Flickering, Symphonic

by Kate Finegan

But honestly, I tend to think of writing as less a temporal-lineal phenomenon and more a data dump. So, for example, the person who wrote my darkest story is still alive in me, as is the person who wrote the most optimistic. Those selves just keep flickering on and off. They existed when you were four and will exist when you’re ninety. There’s some progression over time, I suppose, as your skills improve and you find yourself more capable of getting into the difficult places (which, for me, tend to be the more optimistic or hopeful places) – but I can still get to the guy who wrote the most apocalyptic stories and, even as I was writing those, I think I would have been appreciative of a story like “Tenth of December.” We tend to think of ourselves as being one whole and consistent person but it feels to me now that we are more of a flickering, constantly transitioning phenomenon – no fixity, minimal consistency.   So the artist could be seen as a sort of caretaker of all these different selves – trying to respect and love each self and get it to step up to the mic and really go for it.

George Saunders

I love what George Saunders says here about getting the different selves to step up to the mic. For me, a huge part of revision is making way for my other selves to come to the fore. I do this by deliberately focusing on my obsessions and looking inside the piece to see what patterns are trying to emerge, particularly those patterns which I wasn’t fully conscious of at the time of writing.

If I come at the second, third, fourth, or fifth draft with a mindset of tinkering with what’s already on the page, I am not making way for those other selves. I’m not giving the piece room to become what it wants to be. By making way for my other selves, I make way for other versions of the work-in-progress to emerge.

Of course, sometimes the first, second, or third draft of a piece is pretty close to what I want it to say. I know what the heart of the piece is, and I can hear it beating in the words. That’s when it’s time to edit, to shift my fingers just a bit so I can more clearly feel that pulse.

But sometimes (most of the time?) reading my first draft (or second, third, fourth…let’s be real) is like searching for my pulse by pressing on the top of my skull or the sole of my foot. The heart is beating in there, sure, but not in any way that makes it to the surface. My work in revision is to make pathways to that pulse. Perhaps this means peeling back the skin of what I’ve already written; maybe it means transplanting the heart to a different piece altogether. Perhaps it means building layers that all carry that same beat.

Maybe the shape of the piece is what’s blocking that heartbeat. Perhaps I’m trying to force a story about the repetition of trauma into the shape of a traditional story arc, with a climax. Or maybe I’m writing a story in one voice, when it needs to be told from multiple perspectives. Maybe my piece is using cause-effect logic, when what it needs to follow is the associative dream logic of the heart.

I tried to tell it in a straightforward way. I tried to write that way for years and it never caught fire. I would just read it back to myself and think: Oh, this is dreadful, this is dreadful. And I put it aside. It wasn’t until I thought of this structure that the whole thing opened up. It just felt right. I’m not describing it in a very technical way, I wish I could, but I literally thought: Oh, this is the shape it has to take. The experience was so complicated that trying to describe it in a straightforward way would be impossible. It feels more symphonic than that. It feels more scattered.

Carmen Maria Machado on writing In the Dream House

So much of writing takes place in not writing, but often, thoughts are clarified when they’re forced onto the page by a hand that’s moving almost independently of the mind. Julia Cameron encourages artists to wake up every morning and write three pages by hand, on whatever is coming into their minds, even if all they’re thinking is I need coffee or I don’t know what to write. When I am in the throes of revision, I find this exercise deeply useful. I will write a question at the top of a notebook page before bed then leave it open on my kitchen table, with a pen ready for me. As soon as I can in the morning, I go to the table and write the heck out of that question.

Guess what! That’s your homework for tomorrow. When you wake up, write about what you’re revising. After our live session today, you will have made some progress on this draft, but you might also have some questions. Use those questions to guide you. Fill three pages, or write until your kids get up or the dog needs to go out. Whatever is possible for you at this moment. Give it a try.

But for today, we’ll play with some exercises. You can dig into these at your leisure, but do keep in mind that the heart of today’s live session is focused time for you to work through some of these.

Exercises

Some of these are my own ideas, while others are adapted from Lidia Yuknavitch, Laraine Herring, Rachel Thompson, Kim Addonizio, and Dorianne Laux.

1. Remember identifying the heart yesterday? Write that at the top of a page and use it as your prompt. Maybe you’ll write a piece that’s very similar to what you’ve already done. Maybe it will be wildly different. Either way, you’re good.
2. Go back to the sparks that you identified in Day 1, the passages or images that are working for you, that contain energy. Read one. Disregard what you know comes before and after it. Write what comes to mind immediately after reading that energetic passage. Let that take you somewhere new.
3. This one comes from Lidia Yuknavitch and is called vertical reading. Make a list of all the images in your piece. Choose the three that interest you most, that seem to be telling their own story. Put each one at the top of its own page and freewrite about it. Then, bring those three images together into one sentence: What story are they telling? Now go back to your original draft, with this insight in mind.
4. Notice the patterns you’ve established in your piece. Write a draft that deliberately breaks those patterns.
5. Sometimes we start a piece with a destination in mind, but the act of creation changes it such that that ending no longer serves the piece. Read with an eye toward finding where the piece veers from its truth. Start writing from there.
6. Change the way the piece looks on the page.
7. Freewrite from a different point-of-view.
8. If the piece has a controlling metaphor, change it. Cover the same ground thematically or plot-wise, but place an entirely different metaphor at its heart.
9. Build an imagery inventory: Take the heart of the piece, its central truth, and freewrite imagery that calls to mind that heart. Work this imagery into the piece. Look for abstract ideas within the piece, such as “she was happy.” Write each abstract idea on its own page, then freewrite imagery to make it concrete.
10. Build a sense inventory: Mark each of the five senses in a different color. Notice which senses are lacking. Rewrite lines and scenes, amplifying those underused senses.
11. Particularly if you are writing fiction or nonfiction, write the story of your character’s body. What is its history? What are its scars? How does it move through the world? Often, writers neglect the physical experience of being in a body. Write into that experience, then bring it to the page.
12. Experiment with zooming, panning, and cutting. If this is an intense family drama, try zooming out. Freewrite what’s happening outside the house, outside the city, outside the country. If you’ve written a scene between a married couple, pan to their child’s room. What’s the child doing? What’s the next-door neighbor doing? What does she know? Cut to the past. Cut to the future.

Whatever exercises you’ve tried, now it’s time to go back and apply them to the work! You might find it useful to physically cut apart the draft to insert new insights from your freewriting, or you might start yet another draft, in which you bring together all the insights gleaned from rereading the original alongside the work you’ve done to explore the piece from other angles.

It’s also worth noting that you can apply many of these exercises to a collection as a whole. For more on revising a collection, see this bonus content from the Spring Weekend Workshop Intensive.

Recommended Reading

It can be very helpful to apply these ways of thinking about writing to reading. Pick a piece from our most recent issue, or a favorite piece you already know, and read it. Search for its heart. Write that out in one sentence. Then, go through and identify the choices the writer has made to bring that pulse to the surface. How does the imagery echo the central theme or message? What about the shape of the piece? The way the characters speak? The use of gesture, of silence, of white space on the page?

Then, go back and look at the piece you’re revising. If someone did this exercise for your piece, what would they find? Lean into those moments where you’re amplifying the heartbeat at the core of this work. Write into that.