The First Draft, Finished

So Jim and I were going back and forth a little about the letdown that accompanied finishing his first draft. 

There he was, with an entire novel finished.  A mighty heap of words and pages.  The book has an interesting concept, with characters struggling against their world and themselves, implications beyond the events portrayed, themes and subtext -- all that good stuff.

But he looked at it and realized, googawjawl, there is a lot of work to be done.  That's the bitch about writing.  You finish the thing, and you think -- well, it's done.

But it's not.  It's only started.

I know -- and saints preserve me, I've read -- writers for whom the first draft is the last draft.  That's one of the reasons I seldom read other writers' early iterations any more.  Show me something finished, not something that's merely complete.  There is an ugly kind of hubris in that school of thinking.  If you're so damn brilliant, if you're such a genius that you don't need to revise your work, how come you're not famous and rich?  There are two kinds of geniuses, let's remember: authentic geniuses, and fools.  If you consider yourself one of the former, you're almost certainly one of the latter.

Golly, these rants just pop out of me. 

Writing is a lot like painting.  If I sit down to create a portrait on hardboard, I start with a sketch on paper.  This is just for composition: the figure will be here, with the edge of the table down here and the curtains tied back like so behind the subject.  Light and dark is roughed in, adding volume to the forms.  This can happen in a notebook or a scrap of newsprint.  Only when I know what I want, do I transfer the sketch onto the board.  There are many ways to accomplish this transfer: my father sketched everything in reverse on tracing paper, then rubbed it a verso onto the illustration board with a burnisher.  Vermeer used a camera oscura with a grid overlay.  I just eyeball the damn thing.

After that, the painting commences.

All of this sketching can be considered similar to the process of outlining the book.  The outline is the earliest sketch.  It shows what will be in the book, as the sketch shows what will be in the picture.  Then the drawing is refined: character fleshed out, details added, mood and tone indicated.  That, gang, is the first draft.  We're still working in pencil or charcoal.  We haven't even gotten to the paint, yet.

It took me something like ten years to get used to this idea.  When I was writing screenplays, I'd fall back exhausted and spent at the end of the first draft and cry, "O Lord, have I not done enough?" or words to that effect.  The answer was silence, of course, but I knew the answer.  So I'd start the next draft.

You think the first draft has it all.  It's the right length.  It has loads of words and ideas in it, largely the same ones you want in the finished piece.  You wrote it with the same diligence you'd write any other draft.  And it's in the same medium, unlike a sketch for a painting.  That's where the trick lies. 

We think, just because we're using words, that our first draft is essentially similar to any other draft.  It isn't.  That first draft is the smudgy underdrawing.  It's a welter of stray lines and errors, with erasures patently visible, late additions taped on from another sheet of paper, and all the rest.  In short, it's a big old mess.

The second draft is the one in which we begin to paint.  That's when we get into color and texture and all that.  First draft, we have indicated these things.  Second draft, we begin to resolve them.

I wish there was better news, but that's how it is.  The first draft is just a long, hard way to ruin some paper.  The second draft is when the pretty picture emerges.

The Long View

Sometimes I think about my legacy.  It is an unavoidable vanity to which all artists are prey.

But it's silly.  When I perish, I'll leave a sort of fingerprint on the world that will persist for a brief while.  Maybe eight minutes, if my luck stays true.  Or if I become the next big novelist, maybe ten years after I'm gone people will still remember my stuff; if I write a classic, some poor bastards will be reading it in high school in fifty years' time.

Francis Scott Fitzgerald said, "An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards."  He was, of course, thinking along the same lines I am.  He, however, did it.

 If I somehow manage to find a niche in the pantheon of writers, I could grab as much as a 500 year latency before my name vanishes.  A couple of dozen writers have lasted longer than that.  Even so, nothing I do -- nothing any of us does -- will survive the next ice age.  Which, in geological terms, is a heartbeat.

So pondering my legacy is  pretty fruitless activity.  But still, I do it.

Most of it will consist of theme park designs that never got built, screenplays that never got shot, and ideas I never got around to -- drawers full of 3x5 cards, notebooks, and messages scribbled on the back of receipts.  There will be some art hanging on the walls of descendants, if I'm lucky.  I don't only write, after all.  My ambition, you see, extends only to writing.  I want to tell stories and have people read them.  They're not stories that will last very long without me around to write another one to remind people of those that went before.  But they're the stories I have.

Still, I couldn't write at all, if I didn't think I might someday write something excellent.  It's bad enough seeing my legacy on geological terms.  I have to hope I can knock one out of the park, or why bother at all?  Writing isn't paying the bills for me.  It's serious undertaking, more like a religion than a career.

Even then, my criteria are modest: I'd like to write the most frightening book ever composed.  I'd like people, a hundred years after I've been mulched, to read this thing and get all shivery and afraid and have to leave the lights on and not be able to sleep.  Why?  I don't know. I guess it has been an ambition of mine since I was a child, because I saw that fear has more power even than love.  That's some kind of power, right there.  The idea that mere words could tease people into such a state has always intrigued me.

Another quote from Mr. Fitzgerald addresses this subject.  At Princeton, he confided to a friend that he intended to write a great novel, maybe the great novel.  Some years later, he did: when he set out to write The Great Gatsby, he intended to create "something new - something extraordinary and beautiful and simple, intricately patterned."  He nailed it, and although the book didn't make money, it assured him of a place at the American table in the Valhalla of great writers.  At least for a century or two.

His ambition was probably better calibrated to withstand the test of time than mine.  A great novel is a great novel, if you can pull it off.  If not, you're going to end up being Don Delillio or Cormack McCarthy or Salman Rushdie: somebody that sells books because they're supposed to be great, but nobody actually reads them because they're not, in fact, particularly good.  Just literary.

You write a literary book (throw in a few two-bit words like "obloquy" and "epicaricacy," take out all the punctuation, stuff it full of unfinished poems disguised as paragraphs), the critics will approve.  Sales will occur.  The minute you're dead, everybody will say "thank God for that" and move on to some other subject.  Your legacy, in that case, will have the durability of paper bunting on a windy day.

So don't set out to write a literary book -- unless you're a genius.  Clever, even brilliant, won't do.  You have to be a genius.  You're probably not.  It's okay.  The geniuses I know can barely function.  Fitzgerald probably had immortality in mind, but that's why he's famous, after all: he managed to realize an outrageously large ambition.  He was a genius, and it killed him.  For me, for you, just write a damn good book.  Or screenplay, or short story.  The legacy part is in the execution.  Even if you want to write horror.

Abraham Stoker didn't think he was penning one for the ages with Dracula, and you damn betcha Mary Shelley wasn't thinking much past the next couple of weeks when she dashed off Frankenstein at the age of 19.  Those books are still in print, roughly 100 and 200 years after their debuts, respectively.

What I'm attempting to suggest is this: write like this is the only chance you'll ever get, because it is.  If you write something good, that's excellent.  If you write something excellent, that's brilliant.  And if you write something brilliant --

In fifty years, high school students will be hating your guts.  So just write.  Your legacy will take care of itself if you take care of the writing.

Towards and Away

People -- which means written characters, too -- are always driven towards something or away from something.

Two people suffer through hideous childhoods with addict parents, in squalor, surrounded by filth, violence, and degradation.  One of them picks right up where the folks left off, spiraling down into ever-worsening conditions.  Eventually dies.  The other one, fleeing that childhood, becomes immensely rich and powerful and shuns all vices.

Somebody else has industrious, puritanical, hard-working parents, and becomes an indolent slob.  Someone with similar parents ups the ante by working harder, being more intolerant of laxitude.

You get the picture.  We're all like that somehow.  A lot of people are eating themselves to death.  They know it.  They can feel the effects, they can see the effects.  But they keep on eating.  Their bodies are swollen and congested with fat, their hearts straining, ridden with diabetes, cholesterol, high blood pressure, bursting veins in their legs.  Why do they gorge themselves?

It can be that they are driven towards it: there's a reward buried in all that food, like the sixpence in a Christmas pudding.  It's what they give themselves in lieu of other things they cannot have.  This is self-reinforcing, because once you're obese, a lot of fundamental things become out of reach, admiration being chiefmost among these.  Fat people simply are not admired in our culture, unless they're comedians.  Even then, their physiques are inevitably part of the gag.  So the food becomes a reward for eating, in a sense.

Other people eat to excess because they need to reach a certain limit in their minds, after which they can begin the work of improving themselves.  I have been known to do this.  The all-cheese-bread-and-liquor fiesta must crescendo in half a box of Ding-Dongs before I can rein myself back in.

It happens as often that people are driven away from something that leads them to the same pass.  Overeating, again: a person may eat because they are afraid of something, and the food is a kind of refuge, a place to flee.  We've all heard the cliche of the abused woman padding her body against the blows of a cruel world.  In the process she feels more helpless, and so eats more, and eventually she's in one of those electric carts at the grocery store wearing a bacon-stained muumuu, her arms sacked with excess flesh that bags over the styloid process of her elbows.  In a related case, alcoholics are driven away from something, very often -- fear or pain or guilt or anxiety.  Only college students are driven towards the bottle itself; once real life takes hold of us, the bottle is a form of flight from the world.  I grossly oversimplify addiction for this purpose, of course; consult your physician.

Taking it to the fictional realm, you know a story isn't working when the protagonist is neither moving forward or backward, unless it's a story about somebody that can't move forward or backward.  Even then, we know the character must eventually do one of the other, so the motion is implied.

The Old Man And The Sea features a character pressing on towards shore, determined to bring with him this monster fish he's caught.  He's hell-bent on getting back to the beach with the fish.  Moby Dick is propelled by Ahab's fatal impulse to chase the giant parmicetti.  Both stories exemplify the drive towards something.  The African Queen is another obvious example.  The Telltale Heart and any slasher film are examples of stories in which the characters are driven away from something.  When the solution to the character's problem is a matter of avoiding discovery or escaping danger, for example, that's motion away.  The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure...  All about getting away.

I think I've beaten that point to death.  So here's my fascinating suggestion of the day: the best stories involve both motion towards, and motion away.  Maybe not the best, but the most entertaining, at least.  King Kong: find the giant gorilla.  Now escape the giant gorilla.  Now he's escaping.  Now he's drawn to find the girl, against all odds.  When he finally makes his stand -- unable to flee any further, and with the girl in hand -- he's already doomed, and we know it.  Caper flicks are neatly divided between the two kinds of motivation.  First, plan and execute the heist.  Then elude apprehension.  The Fugitive is about a guy fleeing the law, and at the same time hunting down a murderer.

The Bible, for that matter, works in the same way: here we have this pissed-off tribal God inventing mankind just so he can kick its collective ass.  Man flees the Garden.  The Jews flee the Egyptians.  Everybody flees God's wrath at intervals; even Moses is dilatory at best when the Creator is in one of his moods.  Look at Noah: he's famous primarily for escaping the flood, then trying to find dry land.  Back and forth, he goes, away and towards.  Jesus shows up, and he's the one guy in the entire Book that takes a stand.  What happens to him?  They make him into a meat piñata.  But does he stay dead?  No!  He comes back.  Which is why his story is such a good one.  He's like King Kong: revered as a god, killed by his enemies, and all he did was in the service of love.

So if your story is going around in little circles, consider identifying the thing the characters are moving towards -- or away from.  Otherwise, they'll stay where they are.

What's The Hangup?

The difference between writing and being a writer is largely one of intent: writing is simply a transmission of information.  Being a writer is a transmission of your essential being.  You have to want to do that, and you have to set a price on writing that you can pay.

The act of writing gets freighted with an enormous amount of meaning that extends beyond the meaning of what's being written.  When I was a kid writing short stories, the idea of being a writer didn't seem like a problem.  It was the writing itself I found so difficult.  Now that I'm a great big man who ties his own shoes and drinks liquor, the writing comes easy -- it's being a writer that causes me all the trouble.

Why is this?  If it's easy to write, it's easy to be a writer, right?  Heck, here I am writing at this moment, and ten feet away three men are pounding the living Christ out of a ratshit-clogged furnace so they can remove it from the house.  They'll be up in the attic bashing around with sheet metal and hammers for a few days after that's done.  None of this will have much influence on my ability to write.  Lucky me.  But I can still get hung up -- and I mean paralyzed -- by these mysterious things that don't even have any tangible reality to them, like self-doubt, bargaining, and intention.

Self-doubt is the easy one.  The more I write, the less I have.  I write a lot, in general, so that's not my main problem.  Bargaining is sometimes tough.  I get into this thing of saying, "well, I can write after I make those phone calls," not because I'm putting off the writing, but because I don't want to make the calls.  So I set them up as obstacles to getting on with it, in the hope that I'll pick up the phone.  Another favorite is doing the dishes.  If there are enough dishes piled up, I can stop myself from writing for days.  Anything rather than do the dishes. 

It can work in reverse, too -- I'm writing, and then I start thinking about what else I need to be doing, then I can't write because I have to go do the other thing so I can start writing again.

Intention is the tough one.  Intent is the most powerful force at the disposal of human beings.  It got us to the moon, built the Three Gorges Dam, and motivated every human achievement of any kind.  Intent gets us through high school, weddings, drivers' tests, and daily exercise.

Every single person that ever wrote a screenplay, a poem, or a novel had first to decide, "I am going to be a writer," and then sit down and write.  A lot of people cut out this latter part and simply tell people, "I'm a writer," and if anybody has the temerity to ask what they're writing, the answer is something like, "the great American novel," or "an epic retelling of the Lilith myth set in prohibition-era Cincinnati," and for twenty years they can go around cadging drinks off people with this assertion.  Not a single word need be set on paper.  That's pure intention, but without the action.  At some point you have to write; otherwise you're a fraud.

But because being a writer is both an act of personal witness and a vocation, there's a big gray area in there that catches a vast majority of writers up at one time or another.  You can be an electrician without being electricity.  You can be a fireman without being fire.  But a writer, on a fundamental level, becomes a shaman in whom the work lives, and from whom the work is created.*  When people say someone "gave birth to a novel," they're not kidding.  Writing, if you're serious about it, can be like going through an indefinite pregnancy that leads to a three-year labor.  That isn't to say it's horrible, any more than pregnancy is horrible.  It's just dang tough.

So when you conjure up the intention to create a work in written form, you're committing to an act that will transform you on some level.  It will be significant to you, regardless of how good it is, and it will be judged with the peculiar harshness that only works of art are subject to.  Part of you dwells inside the work forever, and you have to say goodbye to that part of you because it's not yours any longer -- even if it's you.

That's what is inside your intention to be a writer, then.  There's a sacrifice.  You're putting your aspiration, your inspiration, and your reputation on the line.  If you're not up for that, you can just go around claiming to be a writer and spend your free time with furrowed brow and lips a-mimp, thinking deep thoughts suitable for a work of genius. But it won't get the thing written. 

So we get tangled up in our intentions.  If I said to myself, "I want to write a classic work of literature that changes people's understanding of what it means to be a human being," I'd be fucked, to paraphrase Catullus.  And yet, that's what so many folks set out to do.  No wonder they can't get the thing started.  If I set out to write a screenplay that Steven Spielberg will direct, the film to star Tom Hanks and Angelina Jolie, I've already failed.  Because Steven Spielberg isn't going to direct my screenplay, and those actors aren't going to be in it.  Even if I write it, even if I finish it and it doesn't suck, it's just not going to go down like that.  Maybe Rob Reiner will direct and it will star Bill Pullman and that actress with the chin.  If Spielberg does direct, and the cast is just who I want, you know how lucky I am?  So lucky I'll be famous for it, because it doesn't go down like that.

My intent when I wrote Rise Again was to write the scariest, best zombie novel EVAR.  Did I succeed?  I don't know.  But I do know that my intent was so much more specific, and relatively achievable, it didn't seem daunting.  I'll bet I got closer than I would have if my intent was to write a sprawling, vital tale of human yearning in an indifferent world.  The fact is, if you put too high a price on this chunk of your soul, this piece of your fundamental self that you're installing in the work, you'll never give it up.  The story will remain unwritten.  Or it will languish in draft form forever.

They're done with the furnace now, and José is here to discuss some landscaping out back, so I'll leave you with this: when you write, make sure you write with intent.  Make sure your intent is -- if not realistic -- at least reasonable.  Keep it confined to what you can achieve on the page.  Don't worry about which publishing house will pick it up and who will direct the movie.  Otherwise, the self-doubt and bargaining will always win.




*this is true of most of the arts, with the exception of pop music.