Thursday, October 10, 2013
"After Long Silence"
Yes, it is
right, my dear poet, to speak after long silence, but for me, Mr. Yeats, it
won’t be about the supreme theme of Art and Song, there being far too much of
that in my Great September 2013 Novel Revision that I’ve just this moment at
10:10 a.m. on October 9, declared done—ah, how cool it is outside.
Done. Done.
Done. The number of times I’ve declared this novel over and done don’t bear
counting. I nearly abandoned it after the first two hundred pages. The sweet
siren of short stories moved in and inhabited me during my first fiction
workshop with Mary Clyde and Robin Lippincott, both masters of the short story.
Mary Clyde, my mentor that summer, must have thought I was coming unhinged with
the number of new stories I was sending her each month—all under a pseudonym: V.
Hasseltine Taylor. LOL Sounds like a romance that should have Fabio on the cover.
Au contraire. I was looking around at the realities of life as I knew
it—growing up in a mill town, rehabbing a hand surgery in a roomful of other
recovering patients, vacationing with four other couples we had known since our
first Savannah days when the kids were young—everything, all of it was gritty grist
for my short story mill.
The next
semester when I studied with Brad Watson, he was less cheerful about my eternal
output. He wanted to see some revision rather than more new stuff. “Stop trying
to sound like Eudora Welty,” he wrote, regarding my new “Envenomation” which
was over the top with snakes. Written by Kathleen Thompson. Well, Brad Watson
was the age of my son...just saying. I doubt he would ever have figured out the
business of a pseudonym. I wrote him back that neither Eudora Welty nor his
beloved state of Mississippi had the corner on names like Lovie and Radio, or
cottonmouths.
Writing short
stories had run its course by my fifth and final workshop, so I picked up the
old Lost (working title) manuscript
and submitted twenty pages. And did I say the idea was conceived the summer of
1991? My son was home from college teaching Savannah kids how to play tennis. I
told him I would kill for a plot. Easy for him and he was eager to help out. He
wrote on a yellow legal pad. Very little remains of the plot on that page, but
how many embryos resemble the resulting adult? The seed was sown. 1991. Think
of it. Twenty-two years.
My son has
named me Queen of Revision. I do enjoy making things better and better. But
it’s so much easier with a poem or essay whose length is more proportional to my narrow pea brain. (My higher math.) I’ve actually looked around for a
clear wall and thought of imitating Faulkner (truly I like most things
Mississippi including good ole boy Brad and his short story dogs) but the only
open wall spaces are ceilings so I’d have to pull a Michelangelo if I outlined the
novel as Faulkner did. I settled for a new set of big index cards as my
organization tools.
And, all this
is just my first baby step. Just call me Queenie. And now the harder parts: finding
an agent who can help find an editor who will, no doubt, insist on more
revision. Right now I need to plant a few violas and snapdragons. First
things first.
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