Just a Flesh Wound

In case you ever wanted to know what it's like to do rewrites on a first-draft novel, imagine going to a party, getting more and more drunk, swirling around, passing out, waking up the next morning with the taste of vomit in your mouth, having little memory of what took place, and feeling that eye-crushing pain in your skull as the hangover takes hold.

Now, imagine it happening in reverse.

That's what rewriting can feel like.

A Slightly Political Aside

Writer and overall poli-blog analyst Peter Daou has an essay titled "The Broken Triangle," which depressingly illustrates the almost-futile efforts by lefty poli-bloggers these days in getting their opinions to resonate in the public square. I have nothing to say about Daou's piece, except it's readable and highly interesting. Take a spin through it if you have the time.

What strikes me, rather, is notion that we have the best technology to contact and inform people, and yet there's nothing being actually done. Yes, a lot of people post snarky commentary to their poli-blog (I used to be one) and maybe call their elected representatives, but that's about it. The people who do this have the courage of their convictions, albeit their convictions stink of weaksauce.

When I read all the complaints against Bush by American bloggers and their legions of commentors, I'm struck by the subtle laziness given to us by the Internet. Forty years ago, people marched in the streets for civil rights and to end the war in Vietnam. No cell phones, no MoveOn.org, no blogs to exchange information. Instead, people gathered in small groups that built over years to take their frustration to the streets. People seemed to be motivated more because they were together in something, a sort of shoe-leather bonding took place. I felt it when I was in protest marches for Gulf War I and II, even in smaller rallies numbering a couple hundred. There's a sense of community even when you march with like-minded strangers. On the Web, I click through a blog and go to a game site next. There's no emotional permanence, just interchangeable text. Furthermore, in the poli-blogs, I see commentors regularly gripe and talk about taking action on a future date, or waiting for the next election, or hoping someone gets indicted...as if Karl Rove getting served is going to make Americans finally go "Oh yeah, Bush...he's a lousy president." Hoping for some lightning strike from above to change things smacks of the passive, which I guess is what Daou is writing about, because there's nothing else you can do as a lefty poli-blog. You've said your piece. You've done your armchair analysis. You've made your snark with some Photoshop and cut-n-paste linguistics. Great. Way to make an effort. You're, like, totally up there with the union organizers who were attacked by police in the Flint Sit-Down Strike.

All of this takes place on the poli-blogs 24/7, filling up bandwidth and templates with words and pictures shot out into the ether. To me, the poli-blogs on the left and right are deadlocked. There's no more minds you can change. People on the poli-blogs are hyperpolarized now, set to believe in an ideological monolith (sadly, as a lefty) favors the righties. The lefties (to go back to Daou) are just reacting. There's no connection to a working class. There's no non-election-year hitting the streets to talk about what can be done to register new voters or make lives of the working poor better. There's nothing to branch the virtual to the street. There's just people seemingly content to do the Sim thing, sitting behind keyboards, donating money, and pretending they are being something...an active citizen, a proud patriot. I don't know. But it seems that unless you get up and do something (it's called a movement for a reason), you're just sitting on your ass.

Tell Me a Story

A brief note about the whole "uproar" over James Frey.

First, writers are born liars, especially when writing about themselves. We aren't journalists. We aren't historians. We tell stories, and never do we get the truth absolutely right. We have our own agenda, constantly, and if you think in our memoirs that you are getting the whole, unbiased story, we thank you again for your money.

Second, I like to think Frey pulled a fast one and exposed the whole Oprah "lets talk about our failures and redemption in 44 minutes" TV mindset for what it was. I like to also think that Frey pulled a Mike Judge, who used his Beavis and Butt-head to cleverly skewer the media that was paying him and making him an icon. I like to think that Frey used his 15 minutes of fame to point out to Oprah's viewers on Wisteria Lanes near and far that they should stop reading about someone else's "real life" pain as a spectator sport.

Or maybe he's just a massively fucked up guy who wanted to make something out of himself. So, he lied. He made entertaining lies, which were turned down by a group of publishers until someone at Doubleday got hungry for a smash hit and was willing to promote the shit out of a book that was not all together legit. Books don't get published by themselves. A lot of people turned off their bullshit detectors in exchange for a hit. A lot of people were willing to believe in Frey's story. What comes natural to us as meaning-seeking creatures who enjoy a well-told tale becomes doubly-easy when there's a truck load of cash involved.

And then came Oprah and her book club, who put aside their bullshit detectors to make room for Frey's tale of woe. It was an ideal fit for her nook of heart-aching life lessons and affirmations. No one questioned Frey, because Frey was a ready-made, a person who would make for great TV. He talked about his demons. He pimped his book. He made a great patient for America's favorite holistic cuddly life guru, Oprah. And Frey, he went along with the program. If he felt trapped by the lie, felt that steel noose of panic tighten around his neck, it didn't show. Maybe he knew this was going to unravel, and then he'd cash in on the scandal, proving through his genteel mask and forthcoming apology stunt that America loves a fallen icon who has tears in their scoundrel eyes.

Third, a part of me can't help thinking that Frey leaked the information as part of a viral campaign to promote his next book (see page 6 of TSG's report), perhaps about an author who cried wolf one too many times; about disposable amounts of sympathy by day-time TV hosts; about the public's need for a good story (or better yet, a story that makes them feel better about their own lives); and he better make his next book is a novel, because no one is going to believe another memoir by Frey again.

90



So, here's the deal. It's 90 days until my birthday, and one of my resolutions is to have an agent-ready draft by then. Three months to hone what I've written into shape, adding scenes, deleting scenes, knitting it all together so the scars don't show.

Last night, I was reeling from a headache too much to consider how I was going to do this. For NaNoWriMo, I knew I had to write x amount of words per day, with a secondary emphasis on scene generation. Now, it's different. I have all the parts. I just need to bring them together. That's the good news. I should make 90 days no problem with that.

The bad news is, I know already I have revisions I need to make, along with new scenes that will need to be written. Plus, there's the anxiety of This Is It, when I get to the point when everything I've been working on for years comes to some kind of conclusion. Will it be good enough? Will it have that tell-tale flatness of an author struggling to finish a piece? That's the problem with rewrites. The bloom is off the rose. You know the punchlines to the jokes, so there's the temptation of slattering on more of everything. How do you make it more interesting without making it overloaded?

Back before my childhood imploded, my dad and I used to work on things in the garage. One of the prayers he was mutter would be to know when to stop tightening the wrench, lest the nut would shred or the wood would snap from the torque. Art is the same way, and I hope that I find that narrow patch of wisdom between It's Good Enough and Just One More Turn.

Because I'm more type A than I'd like to admit, I've figured out a battle plan.

Jan. 10-Feb. 10: Rewrites to the tune of 1,000 words a day (and/or reconstruction of two scenes)
Feb. 10-March 10: Revision by a couple readers (plus a writing teacher I know, who has agreed to read the manuscript, God help her.)
March 10-April 10: Rewriting again. More eyes looking at it. Corrections. Draft the letter of inquiry. Research the target agents. Send.

Which means giving up a lot of distractions, which is good. I need the discipline again (you can take the boy out of the Catholic Church...). So, it's precious little DS time for now. Very little TV, save for Battlestar Galactica and House. I mean, I have to have my killer robots and medical misanthropes, right?

It Takes Courage to Enjoy This



Tonight, I start working on the revisions to the novel. Tuesday night, I shall wander back into the clutches of my old writer's group. I'm anxious about both events. With the former, I have to dig into the gooey embarrassment of seeing overcooked, under-realized text, getting a big dose of In No Way Are We There Yet. With the latter, it's sitting down with your peers and having them get or not get your work...or worse, have no reaction. But I'm wearing another kind of anxious with the group. You see, the majority of them went on to the advanced writers class, whereas me and another writer waved them adieu from the train station, watching them all depart for bigger/better/leaner/meaner prose.

Me? I sat back and just wrote 55,000 words during November on my own private forced march. No teacher. No instruction. Just fill in the pieces and create a draft. I wrote alone, the only way a writer can really exist. I had a temporary NaNoWriMo group I merged with, but for those long nights in November, I was moving in the shadowy forest by myself, emerging into the amber light of the living room to give my wife the word count.

It's been a trade-off. I've been writing more without them, often coming away from the process a little more excited. I've also found a way to keep my head out of the competition vibe. In a writer's group, there's always talk about nurturing everyone's writing through feedback and arm-around-the-shoulder suggestions, but make no mistake, there's a certain smashmouth aspect via 18th-century witticisms. Damning with faint praise, akin to the polite Southern epithet "Bless his/her soul," as in "He doesn't have the brain power to brighten a light bulb, bless his soul." Of course, nothing is said blatantly. Overt trash-talking gets you exiled from the group. Besides, it's a karmic teeter-totter. You say something positive about someone's prose, they return in kind, often framing any criticisms in the more helpful and friendly verbiage around.

Maybe it's me, but I ended up getting distracted by the wolf pack, writing in duel-mode, trying to be the one with the most intense, most beloved feedback. I'm not too proud or noble to admit that I was looking for praise when I should have been moving to perfect the craft. I was anxious and selfish, prone to comparisons and raising the bar in my head until I would inevitably fell. When the bulk of the writing club moved on, I was secretly happy, even though I felt like I was being abandoned.

Which brings us to Bjork. About a month before NaNoWriMo, I caught Bjork's "Volumen," a DVD packed with videos from her first three solo albums. It was late when I put it in, and somewhere around the laid-back Sunday morning calm of "Venus as a Boy" and the manic-depressive bebop of "It's Oh So Quiet," I got smacked between my bleary eyes about what it means to be an artist. Bjork, with her ethereal cackle-bellow and pixie face, is someone who doesn't promote indifference. People either love her or hate her, either get her or avoid her. I don't enjoy everything she does, but I'm absolutely stopped dead when I hear her. The videos are no exception. Visually evocative that dash through waking-dream states and cutting edge computer technology, yet organic in application, as if the music was turned into three-dimension objects to be photographed. Music videos are too often promotional pieces for an artist, while Bjork seems to melt the song into a visual space. Watching Bjork, there's the epiphany that she absolutes believes in her vision as well as what she's doing. There's no hesitation in her soul; there might be when she's composing or recording, going back to re-record or to alter a lyric, but when she commits, there is no going back. She's expressing herself with a pure cadence, and I was left in awe of how she pronounces herself with every note, illustrates her imagination with every frame. She knows she might fail, but maybe she knows it's beyond the fickle "pass/fail...rules/sucks" binary of pop culture. She merely believes in herself, and how can we not be bathed in her alabaster radiance for having that grace.

After the videos ended, and I'm in the dark with the "Video 1" signal radiating off the TV, I start to learn the new koan: the one of devotion not toward fame or dominance, but to the art of creating something out of confidence because it emerges out of the purity of the soul's expression. And so, Tuesday, I go back, seeing if I have exorcised the temptation to make this a contest of others and instead write for myself, channel that mysterious and elusive fire, whether encased in a torrent of words or a digitized pixie grin.

And I call her, Miyoko



Got my third Shuffle Friday night and loaded her up with music on Sunday afternoon before going out and eating The Biggest Meal Known to Man with friends in some pan-Asian fever dream.

Monday morning, and I forgot how much I need an iPod at work. Between caffeine and music, it's the only way I get through the day.

So, Miyoko, I hope you work better than your deceased predecessors Smitten and Divine did. Honestly, I'm going through Shuffles like Spinal Tap goes through drummers.