...there is, a mystery, but these are not the clues

That’s a John Cage quote, if you don’t know. It came to mind this week as I was reading stories for a couple of people to make comments, and it occurred to me once again how important it is to come up with a method for reading your own work to see what’s there. How do you go about it? Where do you begin, what do you consider first? What can you do to understand a draft so you can move to the next one?

I have read a lot of writings about this. The biggest tip is to put it away for a while so you can then reread with fresh eyes. That’s a tough one. It sounds reasonable, but I’ve found that most people want to go at it right a way, and why not if you’re ready? The bigger problem it seems to me is configuring those “fresh eyes.” The passage of time is not a reliable method. If it were we’d experience constant renewal and the world would always look gorgeous and full of possibility. Beginner’s mind! I think that’s the idea, but it takes a bit more to get there than mere stepping away. Seeing a piece clearly is a great goal, but it is also layered, isn’t it? Does it mean objectively, or does it mean with love? If it’s objectivity that’s the standard, a lot of stuff would just get tossed. Love, on the other hand, may help you see what you can improve, without castigating yourself for not being able to make what’s on the page match what’s in your head.

So whether the fresh eyes can be in place ten minutes or two years after finishing a draft, try doing a read focused on looking for clues. Look for places where the story heats up, where you lose your sense of where you are for a moment and give yourself over to the story instead, where the story surprises you. If you’ve written a whole draft, those places are there, I promise. First drafts are wonderfully revealing compendiums of hopes, dreams, and ideas. Sift for the hopes and dreams. What did you write down that comes from your tenderest self? Did you perhaps have a character feel a flash of compassion for a creepy person? That happened in one of the stories I read this week, and it made me sit up straight. I connected with the writer in that moment, not because I myself approve of compassion toward the creepy (though I do), but because I felt the heat there, the vulnerability—the writer was in touch with his hopes and dreams in that moment, and that spilled onto the page. As a teacher I would point out this throwaway moment to the writer and ask him to remember writing it. What had gotten that onto the page? What was his state when he wrote that? Can he get back to that place and hang around to see the sights? Might that flash of compassion affect the plot? In the first draft, it didn’t, though I sensed that energy wanting to break through again. Or possibly it should be taken out and the story made uniformly cooler? That might be a way to get to the finishing line, which is an okay goal.

The point is to pick up on the clues, do some discernment about how they got on the page, and learn a bit more about yourself as a writer. How do we get in touch with our deeper selves? How did we write a particularly insightful or tender or moving moment? Such places cannot be manipulated. Well, they can…ads can wrench tears. But remember, what Aristotle was getting at with his observations about catharsis was not having a writer give us an excuse to have a good cry, but for a writer to combine a structure and a story and other elements into a coherent whole that would give us a deeper sense of satisfaction than crying. We would be touched in all our facilities, and moved to a deep aestheticized appreciation of art and life. We are aiming toward being able to reach deep states and stay there consciously.

From looking at the clues we have dropped in our stories we can begin to build a method for revision that is our own. My students often ask me how to revise, and I used to have an answer, but not anymore. I see a lot of work around that seems revised according to my old answers. It comes out perfect but not deep. You want to figure out a method for revising deeply. It can take a while, but the inklings are in what you’re writing now. They may not be the clues to the mystery, but let’s say they might be the clues to the clues.