Revision

As readers here know, I do not consider myself a writer. Maybe one day a year during the Dzanc Write-a-Thon to help try to raise money, but I don't sit down daily creating worlds. So when it comes to theories about writing, I usually am in the dark. I read something the other day though that has stuck with me and seems to be a great description of at least part of the process of revision. It comes from the preface of a liimited edition book by Robert Coover--The Water Pourer.

The Water Pourer is a chapter that had been removed from Coover's debut novel, The Origin of the Brunists. The preface seems to be an explanation of why such a chapter might exist and within the preface comes:

 

I can warp the trajectories of adjacent narratives through image clusters, and thereby draw your eye back to see what I think I want you to see. And by withholding from you  most of what lies in my peripheral vision.

Thus, I see the mother of the survivor at what she supposes to be the survivor's funeral. I omit this. I watch a trapped man, dying, drink his own piss. I decide not to tell you about this. I trace the long complex trajectory of a Presbyterian minister whose wife joins the survivor's cult (Dan note--this appears to be what the sequel is about), precipitating a revelation. With great difficulty, I tear him out of my report and destroy all evidence of his presence; this leaves unanticipated voids, and other lives explode into them. I hide from you the dream of the Girl Fried Egg, the farewells of a pressman leaving a depressed village, a whore celebrating her dead brother's birthday.

And i remove a middle -aging bachelor, high-school teacher and volunteer assistant reporter on the town newspaper, parody of it editor, whose confused vision of things spreads through the narrative like a mild high, comforting, sleep-inducing. When I ask him to leave, I discover that no one else in the story has noticed he was there.

 

And maybe it's just me, again the non-writer, that reads it this way--but to me there seems a huge level of bravery as a writer to both a) realize and then b) act upon this idea. That while these events, these people, these backgrounds, all come into my mind as I create this world, and have even committed to putting them down on the paper I write upon (and back then it would have been paper), the realization that my readers would not need them; that the book I want to give them would be better without them.

I imagine that there's an attachment to every word, every idea and especially every character committed to in those first drafts. I love that last line though: "When I ask him to leave, I discover that no one else in the story has noticed he ws there."

Comments

[Kelly Melman]

That really is some beautiful wiritng right there!