During my brief time in Sacramento, I met Ray Carver through his first wife Maryann, who I briefly worked for. Everything was brief in 1966. “You’re a writer?” She said. “So’s my husband, you should meet him.” There was a little poetry magazine called The Levee. Ray may have been a faculty advisor for it, but it was a group project, its pages collated by hand at the communal house where I briefly lived. I showed Ray the poems I was submitting and he showed me how they needed to be revised. I was 22, up until then thought poems pretty much came whole, from God. They don’t. You have to learn to edit yourself, but those alpha readers or fellow workshop writers are vital too.
In the process of writing and re-writing my novel, I’ve come to see it as sculpting. I sculpt the clay, and it gives me a hint at what I’m really making. Then I soften it and reshape it again. And again. The same material takes on new forms until I finally create what I was meant to.
Hi Angel, that’s a really useful way of thinking about process. I like the idea of words as clay - malleable as putty- and the writer engaged in shaping and re-shaping forms. Thanks for sharing.
It's interesting, I've been thinking a lot about revision lately too, in connection to Jean Rhys and H.D., both of whom were notorious perfectionists and often wrote several full versions of their novels (Voyage in the Dark was rewritten from (now missing) Triple Sec over twenty years later; H.D. rewrote the same story as Asphodel in 1921 and Hermione in 1927). Often very irritating to publishers and editors but necessary for the art, it seems
Thanks for commenting, Arden! I didn't know that about Jean Rhys (or else had forgotten) but am now intrigued. There must be dozens of other cases, as almost every writer I know of has at least one 'problem' story that they have tried to rewrite various times over.
During my brief time in Sacramento, I met Ray Carver through his first wife Maryann, who I briefly worked for. Everything was brief in 1966. “You’re a writer?” She said. “So’s my husband, you should meet him.” There was a little poetry magazine called The Levee. Ray may have been a faculty advisor for it, but it was a group project, its pages collated by hand at the communal house where I briefly lived. I showed Ray the poems I was submitting and he showed me how they needed to be revised. I was 22, up until then thought poems pretty much came whole, from God. They don’t. You have to learn to edit yourself, but those alpha readers or fellow workshop writers are vital too.
Thanks for sharing this memory, Patricia. I love to hear about encounters like this!
I enjoyed reading this, RG. I’ve read both versions of RC’s WWTAWWTAL—there’s only one winner.
Am assuming by that you mean the 'Lish' version?
Of course!
In the process of writing and re-writing my novel, I’ve come to see it as sculpting. I sculpt the clay, and it gives me a hint at what I’m really making. Then I soften it and reshape it again. And again. The same material takes on new forms until I finally create what I was meant to.
Hi Angel, that’s a really useful way of thinking about process. I like the idea of words as clay - malleable as putty- and the writer engaged in shaping and re-shaping forms. Thanks for sharing.
It's interesting, I've been thinking a lot about revision lately too, in connection to Jean Rhys and H.D., both of whom were notorious perfectionists and often wrote several full versions of their novels (Voyage in the Dark was rewritten from (now missing) Triple Sec over twenty years later; H.D. rewrote the same story as Asphodel in 1921 and Hermione in 1927). Often very irritating to publishers and editors but necessary for the art, it seems
Thanks for commenting, Arden! I didn't know that about Jean Rhys (or else had forgotten) but am now intrigued. There must be dozens of other cases, as almost every writer I know of has at least one 'problem' story that they have tried to rewrite various times over.