Rewriting

On his blog Jim Murdoch tells us how he spent 3.5 hours getting a sentence right (via Heinz beans, Gillian Anderson, etc). He ended up with "From now on, whenever I pick up or think about Gerald Murnane’s book, Barley Patch, I’ll think of a girl with red hair on a bus" but didn't think that would be the final version.

Ernest Hemingway rewrote the ending to "A Farewell to Arms" 39 times and used to brag about it, but Gustave Flaubert's perhaps the most famous re-writer. His manuscripts have been scanned in. Have a look at the University of Rouen's collection

Nancy Rawlinson thinks of drafting as follows - first Write it out in order to know it, to understand it (whatever “it” is here: story, idea, feeling). Then write it again, with this new knowledge having been dredged up and placed, to some degree, at the front of the mind. These two documents might have very little in common. The first enables the second, and the second isn’t so much a rewrite as a re-imagining.

I recently read "The Author is Not Dead, Merely Somewhere Else" (Michelene Wandor). It's about Creative Writing courses. She thinks that the traditional workshop must go, because it emphasises re-writing rather than writing. But I need to re-write. I try to keep earlier drafts because sometimes rewriting smooths away interesting quirks. In general though, if I write quickly I revert to self-parody - samey characters, plots, details, sentence-length - so my re-writes can be extensive. I individualise the characters, sneak in twists and hints, change the phrase order in sentences, go through checklists (the 5 senses; the start and end; etc). Sometimes I add or delete a character or scene, or change the PoV. I've been known to delete all but a paragraph, or join 2 pieces together. My financially most successful piece went through 19 years of re-writes. By the end of that it looked bruised and battered to me, a war veteran with an artificial leg, sewn-on arm and a dangerously damaged soul. I have a different, more benevolent attitude to a piece written in a fortnight and accepted by the first mag I sent it to. But do readers see any difference between the 2 pieces? I doubt it. There are many ways to end up with a good story. If you try a route you've not tried before there are bound to be more dead-ends and longeurs.

I tend to start with a handwritten draft. Once I have a few hundred words I type it in. There's sometimes a phase when I juggle things around (the example below is taken from that phase) and I frequently re-print drafts.

Sometimes (especially with poetry) I cut a draft up and re-order the pieces on a table. I rarely write at the keyboard. Gradually the piece takes shape, but not before changes small and large. Here's a later snapshot with multi-colour edits

George Watson in the Times Higher Education (July 2010) made these points

• In a 1979 talk entitled "A Neglected Responsibility" [Larkin] called on British libraries to acquire and preserve poetic manuscripts, hopeful that a corrected draft might persuade the young that a poem is the end of a deliberative process rather than a spontaneous act.
• Revision can disimprove, and a poet can bother to the point of being bothersome. Auden's publisher used to tell how hard it was to choke a new edition out of him when he was endlessly intent on revising; Wordsworth spent half a lifetime rewriting The Prelude without improving it

Inspiration

Mine comes from the usual places, I think. Here's a selection from my recent notes (categorized for this blog)

Themes

• brave in front of the children
• trading loneliness for humiliation
• dramatic irony - a person who thinks she's helpful and understanding, called Little Miss Gullible behind her back
• "Blame Culture" - someone surprises their partner with a trip to St Oleve's churchyard, Hart St to show them Mary Ramsay's grave (she brought the plague to London)

Images

• Nostalia = a broken cassette on the roadside, tape billowing like seaweed

Voice

• Start with "We had a fight. I don't remember what it was all about"

Form

• Two pieces which sound the same but are spelt differently: e.g. "Can circumstances change?" - "Cancer comes, stances change"
• A piece called "Single" about splitting up, which reads differently if doubled letters are made single - "her ragged words scarred me, her tinny laughter"

In the News

• some councils have to put notices up in cemetaries after a kid playing on graves was killed by a falling headstone
• In the Utah Desert during WW2 an imitation Berlin zone was build to test which bombs worked best. Wood was imported from as far away as Murmensck. It was furnished by RKO Radio Pictures Authenticity Division (who also did Citizen Kane)
• After Elizabeth died, Rossetti kept a zebra, a kangaroo, a wombat, and a raccoon at 16 Cheyne Walk. Neighbours complained only when he got a peacock.
• When a friend went to a contact lens appointment she was told that tear quality goes down after you're past 40

I often need 2 reasons for starting on a work. I often build around a symbolic framework or a plot, or start with a few dotted images and scenes that I try to join up. "Voice" is my the least successful starting point. If I start in a new voice it all too often trails off, leaving me in my habitual styles. A spark's not enough. I need tinder, paragraphs of it, which is why I have a box folder of work by "Others" (on the right in this photo).

Inside are a few torn-out pages but mostly there are photocopies. Before I could afford photocopies I copied passages by hand - just a paragraph sometimes, paragraphs I could never have written, new places to start from. You see, I sometimes want to sound like Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens and Dylan Thomas. Or Borges, De Lillo and AL Kennedy.

While sifting through the folder earlier this year I saw a name that was familiar - Elizabeth Baines

I must have written this decades ago (don't be fooled by the TXT-like spelling - that's my shorthand). Doubtless it's the voice I was interested in.

Voice is a feature I sacrifice or fracture as a compromise, in order to make room for other features, but those other features tend to mean more to me than to others. In particular, the forms of formal prose demand sacrifices that to others look self-defeating. Voice (in particular starting a story from somewhere new) is what I'll be practising soon.