Breathing Words

Dillard says (The Writing Life, p. 56-57):

“But you are wrong if you think that in the actual writing, or in the actual painting, you are filling in the vision. You cannot fill in the vision. You cannot even bring the vision to light. You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it to the page. The page is jealous and tyrannical; the page is made of time and matter; the page always wins. The vision is not so much destroyed, exactly, as it is, by the time you have finished, forgotten. It has been replaced by this changeling, this bastard, this opaque lightless chunky ruinous work.”

My original vision was lost three chapters ago. My work, at various turns, confuses me, pushes and pulls at me, and sits unmoving. I feel discouraged in my class, re-working this chapter that was born from a “light bulb.” I try to feel passionate, try to see the world that I originally created, but indeed, all I see are broken sentences and unnecessary scenes spliced together in illogical ways.

In truth, I’m bored.

Not with the story. Not yet. Just with this tedious and awful process of revision. Editing for others is always so much more enjoyable.

I love my characters and I worry for them. I worry that I can’t put to words their lives in a beautiful and dignified way. I fret over their names, which sound good in Chinese, but are terrible in English.

I feel dumb, an American-born and raised Chinese girl attempting to write a Chinese story for an American audience.

I’m running out of time.

I don’t know what I’m doing.

This is so hard sometimes.

These are my answers to my previous post. Half-assed, I think. There was a lot I wanted to say that I couldn’t articulate in a coherent way. But what can I say? When the mind is muddled, the mind is muddled. (And I’m a bit buzzed right now. Had half a pitcher of Berry Burst Cider from BJ’s… my face is so warm!)

A. What do you think about the approach of securing each sentence before building on it, as opposed to the approach of not perfecting a work as it progresses?

I think Dillard makes a compelling argument for both approaches.The first, securing each sentence, is important because the writer is building a foundation for his/her work. Each sentence gives rise to the next and the flow of the words can suggest the flow of the story as a whole. It makes great sense, but, from a personal point of view, seems like such a methodical way of working that any enjoyment of the creative process is practically non-existent.

I write in a flurry and will not stop (barring some emergency) until the scene has been completed. I don’t take the time to worry about editing or grammar because I haven’t figured out yet if the scene will work. And there’s always editing, at any stage of the work. I believe perfection is an imaginary state, so the first method, while intellectually sound, seems unrealistic to me. I imagine if I utilized the method of securing each sentence first, I’d never move forward in my story, either from the obsession of obtaining perfection, or from sheer boredom.

Yet, I believe that, after that scene or chapter is written, perfecting the work (or attempting to, at any rate) is absolutely crucial. At that stage, we’ve got a whole block of prose to work with, and if we don’t take the time to make it cohesive, then our later work will crumble because it has no foundation to rest on. We must use the scenes we’ve written to fine tune the voice, perspectives, and tone of our work.

Ultimately though, I believe these methods are up to the writer and whatever he/she is comfortable with.

B. Answer the question Dillard poses on p. 19: “Why would anyone read a book instead of watching big people move on a screen?”

For me, the answer lies with imagination. The writer creates the world, the reader decorates it. Yes, the reader is given descriptions, layouts, and details as particular as “his left pinky finger twitched,” but ultimately, the reader sees what the reader sees. An “old gentleman” can remind one reader of her grandfather and another of a great-uncle. A “little girl” is one reader’s sister, and another’s daughter. Even with the writer’s most detailed description, the reader will invariably connect to the characters on a personal level, which makes every story personal and unique.

C. What does Dillard mean, on p. 21, by “Right now, your job is to hold your breath.”

Finally, Dillard writes something uplifting about writing! I was honestly getting discouraged by how her other excerpts have described writing as such painful, tedious, and difficult work. It’s not. It’s just not! Writing is what she describes in this final excerpt of the chapter. “Flying.” We hold our breaths because our writing has taken off, is traveling faster and farther than we expected. We want to stay with it, ride with it, and revel in the moment. This isn’t the time to pick or worry at it. Just enjoy writing and love every moment.