Novelist as a Vocation(28)
There are times when I come to accept her criticisms. “Yeah, she was right about that,” I may think, or “Maybe she had something there.” It can take a few days to reach that point, though. At other times I find myself disagreeing with her. “No way,” I’ll decide, after giving it some thought. “This is right as it is.” There is a rule that I follow, though, once another person has entered the scene. Whether I agree or disagree with their comments, I rewrite every scene they have found fault with. From start to finish. In those cases where I find myself rejecting their comments, I may take the scene in an entirely different direction.
Whichever course I have followed, once I have sat down and rewritten a given section I almost always find it much improved. It seems that when a reader has a problem, there is usually something that needs fixing, whether or not it corresponds to their suggestions. In short, the flow of their reading has been blocked. It is my job, then, to eliminate that blockage, to unclog the pipe, as it were. How to do that is up to me, the author. Even if I feel “That section was perfectly written—there’s no need to change anything,” I still head back to my desk and work it out. After all, the idea that anything can be “perfectly written” is a clear fallacy.
This time I don’t have to go through the manuscript from beginning to end. All I have to do is rewrite those problematic sections. After that, I ask my reader to revisit those parts, we discuss them, and if need be, I work on them some more. Then I show them again to my reader, and if she is still dissatisfied we repeat the whole process. Once we have sorted things out to the best of our capability, I undertake another full rewrite to check and adjust the flow of the work. If fiddling around with small sections has disrupted the tone of the whole, I fix that. Then and only then do I formally present my manuscript to my editor. By this stage of the game my overheated brain has cooled enough to allow me to cope with his comments in an appropriately dispassionate way.
* * *
—
This brings up an interesting story about the creation of the novel Dance Dance Dance, which I wrote in the late 1980s. It was the first time I had used a word processor (a Fujitsu laptop) to write. I composed most of the novel in our apartment in Rome, and then finished it off in London, England. When we moved from Rome to London, I stored what I had written on floppy disks, but when I checked after our arrival I discovered one entire chapter was missing. I was a greenhorn when it came to word processors, so it was likely my oversight. Not an uncommon story. Of course it hit me hard. I grew quite depressed. It was a long chapter, and I flattered myself that it had been beautifully written. Not the sort of loss I could dismiss with a wave of my hand.
Still, I couldn’t go on sighing and shaking my head forever. So I pulled myself together and tried to resurrect passages that I had sweated over several weeks before. “Did I do it this way?” I wondered. “Or perhaps it was like this.” In the end, the resurrection was completed, and the novel was published with the rewritten section. Some time later, however, the part that had gone missing popped up out of nowhere. Somehow it had found its way into a completely different folder. Again, not an uncommon occurrence. What should I do, I worried, if the original turned out to be better than its replacement? When I read it over, however, I was relieved to see that in fact the rewrite was far superior.
What this story shows is that, no matter what you have written, it can be made better. We may feel that what we have turned out is excellent, even perfect, but the fact remains there is always room for improvement. That’s why I strive to set aside my pride and self-regard when rewriting, and cool the passions generated by the creative process. I have to be careful not to cool them too much, though, since that would make rewriting impossible. I also have to prepare myself to handle the comments that come from my outside readers. Though their criticisms may hurt, I still must somehow find the patience to listen to what they are saying. By contrast, I don’t take criticisms that come out after a novel is published all that seriously. If I worried too much about that stuff, I couldn’t go on! When the writing process is still underway, however, I have to be able to incorporate criticisms and suggestions in as humble and open-minded a way as possible. This is and has always been my firm belief.
During my many years as a novelist there have been editors with whom I have not seen eye to eye. They were not bad people, and I’m sure they worked well with other writers, but when it came to editing my books the chemistry just wasn’t there. Their opinions often left me shaking my head, and there were times (to be honest) when they really got on my nerves. I could even get angry. Nevertheless, I had to make it work somehow—it was our job, after all.
On one occasion, when we were at the manuscript stage of a novel, I did a rewrite of all the sections the editor had queried. In most cases, however, I rewrote them in a way that was the opposite of what he had suggested: when he instructed “Make this section longer,” for example, I made it shorter, and expanded the sections he wanted me to cut down. Pretty outrageous behavior, I know, but the rewrite that resulted turned out to be a big improvement. Thanks to our exchange, the novel was far better than it would have been otherwise. Paradoxically, he turned out to be a very useful editor for me. Far more helpful, at least, than those editors who told me only what I wanted to hear. To my way of thinking, at least.
What’s crucial, in short, is the physical act of rewriting. What carries more weight than anything else is the resolve to sit down at one’s desk to improve what one has written. Compared to that, the question of which direction to take in those improvements may be of secondary importance. A writer’s instinct and intuition derive less from logic and more from the level of determination brought to the task. It’s like beating the bushes to flush out the birds. What difference does it make what kind of stick you use or how you swing it? Neither matters as long as the birds take to the air. It is that flurry of movement that jolts our field of vision, allowing us to see things in a new light. This is my opinion, anyway, crude though it may be.