Preparing to read draft and revise...

OK, so having printed out the rough draft of The Book, I now need to read it. Then revise it. Because I'm more accustomed to writing stage texts, this part of the process is stumping me.

Why?

Because, if you're as lucky as I've been, when you write text for the stage, you get to hear actors read the words rather than simply read it over by yourself. Then you get to talk to those actors and maybe a couple other folks who are in your living room about said draft. Then you revise.

This is a book. There are 754 pages. No one could read it aloud in one evening.

So, I have to read it.

Duh.

Some people have suggested I have others read it at this stage, but I don't want to do that, because I know it's not done yet. I know there needs to be at the very least one revision for the book to be constituted as a book I would be interested in getting feedback on...It's too raw and I don't want to be overly influenced right now by outsider readers' ideas of what 'works' and what doesn't, etc. Praise can be as destructed as criticism at this stage. There are parts that 'don't work' but that doesn't mean I want to lose them yet, and I don't want to be lulled by praise into not making something that might 'work' better...

So, I have to figure out how I'm going to do this. My instinct is to read it once over as much as possible like a reader. Take some notes but not get into minutiae. Then re-read it and at that stage begin revisions and add the things in I know need to be added, cut what needs to be cut, rewrite whatever is staying, etc...

I have done so many revisions on academic type things, shorter prose pieces, etc., but this is a different animal.  I'll have to feel it out, I suppose. I kind of want something like angels with trumpets or something to start me off and then tell me when it's done...not that I'm grandiose or anything...

***

Meanwhile it feels like the world is going kind of crazy now that I've had a few moments to concentrate on it - Ferguson, weird ass weather, Republicans going crazy(er) and writing Iran, I mean WTF people?

So, I am grateful for this little pause in my life wherein I can focus on a writing project and that is all.

I apologize to all of my friends to whom I am not available and to everything/anything else anyone wants or needs from me. I simply don't have it. I have discovered a truth I am sure all writers of books already know: writing is a selfish business. It's like you have to eat the air or something just to survive the process.

I'm used to sharing the wealth of this selfishness with other people (aka rehearsing a play), so we can pretend we're not selfish, we're just Making a Performance Together. But when you write - alone - you're left with yourself, thinking about this thing you are making, by yourself, which takes fucking YEARS. And convince yourself the whole time that it's WORTH it. It's so weird.

But I also feel some kind of addiction to this process happening...in the very middle of putting together the draft I would have sworn to you up and down that I would Never do this again - but as I am now at this place, where it's about revision and Something Exists, I already have ideas for New Books.

Oh dear. Sorry, world.

OK, back to my few days in real life. The plan is to start reading by Sunday - having taken time off to do taxes, see friends, do some self care and just - well - rest.

A draft of book printed out - on paper!

Here's the first printed out rough draft of The Amazing True Imaginary Autobiography of Dick and Jani! Yes, it's rough, but yee-ha it's a draft! Printed out! On Paper!

OK, I'm just a little excited about this.  Gonna take a few days off to enjoy this...

But wanted to share this with you first to explain the radio silence on the blog...

There's a long way to go yet, but this is a huge first step - 754 pages - 4 years in the making...

Woot!

photo take on my meditation chair - nicely frayed at edges by beloved cat, Ugo.

p.s. Manuscript was carried home by steadfast, supportive and generally wonderful husband, John, in truly hellacious downfall of icy slush. We plodded home in puddles, came back soaked but happy. This has been a long time coming, and even if it's just a step, it's a biggie.

Time to celebrate!

And again a shout out to all of you who have made this possible - all the Indiegogo supporters and others with moral support, writing conversations, coffees - all valuable, all the time.

Dispatches from the Writing Warren

I don't know what else to call it. I go into some kind of place where I write a lot every day. This place has many little cubby areas where a bunch of people, including me, are beavering away at writing projects. We sit there and write ... and write ... and write.

I have become addicted to this place, because (a) it's quiet - except for every once in a while there's an annoying person who sniffles a lot (not as in crying, as in has a cold and for some reason doesn't understand the world includes tissues) or clicks a pen...but these people are at a minimum (and FYI - male - the women somehow all seem to be able to stay quiet - as do, to be fair, most of the men), (b) everyone else's focus seems to help mine and (c) somehow even though no one is checking on me I feel guilty if I'm not actually writing. When I need a break, I go out to the kitchen and get a coffee or tea, heat up some food, whatever, chat to my new cell-I mean writing-mates.

Because of this focus, the writing is moving ahead at a brisk clip. The words are piling up, as they have been all along, but also other things are happening - synchronistic things, the more mysterious things that start happening when Something is taking shape...it still feels like early stages in some ways - even though I'm close to a rough draft now (at over 225K words, I certainly freaking hope so) - the shape of what this will become is only now coming into view - and it comes in and out - still not entirely clear - but that's OK.

And this is the best part: it seems like that's OK - for perhaps the first time - and I don't even want to write this because I'm sure I'll jinx it and tomorrow I will go back and think What a Dump! So, we'll just say to hedge bets - for today - for today it's OK. (I've been writing about the ins and outs of all the self-hatred, fears and in some cases just emotional pain due to subject matter that has gone into this day by day on the evil that is Facebook - so this is an overview more or less...)

In the middle of the writing, FYI, John, my beloved Canadian and I had a lovely Valentine's Day back at Bread and Yoga - doing a Thai Partner Massage workshop that ended with homemade chocolate tasting. Can you imagine anything better? It was as great as it sounds. And we did need it, even though we were the creaky oldsters, we managed...

This is important, too, to this process: the pauses to rejuvenate - gather energies, but also need the relentless moving forward - it's a balance.

I saw an amazing documentary from 1982 about James Baldwin retracing the steps of the Civil Rights movement from the 1950s forward - it's called Heard it Through the Grapevine and if you can find a way to see it, you should. More relevant now than ever. This served to remind me of what 1980-81 looked like (when the film was being shot) in the US, among many other things. And what a weird ass time that was....from Carter to Reagan...the end of one era (FDR) into another - an era that began in 1980 and in which we still live...God help us and When Dear Lord does the pendulum swing back? Please tell me...but anyway, it's an amazing film and should be required viewing in every high school and college in the US. If you haven't read Baldwin, just do it. If you want to understand the US and especially racial politics in the US, it's a must...he does way more than that, but he was more clear-sighted than most on these issues...

This all relates, because of so many strands of my grandmothers' lives, but too tired to go into all of those right now (plus that will be in the book)...

However, I will tell you my realization about Nietzsche - which I'm sure you're all dying to know - and it's this: his whole thing about beyond good and evil (and about the inability to judge anyone because there is no place from which you can stand to do so - and there is no way to judge without isolating someone else's action from the course of their entire life and all that has affected that person and led to that particular action)...is directly related to what any great art does. If you are writing or creating anything that involves stories about human beings - even if what they have done is horrendous - you can't just stand outside and judge them.  If you do that, you become a moralist, but you are not creating great art. Great art happens in the place where all judgment - as in standing outside and tut-tutting - ceases. It also means letting go of all resentment (which was another big Nietzschean no-no - bwahahahahaha - but still...), because that stands in the way of clear seeing.

I seriously doubt I am anywhere near the first person to see or say this, but the realization had a profound effect on me, because it affirms not only the challenges of being a deeply flawed granddaughter writing a book about my deeply flawed grandmothers but also my whole PhD thesis (about theater/art being an act of philosophy and art usually being out ahead of philosophy...etc.)

But even more than any of that is what it implies for living, too. How important it is to find a way to see clearly without searching for an illusory moral high ground from which you think you can fling your judgements hither and yon and in order to be considered Wise or at least Clever.

Is that an ideal? Sure as shit it is, but it's one worth shooting for. I think this is also what Virginia Woolf was on about when she was saying it would take women 100 years (from when she wrote A Room of One's Own) to write something as incandescent as Shakespeare, because there would be a need for women to be able to stand on their own two feet without fear or favor...without having to simply be in a rage over their own status...This is troublesome politically of course in many ways to contemplate, but there is some truth to it. There is a certain level of serenity needed to write or create anything with clarity that does not fall into some form of self-justification or ego-feeding. What creates the soil for that serenity/clarity can be argued, but there does need to be a still point out of which all the rest can emerge.

OK, I'm now babbling and it's 3:30 a.m. so it's time to wrap this up...but a book is on the way, my friends, at least there is that...this rough beast is indeed slouching towards - well - me, I suppose - waiting to be born...

new space to write and publish - not a bad day!

Very tired but a couple updates (especially for anyone not on the evil that is Facebook).

Started working at a writing studio where I was accepted today and writing in a space where other writers are writing and nothing else is happening is a religious experience. I was able to go further and deeper with my writing in part because felt buoyed by the focus of everyone else, none of whom I spoke with or even know, except maybe one person. Just hearing the clicking of keyboards and feeling the energy of concentration. Beautiful. It's the perfect NYC experience - surrounded by like-minded people with whom you don't have to share even a word - though when out in the kitchen area you can if you want. I'm in love...and feel for the first time like I might actually get a legible draft of my book done by the end of April.

Today, also, an excerpt from my stage tex Besides, you lose your soul or the History of Western Civilization was just published on the wonderful literary and art site: Ohio Edit.  So nice to see those words again, since it was last produced in 2009.  Check it out, because I'm now open to other directors and/or companies doing my work...if you're interested, give a shout. 

OK, gotta go to sleep now, so I can get up bright and early and go back to my new favorite place... (to which I have 24/7 access, WiFi, a locker, place to keep food, make coffee and tea and a laser printer...heaven, I'm in heaven....)

Day 22 of At-Home Writing Retreat

I posted part of the below on Facebook (aka the Evil That Is...), and realized it qualified as a blog post, too, so for those of you wiser than me who have not been seduced into that evil, here's a report from the Front (of the at-home writing retreat):

Writing retreat at home continues. Moving forward and spending a lot of time now in the 1940s, listening to the music and imagining life in the U.S. during the War, deciding which of my grandmother Jani's original pieces of writing to include and which stories to tell about both Dick and Jani. Finding out details like - because there was a rubber shortage (and all rubber needed was used for bombs), women were asked to give up their girdles and there was no elastic for underwear so undergarments were fastened with buttons. I knew about the rations, but the details are fascinating. Days included listening to the radio three times a day for reports on the fighting, especially if a loved one was over there, which of course included not only Europe but the Pacific. What is particularly hard to imagine in the realest sense is that No One Knew the Outcome of the War...now, it's all newsreels and heroic movies, but then...much more difficult.

I spent many summers in an old family cottage of one of my stepfathers in Maine, where there were big rusty hooks in the rocks below our place and on the island nearby. During WWII these hooks held metal nets to catch German submarines before they could get into Casco Bay and into Portland. This always seemed funny to me, but it was real. There were U-boats around. Also, the cottage was painted green inside still because it had been requisitioned as a look-out post for the Army. There were/are old forts on the back shore of the island.

Being a child of Watergate and Vietnam, it was so hard to wrap my mind around the reality of a World War in which so much was at stake and most people thought the government was right (not everyone of course, but most), so to allow myself to sink into that point of view now feels almost like a challenging acting exercise...such a time of rupture the 40s...not to mention people seeing pictures of the Holocaust for the first time (which Jani's second husband, Bob, helped shoot and send - from Dachau) and the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki (which Dick's husband, George, knew about in advance because he was an executive secretary for part of the Manhattan Project). We had become death, the destroyer of worlds. While the First World War titled the world on its axis, the Second plunged it over the cliff. The age of irony begins for the next generation and the concomitant clinging desperately to old values of many of the older generation. My grandmothers were smack in the middle, one foot in the old and one foot thrust into the new.

These are the things I think about, and these are the worlds I am attempting to unfold from the point of view of two women living through it. This is deeply exciting and of course scary, because the hungry ghosts of inadequacy are always nipping at my heels.

Please wish me luck, because I do so dearly want to allow these silenced women to speak.

While no one in Milwaukee would have considered Jani in the 1970s silenced (and she wasn't in terms of speeches and articles), there were deeper reaches of her that were profoundly silenced - certainly before the 1970s and even during that decade itself - a voice that emerges from her more vulnerable correspondence and private conversations. Dick barely ever showed her cards except to judge the young people of the day as wanting and opine politically in support of Nixon and against the Kennedy's (but nothing about her interior world), and I seriously doubt that wasn't because she didn't have any deeper feelings or thoughts. The only glimpse she gave me when I was an adult was when she told me how much she had wanted to be an artist as a girl and how the classes being cancelled during the Depression stopped her cold.  She figured no one would listen to her, and in her position, where and how she grew up - with the options she felt she had - I think she was probably right.

I'm doing my best now to open up these closed off spaces...raids, as T.S. Eliot said, on the inarticulate.

Some moments it feels like I come back from a raid with a jewel, but other times after a lot of work, I feel all I have in my hand upon further inspection is shiny crap...My goal when rewriting in detail will be to discern between the two. This can sometimes be harder than it seems like it should be, but getting voice and tone right for Dick and Jani, not only as they were when I knew them, but also when they - and the country - were younger...the pre-irony days in other words - can be tricky. Don't want to be fake simple but also can't transplant our sensibility now to then...or even them in the 70s and 80s to then. Jani has left behind original writing from as far back as the 30s, which is very helpful, and Dick left behind all her photos, which I use as launchpads for so many stories...So many threads...following them all (which is why the first draft is so damn long already...but that's another story...)

The good news is: I do feel I will complete the book this year. It's getting close to a full first draft, tantalizingly so.  Fingers crossed and all that...

This message brought to you by Kennedy Fraser (or why writing this book is so f---ing hard)

A friend sent me this quote today and I felt I had to share it, especially for my female writer friends...and for any male friends who want to understand what may appear on the outside like almost psychotic levels of resistance from women they love to writing certain kinds of stories...this is what we're up against. No joke.

"To a woman writer, exposing family secrets can seem perilously close to going mad. Men have had the support of the culture as they recognized their own experience and laid claim to it by writing it down. On the whole, they have been able, without inhibition to feed their creative ambitions with the details of other people's lives. Men had a mandate, after all, to inform the public about the nature of life. Things have not been--are not--so simple for a woman. Women have often withheld their stories, because honesty about emotions and about the family feels to many women like a sin. It means drawing aside the curtain, lifting lids. It means renouncing the role of good girl and ceasing to be ladylike. It may mean expressing anger and being brave enough to watch loved ones be angry. Women must set aside the bowl they have used to beg for approval and praise. George Eliot was not free as an artist until her respectable family had cast her out. Only a community larger than family, only powers greater than lovers or husbands, can sustain women writers when they start asking the big questions: Who am I? Who made me? What is my place in this world?"

Kennedy Fraser from Ornament and Silence: Essays on Women's Lives from Edith Wharton to Germaine Greer. (This quote from New Yorker  essay 'Demented Pilgrimage' published in 1990)

Nothing's wasted...even what appears 'unproductive'

OK, so yesterday - on Day 15 of my at-home writing retreat, - I was struck by a crisis of indecision about what to put in to the book - in this case involving some of Jani's original writing from the 1940s.  I won't go into the details of all that, except to say it was making me feel like I had no idea what I was doing and who do I think I am anyway writing this book, and yadeyadeyadah...

I ended up logging back on to Facebook to ask friends there if anyone had some suggestions for these paralyzing crises, and I got some good advice.  However, in the end I started working on a section I have been terrified by - namely, the beginning of the book - probably because I know how important not only the first pages but the first sentences of any book are for me when I pick it up to glance at an unfamiliar book (in a ye olde bookstore that is - where my analog self buys books...).  So the pressure on this beginning for me has been immense and I've been convinced it's not good enough, etc.

While it's not anywhere near perfect now, confronting that fear and working on that section made me feel immeasurably better about the book itself.  I'm still scared to go back there, but the moral of the story of Confusion Thursday was/is: nothing's wasted.

First I was staring at writing and could not decide what to add. Then I took a long walk in Inwood Hill Park with John.  Then I lay down on the bed and stared at the ceiling for a while listening to the news and then in silence, and then after all that I finally had the guts to open the book up and look at the beginning...and started from there. The beginning. Radical concept.

BUT - and this is the important part -  I know I wouldn't have gotten there without all of the above.

Writing involves writing, but writing a book seems to also involve a lot of staring at the wall.  This is why I imagine most people think writer's are lazy so and so's, but I don't think we are. I think we need these times, too.

If I was rehearsing a play, as a director, this would take the form of rehearsing, trying different ideas with other people involved, and all of those ideas producing nothing good, until at the very end of the rehearsal - or maybe the next day - bam - breakthrough.  However, all the work not used had to precede that...and then - this is the weirdest part - all that work becomes part of what the show is in performance, even if nothing in particular is kept.

The thing I keep having to get used to as a writer of a book is that some of this process just happens in my head.  I should know this because when preparing for rehearsals, I have spent a lot of time staring into space, too.  But the difference is: here, I'm on my own.  There is no part where I get to hang out with lots of other people and hash shit out.  A long way of saying: it's fucking lonely.

Duh.

I may eventually, once I'm not stuck in the study with all the papers and The Thing is contained on a laptop, go out and write in cafes or even the writing meet-up things, just to be near other people word-wrestling.  We'll see.

Meantime, it's Day 16 of at-home writing retreat and so far have written in my journal, seen some friends, and written here but not directly on the book yet, so time to do some of that...

My prayer is for a readable draft by Spring...or my whistling past the graveyard version: I'm writing until the book is done or the money runs out. Please say a prayer for me (or do a dance, or send a good thought) that it's the former.

Peace out.