The Marvel and the Mistake
Hello Friends,
So, I finished my novel draft. Shortly after I printed the behemoth to read on paper, I spent some time going through files. I work so much on paper: I teach with handouts, I believe in the tactile as a method of working (if you’re “stuck” in your work and you haven’t tried writing by hand, don’t talk to me till you do). I am also a frequent purger, particularly of paper. So it was suprising to find a number of critique letters from my undergrad and graduate professors in my files for stories that are long done. Many letters were kind and insightful and held general advice I’m still absorbing. But then there was this one from an instructor that contained this fairly innocuous line: “You will see that I’ve tinkered with your prose in a number of places. I haven’t done so because I think your decisions about syntax are unimportant.” Oh, but he did. Why I’ve kept this letter from a teacher who was regularly cruel in our workshop, lauding one writer’s work only to hold it against the other story up that same week (how convenient for one to be the marvel and the other mistake, always in tandem) is a bit of a mystery to my present-day self. Perhaps I thought the letter contained a message I wasn’t receiving, that it could teach me something, something I know now I can teach myself about my own work, which I’ve been doing for well over two decades now. I like to mention my age—41—when I teach because I know I present young (that it’s because my stories are often about girls and younger women is a subject matter for another letter and I’ll take this moment to thank T Kira Madden for shouting out Back Talk as “High Goddamn Serious Literature about Girlhood” in her Year in Reading for The Millions) but I want my students to know that none of us just arrive here. We work unseen, we develop, we struggle, and when we print out a big stack of pages to photograph for social media, we’re hoping you might understand the weight and time built into each page. I think a lot about this section in Robin Black’s Crash Course:
“The odds are that if you know someone who has ‘bloomed’ late, that person is carrying serious grief over time gone by. As much as every late bloomer’s story can seem like a happy one, it is almost certainly something more. If you stop long enough to ask what lies behind the eventual success—of whatever kind, of whatever degree—you are likely to find a well of pain that may be obscured by relief and gratitude, and possibly, too, by the subtle pressure of other people’s needs to see the positive outcome to the exclusion sometimes of much else. You may find a far more interesting story than the one you think you know.”
One of the strangest things about writing is pivoting from potential to done, and I don’t mean potential realized. Just done—sometimes that feeling that you are finished with the project because it’s taken all it can from you, not even because it’s at its best, honestly—ready to go forward. There’s a part in Art & Fear that talks about the loss inevitable in that completion moment, when you can see what you envisioned is not what you have, and you have to release a project’s potential. Sometimes I feel like this is what I live inside of as a writer, what I feed off of even. I throw out my paper drafts but I keep my notebooks. They’re often my first drafts, and my spots for organizing my structure and lists for revision and research and problems. This novel has 6 notebooks. (Large Moleskines, blank pages, soft covers, for those of you who want to know.) I think sometimes that someone could read the actual book and someone else could read the notebooks and they’d get the same story. I’d argue that the person who reads the notebooks would get the better story, the one without boundaries, the one that is correcting itself as it goes and not discarding what came before necessarily. The layers of paint readers don’t see. The doubts and also the unrealized potential. The marvels and the mistakes.
Though there is undoubtedly work to be done on my book*, I’m ready to let go of it so I can start on the next. I’ve loved and breathed this book a lot. I don’t know how much more I have to give it, which is a sign, I hope, of us closing out our very good run together. But there’s new energy in the next project. I’m so grateful to feel that.
Are you a list maker? Clearly, judging by my archive of bulleted points, I am. Not a journal keeper, but a list maker. I tend to write mine on very small index cards. Sometimes I burn them when I’m ready to move forward onto the next list. Maybe in December of 2019 you’ll make one for yourself to cover whatever span of time you want to encapsulate like a finished draft of whatever your thing is. Maybe it’s a year when you think about what you lost rather than what you gained, or what you let go of or hung onto, what you understood or misunderstood. Are they marvels or mistakes; might they be both?
*It’s not sold yet, and after that happens sometime in 2020, an editor will help me shape it further than my agent currently is and yes I’ll let you know when it’s all happening
Reading, Thinking, Feeling
More Zadie. The Q & A is particularly wonderful here, especially when an audience member asks her if they should have children.
As ever, Jia Tolentino taking something that’s a bit of a phenomenon, so common you look away, and asking you to look closer, think harder, see more. I have been thinking about the ending paragraph in particular.
Lynn Seeger Strong’s newsletter, Practicing. Strong has written some of my favorite essays over the last few years, and she has a book forthcoming from Henry Holt, which you can pre-order here.
I tried to get folks on Instagram to give me ideas for a best of 2019 list that wasn’t books but all I got was a rave for Big Bird accepting an award, so I had to use my own brain to come up with some personal bests of 2019, in no particular order:
Thing I should have learned earlier but that changed my working life: You can schedule sends in Gmail. #neveremailonaSunday
Gifts to receive in the actual mailbox: A nice pair of socks
Thing to hear in a restaurant this year, specifically at Balthazar last week: “We have a dedicated fryer for fries” (#celiaclife)
Revival of a writing utensil: Pencils (If you’re in NYC, a stop at CW Pencil Enterprise is a must). Rarely have I felt as satisfied in life as I am when sharpening a pencil.
Tragicomic moment: our Thanksgiving table collapsing mid-meal and my cousin Ben (and all of us, really) holding it up while we gathered the pieces. (My dad fixed it the next day; the food was mostly eaten; only one thing shattered; no one was hurt; thanks for asking.)
Wow I didn’t know that would make me cry moment: Seeing the film photos of my kids from our trip to Mexico City, remembering what photographs are for. We used these Lomo single-use cameras. Though I managed to fuck up loading the film on my upgraded 35mm, I did successfully re-load these and they’re worth the price of remembering to think before you shoot. I figured out the film thing on mine, eventually.
Where to Find Me
Reciting the “I don’t like sand” monologue with my children for the foreseeable future.
Teaching a 4-week Advanced Fiction Workshop at the 92nd Street Y in the winter. It’s an application class; get yours in by January 10th.
If working one-on-one is more your speed, I’m also open for manuscript consults and coaching in 2020. More information about that is here, on my website.
That's it for this decade.
Talk Soon,
Danielle