Alive, I tell you! Go ahead and visit it yourself, if you don’t believe me. Michael Drayton, Detective Guy. You will be amazed and delighted and will want nothing more than to tell all your publisher friends how wonderful it is. And when I snap my fingers, you will awake refreshed and rested and will remember only your unending fealty to Michael Drayton, Detective Guy.
Snap!
Wyatt Mason, a contributing editor at Harper’s, has recently produced a number of articles for the Harper’s website concerning the relationship between novelists and their critics. It is Mr. Mason’s feeling, as most recently expressed in an article that reprints a letter Phillip Roth never sent to Diana Trilling, that novelists have not only a right but a duty to respond to criticism of their work. This is obviously something that Mr. Mason has thought about deeply, and he makes compelling and interesting arguments.
If only I could agree with him.
As an aspiring novelist–and O! for the day when I can get Drayton published and have that accursed “aspiring” removed–I’ve thought about critics, reviewers, and what my relationship with them should be, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it is all none of my damned business. It seems to me that the relationship between a writer or any kind of an artist and a critic is similar to the relationship between the Grand Canyon and somebody who stands on its edge and judges it to be too deep or not wide enough. The thoughts of the person evaluating the Canyon are meaningless to the Canyon itself.
We don’t expect the Canyon to suddenly fill in or widen just because some guy–no matter how fine and beautiful that person’s aesthetic sense may be–says that’s how it ought to be. It’s the same with any work of art. All critics are looking at the thing after the fact. It is what it is, and nothing said by the most perceptive critic is going to change that. In relation to the artist who created the work, all critiques of the work are too late because they are too late to be helpful–if helpful, in fact, they are. This is why artists often agree with Aristophanes, who famously said that critics are legless men who teach running.
However, I don’t think that’s really true. To understand this, we have to understand what the critic’s role is. To me, the critic’s function is twofold: Critics interpret, and critics evaluate. Now, I believe that Mr. Mason’s thesis is that artists have a vested interest in making sure that their work is interpreted and evaluated correctly. The problem with that is, I think, that it is the artist’s job to merely create. Interpretation and evaluation are functions outside the job description.
Many times, over the years, as I’ve looked back on one or another of my failed projects, I have seen themes that I hadn’t realized were there when I was working on it. I found meanings implicit in the work that I had not intended and themes I hadn’t consciously designed. Typically, the unconscious stuff was better than what I had consciously intended, and probably wouldn’t have been there had I been aware of it. My point in this is that the artist is not necessarily the best interpreter of his or her own work.
Creating any work of art is the act of being overwhelmed. It is a huge endeavor, the writing of a novel perhaps more so than other artistic endeavors, and my experience of it was not so much one of control as much as a kind of dogged floundering. As I’ve said before, “Writing a novel . . . mostly feels like you’re trying to swim from the White Cliffs of Dover to Coney Island. You spend most of your time alone and at-sea, and all you can do is to follow the sun over the horizon.” There’s no time for interpretation because your main concern is just trying to keep alive.
And so, interpretation and evaluation are the realm of the critic. And should Drayton get published and reviewed and picked apart, even in the most flattering way, I will make no effort to find out what is said. For one thing, I won’t be going back to change it, so any criticism–which would, perforce, be specific to that project–won’t have any effect on it. Second, since what one can expect is that different critics will have different interpretations and evaluations of the book, how is one to sort out who is right and who is wrong? Why should I predicate any future works on the comments of anyone? The artist who works to please anyone, no matter how refined their taste, is aesthetically dead.
That’s because there are only two things that can happen when an artist reads a review. It’s either going to hurt terribly and pointlessly or it’s going to fill the artist’s head with all sorts of notions that are best avoided. Praise is perhaps even more deadly than bile, and little can undermine true talent more quickly than coming to believe in one’s own genius.
Finally, I think that reviews and critical essays are conversations between readers–in the case of novels–and that the author might be an object appraised in that discussion, but is not properly a party to it. If the work of a reviewer or critic is without merit, let it be attacked, but not by the poor author. Let the other readers do the job. They have far more of a vested interest in the matter and shouldn’t expect the artist to do their dirty work for them.
Creatively, over recent weeks, I have been working on a single short story. I had originally written a version of it in comments attached to a story Phil Austin posted on his Blog of the Unknown. I took what I had written there and spruced it up a little and then sent it to a couple of places that rejected it.
I had liked the story so much that I was a bit puzzled by the rejections, so I decided that the best thing to do was to put it aside for awhile, concentrate on finishing Michael Drayton, Detective Guy, and see what I thought about it after I had had time to cool down. And so I concentrated on Drayton.
By the beginning of March, I was ready to approach the story again. What I read was good, but it was more like a precis than a real story. It seemed to need fleshing out, and once again I had to remind myself that it is better to show than to tell. It needed dialog and fleshing out. Individual sentences could be spun out into complete scenes. I had a lot of work to do.
I’m still doing it.
The original story ran somewhere around 1500 words. The current version is pushing 6500 and I’m at most three-quarters of the way through. Most of the writing has gone slowly, which is not unusual for me, sometimes painfully slowly. Lately, it’s almost stopped dead. But it will be worth it.
I do believe that this version is better than the last, even though I expect that I will end up rewriting it at least one more time, and by that I mean one more time from end-to-end. The word count is getting up into the regions in which it would be considered a novelette, and generally unpublishable because of that. But no matter. I’m writing it because I need to write it, not because it’s a good career move.
And so I’ll continue on, word-by-word, page-by-page until it is done. It would be nicer if the process were simpler, but it isn’t. That’s how you have to approach writing if you are going to do it right.
Well, it is done. I wrote another five pages of Michael Drayton, Detective Guy yesterday and thought I had it finished. Except that the last sentence kept nagging at me. I ended up writing another couple of paragraphs this morning, and now I think I can officially declare this novel over.
It stands at 234 pages, which works out, in publishing terms to about 58,000 words. Quite respectable.
It all started out as an idea for a parody short story in about 1979. I then thought of it as an idea for a movie for a while. I tried writing it as a novel in the mid-to-late ’80s, but the result really stunk up the place. I then wrote it as a teleplay for a TV movie in the early ’90s, and actually got some interest from an agent. That deal fell through when she wanted me to change every damn to darn, every God to gosh, and wanted to remove every instance in which alcohol was used, which was plenty.
I then decided to try writing it as a novel as part of Na-No-Wri-Mo (National Novel Writing Month) in 2004. That November, I churned out a decent portion of a draft. That got put it aside for a year-and-a-half while I worked on radio scripts. I then started revising the chunk I had written, then kept writing more. I finished the first draft on March 9, 2007, and entered it in an idiotic contest on Gather.com. It foundered there, and I started work on the second draft, which mostly entailed rewriting the second half of the previous manuscript.
I also found out something interesting along the way: The book improved the more I took out the jokes. I had always thought of myself as a comedy writer who worked with serious themes, but it turned out that I was more of a serious writer with a well-developed sense of humor. Live and learn, huh?
I’m sure that there are parts that still need work, pages that will come back from an editor some day awash in red. And that’s okay. I’m willing to do that work. Later. Right now, I need a break. There are some short stories I need to give my attention to and air to breathe and life to live.
Writing a novel is a huge endeavor, and it mostly feels like you’re trying to swim from the White Cliffs of Dover to Coney Island. You spend most of your time alone and at-sea, and all you can do is to follow the sun over the horizon. I have now arrived, exhausted and out of breath. And by early next week, I’ll be thinking of writing the next one.
Update: I just finished rewriting the ending that I just rewrote. The book now spans 235 pages. At this point, I expect to be rewriting these last entences until the end of time.
Yesterday, I started work on what I think will be the final chapter of Michael Drayton, Detective Guy, and the words came out in a torrent. At least, a torrent by my standards. I just pasted the verbiage into a Word document to get an idea of how much I actually did, and it came out to five pages. Now, you have to understand that, typically, one page of finished writing is a good day for me. Five page days come at rare intervals and are celebrated events.
The story itself is also taking an interesting turn. In the previous version, the last chapter wrapped things up in an ironic, almost actionless way. That is no longer the case. It’s in many ways a very traditional ending for a hardboiled tale and is kind of like the end of The Maltese Falcon and the chapter with Silver Wig near the end of The Big Sleep smashed together. At least that’s how it’s turning out. I honestly have no idea how it will end up.
It turned out that I was just making the end of Chapter 22 of Michael Drayton, Detective Guy harder than it needed to be. As soon as I lightened up and let the story speak to me, it all came together in ten minutes. This is why writing is like trying to find the staircase in the dark. You’re going to bump your shin or stub your toe, but it generally works out fine in the end.
And so on to Chapter 23, which may be the last chapter or may not. The problem I’m having is that I’m not really sure what the solution to the mystery is yet. I have some ideas. I think I know. I used to really think I knew. But now it’s more bumping around in the dark.
Now let’s just hope that I don’t fall over that ottoman.
Authors have traditionally used epigraphs at the beginning of books or chapters to let the reader know what they had in mind while writing it. (There are exceptions. Max Shulman purposely misled his readers with his. In his book Barefoot Boy with Cheek, he gave a new epigraph for each chapter. The most memorable one is : “Mon oncle est mort.–Balzac.”) Well, I’ve finally dived in and joined the crowd.
Last week, while reading about the great dead French filmmaker, Jean Renoir, I came across the epigraph for my novel, Michael Drayton, Detective Guy. And I came across it with the posthumous help of Orson Welles. He had written an article for the Los Angeles Times back in 1979, right after Renoir died, and the one footnote in the Wikipedia article happened to link to Welles’s piece. I well remember when Renoir died. I watched his obituary on the evening news and was interested because he was the son of Pierre August Renoir, the Impressionist painter, and because Woody Allen kept mentioning him in his movies. (Grand Illusion is mentioned in Annie Hall in one of the scenes in LA and Renoir himself is mentioned in Manhattan. The look of both films is influenced heavily by Renoir.) A few months later, I took Film as Literature at the Community College of Rhode Island, and the professor screened Grand Illusion for us. It was brilliant. I was smitten.
So, there I was, reading Welles’s tribute to his friend and mentor, and suddenly Welles quotes a well-known line from Rules of the Game: “The terrible thing about life is this: Everyone has his reasons.” And an epigraph was born. Or, rather, nicked.
The rewriting of Drayton grinds on. I’m finishing up the next-to-last chapter and am preparing to begin the final installment. Only I realized today that this current chapter lays out some material that could be spun out even further. And yet, I need to finish this draft by April 2nd, just in case it gets picked as one of the ten finalists in a contest being sponsored by the Creative Writing department of the university I work at. And maybe it doesn’t need to be spun out any further at all anyway. But that’s how writing goes. You feel your way through.
I don’t know how it works for everybody, but I know how it works for me. I intend, with the completion of each chapter, to go bounding into the next, to keep the momentum going and to push right through to the end. It never seems to work that way, though. Instead, I approach each new chapter like a dog approaches a place to nap. I sidle up to it slowly, sniff it a few times, complete three circles, and then get down to business.
That is exactly what’s happening with Chapter 22 of Michael Drayton, Detective Guy. Psychologically, I’m ready to go forward. I just haven’t come up with the right opening sentence yet. I actually put down a couple of sentences three days ago, but removed them yesterday. They didn’t sound right, didn’t hit me right. And then, a few minutes ago, I opened up the previous chapter and read the end, hoping that something in there would inspire me. I just ended up rewriting the last paragraph of Chapter 21 and coming up with nothing for Chapter 22.
But that’s the process. I’ll come up with something soon. I’ll be taking a shower or going for a walk or reading something that has nothing to do with the book, and it will all open up in a moment of rapturous insight. That’s the system, and you can’t fight city hall.
I finally finished Chapter 21 yesterday, work on which was delayed by the holidays, the flu, a cold, and moving. Other than that, it couldn’t have gone better.
I’m now contemplating the end of the novel, and I think it’s going to be radically different than I had previously planned, and that there will probably be a confrontation with the killer or killers. I’m going to have to turn it around in the atomic wind machine of my mind for a day or two, I think.
There is a bit more information that I feel, in order to be fair to the reader, ought to be divulged. Because of this, I’m not certain whether I’m looking at just one more chapter or two, one long and one short. I suspect it will be the latter, but you never know until you actually start writing, an activity which should occur either today or over the weekend.
Provided I don’t get sick or have to move again.
(This post is a mirror of the most recent post on my Michael Drayton, Detective Guy blog.)
