For the past month or so I have been working on the final edits to my third novel, Marcelo in the Real World. Today we finished the copyediting process. It is a funny feeling to see my work “corrected” that way. It is a humbling experience to see all that I missed despite the reading and re-reading and revising that I did before sending the manuscript off to publishers. It made me realize how much I need others with different skills to bring a book to completion. Even though the book is different now than the first submission, it is still very much my own. It is as if the initial vision of the work lay hidden and the editing cleared the way for it to emerge. This, I think, is what a good editor does – she opens the way so that the beauty and the light of the work can shine forth. Marcelo was very fortunate to have found an editor like Cheryl Klein at Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic. It is truly beautiful when a book and an editor are made for each other – when the characters and ideas in a book resonate with the sensitivities of the editor and when the editor has such kinship with the book’s meaning that she can articulate for the author what the author dimly feels. Publishing a book is such hard work. And in the midst of the hard work there is the element of “luck” or “fate” or “grace” – some mystery that cannot be accounted for in rational terms. Dozens of people read a manuscript and one likes it. Why that person? It is a mystery – like love.
April 15, 2008
September 20, 2007
Journaling
I’ve been working lately on a book about Journaling- a book for young people to encourage them to keep a journal. The book is a combination of thoughts about journaling and relevant entries that reflect or exemplify those thoughts from my own journals (which I have kept since I was fifteen). Here’s an excerpt I wrote recently.
There is something about journal writing that goes hand in hand with a crisis — an event that is emotionally painful. I don’t know that it is terribly important to figure out why that is. There is a whole body of science that deals with the benefits of getting to the bottom of a person’s feelings and of sharing them with another person. When we are having problems in our lives, we see a school counselor or a doctor, someone who listens to us. And the very act of communicating what we feel to another is therapeutic. Healing comes from sharing what we feel with someone else. Maybe writing in a journal heals us that way too — we get what is bothering us off our chest.
I don’t like to look at journal writing as a place where I can dump whatever I want, although I do. I don’t like to look at it as a source of healing, although I am sure it is and has been in ways that I do not know.My journal is a blank page where expression of any kind can take place.
I think of those caves in France and Spain where our ancestors crawled in thousands of years ago and painted pictures of bison and antelope with paints made out from ground colored rocks. No one seems to know exactly the purpose of those pictures. Some say they were religious symbols. Others say they represent their view of the world. Other say they were just representing what they saw. Some of the walls on those caves are very difficult to get to. And some of the pictures are high on the walls, which means they had to carry materials to make steeples to reach those places. Why all the work? What is it about expression that is so important? There is a part of me that understands the graffiti artist who sprays his signature on a building as if to say, “I exist.” But what about the caveman who painted in the depths of a cave that was clearly inaccessible even twelve thousand years ago. Or what about a person who writes in a journal that he knows will never be read by anyone? What is the point of this kind of expression? Is something worth doing if there is no point to it?
September 5, 2007
Some Thoughts on Editing
I have been working on the revisions to Marcelo in the Real World with Cheryl Klein, my editor at Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic. Now that I have finished a first round of revisions (there will be a few more, I am sure) and have sent the manuscript to Cheryl for comments, I want to tell you a little about the process of editing. My hope is that the young people visiting this website who want to write, will get a better understanding of the writing process. Today’s lesson is on editing. Editing is a process that can begin at various stages. (Uggh! I sounded like a teacher just then!) It can begin once you have finished a first draft of the work, be it essay or poem or short story or novel. It can also begin when the work has been accepted for publication. The word “editing” is somewhat misleading. It makes one think of making sure that you have spelled all the words correctly and you have fixed all the typos. And it is that. But editing also involves re-writing. It involves tossing out a sentence or a paragraph or a passage or a chapter or two hundred pages and starting over. The big difference between this type of re-writing and just writing is that when you re-write you are doing it pursuant to a plan, a direction, a vision of who your characters are and what they are going to do. The act of writing for the first time, that is, the process of creating that you do as you work through your very first draft is done in a kind of intellectual darkness — you move along not knowing exactly where you are going. Creating requires intuition, editing requires reason. Creating is a movement forward that relies on trusting your gut. Editing requires reaching the end and then traveling backwards to make sure that all the pieces fit together and get you to the desired end. But even within the process of editing there is another type of movement — a kind of narrowing of focus that goes from the large to the small. Editing begins with tossing away what is no longer necessary, filling in new gaps by writing new scenes, and proceeds a narrowing path towards the characters, what they say and what they do, so that they remain true to who they are. Editing ends up with the author focusing laser-like on each sentence and each word so that every part, no matter how small, is part of the whole.
Maybe not all writers put their left side and right side of the brain to work when they write. I am sure that there are writers who manage to stay within the left (logical) hemisphere and there are probably miraculous works out there that are written solely from the right (intuitive hemisphere). (Gabriel GarcÃa Marquez claims that One Hundred Years of Solitude was written over a frenzied, ecstatic period of two weeks when he didn’t sleep and barely ate.) But I think that if you want to write you should start out by trying to embrace all sides of yourself and by putting to work all that you have. I have found out that editing is hard for a beginning writer but that it gets easier if the beginning writer keeps on writing until he/she becomes an experienced writer. For any writer, the finished first draft usually seems so utterly brilliant that it is difficult to accept that it still needs work. Criticism at this stage, whether from a family member, friend or editor, will seem to totally miss the point and will even seem ignorant or mean-spirited. Suggestions for change will be seen as a violation of our deepest moral principles. Making the work more coherent, more readable, will be ‘selling out’. But for the older writer (and for the young/wise writer), criticism is always welcome, even if not accepted. For the older writer, the detail work of editing is also a pleasure, a pleasure different from the thrilling rush of creation, but still a pleasure. And if you persist in writing, there may come to you, as it did to me, the rare joy of collaboration — where you find one or two persons who are so in tune with your work, that their views seem as if they were coming from a part of your soul that you had not listened to before. Finding these persons, in whatever form they come to you,  is a gift to your work and a blessing to you.Â
