Nine thoughts about novel revision
the geometry of knowing, the unity of a clean room
Today I offer you an extremely honest peek into novel revision … I was going to say “hell,” but let’s be optimistic.
I’ve been collecting these thoughts in random spurts more or less since January. My second novel was rejected by my former publisher in December, and I took a solid month to, I don’t know, just be sad and try to acclimate to an identity crisis haircut; in January I dusted myself off and began looking again at this book I had written.
Some days, J—whose day job requires lugging sandbags and digging trenches and hauling lighting rigs so that you and I might enjoy our binge watch of The Chair—comes home and finds me crying on the couch, saying that the book is fucked, impossible to fix, just bad, embarrassing, and I should just give up before I waste my whole life.
“Babe, did somebody say something to you?” he asks. (He asks because J will assassinate anyone’s character in defense of me. So be warned, if you ever said anything shady about me on Twitter, somebody in Pittsburgh has called you a loser. That’s right. He has looked up you and your haircut and called you a loser.) (If you’re a writer, I urgently suggest that you get such a person in your corner immediately.)
But of course, no, it’s just me in here, listening to a cruel imagination.
Figuring out how to revise a novel is such a weird piece of work, mainly because it looks like nothing is happening. Of course you can go back into the document numb and preoccupied and start cutting any passage that minutely displeases you—a little bit like giving yourself an angry haircut before work. You can have index cards, you can print the manuscript, you can leave bitchy little notes to yourself. You can try changing point of view from first to third or third to first. If you’re a real self-punisher, you can go right to the sentence level and bring out the floor buffer. But until some presently disconnected wires connect, deep under the surface, in a way that makes everything else light up sympathetically, there’s no point to index cards and ruthless edits.
On rejection: Fuck everyone.
And also: There’s a grain of truth in everything if you know which angle to look from.
And also: Books don’t want to be published until they’re done, which is usually much later than I would like.
And also: Fuck everyone.
Revising a novel is really just deciding. It has to be decided, what is the most important thing about this book? After which everything falls into place. Once the matter of primary importance has been chosen, all other decisions make themselves because they either serve or do not serve. This is true, in my opinion, even if you’re writing a lyrical, experimental, nonhierarchical book: its nonhierarchical nature takes precedence in that case.
Terrance Hayes, who was my undergrad thesis advisor, always did the same thing in our meetings: He would sit with a stack of 10 or so recent poems of mine and go through them with a yellow highlighter and an orange highlighter. Yellow was for good/cool/funny moments. Orange was for ? moments. (Not bad moments, just ?.) Sometimes he would highlight an image or line orange and ask me, what’s going on here? As in, what’s going on here for you, what are you pointing toward. Occasionally I could answer. It was always something like: “I’m thinking about the way old suitcases are lined in satin” or “there were these wind turbines at the farm where my dad grew up.” And Terrance would say, “Cool, cool. You have to know. The reader doesn’t have to know what it’s about, but you do.”
And that’s what the deciding is. It’s not like the people who read the novel will know what you decide is the most important part of the book. But you have to know, or it won’t hold together. There’s a certain geometry produced by knowing, and it has almost nothing to do with what the reader gets out of a book.
If I could do one thing to improve the working conditions of a novelist (ridiculous sentence if ever there was), I would make some visible, tangible, countable object appear in relation to the “figuring out” part of figuring out how to revise a particular book. I’m thinking drifts of sawdust piling up around the desk (or bed, in my case), or everlasting gobstoppers spontaneously appearing. Or mylar balloons bonking against the ceiling. Take a walk and try to figure out how to dramatize a particular character’s actions in a way that doesn’t feel demonstrative, and you come home with a pocket of sawdust, or three lizards on your jacket. Something so there’s proof that a thing is happening, even if it can’t be said to be visible yet. That way, people could stop asking you “how it’s going.” They would see the drifts of sawdust or the lizards and go, “Wow, you’re really working hard.”
Over the last few months, I have read the following books in pursuit of something:
Suite for Barbara Loden, Nathalie Leger
Play It As It Lays, Joan Didion
The White Album, same
Less Than Zero, Bret Easton Ellis
Leaving the Atocha Station, Ben Lerner
No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy
State of Grace, Joy Williams
Black Freckles, Larry Levis
Mona, Pola Olixoirac
Amulet, Roberto Bolaño
A Little Lumpen Novelita, Roberto Bolaño
By Night in Chile, Roberto Bolaño
The Quick and the Dead, Joy Williams
The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector
Malina, Ingeborg Bachmann
Largesse of the Sea Maiden, Denis Johnson
Pure Colour, Sheila Heti
Intimacies, Katie Kitamura
I almost never read for “craft purposes,” whatever those are. I read because there’s some sense of ease, intelligence, and inevitability that I want to put myself in proximity to. Because the problem with edits is that it’s so easy to find yourself explaining, earning, deserving, proving.
But looking at this list, I have to admit that I feel a little bit more dignified in my efforts. Reading a number of books is at least proof I’ve been doing something. As much as I have come to hate academia, I can see the appeal in having a monstrous list of books you’ve read as proof that you have thought thoroughly and well. There’s a way to make everything feel difficult and important, and that seems potentially very gratifying.
On some days, I think, “You know what? This is just a weird, arty, abstract novel, and maybe I’m trying to make it something it isn’t, shouldn’t be.” Or if I’m being less charitable to myself, I think, “You lack the spine to write the kind of daring work you want to read and stand behind it no matter what. Even on the page you’re a people-pleaser. Alejandro Jodorowsky would be ashamed of you.”
On other days, I think, “The real mark of genius is being able to write for yourself and for other people at the same time.” Or: “There is always a simple way to solve a problem, and any solutions that feel complicated probably aren't good.” Or: “Stories are a technology that work for a reason, and nothing is that deep.”
But there’s also this: I tend to think that the most important part of a novel isn’t on the page yet. (Or at least I think that in my case presently.) I think it’s something that is so inherent to the way I see things that I take it for granted, or something that I’m so invested in not noticing about myself that I’ll happily project it on anyone and anything else.
I did something kind of crazy this week. I prayed over my book. I prayed over every word. I highlighted every word and prayed over it, it took me about six hours a day over three days to finish. I did it because it occurred to me to do it, and because there was something satisfying about devoting so much time, hearing my voice go hoarse.
In the morning, I work on the book. At 11, I go upstairs and clean the AirBnb between guests. This is a good rhythm: There is a way to stop thinking when you’re wiping drool stains off a couch cushion with wet wipes. (Guys. When we started this Airbnb I had NO IDEA that bodily fluids on the couch would be such a big issue. No idea. No clue.)
I was going to say that revising a novel is the opposite of cleaning a room, because there’s no sense of visible progress, no necessarily accepted methodology, no specific set of tools, no objective standard of completion. But actually, they’re exactly the same thing. Because a clean room has a particular kind of aura—it’s not just the absence of dust or candy wrappers. It’s a kind of unity which takes hold in all the corners of a space once things have been tidied. You can’t always tell it while you’re in the act of cleaning, but once you stand back and look at the whole, you can tell that it has a different disposition. Guests’ perfumes disappear from the air while I work; my lungs clean the air. There is a subtle dishevelment to the way people hang towels when they have gone against my personal towel rules. The room seems relieved when I have fixed this. If you cut a corner or skip a step, a sort of experiential smudge hangs in the air. And revising a novel is exactly, exactly, exactly like this. It has to have a unity. It gathers an aura. If you leave something dull in it because you’re too lazy to take it out, there’s a smudge. And it won’t work until you go back to the beginning, take a deep breath, and go through setting things in the best place for them to be. All clutter has to be sorted or thrown away. You have to take a deep breath and do it. And the clutter has probably accumulated because there’s a decision you don’t want to make.
Till next time, buckaroo …
What you said about revising a novel: Yes, exactly. I'm forwarding this to a friend who is in revising purgatory right now. Been in various Hells for too long. Thanks, Sarah Elaine Smith, for writing this.