Invisible Engineering: The Fine Art of Revising “The Fine Art of Sighing”
Posted: April 14, 2013 Filed under: Literature | Tags: Bernard Cooper, Christine Wilson, revision 3 Comments »[First posted at Essay Daily and since revised.]
If you don’t already, you should know this essay by Bernard Cooper, for its pleasures will make you a connoisseur of the art in question: “Poised at the crest of an exhalation, your body is about to be unburdened, second by second, cell by cell” (“The Fine Art of Sighing,” in Truth Serum: Memoirs, 111). Its concise and lyrical prose, its brevity and effect of effortlessness, the constructed undertow of its associative method, an inventive demonstration of how a writer’s thoughts shape a piece—these qualities make it an exemplar of the contemporary essay.
Behind the ease of “The Fine Art of Sighing” is the writer’s art of revision, and that is what launched the inquiry I am about to describe. Can we detect the steps toward its art? How did Cooper shape the breath of its sentences, its elegant respiratory system, the suspended movement of the climax, and the expelled throb of the conclusion? Out of its beginning, how did he craft its final finesse?
* * *
For me these questions first emerged from pedagogical concerns—specifically a moment when, huddled in my cold office on a winter afternoon, the graduate assistants in an introductory creative writing course turned to the problem of revision.
“How do you incorporate revision in your courses?” they asked. “What are your approaches?” In their voices was a yearning for answers. They had only recently encountered what all experienced teachers of writing know: the difficulty of pushing students forward from their current mark. There could be no writing without revision, we all agreed. However, our students did not necessarily see it that way. Some of them positively bucked revision, as if we were trying to cage their noble and wild words.
One GA in particular, Christine, was perplexed by her failure to communicate to students the importance of revision. She had developed a series of systematic steps they should follow, yet these novices resisted them, or implemented them without improving their prose. Students tend to believe that good writing comes out whole. No, we teachers insist, writing has a history. Revision is an essential return, even if only an hour has elapsed between the first version of the words and the second. Students needed to grasp that idea conceptually and experientially. How could we get the point across?
Christine Wilson is a Lecturer at Wright State University–Lake Campus, where she teaches English and directs the Writing Center. She received her Ph.D. from Michigan State University. Her essays and criticism have appeared in Legacy, Popular Ghosts, Universal Vampire, and Red Cedar Review.
A thought emerged in that frigid room: It might be enlightening to show students the revisions that an admired essay went through to arrive at its final disposition. We had found that students liked “The Fine Art of Sighing,” which displays a deceptive ease. It seemed an ideal pedagogical tool, highly wrought, of manageable length, and appealing to the apprentice writers we wanted to help.
Christine and I decided to email Bernard Cooper, saying we wanted to document the various stages of “The Fine Art of Sighing,” to analyze patterns, methods, specific changes, and authorial choices during revision. We wrote out and sent detailed questions—the mass of which embarrasses me—helpfully categorizing the topics on which we were requesting enlightenment: General writing practices (ten questions here), Conditions of writing (six questions), Specific practices in “Fine Art” (four questions), Revision of “Fine Art” (four questions, the second of which had eight parts), Content of “Fine Art” (two questions, one a two-parter), and “Fine Art” in the context of your other works (two questions).
Rather than shake his head at our presumption, rather than politely decline or—more what we deserved—press the Delete key with a stiff middle finger, Bernard Cooper wrote back, answering our questions and betraying not a sliver of irritation. His responses blossom with personality, generosity, and vividness.
* * *
When we contacted Cooper, we were operating under certain assumptions—that “The Fine Art of Sighing” went through many drafts and that we could, with his help, map out the revision process. We proposed to look closely at his drafts, analyzing why he chose this word instead of that one, this paragraph ahead of that one. Christine was prepared to undertake a close reading of Cooper’s changes and their significance, and to create therefrom a useful tool for teaching revision. She hoped that “he would create an order within the mystery,” that “he would give me a way to teach my students how to revise, a way that I could say, ‘Remember that great essay we read the first day of class? Here’s how he revises and writes. You should do that too.’” As teachers, we wanted to identify definite steps, from idea to draft to final version, that we could pass on in the classroom.
We were in the grips, that is, of a fetish of the draft. This is not to say that writers don’t revise, or sometimes hold onto versions of a work as it stood prior to its published form. Obviously, writers often do. But the real process of composition is more fluid, interior, hesitant, oscillating, obsessive, and charged than is represented by black text on white paper or by a file bearing a precise time stamp.
The draft is a pedagogical fiction, a frozen moment when fixed words can conveniently be assessed by an instructor or by peers in a workshop, suitable for classrooms, places where, in the last moments of a session, a teacher raises her voice over the hubbub as students grab their backpacks and pull out their phones, to announce those familiar final words: “Drafts due on Tuesday!”
* * *
Cooper’s essay, it turns out, was inspired by a friend’s query: was he aware that he sighed all the time, “big melancholy sighs”? (This and subsequent quotations come from Cooper’s email correspondence, specifically the answers he graciously provided to questions.) No, he was not:
I was stunned that a routine physiological response as fundamental as sneezing or sweating had escaped my attention. From where, in my body and temperament and history, did all this ponderous heaving arise?
He began to pay attention. The process of writing had begun.
I started out, simply, by attempting to describe the intake and exhalation of air, the metabolic and emotional release. The rest followed. Note that I do not say, the rest “flowed.”
A sigh is invisible, of course, but that never stopped me from turning it over and glancing at its facets as though it were a solid object. I was exploring a simple phenomenon—it is the nature and meaning of the essay to conduct this kind of verbal exploration—instead of setting out to make a point. The point made me, so to speak.
The result was one of his shortest pieces, written in a relatively short period of time.
The first half of “Sighing” came fairly quickly (if only every piece of writing would drop off the tree like a ripe fruit!), the rest over the course of two or three more days, then three weeks of small changes.
He also revealed that he had kept none of the working drafts for “Sighing.” He had no paper trail to provide or consult. He might temporarily retain a draft of a longer essay
to keep a record of the narrative. With long stretches of prose there’s too much to keep track of and it’s harder to assess in a glance, so to speak, and so I like to read long stretches in hard copy.
However, when he finishes an essay and sees it into print, even the long ones, he usually gets rid of the drafts.
This was a blow to our hopes, and there was more disappointment to come. We had pointed out, in one of our bloated questions, that “some writers keep their papers (lying in their treasures) with an eye turned towards posterity and history, perhaps assured of their place therein.” Cooper responded,
I don’t mean to sound too humble-pie-ish, but I wince at the thought of that kind of close scrutiny being devoted to my work; it leads to just the kind of self-consciousness I try hard to avoid.
His reluctance to keep his drafts, and hence expose them to scrutiny, arises from a desire to make his writing a “source of pleasure for the reader rather than … an academic or analytic labor.” Cooper works to immerse himself in the process and to avoid, as much as any writer can, worry about the destiny of his writing. As he put it, “The fate of my work will unfold on its own. I’m happier when I can stand apart from how my work is received, or from how it might be compared to the work of other writers.” In short, the absence of a paper trail, of the very drafts we were after, was central to Cooper’s efforts as a writer.
Its hull damaged by these rocky shallows, the ship named Cooper Project finally ran aground on revision itself. As a teacher, one tends to separate revision from composition. Cooper makes no such distinction.
Writing, for me, is revision. I generate an inchoate blob of language and then try to shape and polish it till the words make sense, though I may not know what sense I was aiming for until revision shows me.
* * *
It was now clear Cooper was not going to provide us with a methodical approach to revision. Christine bemoaned what seemed a nil payoff: “His answer didn’t chart out a practice of revision that I could teach.” “Where were the steps?” she asked.
But there were lessons a teacher could learn nonetheless. A writer in a classroom is different from a writer outside of one. The process I offer my students and the process a writer like Cooper follows are separated by an impassable river. Consider the workshop, that classroom fixture. Before he’s finished with a piece, Cooper sometimes shows it to a few friends whom he has cultivated over a lifetime. Although he’s participated in a couple of writing groups,
It is a daunting task to absorb a great deal of commentary about one’s work all at once, weighing which suggestions to dismiss and which to implement.
Think of the often contradictory responses students are bombarded by in workshops, and think of the context: they must by a fixed deadline cough up a rough draft for exposure to near strangers whose comments are often untrustworthy.
Many of our students see themselves not as writers but as students, with limited time to write outside the classroom. The can’t call themselves writers. They do not compose every day for three or four hours in the morning, as Cooper does. They do not go back later in the day, every day, to edit the morning’s work. They do not lie awake at night and think about an essay “with a mixture of excitement and apprehension,” as Cooper does. They do not beat their heads against “the metaphorical brick wall for quite a while” before they show their work for feedback. Obsession cannot be their method.
We began our project thinking that revealing how Cooper writes and revises would be instructive and encouraging for students. But what emerged is the gap between my own expectations for my students and the actual conditions of their writing. Much of what Cooper models—his philosophy of writing, the intimate relation of an artist to his work, the essay as an aesthetic object brought to vivid realization, his method of revising through obsessive practice, the protection he affords himself until he is ready to release his writing for commentary, his emphasis on the reader’s pleasure—does not help bridge the gap between writers and students. Rather, it maps differences. It confirms the distance between a professional, accomplished writer and a novice who dares not even claim the title.
While Cooper’s work takes its place in public, his writing process remains a secret I still don’t know how to whisper to a listening ear. How can students become so tied to writing that, driving or sleeping, they turn to each facet, over and over, looking hard at image and word until something emerges that pleases?
Far from producing a guide to revision, I think I’m better off going back to where I began—in moments of reading pleasure produced by “The Fine Art of Sighing.” Maybe it will inspire the young writer, who will inhale and exhale the sigh of writing: take a deep breath, I will say, release with feeling, attend to its passage, its history, its future. That is the fine art of writing.
I’m Not Writing about Trees
Posted: March 16, 2013 Filed under: Literature, Uncategorized | Tags: AWP, B. J. Hollars, Bonnie Rough, exploitation vs. documentation, Roxane Gay, Ryan Van Meter Leave a comment »These are my notes to the AWP Panel, 2013: How To Lose Friends and Alienate Loved Ones: Exploitation vs. Documentation in Creative Nonfiction, organized by B. J. Hollars. My fellow panelists were Roxane Gay, Bonnie Rough, and Ryan Van Meter. B. J. sent us a series of questions to think about; we agreed not to read prepared papers, in the hope of stimulating a conversation among us and engaging the audience. We could have spent hours answering questions afterwards.
***
Words from Derrida’s Writing and Difference guide my thinking these days about working within the field of creative nonfiction: “There is no writing which does not devise some means of protection, to protect against itself, against the writing by which the ‘subject’ is himself threatened as he lets himself be written: as he exposes himself.”
The prompt I have responded to was this:
Tell us a bit about your experiences writing nonfiction about friends and family.
I came to writing creative nonfiction through poetry. My background as a scholar and writer was steeped in the history of poetry. I hadn’t been participating in conversations about the generic boundaries between fiction and nonfiction. I had in graduate school read works like Paul De Man’s “Autobiography as Defacement” and thought about the complications of authorship, the inherent fictiveness of language and subjectivity. I encountered zero debates about the literal status of truth and fact. A poem’s value—its literary value—had little to do with whether anything in the poem happened or could be corroborated. I’d go so far as to say that facts occupied a negative space in my education. Poets were under an obligation to make something new out of the autobiographical through imagination and art, through words. We were concerned with issues of emotional truth, though I don’t remember using those exact words. Poems needed to operate with emotional coherence. The task was to find language and sequence and image that struck the reader as real while doing the emotional work of the poem.
I believe that I revealed myself in my poetry, but in the terms of our topic, I was also disguised and protected, and by inference anyone I “wrote about” or included in my poetry was also shielded. Certain conventions in how to read poetry were in place that gave me cover, a cover that is not available to the essayist or memoirist. It was assumed that a supposed person was the narrator of the poem. Attention was paid to the inventive use of language, the form on the page, and the internal coherence of image sequence rather than whether that was really my mother I was writing about and what might she think about that. I don’t ever remember being asked if my mother had read a poem in which “she” figured or what she thought about it as I have been asked by audiences after reading my nonfiction prose.
While creative nonfiction derives some of its power from the writer’s self-exposure, it is also burdened by a need to identify the literal status of the biographical.
My family didn’t really read my poetry. They were resistant to my artistic tendencies. Occasionally my mother read something, and what she liked is instructive for the discussion. She liked poems she found decorative and that did not raise any questions about how I might be representing my life, which might include her. She liked one poem of mine called “Young Women Picking Fruit,” based on a Mary Cassatt painting, and she asked my niece to write out the text using her calligraphy skills. Then she framed the poem with a small reproduction of the painting side by side and presented it to me as a gift. This was a piece of my writing that the family could get behind. They weren’t in it. And they didn’t think I was in it either. They didn’t understand anything going on in the poem because they considered themselves unqualified to understand poetry. It was pretty, benign, decorative. And I was safe. Their acknowledged ignorance kept me safe. And the conventions of poetry as I was safely employing them kept my writing unthreatening.
Not so when I began writing essays and memoir. Nothing kept me safe, though I didn’t know that at the time I began to dip my toes into the waters of creative nonfiction. I was woefully unprepared for the kinds of questions that arise in writing creative nonfiction. When I began to experiment in what I was vaguely thinking was autobiographical prose, I thought the same expectations of artistry applied to poetry and creative nonfiction—that they both belonged to the category of literature, not journalism. I believed they were both involved in the drama of the self, they were both mediated by language, and that memory could not be verified but is dynamic and constructed. I believed that a complicated relationship existed between the I who writes I in the text.
So, to compress wildly here, I want to use one essay I wrote as an example of what I was unprepared for. I began writing what I later learned were essays. At the time I knew they were prose and they were triggered by my attempt to explore my history through family, class, and gender. I had begun to send them to literary journals but I didn’t designate whether they were fiction or nonfiction. One of these pieces—“Hair”—was published and subsequently included in The Best American Essays. I was stunned to learn that my meditation on women and hair was an exemplar of Montaigne’s classic style. At the time I had never read Montaigne, I’m embarrassed to say. But more to the point, somehow my family got a hold of it and read “Hair.” I did not tell them about it, which betrays my concerns that they would not look favorably upon it. I never dreamed my little essay about my mother and sisters and I would get such play. But I knew my parents would not understand the essay and I was right.
They thought they could read and understand my essay very well, thank you, and they didn’t like it one little bit.
Here was one portrait of my mother’s hair—“This was hair no one touched, crushed, or ran fingers through. One poked and prodded various hair masses back into formation. I never saw my father stroke my mother’s head. Children whimpered when my mother came home fresh from the salon with a potent do.” And on it went in that vein.
My sisters didn’t fare much better, especially one. Here is my intro: “My other sister was born with thin, lifeless, nondescript hair: a cross she has had to bear. Even in the baby pictures, the limp strands plastered on her forehead in question marks wear her down.”
I didn’t spare myself. “Having not outgrown the thickets of cowlicks, mother bought a spectrum of brightly colored stretch bands to hold my hair back off my face. Then she attached thin pink plastic curlers with snap-on lids to the ends of my hair to make them flip up or under, depending on her mood. The stretch bands pressed my hair flat until the very bottom, at which point the ends formed a tunnel with ridges from the roller caps—a point of emphasis, she called it. Coupled with the aquamarine eyeglasses, newly acquired, I looked like an overgrown insect that had none of its kind to bond with.”
I wasn’t revealing what we’d call big, bad family secrets, but that didn’t matter. That I included myself for the worst treatment didn’t matter. My mother and sisters were upset with me. They didn’t understand the essay as a cultural critique about gender and style; they didn’t get the exaggerated humor—all of the niceties about literary voice were lost on them. To even try to talk to them was pointless. They felt exposed. And they didn’t like it.
What did I learn?
1. That the “personal essay” worked differently than poetry— there were new risks, new exposures, that people might read what I wrote, that all kinds of people who don’t feel qualified to understand poetry do feel qualified to read and judge memoir and essay, that people will for the most part not like being “included” in my work. And who can blame them?
2. The truth of what Joan Didion says– “Writers are always selling someone out.” I hadn’t intended to hurt or sell out my mother and my sisters, but from their point of view that was just what I did. In my writing up until this point, I had been spared this glimpse into the heart of darkness.
3. That to tell my story I had to include other people who didn’t ask to be written about. There was no way to write well about my past without writing about my mother and sisters. The essayist and memoirist face a terrible conundrum—their family cannot remain vague and inscrutable. And even when one writes out of empathy, there is no getting around the fact that they didn’t ask to be written about and that you aren’t telling their story.
4. That Mark Doty’s conclusion in “Return to Sender, Memory, Betrayal, and Memoir” was more true than false —“that we will lose people in our lives by writing about them.”
Do I regret writing the essay? No. I wouldn’t change the writing.
Would I do anything differently? Yes. I would know what the risks are in writing about my family. I wouldn’t keep my writing secret. I’d own up to what I was doing.
I’m currently writing a memoir, and this time around I’ve got a hold of what I understand a memoir to be and the risks I am incurring. Besides the many challenges of re-entering one’s past, the most immediate issue has been my realization that in order to tell my story, I have to include the man I married when I was exceedingly young who had been my professor my sophomore year in college. We divorced shortly thereafter, and we’ve gone on to live many lives since then. Still I can’t write about that period of my life without writing about him. He was integral to the experience. There is no way of going around him or leaving him out. I will have to use him to make something worthwhile. This intimate connection, this one on one, this life to memoir if you will, is the pleasure of the memoir and the pain of memoir; it is the risk one takes, and there’s no question it can go badly.
It’s impossible to get around this central fact of dependence upon others in memoir unless you write about trees.
I am not writing about trees.
Though there is nothing wrong about writing about trees.
I don’t think creative nonfiction is monochromatic. Each project is different and requires that the writer think through the ethical questions for herself. There are limits to the usefulness of generalization. There are writings in our field that make me uneasy—almost on an instinctual physical level. Sometimes I feel that the writer has not revealed herself but has exposed others and that the dynamics should be exactly the other way around. I have to work these tangles through again and again. The work is never finished.
For a long time I was blocked in my current project. I didn’t have the courage to seek out my ex-husband and put the case before him, and I knew I wouldn’t go forward without his response. I wouldn’t spring the memoir upon him as I sprung “Hair” on my unsuspecting mother and sisters. I was at an impasse, stymied. And then in a great stroke of luck he wrote me because a book of essays he wrote about viewing particular films had come out and he wanted to send it to me. He had written an essay about our watching Truffaut’s The Wild Child. So he was rereading his past too, and I was in it. I wrote back and told him what I was up to and was relieved to receive his go-ahead. I imagine there will be many difficulties ahead, but this is what I think I must do. It is an opportunity for me to try both to write as I must and to think about what it means for him.
Cordelia Does Acknowledgments
Posted: February 22, 2013 Filed under: "Companion to an Untold Story", Literature | Tags: acknowledgments, Anne Carson, dedications, Jonathan Black, Justin Torres, Leigh Gilmore, Marilynne Robinson 1 Comment »In the fall of 2011 I faced the happy task of writing the acknowledgments page, and a dedication if I wanted one, for Companion to an Untold Story. I had worked my way through the copy editor’s suggestions, all typographical errors had been corrected, reference citations double-checked—the book was ready to move on to the next stage in production. In the writing of Companion, a book about the suicide of my friend Joel, I had spent years considering all manner of questions, but hadn’t thought about whom to acknowledge or whether a dedication was desirable. I had become faintly aware of the contemporary trend in acknowledgments, an outpouring of gratitude to a large cast of characters, but by and large I had paid little heed to these matters.
Best to take a look at how other authors approached this task before penning my own thanks, I thought, and I started to pull books down from my shelves.
Faulkner dedicated As I Lay Dying to Hal Smith on the copyright page. That was all. No acknowledgments. William Styron’s memoir of madness, Darkness Visible, published in 1990, is dedicated To Rose, words set off on an otherwise blank page after the copyright information. Styron acknowledges no one.
I noted with approval that one of my favorite writers, Marilynne Robinson, tucks her Housekeeping dedication—for my husband, and for James and Joseph, Jody and Joel, four wonderful boys—above the copyright notice, where, if I weren’t looking for it, I’d probably miss the small nod to her family. Anne Carson in Glass, Irony, and God spells out her dedication down the empty leaf before her title page:
For
my
mother
and
father
She embeds her acknowledgments on the copyright page, dutifully thanking the editors and publishers of magazines in which some of the writing first appeared.
Collections of poems traditionally include some form of acknowledgement, often a section that lists the literary venues where individual poems were previously published. Louise Glück’s landmark collection The House on Marshland includes a full page of acknowledgments. That format was necessitated by the number of poems previously published in magazines, or maybe Glück highlighted this history in a bow to the magazines’ services to literature. Embedding their names in small print on the copyright page would not bespeak gratitude so much as legal obligation.
The next page is her dedication:
With love and gratitude
Karen Kennerly
Tom Gilson
Ellen Bryant Voigt
So far the writers I’ve mentioned—novelist, poet, and memoirist—are restrained.
The expected breadth and depth of acknowledgments, however, seems to be evolving. Many hands are required to bring a book to life, and there’s a movement afoot to push this fact forward. Jo Ann Beard’s much-admired memoir The Boys of My Youth, published in 1998, lists venues where parts of the book were previously published. In the first paragraph of a separate page of acknowledgments she expresses gratitude to two art colonies for the “gift of time” and to a foundation for its financial support. Then she turns to thank her agent for “her sustained belief in my writing, her sanity, and her charming unwillingness to accept rejection when it came our way.” In the second paragraph, she thanks twenty-nine other people.
Mary Cappello’s Awkward, published in 2007, prints a five-page section at the back of the book that resembles an academic model of acknowledgments, wherein the author is entrenched in institutions. It’s hard to classify this book—it’s a memoir and a tour of an idea, combining research and personal meditation. She thanks a variety of fellowships that supported her research, thanks a range of writers and scholars to whom she is indebted, thanks in detail her students, undergraduate and graduate, and the courses that were instrumental to her thinking. She thanks eleven colleagues for their encouragement, nine friends and guides in Russia and Italy, where she was on fellowships, and gives a shout out to two tailors. She turns, then, to note the intellectual friendship of five others, her agent, who “keeps the faith,” her editor, her writing guru, her writing partner, and a partner in adventure. In all, it’s an utter refusal to make the immodest claims of the solitary genius in the attic.
Notes from No Man’s Land, published in 2009 by Eula Biss, is close in spirit to Awkward. Her essays are formally inventive, a rich blend of research and personal reflection. They are followed by twenty-three pages of notes. Her acknowledgments begin with the SOP of thanking the editors of the publications where the work previously appeared. Thanks then go out to her agent, to Graywolf for publishing the book, to Robert Polito for choosing her manuscript as the contest winner, and to Jeff Clark for the cover design. Then she moves to the foundations that supported her, seven friends who helped her write, three teachers who advised her along the way, and an additional four friends who specifically helped the revision process. Last she thanks her husband.
It’s not just nonfiction books that carry weighty acknowledgments. Frankly, the warmth and fellow feeling in Justin Torres’ We the Animals, a slim autobiographical novel, pretty much won me over. He graciously notes eight educational foundations that gave “generous support.” Agent and editor are mentioned. He provides a “partial” list of fourteen influential teachers, with special appreciation to his high school English teacher, whom “he loves very much.” The second page acknowledges readers, friends, and heroines for inspiration and guidance.
However, not everyone is on board with the proliferation of thank-yous. In the February 2009 issue of the American Spectator Jonathan Black takes on the shift in the way we do acknowledgments and quotes Sara Nelson, an editor of Publishers Weekly: “It used to be a writer spent 20 years alone in a room and came out with an ink-stained manuscript and made a deal with Bennett Cerf. Now it’s publishing by committee. Everything’s sales and marketing and publicity.” She says a bit snappishly that contemporary acknowledgments have turned into a “phonebook of helpers.”
In response, a blogger has taken issue with Black’s view that writers needn’t bring everyone in from the cold. It’s a good thing, says the blogger, that all persons involved with the birth of a book be laureated. Fifty-six commenters on the post agreed with his position; one found Black “curmudgeonly.” Gratitude can never be a bad thing—that was the consensus view. Spotlighting the many hands of support is good manners, good literary etiquette. Respondents also felt they got to know the author better by reading acknowledgments. They liked the personal touch.
When did the self-portrait of a writer as teetering atop a pyramid of support become commonplace? Listing a bunch of helpers behind a book was once seen as an uncrafty gesture. Inviting the whole cast—like that of a Broadway musical—to share the stage with the author diminished her stature as author.
If a book today is selected in a contest, as mine was, it is commonplace to thank the organization, the judge, and other “essential” people, such as first-round readers who passed the manuscript onto the judge. Then the publishing house must be thanked, with its troops of editors, copy editors, designers, production staff, and publicists. Agents might be involved—they can’t be left out. The impulse to pull the curtain up and bring everyone on stage for a bow is generous, and it demystifies the notion that an author is a genius alone responsible for birthing her book. Such an acknowledgment may awaken new respect for the mostly invisible assistance that is required for a book to be hatched, but sometimes I think that, given all the well-documented help the writer required, it’s a miracle the book got written at all.
In another era, we wanted the support behind the author to be invisible. No one advertised how substantially Gordon Lish “edited” Raymond Carver’s stories. Now, after the reputation has been established, we are faced with the much more complicated history of authorship behind the writer. Part of the romance of the book is the notion that there is only one author. A good book cannot be written by a committee, or so we have thought. In today’s mode of acknowledgments, the apparatus of writing is put on display.
The scene of writing, it turns out, is a crowded place. Children who suffered while their parent wrote must be brought on stage to be apologized to and thanked; others whom the author failed in some way (and who, according to the contemporary mode of thanks, are never a bitch about it) must be hailed for their patience and loyalty; agents and editors who believed in the writer and the book, against all odds—they, too, must take the floor. The book the reader holds in her hands was not miraculously created by the author and walked through a lonely tunnel; it had many stopovers at soothing spas along the way.
How can one not admire giving all persons their due, thanking each and every person for a part played so admirably? Isn’t it like the credits rolling after the film has ended?
The shift in attitudes I’ve been talking about is a part of much bigger changes in our world that go way beyond books themselves: the expansion of higher ed and the burst in the number of writing programs, which means that more authors have been supported by grants, research leaves, and other sorts of impersonal assistance that fertilize manuscripts; intensified interest in the conditions that allow markets to work, for example, economists’ attention to courts, financial apparatuses, and other institutions that have no role in a pure laissez-faire model; scholars who have in recent years studied the material conditions of books as objects, which–until the Internet allowed electronic versions–required paper and ink, typesetters, printers, warehouses, transportation, etc.; the decay of reverence in our jaded age; and so on. (What’s required here is a long list of factors—shall we call it an acknowledgment?)
And that leads me back to my own choices.
I was torn. On the one hand, being generous is a good thing, and I didn’t want to be seen as a curmudgeon like that rapscallion Jonathan Black. On the other hand, I noted that Denis Johnson’s recent Train Dreams thanked no one. There was no recitation of all the people who helped Denis Johnson write or publish Train Dreams. The era of the iconic author isn’t over just yet.
My first draft was fulsome. What about my copy editor? She was exemplary, I must say. I admired her care with details, her engagement with my themes. She probably never receives enough notice for her work, I thought, and decided to include her. I didn’t want to waste this opportunity to mention people who assisted me, and I thanked my high school teacher, Mr. Hinderlie, who had us write a short story a day for the first three weeks of my junior English class. He made us write a novel my senior year, and he introduced me to Joyce, Faulkner, Dickinson, Whitman, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and many other writers who were thankfully, mercifully over my head and nothing like the pabulum served by Mrs. Troup, my English teacher for ninth and tenth grades. Who had ever properly acknowledged Mr. Hinderlie for the role he played in our development? No one. And I thought, I’m going to include him. The floodgates opened. In no time I had written two pages of gratitude, and I was just getting started.
But something was wrong. I thought about how awful those speeches are by actors who win awards. They’ve got a class roster of folks to thank, and they do, and by the end I don’t remember a single name or have any idea who was genuinely important. What’s special about being one of thirty people?
There were just three people whose acts of support towards me went deep, beyond the definition of help. One might even say their help cost them something, and none was employed in the business end of publishing. My husband allowed me to make him a character in my book, to open up his friendship with Joel for public scrutiny. Gale, the woman who had made a life with Joel for a time, allowed me to open it up again, even though it was painful. And Leigh simply was my ideal reader, the person I write to, who in that role has forged a lifetime bond with me and without whom I would be bereft.
At first, those three were lost in the crowd of the be-thanked around them. Their help wasn’t distinguished from that of a copy editor. It wasn’t my friend’s job to be my ideal reader. This was a gift I would never be able to adequately describe, not in a million acknowledgments. On my acknowledgments page I would thank only the people who couldn’t really be thanked.
In the final version I didn’t mention the Associated Writing Programs, which ran the contest I won, or Susan Orlean, who selected my manuscript, or the people at the University of Georgia Press who oversaw the production of my book (though they did a great job!). In each instance, I feel nothing but admiration, praise, and gratitude for these individuals and organizations. Yet I didn’t include them in my acknowledgments. In the end, I said: “I can’t say enough, and so I say very little.”
I didn’t dedicate my book to anyone. The book itself was the manifestation of my dedication, dedicated to Joel and laid at the altar of death. If I had written To Joel, it would have been a sign that my book had failed.
The Next Big Thing: Blog-Tagging
Posted: January 22, 2013 Filed under: "Companion to an Untold Story", Literature | Tags: "Companion to an Untold Story", Adriana Paramo, Anne Carson, Barrie Jean Borich, D. J. Waldie, John Vernon, Nicole Walker, Paul Auster, Rae Paris, Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai 1 Comment »Adriana Paramo, the author of the highly recommended Looking for Esperanza, asked me to participate in this blog-tagging thing called “The Next Big Thing.” All of the participating writers agree to answer a set of questions in common and then tag five other writers to put forward as the “Next Big Thing.” It’s a way to bring attention to writers in a friendly chain of tags. My answers to the questions follow.
What is the title of your book? Companion to an Untold Story
What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book? Companion to an Untold Story is about the death by suicide of my friend Joel, who carried out a methodical plan to take his own life.
What genre does your book fall under? Literature, not journalism: creative nonfiction. Companion includes all kinds of documentation, but at heart it attempts to sort out what happened to Joel through an assaying of ideas, images, and feelings.
Where did the idea come from for the book? I’m not sure I can reconstruct when it occurred to me that I might be writing a book. As a writer I tend to process experience through writing and that’s what I began shortly after Joel’s death. I began writing numbered entries in a notebook. I felt compelled to do so. The entries weren’t always directly about Joel and yet they were about him, about the effects his death was having on my life. At some point when the entries grew into a sufficient number, I realized I had stumbled into a large project. It has never felt as if I decided to write this book.
How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript? The structure of Companion is not the form I began with. In the beginning I wrote a version that was closer to a biography, and tried to provide a more exhaustive account of my friend’s life and death. I discovered how many things I didn’t know about him, how many gaps there were between the man I thought I knew and the man he came to be. It became clear that in part my subject was how the mysterious resides within the familiar. His suicide exposed that central fact. I also came to see that I had left myself out of the story. In the final version I strive to be a companion to my friend’s story and the theme of companionship runs through the book.
Who or what inspired you to write this book? In part, I wanted to remember my friend. Suicide tends to write over the life lived, to erase it. Finally what one becomes is a suicide. Joel attempted to destroy much of the record of his life. My book remembers him. “Memory is, achingly the only relation we can have with the dead,” said Susan Sontag in Regarding the Pain of Others, and so I remember.
Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency? Companion to an Untold Story was selected as the winner of the AWP Prize in Creative Nonfiction by Susan Orlean. The book came out September, 2012, from The University of Georgia Press.
What other works would you compare this book to within your genre? John Vernon’s A Book of Reasons, a memoir about the death of the author’s reclusive brother. Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude, D.J. Waldie’s Holy Land; A Suburban Memoir, and Anne Carson’s Nox.
What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition? I can’t say what actors I’d choose. I can strongly say I see Terence Malick as the director.
What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest? In the current publishing scene, authors have taken on the bulk of responsibility in promoting their books. In the list of recommended activities the publicist from The University of Georgia Press sent me I was most intrigued by the idea of making a trailer to accompany my book. Instead of posting lots of updates about my book, the trailer offered me the opportunity to make something with its own discrete artistic merits which might also help build interest in my book. Last summer I worked with Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai, my colleague in the Department of English at Michigan State University, to make a trailer for Companion that I am proud of. I also wrote ten blog entries about the process, which was entirely new to me, called The Making of a Trailer.
I am supposed to tag five writers who I think fit the phrase “The Next Big Thing.” And here I have to admit some difficulties I’ve run into trying to fulfill the instructions. I had no trouble thinking of five writers I’d like to highlight. However, I discovered that many of the writers were swamped with more work than they could handle at the beginning of a new semester and couldn’t take on anything else. I fit that profile as well. And some writers didn’t have blogs. Imagine. And so they couldn’t participate. I am tagging three wonderful writers whose books I am awaiting to read with great anticipation.
Nicole Walker is the author of the forthcoming Quench Your Thirst with Salt.
Rae Paris is the author of the young adult novel titled You, excerpts of which were finalists for the Summer Literary Seminars and Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards.
Barrie Jean Borich is the author of the forthcoming Body Geographic.
Making a Book Trailer (10): Conclude with Music
Posted: September 17, 2012 Filed under: "Companion to an Untold Story", Book trailers, Literature, Movies | Tags: "A Hudson Cycle", "Beast with Five Fingers", "Companion to an Untold Story", "The English Patient", Bach, Book trailers, Daniel Johnson, Lhasa de Sela, Nico Muhly, Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai 1 Comment »Music on the sound track or not? That was the last major decision to be made on the Companion trailer, although the preparations required to make it took months.
I briefly considered commissioning a score, but there are no composers among my friends or colleagues who might donate time and talent, and I had no budget to hire someone at market rates. That meant using extant music. But music of what sort, and of what century?
My first thought was premodern classical music, which would allow us to avoid legal barriers. I do have a friend who’s a professional pianist. He was willing to record the chosen piece, and that way we’d avoid problems of copyright.
A search for the right music, however, did not turn up good prospects. The works that Richard and I listened to would, in the trailer, sound rarified, highbrow, and stuffy. I wanted quiet exposition, lament, and resolution, not a requiem for a fallen giant.
An example is Bach, who was at the top of our list, since Joel played his keyboard music on the harpsichord (see the entry “Manhattan” in the Companion). Despite his varied output, however, Bach wasn’t right. The controlled passion, onward drive, and profundity that make him the composer of choice for movies from The English Patient to The Beast with Five Fingers (now there’s a trailer with gusto) were not in the mood we hoped to create.
By chance, however, Bach did lead us to the right music. After we heard the St. Matthew Passion performed by the Los Angeles Master Chorale two years ago, Richard signed up to receive the Chorale’s promotional emails. On a recent program appeared a contemporary composer not familiar to us, Nico Muhly.
Having listened to some of his compositions, Richard sent me a link to “A Hudson Cycle,” a piece for solo piano about three and a half minutes long. He liked its quiet forward motion against restraints, and thought it would bring pace to the trailer. I was unsure at first, but as I listened more, the music grew on me. Reading about the composer, I was surprised by his youth (born 1981) and pleased to learn that his father is a documentary filmmaker, like Pillai. After a hiatus of a couple of weeks, I listened again to the piece and announced, “It’s perfect.”
In the meantime Richard had emailed an address on the composer’s website, asking about purchasing a license. Somewhat to our surprise, an answer came back from the St Rose Music Publishing saying yes to a two-year license, and at a reasonable cost.
We still weren’t sure we’d use the piece, but if we did, we wanted the trailer to have a longer life. Richard wrote back to St Rose:
We are hoping that the trailer will be a work of permanent value (to its creators, if no one else!). It would be unfortunate to lose the ability to present it after two years. Would it be possible to include in the agreement an option on our part to purchase a permanent license after the initial two years?
No response came for week, for two weeks, three weeks. Richard called St Rose and left a voice mail. No response. What had happened? Had our efforts at negotiation turned off the professionals on the other end?
We needed to find another option. Wandering around YouTube, Richard chanced upon another name new to us, the tragic Lhasa de Sela. How stunning “Love Came Here” would sound under the credits! This was the sort of thing movies did a lot of—a jumpy number as the credits roll.
But we wanted music for the body of the trailer, not just the credits, and Lhasa’s strong vocal personality would clash with, maybe overwhelm, the narration. We couldn’t afford to pay for two pieces of music, and so our Lhasa craze faded.
And then St Rose emailed, offering a license of five years. We had our preferred musical option back on the table.
When the editing was almost complete, the time came to make a decision on the music. The various members of Team Trailer had different opinions. Pillai seemed to believe that the whole was already complete, that the trailer should should stay “dry” (so goes the lingo). Richard was music’s main advocate. He had invested effort in finding the right work and obtaining a license, so I was inclined to defer to his wish to experiment with it on the soundtrack. Pillai was quite willing give it a try.
The trailer has two halves, four segments, divided by fades to black. To put things schematically, the first two segments are Joel’s history and his death, the second two my response and an affirmation. Pillai proposed starting the music with the second half.
Richard jumped on this idea and emailed Pillai:
It occurred to me to begin the music at the same spot you suggested, after the blackout following “And on that day he died.” It would thus represent movement forward in the aftermath.
The music could play continuously below whatever other sounds occur, and end with the word “companion,” the last word of the narration.
Pillai’s response:
I do feel the same way about the music as you do—using it after the bathroom sequence, starting it during the fadeout and the sequence beginning with the egg coddler, and layering it till the end.
When Richard and I visited the lab to watch the version with music, however, Pillai and Drew had placed it much later. The trailer concludes with a few seconds of the river rippling in the sun, a dissolve to the book cover, and then the credits. The music began with the rippling water.
What had changed Pillai’s mind? The piece had too much momentum, he said, and made the trailer “too strong.” The very quality in the music that had appealed to Richard—its ready pace—clashed with the rhythm of the trailer prior to its final scenes.
Yet the music was right for the resolution of the story. It smooths out and unites the concluding sequence, Pillai commented. Although some of us handle silences well, he said, much of the audience would be carried along by the music. In the end there’s “a kind of redemption,” and the music bears this feeling forward.
The music was in.
Still there were fine adjustments to make. Fade in with “the sparrows were up and swooping”? No, the birds sing in a different key. Accompany “the sun is up,” or join “ablaze with light”? Fade in how fast, and fade out how slow? We chose precisely how the musical river would flow, and on what slope.
Only after all my own decisions on the music were made did I read Daniel Johnson’s analysis of “A Hudson Cycle”:
The primary rhythmic figure—a restless polyrhythm of two beats in the right hand for every three in the left—should recall the onward rush of the titular river, which very much represents “home” for the composer. (There it is, out his window.) … its relentless rhythms propel the piece as a river of sound, dark and liquid.
Here ends this series of posts on the making of a book trailer. Here exit the river (there it is, out my window), the river house, the stamps and coddler and things, the bon creative crew, Pillai, Tim, and Drew, and the “unknown man whom we knew.”
The trailer is made.
Making a Book Trailer (9): Editing
Posted: September 14, 2012 Filed under: "Companion to an Untold Story", Book trailers, Literature | Tags: "Companion to an Untold Story", Book trailers, Drew Seymour, suicide, Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai, Timothy Schafer Leave a comment »The editing was done in the Creativity Exploratory lab on the Michigan State University campus, a room wall-to-wall with monitors and CPUs of this size and that, mismatched too-large chairs, students jacked into headphones, the shiny cardboard yield of the packaging industry emptied of contents and abandoned here and there, dusty old computers on the floor that would think no more, on a table excavated hard drives waiting to be smashed or passed on to persons with less need for capacity and speed, empty packets of salty snacks, paper-format cartoons and FYIs taped to walls, others scribbled on a whiteboard, monitors playing their dazy screens, a window air conditioner blowing, a mini-fan going—all the features you’d expect in a student-populated, hard-used IT workspace.
Here in the lab Pillai and Drew selected and ordered the segments in the trailer. Selected how? Ordered according to what aesthetic?
As I mentioned in my post on the script, connections between the voice-over and specific images in the visual stream were severed early in the process of making the trailer—before shooting began, in fact. We did not have footage of a car to accompany my words about a car, for example. We had footage of binoculars, but no binoculars in the voice-over.
When it came time to order the recorded scenes into sequences, there was no inherent connection between the moving images in our collection and the narrative. (The big exception to this dissociation is Omar as the designated companion.) The latter provided the plot, the skeleton, but the flesh of the trailer, the images and sounds, had to be added to it. How would the scenes be picked in relation to the procession of words?
Pillai believed that strong emotions would be evoked by the objects they had filmed, as if the objects themselves had feelings:
In this trailer, as the focus was on the memories invoked through objects, it was important to go by their emotions—their tears and smiles when they were touched by the sun dancing through the leaves and the breeze.
The associations of ideas and emotions with various images—did I just hear someone think, Eliot’s objective correlative?—created connections between particular elements in the narration and particular shots. Certain structures of bone belonged with certain ligaments and shapes of muscle. I’ve already written about some of Pillai’s associations between objects and feelings. Here are others that he and I discussed at one time or another.
| Lights flashing on | The fact of Joel’s suicide breaking into my blindness. |
| Ant crawling | People in their routine unable to see what’s going on because they are too engaged in their tasks, have their heads down: what I couldn’t see—that Joel was saying good-bye. |
| Shower | Interior, enclosed space of purification: the bathroom. Everything washing away. |
| Shot outside the window to the river, with flowers | Sense of life continuing. |
| Colored platter/egg coddler /flames/hands | What life does the object carry, what stories, what has Joel passed to me? But also the juxtaposition of the flames and flowers, symbols of life. |
| Pages of manuscript, stamps | Ways I haven’t let go of Joel. Ways I’ve put my arms around it. |
| Stamps floating free | Release, beginning to accept, to let go, to move with the current of time passing and water flowing. |
| River | Time, current. |
| Binoculars | Object that shows I am seeing in a less blinded way, less one-sided, seeing both Joel and me. |
| Omar | A companion, life, energy, the river, gifts. Restoring the idea of gift from poison to something generous. |
In assembling a sequence of sights to follow the voice-over, one can identify emotions and ideas in the right-hand column that are expressed by the spoken words, then convert them into the appropriate image in the left-hand column (Pillai, of course, didn’t work so mechanically as that). In this way he and Drew Seymour, the editor, assembled a rough order for the visual stream, such that the appropriate emotions connected to images were synchronized with specific passage in the voice-over.
There was another major consideration in the sequence of images: rhythm.
Generally one thinks of rhythm when it comes to a trailer, because it helps lead the audience into the heart of the work. Often the mainstream films prefer sensational leads, while the art film might privilege Bazinian long takes with artful dissolves.
Pillai is referring to the French film critic André Bazin. His reference to “long takes and artful dissolves” is a perfect description of the style of the trailer.
Rhythm in the sense of an alternation of types of shots was a special concern because of the intense use of extreme close-ups in filming. As Pillai put it,
At a fundamental level, editing is smooth when you have a change of scale, i.e. volume between shots, for instance, when you cut from a long shot to a mid-shot or a close-up. Or you must have a change of angles of at least 30 degrees—if you are going to cut between shots taken from almost the same position, the transition will be noticeable.
In other words, Pillai and Drew needed to avoid jump cuts. Tim, with his experience as a news cameraman, gave the example of juxtaposed head-and-shoulders shots, which look jarring. A wide shot inserted between them makes the sequence smoother.
These were the general concerns as the trailer was assembled. The macroediting was done before Richard and I saw a rough cut, and when we came to the lab to watch it, what we observed was the fine-tuning.
At the Apple touchpad was Drew, with Pillai in the director’s chair (too large, mismatched). The software was Final Cut Pro X. I wish I could provide a technical discussion of its features, but my nontechnical assessment is that it can do anything.
Drew Seymour is a graduate of Michigan State University with a degree in Bio-medical Materials Science Engineering. He has been involved with producing, directing, filming, branding, editing, and social media for an eclectic mixture of projects including the punditry news show The Reaction, the life culture podcast BNF, and short documentary films. He has just completed working for the Creativity Exploratory at Michigan State University.
We observed as Pillai and Drew adjusted the shot of the swing hanging on the rope; Pillai wanted to slow down its motion. Drew played the same few seconds again and again, and I heard “school district south of San Francisco” repeatedly as they adjusted the speed of the swing. Between Pillai’s quiet voice and the noise of the air conditioner, I couldn’t understand their conversation. After repeated calibrations, Pillai nodded when it was right and said, “Yes.”
They changed the pace of a dissolve into a five-second shot of tangled tree-roots on the riverbank. Pillai, using the old vocabulary of celluloid, wanted to move the dissolve forward a few frames. Five minutes went by, ten. Finally it was right. (This shot was later eliminated altogether.)
Microediting, I soon learned, is laborious, intense, slow, minute (in Pillai’s words, “painstaking and productive, obsessive and absorbing”). We watched for an hour and a half as Pillai and Drew adjusted less than a minute’s worth of the trailer they had already been editing for several days. I now understood why editing a full-length movie takes months.
I should say something about our difficulties with sounds.
The ease with which the green ribbons on screen that represented pieces of audio (I think that’s what they were) could be manipulated sometimes led to unintended effects. Bird sounds could be dropped in willy-nilly or moved unwittingly and, said Pillai, result in “a cut-and-paste effect that I wanted to avoid.” They needed layering at more gradual levels. We also discovered that what sounded fine through low-fi speakers was no good through high-quality headphones at high volume. The birds were singing to the accompaniment of what sounded like a dishwasher. Drew applied a filter and cleaned them up.
“Bird sounds are now the leitmotif of our film,” Pillai said with a bit of avian pride. Indeed, the call of a cardinal begins it.
In one microediting session I observed, Pillai wanted the loudness of the churning water in the shower to differ in two clips, with the first quieter than the second, so the second would startle and punctuate.
There were mysterious problems; sound in one of the clips had dropped out of the sound track. A hardware/software mismatch? No one was sure. Drew returned to a backup version from yesterday’s session and pulled the clip from there.
This was the second point of punctuation in the trailer, the bird sounds being the first. How high should the peak of sound be? Over and over they played the bathroom scene, adjusting duration and volume: . . . late in the afternoon. Yes, this is my time. . . . late in the afternoon. Yes, this is my time. . . . late in the afternoon . . . late in the afternoon . . . late in the afternoon … Dazed myself, I admired the editors’ precision and tenacity.
I’ll give over the summary words to Pillai, who brings us back from microediting to a larger viewpoint, from metadata and codecs to the poetic end of this technical practice:
In this trailer, where the focus was on extreme close-ups of objects—shot through a macro lens—in most of the shots the challenge was to work on their evocativeness to point to the rare poetic quality of the book, which is invested in the materiality of the object as the career of memory, while at the same time [the book] uses it as a point of departure to journey into the deeper recesses of the heart where guilt, anger, justification, and redemption intersect in a profound and poignant way. The shooting and editing was, therefore, dictated in the final analysis by this journey into the interiority of the narrator through exterior objects—both visual, like the egg coddler or the stamps, and sound, like the chirping of birds and the water.
Editing: to splice, to unite, heart-sound-sight.
