…are, as I’ve discovered over and over, two very different
fish. The second swims close to the surface and is relatively easy to land if
you have a good editorial eye and have been teaching for as long as I have. The
second? It’s a very slippery customer, often diving too deep to see and coming
up from behind to bite you in the most sensitive parts!
Okay, enough of the piscine metaphor. Suffice it to say that
it’s as hard for me as for anyone else to practice what I preach, so that the
writing advice I give my students often goes unheeded in my own work. In
particular, my admonitions about “character penetration” and “going deep” may be easy to say, much harder
to do. Part of this is because all of us are better judges of others’ writing than
we are of our own. The rest, at least in my experience, comes from
garden-variety fear; the fear of going where I need to, of getting what I came
for.
Which is why revision, for me, so frequently requires looking for what ISN’T on the page, instead of scrutinizing what is. And because I’m so good at avoiding places I’d rather not visit, such revision usually comes only after a fellow writer and first reader asks, “But what about….?”
Like the time, in grad school, I wrote a short story without describing the funeral of the protagonist’s brother. The brother’s death was the culmination of the whole piece, and everyone in my MFA workshop wondered, “But what about the funeral?” When they asked this obvious question, it was as if I’d woken from a dream and looked at my work for the first time: yes, of course! Where was the funeral? Why hadn’t I given my main character a chance to mourn? To respond to the death for which he’d been preparing for some twenty pages?
Do we get any better at catching ourselves in the act of NOT writing about things it’s too hard to examine? Things that make us uncomfortable? A little. But not enough. Not without the help of trusted objective readers, whether they’re author friends or members of a writing group. Thank goodness, for instance, for the dear friend and fellow author who stopped me during a reading of my first draft of The Vanishing Point. The place she stopped was a scene in which the young protagonist, a painter, has gone blind. Mystified by how well my young heroine was taking her misfortune, my friend asked, “But what about getting mad? Isn’t she angry?”
As my friend posed her question, I recognized my own tendency to avoid anger, to skip over confrontations. And then I went home and wrote what is arguably the strongest scene in the book – one where Vini, the young Italian artist, beats scorpions to death with her shoe. She can’t see them, but she strikes out blindly, everywhere, yelling and screaming. And if she herself doesn’t know why she’s so violently furious, the reader does. Now? I can’t imagine the book without this crucial scene. Just as I can’t imagine writing a novel without having a pair (or more) of critical eyes to catch me up, to ask, “But what about….?”