The Creative Process – the Story Thus Far…

Thought I’d do a quick update on where things stand with the novel and grad school.

Grad school first because it’s easier. Basically, I’m done except for the physical act of the graduation ceremony. My thesis is complete and being bound, probably even as I write this. I should be getting an email this week from the campus copy center letting me know my copies are available for pick up. So, all done. There’s no way I can screw this one up at this point.

Now the novel. As loyal readers will remember, my thesis is the completed second draft of the novel. Despite all the lovely things my professor had to say about my thesis, there’s still a lot of work to do before I’ll feel comfortable sending it out the door to agents. It’s more a case of fine-tuning the whole thing rather than the complete overhaul/rewrite of the second draft, and I’m planning on having it ready to go in the fall. That’s provided the dreaded demons of summer don’t get me (my personal demons are the children being in the house and needing to provide chauffeur services to get them to their various activities – I may need to become nocturnal again).

So…where things stand. I did a read-through of the second draft and was very happy to find that it holds together wonderfully. As I said, there are still things that need work. I’m noticing that my creative process is one of accumulation. There are writers who throw everything they can into the first draft and their subsequent drafts are a process of paring away what doesn’t fit. I’m the opposite. My first draft is like a skeleton, very little flesh. It’s not much more than the outline of the plot and the actions of the characters. It was in the second draft that a lot of the themes and imagery started to appear, connections occurring between images and scenes – things like the recurrence of snake imagery – and my understanding of what the novel is really about letting me more fully develop characters and the shape of the novel.

For instance, the second draft was broken into three sections. When I tried to create chapters as I wrote, I found the divisions becoming artificial, so I stopped and just wrote. During my read-through, I found the sections breaking down quite naturally into chapters, which, in turn, allows me to see where there are place for expansion because a few chapters are very thin. The actions within these chapters need to have their own space, so it’s not a question of tacking them onto the end or beginning of the surrounding places, but one of needing additional development to give them the impact they deserve.

I also just finished typing up my working notes for the novel. These are the notes I make to myself as I’m writing about ideas, questions, images that need to be included in scenes. It encompasses everything from the philosophical (“Don’t suppress the metaphor” or “Anger is never non-specific, it has a direction, a focal-point, someone or something on which to place it, real or otherwise”) to ideas for specific scenes (“telescope scene – use the weather – it’s cold”) to reminders about things I need to track on my read-throughs like the way Ray’s appearance deteriorates or how Matt’s voice changes depending on with whom he’s speaking. My next step will be to go through the draft and make notes on the text on where I need to go back into the text and flesh things out.

My next next step, though, is a quick trip to Reno to do some research. There are some place I need to visit again while thinking within the world of my novel and some new places I need to explore to make sure I’ve got the feel of them right. I’ll be doing that this coming week.

A funny thing about going through my working notes: when I was in London in my junior year of college, my professor took our class to the British Museum and showed us, among other things, James Joyce’s notebooks for Finnegan’s Wake. The pages of the notebook were covered with scribbled notes, all of them covered by big red X’s. My professor told us, laughingly, that it was a commonly held belief that each one of those x’ed out places was in the book. (see above) His understanding was that Joyce had initially chosen not to put those ideas in the book but then reconsidered since Finnegan’s Wake is one of those everything-but-the-kitchen-sink kind of books. Hm….not exactly, Jack. Looking over my own working notes (see right), the X’s are those things I’ve already included in the text, the highlighted portions are those I’m still going to be using, but will be X’ing off as I go along. My professor was a poet. I don’t think he understood the mechanics of working on a novel and how to keep those ideas present for the marathon run of writing a novel. I know I didn’t understand a lot about writing a novel until I was working on this one.

Reading is Fundamental

For the past couple of days, I’ve been compiling a list of every book I can remember reading. I’ve done a lot of it through memory and more by searching for lists of “books you should read before you die.” So far, I’m closing in on 300 books read in my lifetime, going back to Harold and the Purple Crayon. I’ve got no idea what the first book I ever read on my own actually was. The accomplishment of reading that first book didn’t leave a mark, but the impact of learning to read has had a tremendous impact on my life.

There have been a few surprises as I’ve looked at the growing list. Interesting clusters of books by the same author that show where I became enamored and read a great deal of a particular writer before moving on. Hemingway and Faulkner both appear on my list with multiple titles, as does Woolf. I also feel a sense of satisfaction at the number of women writers (thanks, in large part, to lit classes that focused on women writers and exposed me to many fine writers I would never have had the pleasure of getting to know). Non-western writers make the occasional appearance, as do writers of diverse ethnic heritages. I’ve also got a nice smattering of science fiction/fantasy, I’m happy to say, so my list isn’t comprised exclusively of Penguin Classics titles.

Though, I am pretty well read in the classics having read the Iliad and the Odyssey as well as the Aeneid, the Inferno, many, many Greek plays and histories, Canterbury Tales, and Beowulf. I’ve also read an extensive amount of Austen. My next step in reviewing the list is to look up publication dates so that I can see what time periods I haven’t read yet. I know I’m pretty thin on the 1700’s and there are some pretty interesting books there. I also haven’t read a great deal in the early 1900’s, though I’m great with Modern writers.

Which is the interesting thing about this exercise: seeing where there are gaps in my reading time line and my reading geography.

What’s also been interesting is to see how many of these books I read during high school and college. I started doing this list because I was trying to remember the reading list from freshman English in high school. My memory says we read 13 books that year, and I’m closing in on the full list. So far, I remember reading The Iliad, The Odyssey, Catcher in the Rye, A Separate Peace, Watership Down, Romeo and Juliet, The Human Comedy, Animal Farm, Siddhartha, Night, and Grendl. Other possibilities are A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1984, and Heart of Darkness, mainly because I remember reading them in high school and think they might have been during Mr. Johnson’s class. During high school, I also read: Canterbury Tales, Wuthering Heights, Huck Finn, Great Gatsby, Grapes of Wrath, The Sun Also Rises, The Sound and the Fury, Death in Venice, Crime and Punishment, and so many more. Books I remember very clearly to this day. Books which became a part of me and who I am today in a way no current reading does. They etched themselves on my DNA. I’ve already talked about the influence Catcher in the Rye had on me even though I didn’t recognize it until I reread the opening pages of the book a few months ago.

Creating this list has also saddened me a great deal as I think about the books my older son isn’t being exposed to in his high school experience. They’ve read two novels this year - Nectar in a Sieve, which is a YA novella, and Animal Farm. After he finished Animal Farm, we gave him 1984 and Brave New World to read. He devoured both books. I know that there is a great deal of effort on the part of the schools to keep the kids interested in literature. Although, actually, that’s not true. The schools have emphasized “reading,” with required amounts of time the kids needed to read each night and reading logs that had to be filled out and turned in (which we could never remember to do). A couple of years ago, the elementary and middle schools instituted a new “Accelerated Reader” program that rewards the kids with points for each book they read. Sounds good, but you get points by passing a multiple choice test, and the kids with the most points get awards. When they first started using AR, reading became a total competition, with kids reading lower level books so they could get the points. When our older son read A Tale of Two Cities in 8th grade, it asked ridiculously pointless questions like what was the color of the heroine’s dress in a particular scene. My son failed the test. This was after having an in-depth discussion with me about the influence AToTC’s had had on another book he was reading for class. So I know he understood the book on a deeper level.

There are actually two points I want to make here. One is that I think the schools are missing the difference between encouraging reading and understanding (and loving) literature. One does not necessarily lead to the other. While I think encouraging kids to read as many words as possible may have a place in the lower grades, by 8th grade, the kids should be learning to talk about literature and how to really read for deeper meaning. Asking about the color of a dress (unless it is truly symbolic of a larger theme in the novel) is irrelevant and misses the point of reading a book like A Tale of Two Cities. And learning to read deeper isn’t necessarily a function of reading a lot. It’s something that needs to be learned and takes practice to do well, but the schools aren’t doing this. They aren’t even trying to show the students that there are different ways of reading a text. Believe me. I work with the kids often enough to know. It blows their minds when someone shows them what else lurks behind the text. They get excited about it. It makes the books more interesting. And they want to read more.

My second point is this: I know the schools are trying to make reading more engaging for the students. I know they face lots of competition from computers, TV, video games, texting, and just kids being kids, but I am worried the schools are squandering good opportunities to engage the students with challenging work. I know, sometimes school ruins books for people. I agree. I will never be able to read Herman Melville because of my junior year in high school, nor can I read Heart of Darkness (or even think about it) without feeling the chagrin of having to have read it THREE times in four years (high school and college included). I hate, hate, hate that book. But…what my list showed me was the importance of that exposure. And I think this is what the schools are abdicating by trying to use more engaging texts or limiting the number of books they ask the kids to read. The exposure is important. Letting the kids know the full range of written works that are available in the world, even if they don’t understand everything they’re reading, is important. Challenging them to read more complex works is important. Risking that they will dislike something or hate it even, is important (we tell our kids it’s okay not to like something, you just better be able to articulate why you hate it to us). And it’s important to teach them how to read and that they aren’t stupid if they can’t understand what’s been written. Heck, I read Ulysses, but the only way I got through it was to read a chapter, listen to a recorded college lecture by a leading Joyce scholar about that chapter, then re-reading the chapter, and finishing off by re-listening to the lecture. And I still don’t understand all of it. But…I now know why it had such a tremendous impact on the way stories are told now, and I can see its influence when I’m reading other work and can talk about the novel quite well. But…give me a multiple choice test on the book, and I’ll probably fail.