In January I began the rewrite of Partial Recall, the memoir I’m writing about the crazy life of a clueless kid (me) living a rather dangerous life in Southern California in the early sixties. I’d been working on Partial Recall for a couple of years. I expected to breeze through the rewrite in record time because I’d worked harder on Partial Recall than any of the other four books I’d written. I assumed it was in pretty good shape.
So I sat down at the start of the New Year, opened Scrivener, and clicked to the beginning of Partial Recall. Despite all the hard work, the feedback I made use of from my agent and two writers groups, Partial Recall’s introduction was a mess. So was Chapter One, Chapter Two, and so on. I thought I was reading one of my journal entries from elementary school. After the initial shock, which left me sweaty and disoriented, I thought about the writers in my writers groups who had so kindly heard me read chapters. Looking at the opening pages now, I felt like I’d subjected them to abuse.
There was nothing to do but start over. I am committed to this project but don’t ask me why. I sat with the book for a few weeks, thinking about structure, story arc, character development and likability, beginnings and endings. This was not a calm process. I was panicked. But, slowly, without enthusiasm, I began a massive reconstruction project. Not really knowing what I was doing, I moved whole sections of the book around not once but several times. I started writing new material and pulled out entire chapters that needed to be pried apart, sentence by sentence, and inserted piecemeal throughout the material. It was almost too much for my frontal lobe to manage.
I’m now behind schedule. In fact I’m schedule-less, my self-imposed deadlines and to do lists out the window. Who knows when this work will be completed? I’m right where a writer needs to be, in free fall, with nowhere to go but wherever the writing takes me.
Writers cannot function without faith. Faith is what goes on in free fall when all I have is a vestigial inkling that mastery over the material will quite suddenly spill before me like stepping into a meadow on a soft spring day. Oh, yes! The chaos is back there in the thorny woods. Finally I see my way forward.
So I sat down at the start of the New Year, opened Scrivener, and clicked to the beginning of Partial Recall. Despite all the hard work, the feedback I made use of from my agent and two writers groups, Partial Recall’s introduction was a mess. So was Chapter One, Chapter Two, and so on. I thought I was reading one of my journal entries from elementary school. After the initial shock, which left me sweaty and disoriented, I thought about the writers in my writers groups who had so kindly heard me read chapters. Looking at the opening pages now, I felt like I’d subjected them to abuse.
There was nothing to do but start over. I am committed to this project but don’t ask me why. I sat with the book for a few weeks, thinking about structure, story arc, character development and likability, beginnings and endings. This was not a calm process. I was panicked. But, slowly, without enthusiasm, I began a massive reconstruction project. Not really knowing what I was doing, I moved whole sections of the book around not once but several times. I started writing new material and pulled out entire chapters that needed to be pried apart, sentence by sentence, and inserted piecemeal throughout the material. It was almost too much for my frontal lobe to manage.
I’m now behind schedule. In fact I’m schedule-less, my self-imposed deadlines and to do lists out the window. Who knows when this work will be completed? I’m right where a writer needs to be, in free fall, with nowhere to go but wherever the writing takes me.
Writers cannot function without faith. Faith is what goes on in free fall when all I have is a vestigial inkling that mastery over the material will quite suddenly spill before me like stepping into a meadow on a soft spring day. Oh, yes! The chaos is back there in the thorny woods. Finally I see my way forward.
• • •
SELF - PORTRAIT: WRITING AS AN ACT OF FAITHYou see her from a distance. Quiet defines this moment. Quiet belies the fervor in the struggle. She hunches in the half-light of a monitor, Vermeer-like, at the table, fingers spread on her keyboard, staring at a sentence. She reaches for coffee to dispel the resident anxieties. With her right hand, she touches the backspace key and deletes a word that doesn’t ring true. She reads the sentence back to herself, weighing the new arrangement. Lips purse, but not from the bitter, lukewarm coffee. The right hand makes a bolder move and the sentence is gone. She writes another one. Listens to how it sounds in her head. She barely hears the knock at the door. A text pings but she’s busy. Her stomach grumbles. But in her world at that moment, there is only that sentence. Anything more would be too much. If she can make this sentence, she can move on. And she does. Word by word. Sentence by sentence. It’s slow, deliberate work and all she has is faith that if she finds the words she wants and puts them in a fine and artful order, then these base units can build sentences and together sentences shape paragraphs and paragraphs yield scenes and scenes support chapters and chapters make books. In a world where there are no guarantees, where bad sentences like those from Fifty Shades of Grey are constantly pilloried in lists on bloggers’ websites, writing is an act of faith.
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• • •
I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe I live in a world where fairness prevails. I don’t believe in much. But I have faith in the writing process, and this faith comes from writers I have listened to over the years.
Don Murray, a long-form nonfiction teacher I had in Durham at the University of New Hampshire, told me in his urgent, quiet, confiding way I loved so much: No matter how bad it looks, keep going. No matter how lost you feel, keep going. No matter how scared you get, how meaningless it seems, how overwhelmed you are, keep going. His mantra, the one his students clung to for its simplicity and its promise — “A line a day.”
He was talking about momentum. The author James Michener once wrote that, in his experience, a stymied writer was usually experiencing a loss of momentum. But momentum implies so much. Energy. Enthusiasm. Direction. “A line a day” is about safeguarding the precious momentum.
Don Murray taught the reality. Most writers don’t sail on wings of inspiration. We muddle. There’s the pre-writing he was always touting — that stage of writing that goes on in my head when I’m driving to the newsroom from a meeting I just covered or when I’m kneading bread dough. He taught the reality of the long process of information gathering. The tedium of the organizational stages of creating a long-form feature article: outlines, ledes, nut graphs, setting up quotes. The reasons my story worked and the reasons it didn’t.
When Don Murray said, “carry on,” he wasn’t just talking about writing. He meant everything else, as well, like the sudden and shocking death of his 18-year-old daughter who shouldn’t have taken those two aspirin when she came down with the flu. No matter how lost you feel, keep going. Don Murray kept going, a softer man who, as he grew older, grew more and more open to sharing the writing process with young students. He carried his laptop on his hip exactly the way I carried my infant daughter. He walked up and down the rows of writers, and said, “Look, here’s my first graph, before rewriting it.” He got us used to our vulnerable states. He showed us how to do faith.
For the Larcom Review, a now defunct literary magazine, I once wrote a profile of Andre Dubus III, author of the wonderful memoir Townies and the novel-made-into-a-movie, House of Sand and Fog. He had just had the great experience of being on Oprah for a book club feature. During the interview, which happened in a Newburyport coffee shop where everyone who walked in seemed to know and love him, I asked Dubus: “Do you believe that everything you want to say can, in fact, be said?”
“Yes.” Without hesitation. Now there’s a man with faith.
John McPhee, maybe the most talented and accomplished of all long-form journalists, talked to a group of us about the chaos that overwhelms us when we look up, stand back and eye the mountains of research we must sort, assess and shape into a well-ordered, beautifully written, compelling story. He gets a grip by using index cards.
Rod Kessler, a writing professor recently retired from Salem State University, used to talk about the 10,000 pages of garbage we have to write before we get to a good page. Only faith will get you through that adventure.
Ann Patchett recently published a book of essays, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage. One essay references people who have a little too much faith and not enough of Don Murray’s reality teaching. She’s sick and tired of people coming up to her and saying they’re going to write the next great American novel. What she and most committed writers know is that these big dreamers’ faith will waiver, possibly collapse, at the first encounter with the blank screen.
And in the poet and essayist Donald Hall’s newest book of essays, Essays After Eighty, he writes about how much he loves rewriting. I know why. He’s over the hump. He’s found his way to that spring meadow we all write toward. Now he has something to work with that is, by the way, better than most writers’ first drafts. Now his fun begins.
Everything good comes from faith. You can only have persistence when faith is there in the background urging you on. You can only be dogged when you believe in the fight. You can only get up in the morning when you know, consciously or not, that there is something beyond that deep sleep.
Here’s the rub. The only way to have faith is to practice it, whether or not you believe in it. That’s what faith is, a soap bubble of an idea that dances in the margins.
Don Murray, a long-form nonfiction teacher I had in Durham at the University of New Hampshire, told me in his urgent, quiet, confiding way I loved so much: No matter how bad it looks, keep going. No matter how lost you feel, keep going. No matter how scared you get, how meaningless it seems, how overwhelmed you are, keep going. His mantra, the one his students clung to for its simplicity and its promise — “A line a day.”
He was talking about momentum. The author James Michener once wrote that, in his experience, a stymied writer was usually experiencing a loss of momentum. But momentum implies so much. Energy. Enthusiasm. Direction. “A line a day” is about safeguarding the precious momentum.
Don Murray taught the reality. Most writers don’t sail on wings of inspiration. We muddle. There’s the pre-writing he was always touting — that stage of writing that goes on in my head when I’m driving to the newsroom from a meeting I just covered or when I’m kneading bread dough. He taught the reality of the long process of information gathering. The tedium of the organizational stages of creating a long-form feature article: outlines, ledes, nut graphs, setting up quotes. The reasons my story worked and the reasons it didn’t.
When Don Murray said, “carry on,” he wasn’t just talking about writing. He meant everything else, as well, like the sudden and shocking death of his 18-year-old daughter who shouldn’t have taken those two aspirin when she came down with the flu. No matter how lost you feel, keep going. Don Murray kept going, a softer man who, as he grew older, grew more and more open to sharing the writing process with young students. He carried his laptop on his hip exactly the way I carried my infant daughter. He walked up and down the rows of writers, and said, “Look, here’s my first graph, before rewriting it.” He got us used to our vulnerable states. He showed us how to do faith.
For the Larcom Review, a now defunct literary magazine, I once wrote a profile of Andre Dubus III, author of the wonderful memoir Townies and the novel-made-into-a-movie, House of Sand and Fog. He had just had the great experience of being on Oprah for a book club feature. During the interview, which happened in a Newburyport coffee shop where everyone who walked in seemed to know and love him, I asked Dubus: “Do you believe that everything you want to say can, in fact, be said?”
“Yes.” Without hesitation. Now there’s a man with faith.
John McPhee, maybe the most talented and accomplished of all long-form journalists, talked to a group of us about the chaos that overwhelms us when we look up, stand back and eye the mountains of research we must sort, assess and shape into a well-ordered, beautifully written, compelling story. He gets a grip by using index cards.
Rod Kessler, a writing professor recently retired from Salem State University, used to talk about the 10,000 pages of garbage we have to write before we get to a good page. Only faith will get you through that adventure.
Ann Patchett recently published a book of essays, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage. One essay references people who have a little too much faith and not enough of Don Murray’s reality teaching. She’s sick and tired of people coming up to her and saying they’re going to write the next great American novel. What she and most committed writers know is that these big dreamers’ faith will waiver, possibly collapse, at the first encounter with the blank screen.
And in the poet and essayist Donald Hall’s newest book of essays, Essays After Eighty, he writes about how much he loves rewriting. I know why. He’s over the hump. He’s found his way to that spring meadow we all write toward. Now he has something to work with that is, by the way, better than most writers’ first drafts. Now his fun begins.
Everything good comes from faith. You can only have persistence when faith is there in the background urging you on. You can only be dogged when you believe in the fight. You can only get up in the morning when you know, consciously or not, that there is something beyond that deep sleep.
Here’s the rub. The only way to have faith is to practice it, whether or not you believe in it. That’s what faith is, a soap bubble of an idea that dances in the margins.
Header art by T. Guzzio. Original photo by B. Gagnon.
CONNECT WITH RAE:
Rae Padilla Francoeur published Free Fall: A Late-in-Life Love Affair with Seal Press. She publishes fiction and nonfiction, and works as a journalist and book reviewer. Her weekly book reviews run in GateHouse Media papers around the country. Rae is creative director in her arts/tourism marketing business New Arts Collaborative. She was creative services director at the Peabody Essex Museum and editorial manager at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She started her writing career as a journalist. Later she managed several magazines and the Sunday Portsmouth Herald. Learn more about Rae and her work at her blog, and at her website. Rae splits her time between Rockport, Massachusetts and Manhattan.
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