Image of Blue plaque, 3 Kensington Court Gardens, Kensington, London, home from 1957 until his death in 1965
In the movie Tom and Viv, about poet T. S. Eliot and his first wife, Vivien Haigh-Wood, Eliot’s character says that poetry is an “escape from emotion.”* When I heard that, a percentage of my brain defaulted to English 2310 (British Poetry from 1798. or something like that) and Wordsworth’s statement that poetry is the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.”
Dr, Thomas Brasher said the key to Wordsworth’s phrase is “recollected in tranquillity.”** Poetry written in the grip of emotion usually turns out to be poetry which, reread the next day, must be revised and edited before it is “good.” Wordsworth composed much of his poetry while taking long walks and later dictated it to his to his sister Dorothy.
William Wordsworth
Everything I write should be recollected in tranquility. That is, I should wait at least twenty-four hours and edit before publishing.
Fiction I edit like crazy for days and days. In one case, for years.
But blog posts—no. I edit like crazy as I write, but that really isn’t adequate.
As a consequence, when I read old posts, I’m often embarrassed.
In twenty-four hours, this one may embarrass me. But I’ll risk it. When it comes to blog posts, my vanity slips a little.
*
*Eliot’s full statement: “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” Which echoes what Wordsworth wrote.
** I remember so much Dr. Brasher said. If you read the work he assigned and listened in class, you remembered. No lectures, just close textual analysis. I took three courses he taught. One of the two best, and most interesting, professors I ever had.
Dr. Brasher also said Eliot was “an intellectual snob,” but I doubt that I will find that on the Internet.
Because last night I waltzed up to the watermelon buffet and chose
Complete the edit the AMW story for its (I hope) final major critique
If I’d been taking naps, #1 would be only a memory. But there’s more to do.
Weeks ago, I edited out a couple of sentences but later realized I’d removed a bit of necessary information and created a contradiction. The error would be so difficult to resolve, and the lapse in logic was so subtle and so trivial, and the remaining text flowed so smoothly that I thought about saying, with Walt Whitman,
“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself;”
and leave it alone and hope no one would notice.
But someone always notices. Sometime, somewhere, some reader would say, But the character says this is going to happen, and this doesn’t happen, or maybe it does, but whatever happened, she never says another word about it, so it sounds like maybe both things happened, and she should have told us…
So I tried a number of fixes, none of which pleased me, settled on one, and moved on. In a few days, I’ll go back and try again.
Just wo-ahn out
In moving on, I went from editing/revising to tampering. The official word is polishing, but I tampered: with words–thank goodness for thesaurus.com running in the background; with phrases; with sentence structure… Tampered with things better left untouched.
Tampering–especially when you think you’re polishing–is doomed to fail. It usually takes place near the end of a project, when you think everything is perfect, but not quite. So you make one little change, and then another, and another, and soon, part of your brain–the part where judgment lives–shuts off and you go on automatic pilot. You keep on clicking that mouse, cutting, pasting, copying, deleting, inserting…
Do this long enough and you can drain the life out of a story.
I’m most likely to tamper when I’m tired. I was tired last night. I should have watched Acorn TV or read or, better yet, given in and gone to bed at a reasonable hour. But I didn’t. Hyperfocused on the manuscript, I lost track of time and stayed up long after midnight. Then, in a perverse turn of events, I woke today up at 7:00 a.m.
So, as I said at the top of the page, I am tired.
A deadline approaches. I need to finish that story. First, though, I’ll let it rest. Several days. A week. Until I’m sufficiently rested. Until I don’t hate it with every fiber of my being. Until I’m detached enough to distinguish the good from the bad from the ugly.
#ROW80 Update
The July 20 Buffet
The original Buffet was meant to cover 80 days beginning with July 4, not just a few days or a week. Some haven’t been completed. Number 5 is on-going. So nothing changes.
Complete the edit the AMW story for its (I hope) final major critique Tried but didn’t finish, might have created a monster instead. See above, if you haven’t already.
Draft the second half of the story “Texas Boss” and submit to AMW for critique–Nope.
Finish a very rough draft of “Thank You, Mr. Poe”–Nope.
By September 5th, read at least ten of the books on my 20 Books of Summer 2016 list. (The list appears at Writing Wranglers and Warriors.) Still reading Isabel Allende’s The Japanese Lover, 68 pages toBy Mutari (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commonsgo. I used the calculator to figure that out. I didn’t have to. I can still subtract in my head. But I don’t want to think that hard. Sad.
Post #ROW80 reports on Sundays and Wednesdays. It’s Wednesday and I’m posting.
Visit three new #ROW80 blogs a day.–Nope. I don’t know why, but nope.
Take three naps a week.–Nope. And I’m so sorry I didn’t.
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The July 27 Buffet
They don’t change much. The point of the buffet, per shanjeniah, is to have choices and plenty of them. So I’ll add more watermelon.
Complete the edit the AMW story for its (I hope) final major critique
Draft the second half of the story “Texas Boss” and submit to AMW for critique
I ended an earlier post with the sentence, “There’s a hole I have to write myself out of.”
Parse that and you’ll find it equal parts wish, bravado, pretense, and humbug.
I had no idea how to write myself out of that hole. I thought I’d have to scrap “A Day in the Life of a Rancher’s Wife” and replace it with “A Day in the Life of a One-Room Schoolteacher.” Or anything else I could both start and finish.
But I gave it a shot, opened the document, and began revising. For the Rancher’s Wife, that meant squeezing 700 words into under 500, just in case I came up with a conclusion.
And in the middle of all that deleting, adding, shuffling, it happened. I knew how to end the story.
By the time the epiphany occurred, it was after midnight. I tacked on a couple of sentences to hold the thought and the next day continued reworking the piece. The result is a story I’m satisfied with. Almost. There’s still time for tweaking.
When I was teaching English in the late ’70s, the latest fashion was to teach the writing process: brainstorming, prewriting, writing, revising, editing, polishing, proofreading. Sometimes prewriting was put before brainstorming. Sometimes editing and polishing were rolled into one. It was neat and tidy and linear.
But there was no step to describe that epiphany.
If there’s frustration here–and there is–it’s that I can’t explain that missing step. I had given up. I wasn’t trying think of a solution. I was playing with words. And then I knew.
Maybe that’s the heart of the process: relax, play, stay in the now, allow ideas to come. Maybe the process isn’t a process at all.
I’ve read that creativity has something to do with the frontal cortex, the anterior cingulate, the temporal lobe, the limbic brain, alpha brain rhythms, gamma brain rhythms, warm showers, long walks, and happiness. When scientists have it all observed and assimilated and indexed, I’ll try to understand.
For the present, however, I like to think that extra step is Gertrude Stein’s miracle.
M. K. Waller 