Rewriting the Draft (four years later?!?)

I spent a good part of the weekend revising an essay that will be published this spring. I first started writing it 4 years ago. I wasn't really sure what I was writing about back then, but I knew that I'd had a relationship with a woman that had changed my life and I wanted to tell that story.

The first draft was emotional and rambling. I shared it with friends who were writers and avid readers. One friend sent lots of notes and really good suggestions. She kept saying that she was moved by it. That was enough encouragement for me to feel like I had something to further develop.

I let the draft sit for a few months before I picked it up again.

I'm always amazed at how clearly I see my writing after I let it rest for a while. When I return to a piece after a hiatus, I can tell right away what's working and what isn't. That is never true for me when I spend days in a row revising and editing. For me, working too long and hard on the same piece obscures my vision. I've ruined good drafts that way.

When I read the essay again, I liked a lot of it, but the introduction wasn't working and the themes were not fully developed. I took another stab at it. When I finished that draft, I sent it out to literary journals who accept nonfiction. No one was interested. When I read the draft again, after it had been rejected, I decided that it really wasn't the type of essay that a literary journal would publish. The tone was not literary and the subject matter was popular. It was also an essay that would be of special interest to women, especially mothers.

I sent a pitch to an online magazine. The editor seemed interested and asked that I forward it. I sent the essay to her and waited. Nothing happened. I read through the essays that this site published and realized that my piece, although too commercial for the lit journals, was probably too serious for this site. The essayists writing for this site were young, hip, and kind of snarky. I could never write the way that they did.

Then I purposely forgot about the essay. This is the hardest thing for me to do. I feel as much pressure as the next writer to publish and publish often, but taking a pause is a crucial part of my process. I've found that when I just live my life, I'm inevitably observing the world and thinking deeply about issues, even when I'm just walking the dog. When I just live my life, something I hear or see will "click" and remind me that "This is what you were trying to write about in that essay." Then I'll feel a new sense of urgency to return to the draft and sharpen its focus.

I've learned that my first drafts are usually about releasing the emotion I feel about an issue. The intellectual piece does not come until later for me, and it doesn't come at all if I try to force it. I have to do ordinary things like work and deal with relatives. When I interact with other people, I see situations that are extraordinary and that are the stuff of literature. That's when I understand the theme that wants to emerge in my work.

So the intellectual piece for this essay eventually revealed itself and I understood that I was writing about ideology--when to trust it and when to let it go. I revised some more and then sent it to two places, a publication where the readers are mostly educated women and mothers, and as an unsolicited email to an editor at a bigwig monthly magazine. The bigwig editor never answered, but the women's magazine was interested.

The editors thought that I had two distinct narratives going on and wanted me to get rid of one of them. This was a revelation for me. I thought I had one major plot line and a sub-plot that helped clarify the main story. But once I read the essay again, they were absolutely right.

They also told me I needed more scenes and so I added that.

Once I'd made those revisions, they accepted the submission. Then came the first round of edits, the ones I spent this weekend incorporating into the latest revision. There are two editors and their comments are in two different-colored fonts. They made suggestions about the title, the opening, the closing, whether or not to name my children in the essay, they asked for more background information and, once again, told me that I needed more scenes.

To say that I'm grateful for their help is an understatement. I feel so lucky to have the chance to learn from them. I always tell my students that they need a community of writers to give them feedback, but I also know that good editors, the kind that get what you're trying to say and that push you to write your best, are rare. So I've spent several days trying to live up to their expectations.

I've also learned two things about my relationship to creative nonfiction. The first thing is that I'm avoiding scenes in my essays because I believe that my memory is unreliable. I think, How can I write dialogue that's not 100% accurate? This isn't completely true. I really need to get over that.

The second thing is that I fret over how much of my family's personal life I should share in my writing. I will use pseudonyms for my children in this essay, to protect them, even though the essay really isn't about them at all. Still, I feel like I'm straddling a tricky line by even mentioning them in my work. I'm now thinking about whether I'll ever include my kids in writing which I publish in the future.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

I am reading this book now, a little bit after it was the featured book of a book club that I belong to in Phoenix, Sisters of the Desert Sun. I'm sure you've heard of The Immortal Life... since it's been highly publicized . It's the story about Henrietta Lacks, a black Southern woman who had her cancer cells taken without her knowledge and used as an important tool in medicine. Her cells were the first to become immortal, they've been replicating for half a century.

Anyway, I am struck by the poetic vision of the author, Rebecca Skloot. This could have been just a science story with a little narrative about the Lacks family thrown in. Instead Skloot seems interested in the social justice angle of the story and uses juxtaposition, irony irony, and other literary techniques to dig into the heart of the story. Take this passage about the white male researcher, George Gey, who takes the HeLa cells as they are known and starts distributing them:

He sent shipments of HeLa cells to researchers in Texas, India, New York, Amsterdam, and many places between. Those researchers gave them to more researchers, who gave them to more still. Henrietta's cells rode into the mountains of Chile in the saddlebags of pack mules. As Gey flew from one lab to another, demonstrating his culturing techniques and helping to set up new laboratories, he always flew with tubes of Henrietta's cells in his breast pocket. And when scientists visited Gey's lab to learn his techniques, he usually sent them home with a vial or two of HeLa. In letters, Gey and some of his collegues began referring to the cells as his "precious babies."

--from The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Copyright 2010 by Rebecca Skloot

The Monday after Thanksgiving Links

Huffingtonpost has posted 29 of the Bart Simpson chalkboard scenes in celebration of the 21^st season of The Simpsons. My favorite one: Bart writing It’s “Facebook” not “Assbook” over and over.

Author Virginia DeBerry writes an open letter to Oprah about the plight of black writers.

I recently wrote about my growing interest in nonfiction. For more discussions about fiction vs. nonfiction, which is better, check out essays by Maud Newton and Zadie Smith. Salon also recently published this article about the rise of memoirs and the supposed death of fiction.

The Pull of Nonfiction. Part Two.

Some days ago a girlfriend reminded me that we are “way woman now.” At forty-two, I’ve had many life experiences both good and bad. I’ve lived through an unwanted pregnancy, the birth of my children, the deaths of relatives and high school friends. I’ve had employers who respected me and I’ve worked, too, for a few brain-dead reptilian jerk-offs. I’m better for it. The artifice I wrapped myself in when I was young (as I sought the rewards the world gives for the inauthentic, the charade, the illusion) has been slowly chipped away by these real life events.

One result has been a change in what I like to read and write. I will always read fiction and poetry because it helps me make sense of the world, but I’ve been increasingly drawn to nonfiction. The books that are catching my attention are memoir and essays, and the films I’m watching are documentaries. Being “wired” may have something to do with it. As I navigate the internet I am constantly immersed in nonfiction news stories and video clips. I also think my attraction to nonfiction is just where I am in life: busy enough to want to sit down with a book that tells me up front what it’s about. Novels force me to consider themes and poetry makes me grapple with metaphor and allusion, but nonfiction—even creative nonfiction that uses literary techniques—is straightforward. A grown woman likes straightforwardness.

So over the last months I’ve watched:

Tyson, the documentary about the boxer Mike Tyson;

the Katrina documentary Trouble the Water;

The Thin Blue Line, a docudrama about the wrongful imprisonment of Randall Dale Adams;

Food Inc., a documentary about the food industry;

Valentino: The Last Emperor, a documentary about the fashion designer Valentino;

and this wonderful archived film of James Baldwin interviewing black San Franciscans circa 1963.

I recommend all of the above!

Still on my list are a documentary about the making of A Chorus Line titled Every Little Step, and Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story.

The nonfiction books on my “to read” list include Cornel West’s memoir, Living and Loving Out Loud, Irene Vilar’s memoir about abortion, Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict, David Small’s graphic memoir Stitches, and Chinua Achebe’s The Education of a British Protected Child.

Being way woman means that I no longer have time to sit with my girlfriend as we did years ago eating salad with Annie’s Naturals Goddess dressing and talking about poetry. Being young was a wonderful trip. I hope to land somewhere near grace.

Some Thoughts on Humor

The Blue Pill in the Applesauce

I have not told my son this story: how I felt him drop into the birthing position as I danced and stuffed dollars into a naked man's G-string. How I went into labor two days later. Perhaps a son could never find this funny but just maybe when he's older, he will.

Humor is a birthright that runs in our family. I'm reminded of this weeks after my mother's death as I sift through hundreds of sympathy cards mailed to my father. Several cards contain a handwritten note which says that the writer "will miss Elaine's great sense of humor." Amen to that. My mother was the queen of ironic deadpan. In 1985, when my five-year old nephew sang a song in his little boy falsetto while swinging his legs in our kitchen chair, my mom was the one to put this precious moment into perspective. "He can't read, can't spell his name, but he knows all the words to a damn Prince song," she said. My mother had the comic's gift, the ability to make you laugh at your behavior and critically examine it at the same time.

Since her death, friends have given me books on death and I've read them. I understand that grieving for her will be a rough river. Instead of books, though, I'd like a bereavement culture that incorporates a dose of bawdy humor. I know of other cultures where this exists--the uproarious Irish wakes, the playful traditions of jazz funerals in New Orleans. But there is nothing in my Episcopalian and very Midwestern background that encourages the levity I now seek. How I could use a Day of the Dead skeleton of my mother playing golf in the afterlife.

And the truth is that I'm recalling the irony of her illness and death anyway. The end of life is a tragic comedy and laughter, for me, lessens the tragic part. This is how my mother looked at the world, as if pain is to be expected and mocked. I suspect she learned this early in life when her father abandoned her. Or maybe she learned this as a young mother when her husband died in the Korean War or after her second husband beat and bloodied her. Somewhere in her life my mother learned to laugh through hard times, to tell life that it's often ugly and its breath stinks.

And so in that tradition I remember the fart. My daughter, who was two months old at the funeral, passed gas in mom's face the day before she died. My mother was too ill to even speak, but as soon as the baby let it rip, mom's eyes widened, she lifted a frail hand to her mouth and she smiled.

There's also the day that I was so exhausted after caring for my mother and the baby that I forgot to put mom's bottom dentures in. When I returned to the house hours later she sat with her bottom lip sunken in, her top teeth hanging over like a chipmunk's. My father pulled me to the side. "Why did you do your mother's teeth like that?" he asked.

I imagine the conversation that me and mom could have about those last days:

"I was so tired. And the pain--"

"I know. You moaned a lot."

"Girl, you don't know. That was serious pain."

"But you wouldn't take the morphine."

"It gave me bad dreams."

"I didn't know that."

"Mmm hmm."

"Remember how you hid the pill under your tongue--"

"--and spit it out."

"Daddy was upset about that. He found the melted blue pill on your nightgown."

"Your father got on my nerves trying to hide that mess in the applesauce."

"He was just trying to make you comfortable."

"Comfortable cancer," she would say.

I am still a sentimentalist who will cry during moments of kindness or beauty, but I also think human existence is one absurd little trip. We live, we die, and both experiences are painful, clumsy, and fraught with errors. Why not laugh at it? And why not laugh at ourselves?

Perhaps this is how I'll explain the irreverent baby-shower-at-the strip-club to my son. It was such a ridiculous idea that it made perfect sense. And it's why I laugh today as my six-year old boy raises his shirt to show me how he can roll his stomach. He doesn't know this, but it's the perfect imitation of a male stripper.