An Office Hours from the Road

Hi everyone,

My wife, Paula, and I are traveling - I’m writing this late at night from the O’Hare Hilton, having just spent a wonderful couple of days with Joe Lindbloom and Sheri Williams, the two high-school teachers who changed my life by encouraging me to go to college and then helping me get in.

I wrote an essay about these teachers, called “The Secret Mansion.” Thanks to Olivia for locating it. (Scroll down a bit within the link.)

So…that was a lovely visit.

Tomorrow, bright and early, we’re off to South Dakota to spend some time with Paula’s family and our daughters. So I hope you’ll forgive a brief(er) response than usual to the following very perceptive observation, made in the comments, by Gail, re my post on rhythm, of last week - I’ve been thinking about this observation all week.

What Gail said was:

Q.

George, I think you might underestimate (in your response to questioner) your advantage in having a really “good ear” for the way a story sounds.

A.

Yes, Gail, I think you are absolutely right - not that I have, necessarily, a “good” ear, but I do have a very insistent and regular ear - that is, I can always count on it to have a strong and somewhat consistent opinion. My ear is what I rely on in my editing - it’s kind of a polestar for me. I didn’t choose this - it’s just the most reliably strong source of feeling (i.e., of decision-making) that I have as I write and edit.

And I think, sometimes, in my advice here, I do, indeed, assume that everyone approaches writing in the same way - by ear.

(And I should say that, by “ear,” I don’t mean necessarily an aural sense - but, rather, by “ear” I mean whatever is driving my edits as I read and re-read my work - it’s more of an internal ear, or prose-assessment tool, or something like that: the thing that tells me, forcibly, to “cut this” or “more this here” or “pick up the pace,” and so on. It’s my ability to see the dial on that P/N meter I’m always yapping about. But, for simplicity, let’s call it “ear.”)

But - and here’s the important part - 1) not everyone has an “insistent” ear, but 2) everyone has something that is insistent - everyone has some form of a polestar. It might be a fetish for structure, or figuring out plot, or it might be thinking about characters, or something beyond my ability to imagine and name - something personal to you, something irreducible - something that shows up, smiling and ready to help, whenever you sit down to write. Sort of: the gateway to the place where your strongest opinions live (or where your strongest sense of beauty); the place where that little voice resides that says, “Oh, this is exciting to me and I know exactly what to do. - let me at it.”

So, how about this: maybe the whole game is to find and make friends with your polestar and then indulge in it (or listen to it, or follow it), even to excess.

I can’t explain why I feel so inclined to trust my ear when editing, or why I enjoy doing that so much - but I just do. And I feel that, in my best work (the stories that have surprised me the most and expanded my sense of the world and of my own talent) it was the recklessness with which I was following my ear that caused the story to be good. (I just couldn’t help but follow it, wherever it led.)

What if this is actually what people are looking for when they pick up a book: someone engaged excessively in doing something they love to do and have allowed themselves to become obsessive about, by a method they have secretly discovered and aren’t particularly interested in defending. Readers (let’s say) love to see a writer steering by his or her own affections. They love to see a little concentrated, focused, madness. (“Look at that person, doing exactly what she wants, steering by some secret roadmap, beautifully lost in her task.”)

If we think about it this way, maybe things get simpler. We can put aside theories and writing witticisms and methods and all of that (including that part of our minds that is always saying, “Well, the problem is, you’re doing it wrong,”) and sit down every day with the desire to indulge ourselves in some excessive fun. Or, to put it another way, we can spend our writing day doing what we like - what delights us. (This is, I guess, a form of “following the muse.”)

The assumption is that a reader likes seeing a fellow human being in this state; she gets some sympathetic pleasure from watching the writer play around happily on a high-wire of his or her own making.

Now, there’s a potential pitfall in this advice, implicit in Gail’s question: it’s not the case that each of us will have some “polestar” that, when we indulge it obsessively, will produce something wonderful.

It would be nice if this were the case but it isn’t - there’s the issue of talent.

But: we do all of the hard work we do to find out - to find out what happens when we indulge joyfully, intensely, in the work of finding out how we do it, and then get after it, with all our heart.