Word hoarding and other illnesses
Upon hearing about how I’d spent half a day working on a manuscript only to throw out 3,000 words, a clever friend giggled at me and said it might be better to call what I do unwriting. There is more truth in that than I care to admit.
Each of my stories that finally finds its way into the world is accompanied by bloated files containing the words I did not use. At first, I named these files junk. Once I called such a file plan for world domination. Lately, I’ve enjoyed naming them something more playful like messing around.
It’s rare but not unheard of for me to return to these files and resurrect something. So far, the something has been for an entirely different story, never the one it came from. But I’m not comfortable throwing out words. I need to know they’re still around somewhere in case I need them. Is this a form of hoarding? Probably.
Discarded finds
Many years ago, I stumbled upon a brilliant documentary about Picasso called “The Mystery of Picasso.” Henri-Georges Clouzot filmed the artist painting on a translucent canvas. We get to watch his creative process unfolding. I was startled by the slash-and-burn destructiveness of it. He’d no sooner paint an image than it would be replaced. It was hard to keep up and often I mourned the loss of an image he’d destroyed. The whole business seemed painful and a bit ugly too . . . to be honest.
Am I the only person brought up to think art falls from the sky immediately intact, a wonder of genius? When an artist is talented, they know what they want to do . . . and they set about doing it. As if.
Art is an unsupervised playground as this documentary shows. Knees get scraped. Faces get muddy. Sometimes there are tears. Sometimes there are tantrums. But the wilder the proliferation of ideas, the greater the play, the more there is to chose from and the more potent the eventual result.
Here’s what Picasso says about the matter:
“When you begin a picture, you often make some pretty discoveries. You must be on guard against these. Destroy the thing, do it over several times. In each destroying of a beautiful discovery, the artist does not really suppress it, but rather transforms it, condenses it, makes it more substantial. What comes out in the end is the result of discarded finds. Otherwise, you become your own connoisseur. I sell myself nothing.” – Pablo Picasso in “Painters on Painting” by Eric Protter (page 203)
Falling in love
There is great potential for narcissism in the making of art. We see our reflection in a clear pond, and think, oh my, isn’t that human lovely. It’s an act of ego strength to turn away from that powerful jolt of self-affirmation, the sweet little moment when we look at our work and think to ourselves, this is good.
In my experience, more can be gained from moments of reckoning, when we look at our work and think oh my frig, what a disaster, that completely bombed. I’ve been through this countless times, and I’ve learned that it’s best not to fall in love with my own reflection, but to instead get ready to work harder than I’d ever imagined. To me, this is what Picasso means when he talks about not becoming your own connoisseur (such a perfectly snobby sort of word for that particular creative illness).
The first short story I ever unwrote
No short story has been destroyed more times than my first. I worked on that tough bit of mistaken effort for years and years and years. Things only began to show promise when I gave up on it entirely. I know! This is crazy-making, isn’t it? Such is writing.
I’d decided to call that story my “practice piece”, a way that I’d worked on the craft, not something to be shared ever with anyone. But then I found myself in The Writer’s Studio, ten months of intense workshop, an opportunity to get feedback from six other writers, a serious opportunity for learning. And I decided to bring this failed piece of writing to my group. I did that under one condition—that I would try everything people suggested.
The wonderful thing about giving up on a story is that it opens you up to things you’d never have considered otherwise. Sachi, one of the people in my group, noted that the most interesting thing in the story was the marriage. Paula, another person in my group, recommended a brilliant book called “Deepening Fiction” by Sarah Stone and Ron Nyren. In this book, I came upon a story called “The Forest” by Andrea Barrett, in which the narrative is balanced between two people, not in an alternating point-of-view fashion but more organically within each scene. Neither character gains full power. Throughout the narrative, the story is shared.
I rewrote my practice piece inspired by this strategy and it definitely worked better . . . enough at least, to finally be published in descant, a literary magazine in Texas. And yet, it was not yet done. As I revised my collection for publication, I could see that the story did not work. And why? Because I’d taken a cautious approach, nesting my experimental point-of-view within traditional third-person narrative. The result, as my substantive editor Rosemary Nixon pointed out, was confusion as to whose story it was.
The chewy centre, yum yum
As I was revising my collection for publication, particularly the first story “Secret Workings,” I decided to risk it all. It’d taken me two decades to write a book that was going to be published. I’d be darned if I was going to do it halfway. If it failed, I would fail big. (And anyways, I’ve survived such moments before.)
I set aside my revisions of revisions on the practice piece that was still teaching me. And I started again, only this time committed to balancing every word of the story between the close third-person view of a husband and wife. The protagonist in this story as I see it is neither of them, but rather their marriage. Oh my, the fun I had doing this. It still feels subversive the way I reshaped my story entitled “Intimacy,” all the while not knowing if it would work.
I think of “Intimacy” now as the chewy centre of my collection. If you happen to read it, I’d love to hear what you think of it, positive or negative. The book may be published, but I am not. My growth continues.
Debbie Bateman 