front of mine) and give him a full report, something I refused to do—though I liked Jill's skirts, peacock blue paisleys that were the perfect foil for her flaming strawberry blond curls.

There was in the air that we breathed a sense of premonition and doom that was its own kind of nuclear fallout. My friends and I would sit on top of Cheese Hill, a limestone cliff overlooking one of the town's many abandoned or converted hat factories. We called it Cheese Hill because the limestone broke off in pale, crumbly, cheesy chunks—like the parmesan cheese my father would bring home to my mother from New York City. There we'd sit, banging our P. F. Flyers into the limestone, debating how long it would take for us to die, and by what exact means. Wesley C. claimed that we would melt from inside out, our bodies turning to water balloons that would finally burst. Chucky S. said our organs would deep fry inside us like ˆgalumkesˆ or chicken livers. Lenny P. said we'd die in layers, with the dead layers falling off one by one, like the skin of a rotten onion.

Out of this radioactive sense of gloom and doom grew the need for heroes. More than ever we needed Supermen to come to our rescue. But to be rescued wasn't good enough. Being rescued was for sissies and girls. The thing to be was the rescuer. At the local swim hole, a two-acre pond dug out of the landlocked wilderness and trimmed with beach sand (officially called Meckhauer Park but for obvious reasons dubbed Muckhauer), I wished nothing more than for Jill B. to drown so I could save her and in the process save myself from being totally inconsequential to her. True, I wasn't much of a swimmer, but I would rise to the occasion—if only she'd give me a chance. I'd search for her golden hair among the throngs, and keep an eye on her every time she splashed into the water, hoping that at long last she would snag a leg on some algae.

Among the many frustrations of boyhood is a near total lack of heroic opportunities. Either the circumstances don't present themselves, or they have to be manufactured—as was the case with Robin Lee Graham, the boy who, as a sweet sixteenth birthday present to himself, sailed around the world alone in a 24-foot fiberglass sloop, and whose story we all devoured in that summer's National Geographic.

But there we were, stuck on dry land in Bethel, Connecticut, with the chimneys of crumbling hat factories the closest things to lighthouses. For a pubescent boy the only way out was sheer fantasy. So I put on my Popeye shirt. And when that turned into a rag, and as the big 'S' faded from my T-shirt, I turned to other heroes. With television they weren't hard to find. To be a hero you needed the right clothes. A leather jacket let you be Steve McQueen in ˆThe Great Escape,ˆ or Colonel Hogan of ˆHogan's Heroes.ˆ For James West a tight brocade vest and cowboy boots would do.

I remember my first pair of cowboy boots—black and tight and pointy enough to jam into a tailpipe. My parents bought them for me at Buster Brown. The store had a merry-go-round in it. The sides came up to my calves and were filigreed with colored stitches and whirls. The heels cut in at a sharp angle and were high enough to make me feel something like tall. The smell of the leather was itself heroic. I wore the boots under my straight-legged Lee's, with a matching wide black belt hung with brass loops serving no purpose but to hook my thumbs into when I felt like it. Into belted jeans I tucked my denim cowboy shirt, with double pockets and steel buttons. Over the denim shirt I wore one of several brocade vests that I had gotten my mother to sew for me.

Those brocade vests—I have to tell you about those.

Generosity

One out of ten books I find unreadable. This formula bore itself out over the past several days, when I attended Book Expo America as the Javits Center. Like everyone else there I collected my share of free galleys, books that have yet to be officially launched, still in their "uncorrected proof" labeled jackets. Some books were thrust on me, others I chose myself based on a quick sampling of their prose (and—I have to confess—on their appearance; I'm a sucker for the look and feel of books. A poorly designed or overaggressive cover, an ill-chosen typeface, or a book that simply defies comfortable reading due to its bulkiness or awkward dimensons, I'll almost always pass up).

Sure enough, I came home with ten books, only one of which I ultimately found readable. By "readable" I mean exactly that, since (more and more as I get older) I can either read books or I can't; there's no in-between. A sampling of an "unreadable" (for me) book:

He wanted to have a party for his birthday, his fiftieth. Given that it was not my own birthday, it was no big deal to me. I can never get excited about other people getting older, but there you are, there is always that distance between them and me. No one can stop my getting old like a hypocrite. I keep no count of the passing years: I just keep looking forward. The only thing that could put me off is death but until further notice, it is not here, it is somewhere else, busy culling other people. I only know it by reputation and I am pretty sure that when we do meet, things will not go well. No chance of sweet-talking it. So I have no intention of sweet-talking up the process.
—The Unforseen, Christian Oster (Other Press)

What makes this unreadable? Part of the answer is of course subjective, and has to do with the character of the narrator, with the kind of person who uses expressions such as "given that" and "there you are." Were this narrative a road, there would be warning signs along it saying, "Pomposity at Work" and "Danger: Pretension Ahead." First-person narratives are always at the mercy of their narrators. One either likes the storyteller (Holden Caufield, The Catcher in the Rye), or finds him/her tantalizingly repulsive (Ford Maddox Ford, The Good Soldier), or dislikes and stops reading.

But the character of the narrator in the above passage is but a symptom, I think, of a deeper problem that rests with the author himself, who must take the blame for slipshod punctuation, non-sequiturs and redundancies, but above all for a passage which at best amounts to weak-tea philosophy (I'm not in a hurry to die but then there's no avoiding it, is there?). The first time I read this passage (I read it for a second time now only to comment on it), I was not even aware of its contents. The passage occurs on page 4 of the book, and by page 2 my eyes had already glazed over. Words and sentences had turned to decorative filigree. Because I enjoy the shapes of paragraphs, it sometimes takes a while for me to realize this disconnect between words and meaning. Then the spell breaks and I put the book down.

Another passage, another book:

All my life I have longed to be alone in a place like this. Even when everything was going well, as if often did. I can say that much. That it often did. I have been lucky. But even then, for instance in the middle of an embrace and someone whispering words in my ear I wanted to hear, I could suddenly get a longing to be in a place where there was only silence. Years might go by and I did not think about it, but that does not mean that I did not long to be there. And now I am here, and it is almost exactly as I had imagined it.
—Out Stealing Horses, Per Petterson (translated from the Norwegian by Anne Born (Graywolf)

Granted, this is a translation, and a rather awkward one at that (assuming that the errors in tense owe nothing to the original). Still, the style of the writing here can best be described as "chatty." Though I have nothing against writing in the vernacular, or that's driven by character voice and is therefore casual. But chattiness is another matter. Chatting puts no premium on words or content. It is language for its own sake. But it's worse than that. Gertrude Stein, for better or worse, shoves language in our faces, hammers away at the reader with repetitions like a sculptor chiseling away at his marble to get at the form within it. But here there's no groping after form; there's just talk words like packing noodles occupying the empty space between solid things. I feel about this passage roughly the way I feel about the two inches of foam the barrista's invariably dump on my lattes: can't eat it; can't drink it; what to do with it? Now here's a piece of writing that engages me.

My father wanted to show me something, but he wouldn't say what. He only said I should go get my gun, my thirty-six-aught-six, and follow him. This happened just outside Bend, Oregon, where we lived in a ranch house surrounded by ten acres of woods. I was twelve at the time: old enough to shoot a gun, young enough to fear the dark.
—Refresh, Refresh, Benjamin Percy (Graywolf)

In my writing workshops I'm always preaching against withholding information. This passage shows me why. It is nothing if not generous. Look at the amount of information given. The protagonist is a twelve-year old boy who is afraid of the dark and whose father presumably hunts. The setting: Bend, Oregon. The passage is pure information, pure generosity. I think of that frost poem, Provide, Provide. That's what Percy does here: he provides his readers with information. He communicates; he gives. He wastes none of the reader's time. But he is more than just considerate. He is bountiful; he holds nothing back. There is an urgency behind the words that is of a piece with the author's willingness to share them; the impulse to "give" is also an impulse to "get rid of." So different from the authors above who sit back lazily in their padded chairs chatting us to death while swirling the brandy in their snifters.

To be generous and considerate: that's what I want to teach my students, and what I want to practise in my own writing. To give everything and hold nothing back. To create experience for the reader with as much care as you would cook a meal, knowing that it's meant not just to be looked at, or heard, or even tasted—but ingested as life-giving sustenance, to become part of the reader, to add to and not subtract from the reader's own life experience.