Writing

Writing

I'm always writing.  24 hours a day I got my antenna up waiting to hear from the muse.

Most of the time the signal is weak, creaky.

But sometimes it's perfect.

Either way, I write it down.

And what happens is that I have a house full of little sheets of paper.   Everywhere.

Sometimes I find one, and I say that's it. That's right and I put it in the pile of stuff I'm working on.

Sometimes I find one and wonder where it came from and where it's going.  I put it back where I found it.

Here's one of the poems I put back where I found it.

Hurry Home -- It's getting late

1.

Black man came out of the dark woods
singing a song

2.

White man came out of the dark woods
singing the same song

3.

Here's what they sang:

The graves of the dead
are the graves of the dead

4.

In Jerusalem they do
the hokey pokey
and they turn it all around

The 60s

1960s

I took acid 5 times, cocaine twice, meth too often to remember, pot about 5 times a week for 6 years, vodka/beer/tequila just about every day.

I smoked too. A pack a day. A pack was about 25 cents when I started. Sometimes when out of cigarettes I smoked a pipe.

I also drank about 10 cups of coffee a day. In the morning and in the evening and at 3 in the morning.

I don't think I ever slept. Maybe once or twice. I remember one time being awake for 3 days and waking up behind a gas station in Moline, Illinois.

But most of the time I didn't sleep. At night I lay in bed, drunk and stoned and coffeed up, listening to the Doors.

"This is the end, my friend. This is the end."

I believed it and didn't care.

Milan Kundera Returns to America

Breaking News:  Milan Kundera, the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, returns to America

Milan Kundera took the bus from Prague. It was a long way, but he knew he wanted to come back.

There was something about the greyhound station in Chicago that called him back, reminded him of his childhood, his mother standing close to him as he waited for the light to change so that they could cross the street.

All those long days and nights on the bus from Prague, he stared out the window, dreamed about a greyhound running through the light, past the darkness.

There was one day when he almost asked the bus driver to stop the bus so that he could get off the bus and breathe in the light. He knew breathing was good for him and that he needed to do it, but he finally decided not to ask the driver to stop the bus.

It was better to keep going.

Maybe once he got to Chicago he would see his mother still standing on the corner there by the greyhound station, waiting for him to take her hand so they could cross when the light changed.

Sermon on God and Politics

I went to a politicians forum here organized by the young democrats and young republicans and listened to 16 politicians, dems and repubs, men and women, for offices ranging from city councilmen to US representatives,  and all of these people except one began and ended their debates/speeches with a statement about how God had told them to pursue this office for the greater good of mankind.

Two of these guys, in fact, were ministers.  One was a democrat-episcopalian, and the other a republican-baptist. 

'What they probably all are is bad readers.  I can't see how you can read the New Testament and walk away thinking that Jesus wants you to go into politics, or for that matter, thinking that Jesus wants you to join a church.

I read a book called What Jesus Meant by Garry Wills--and his take on all of this (and he's a catholic) is that there is almost nothing in the NT (at least in the 4 gospels) that would have you honestly joining a church.  And I've read bible scholars who have pretty much said the same thing (Elaine Pagels/Karen Armstrong).

If Jesus wants you to do anything, he wants you to be good and help people.  See the Sermon on the Mount.  You don't need a church for that.  If anything, a church gets in the way, and also sets up a structure that is more about structure and power and politics and maintaining power than it is about anything that has to do with the soul.

I was brought up a catholic and I look back on the things I was taught and it's amazing how little of it came from the teachings of Jesus.  If Jesus is point A, and the catholic church or any church is point Z, I don't think you can explain by either reason or faith how the one led to the other.

Jesus says in the sermon on the mount, as plain as plain can be: if they strike you in the face, turn the other cheek. 

I don't think any of these preachers or politicians is advocating that.  In fact, I think what all of them are advocating is a rejection of Jesus's teachings and an acceptance of a sort of vision of the marriage of politics and religion that you get in the old testament.  America as a sort of israel, a warrior state with a god who's angry at other nations.

One of the preacher/politicans at this political forum said something very interesting.  He said that where there is faith there is no need for fear.  I thought: that's wisdom.  I don't think Jesus ever teaches fear.  And those politicians and preachers (what bruce springsteen in one song calls "those soul sucking preachers) who get you worked up with fear to be afraid of other people and other countries are probably doing the devil's work.

End of sermon.

Found Poem

The Found Book:

You pick up a book of poetry on the floor of your study, and you wonder where it came from.

There’s nothing you remember about it.  The light tan cover?  The title?   The author’s name?  Nothing.  Was this author a friend whose name you’ve forgotten?  Or did another friend give you the book, telling you to read it because it meant so much or so little to him.  You don’t remember.

You turn to the blurbs on the back and discover the book is 30 years old, and you realize it’s  probably been sitting on your bookshelves for that long.

You’ve moved it from one house to another through those 30 years and you never once opened it.  It’s sat on those shelves through storms and deaths, through crises and miracles, and you never once opened it.

And now you do.

And the words are magic.

But only for a second.

You put it back on a shelf.

USELESS WRITING = ART + GENOCIDE

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Art

My Summer So Far

There is heat and stillness.

A car's been parked in front of my house for 2 wks.

Not moving.  Ever.

Something is killing the hedgehogs in Forest Hills.

I saw 4 dead ones in the streets this morning while driving my granddaughter to her summer camp.

Each one had its head cut off.  You could see this plainly.

Who's doing this?

I never see hedgehogs and suddenly there they are in the street.

Have other people noticed the dead hedgehogs and the heat and the stillness and the car parked in front of my house?

Making of a Murderer

Linda and I finished watching the Netflix 10-part documentary about Steven Avery last night.

Avery spent 18 years in prison for a rape he didn't commit, was freed after DNA evidence was found proving him innocent, and then was arrested for another unrelated kidnapping, rape, and murder.

The documentary is very troubling about the flawed nature of our justice system.

We couldn't believe the way he and his nephew were mistreated and misrepresented by the courts.

But the case against Steven Avery is much more complex than the documentary suggests.

If you've finished watching The Making of a Murderer, take a look at this article about the evidence missing from the documentary.

Here's a link to the article.

http://www.avclub.com/article/read-damning-evidence-against-steven-avery-making--230224

Me and God

Me and God

I tend not to see him as a person like you or me.  In fact, I tend to think of god more as the universe. 

For me the problem of too many religions is that they try to "belittle" god by making him our size. You know what I mean. The dude's the be all and end all of everything under, over and in the sun, and too many of us want to see him as the buddy we never had or the man and dad we never failed.

That's not the god that makes sense to me. That buddy/mom/dad sense of god that religions try to foist off on us.

All that religion stuff -- to my way of thinking -- is mumbo jumbo, whistling in the dark.

The bible? Folk stories, myths.

Can you have a personal relation with god? Sure, stand outside in the snow and watch it fall.

Breaking News: Milan Kundera, the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, returns to America

Milan Kundera took the bus from Prague. It was a long way, but he knew he wanted to come back.

There was something about the greyhound station in Chicago that called him back, reminded him of his childhood, his mother standing close to him as he waited for the light to change so that they could cross the street.

All those long days and nights on the bus from Prague, he stared out the window, dreamed about a greyhound running through the light, past the darkness.

There was one day when he almost asked the bus driver to stop the bus so that he could get off the bus and breathe in the light. He knew breathing was good for him and that he needed to do it, but he finally decided not to ask the driver to stop the bus.

It was better to keep going.

Maybe once he got to Chicago he would see his mother still standing on the corner there by the greyhound station, waiting for him to take her hand so they could cross when the light changed.

Writing Suitcase Charlie -- Writing is an Incremental Art

When you’re a writer, there are bad days and good days. Some days, you sit and write, and the words feel like they’re in someone else’s head; and some days, you write and the writing is fast and right, and you think that each word is a gift from some muse that really and completely loves and cares for you and what you have to say.

That’s the way it is for all of us, I think, but one of the things that I've come to feel about writing on bad days as well as good ones is that the progress, the movement forward, the work, is all important. It doesn't matter finally if the writing I’m doing is going bad or going good, just so long as I keep writing. Putting one word after another, the bad days will give way to good days because writing is an incremental art. One word after another, and another word after that.

This word-by-word idea came to me from listening to the painter Chuck Close do an interview with Terry Gross on "Fresh Air" a couple years ago. I was just starting to write my first novel Suitcase Charlie then; I had finished the first chapter, and I was looking at the tall hill of the second chapter, and the long row of hills and mountains beyond that. Finishing that novel seemed impossible. I had been writing poems for the last thirty-five years and was comfortable working with poems. Unlike novels, they live in little spaces, valleys and small plots of earth. I hadn't written fiction of any kind since I was in college 35 years ago, and I was sure I couldn't move beyond that first chapter.

Then I heard that Chuck Close interview.

I love his portraits, his giant canvases, 15 and 20 feet high and almost as wide. They're a human marvel. Terry asked him how he manages to create those mountains of paintings, and he said something that stopped me. He said that painting was an incremental art, one dot of paint and then another.

I had seen his paintings close up years ago at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and I knew just what he meant. If you look at those giant canvases what you see is that each one is made up of thousands and maybe hundreds of thousands of little dabs of paint, each dab almost a perfect moment of painting in itself. A little Jackson Pollock dab of painting -- one right next to another and another and another.

And I started thinking of my novel that way, each word, each line, each paragraph. One dab of words after another.

I knew I could write a word--it wasn't daunting to do that. And I knew I could write a line. And I figured I could keep going and going, one word after another after another.

And I did.

I finished my first novel and it came to 98,643 words, and all of them are on a literary agent’s desk right now, and then I finished the second novel.
And while I'm revising it, I'm starting work on my third . I’m on word 236 and climbing.

Like the poet Rilke says, “Patience is everything.”

________________________________

Suitcase Charlie is available as a Kindle or a paperback from Amazon.  Just click HERE.

You can hear a podcast of Terry Gross’s interview with Chuck Close: podcast.

Here’s a link to Chuck Close’s website: click.

The copyrighted painting of Close is from a site about his various self-portraits.

Losing Books



I'm thinking about losing some books, cleaning out my bookshelves.

One time I moved, I had to package up 150 boxes of books that I had a massed.  That was 35 years ago.  I've been collecting books and picking up books and just getting books since then.  I don't know how many books that is altogether that I have now but I feel it's a bundle.

I'm looking at books I've been living with for decades. Some I've read, and some are books I've always planned to read later.

We're thinking of moving again, or at least entertaining that possibility, so I'd like to get rid of about half of the books, but I want them to go to good homes. 

Some of the books -- the mass market paperbacks that are easy to come by -- are going to Goodwill, but there are other books that are special. These are the unusual hardbound by authors no one has heard of in 30 or 40 or 50 years, but who meant a lot to me at one time, authors like Thomas Berger (Little Big Man), Harry Crews, and Rudolph Wurlitzer.  And then there are books by writers I loved but will never reread: Norman Mailer and Joyce Carol Oates, for instance.  I've got a lot of these books.

If I were still teaching, I would invite my best students in and ask them to take a book or two.

But I'm not teaching and I'm afraid these books won't go where they should.

Any suggestions?

Super Bowl Sunday, 2015

Super Bowl Sunday 

I never watched football much when I was a kid.  My dad, a Polish farm kid who grew up without electricty or football, didn't follow the game and neither did most of my friends.  Their dads had also grown up without football.

So I never learned the game.  Can't tell the difference between a full back and a half back.  A snap or a spread.

I was invited to one Super Bowl game party about 35 years ago, and I asked so many questions I was never asked back to another.  I guess the news about how ignorant I was about football got around.

Anyway, I'm reaching out today just to tell everybody else in Ameica to enjoy the day, and I hope your team wins.

Deflated Poems

Deflating Poems

I have never deflated a poem.

I will never deflate one.

When I pass a poem on to you, you can bet your air pump that it is fully inflated.

Sparrows

I write poems about sparrows too often,  I've been doing it for years.  The first sparrow poem wasn't really about sparrows.  It was about St. Francis and how his hands taught sparrows to fly.  Since then sparrows are my go to bird.

If I need a bird, I throw in a sparrow.

Sparrows above cars, sparrows in black trees rising out of the rain, sparrows above the manger in Bethlehem, sparrows looking for a friend in a blizzard.

But really I don't know a thing about sparrows.

I don't even know what they look like.

Are they black?  Brown?  Gray?

Big or little?

Claws?

Really they are a mystery to me.

From now on, I only write about pigeons.

I know pigeons!

______________

Thanks to Wikipedia for providing me with a picture of a sparrow.

Me and Thoreau

 

Thoreau is an author I love. 

When my daughter was a kid, I would reel out these Thoreau quotes on every occasion whether we were making vegetable soup or going to a funeral.  I would have a quote, and I always acknowledged my quotes.  "Like Thoreau used to say ..."

I thought I was giving her gospel that would help her in all circumstances.  It would be the universal clock that Melville writes about somewhere--right in all longitudes and latitudes.

I was wrong--but have never learned how wrong.

I keep teaching Thoreau and expecting students to say, "Yeah, this makes sense."

They never say that.

For years I taught Thoreau's Walden.  All of Walden.  Whenever I could. Students hated him. Hated it.

He goes so much against their grain, and against the grain of any practical person. 

I was reading a review in the New Yorker about some book from Oxford U Press about technology in the 19th century, and the reviewer points out that Thoreau was the anti-modern.  The whole world wants to go forward into the 20 century and then the 21 century--except Thoreau.  He wants to take us all back to the 18th century!

People don't want to be farmers--lead simple lives.

Let me tell you a story and then I'll stop. 

My father grew up on a farm in Poland--my mother did too.  My dad then spent 5 years in Germany as a Slave Laborer, and 6 years as a refugee.  When he and my mom finally came to America, they were offered the opportunity to work on a farm in upstate New York, make a living and settle there.  They stayed on the farm there long enough to pay off their passage over from Germany.  

Then, they moved to Chicago (3 million people, coal dust in the air, not a cow in sight [they have some now at Lincoln Park Zoo]).  My parents worked in factories, double shifts, never took vacations.  There was nothing rural/bucolic about their lives there.  I once asked them, "Why didn't you stay on the farm in Upstate New York?  The trees the cows the quiet"  My mother said, "Are you kidding?" 

Working a shift and a half everyday in a factory where melting plastic burnt your arms and chemicals scarred your lungs was better than working on a farm.

________________________

PS

I know I could never live on a farm.  Not now.  It's no country for old men.  I can barely keep track of the garden in my backyard, the leaves of grass in my front.  

But I know I can still read Thoreau, and dream about the forests beyond the garden in my backyard.   

Revision is Experimentation

I taught creative writing for 25 years and have been writing myself for a lot longer than that. In all that time, I've learned somethings about revision. What follows is a statement of what I've learned about what revision is.

Revision is Experimentation

The Artist’s Idea of Revision:  Not Just Fixing

For a lot of people who are just starting out to write poetry or fiction, revision isn’t easy.  It’s not something they look forward to.  Part of the problem is that a lot of us are still carrying around the idea of revision that we picked up in high school or even grade school.  

When you got a paper back from a teacher back then and she asked for revisions, you figured, “There’s something wrong in this paper, and I have to fix it.”  And sometimes you would look long and hard at that paper and didn’t know what to fix.  Was there a comma that needed changing, a fused sentence, a paragraph that needed a thesis?  And besides, you didn’t like to think of your paper as being broken and needing fixing.  Most times when you figure something is broken and needs fixing, you figure that the thing is one step away from the trash heap.  Also, we were taught in school to think of revision as merely correcting comma flaws or spelling, that kind of mechanical stuff.

Revision in the arts isn’t really like that at all.  

I like to think of it as experimenting.  

Paul Valery, a French poet, said that “No poem is ever finished; it’s only abandoned.”

And I think what Valery said is right about poetry and all the arts.

The Story of My Father-in-Law Tony and his Yellow Car Painting

Let me tell you a story about my father-in-law Tony, a graphic artist, a painter, and how he works with a painting.

He literarily never finishes one of his paintings.  He is always experimenting with them, trying to see if he can do something different with them, trying to see them in a different perspective, in a different way—in the hope that that different way will be a final way of seeing the painting.  But like I said, “He never finishes one of his paintings.”  

When my wife and I got married 37 years ago, Tony gave us a painting.  It was a cityscape, a picture of a street that was slightly wet from a rain shower, and you could see a gray car across the street in front of a brick 3 story brownstone building (this was in Brooklyn).  And on the side of the street nearest the person looking at the painting there was a yellow car.  But you could only see the front half of a yellow car because the rest of the yellow car was out of the picture frame.

Okay.  That was the painting then in 1975.

The summer after we got married, Tony came to visit and brought his paints in one of those wooden boxes with a handle that painters carry around.  I thought that he was going to be working on something new, maybe the patio I was building in the backyard, but he wasn’t.  He had thought about that yellow car and thought about it, and decided that he wanted to move it back a little so that it wouldn’t be so big and yellow in the painting.  And that’s just what he did.  He moved it so far back that all you could see of the yellow car was the bumper and a little bit of its yellow nose.  

He was experimenting.  You might call it revising but the painting wasn’t broken, didn’t need fixing.  But he did want to see it in a different way.  This was his experiment.  When artists experiment, they try to get a fresh view of their painting or their novel or their jazz symphony or their movie.

And Tony wasn’t finished there.  When he came to visit the following year, he moved the car back even further, so that you couldn’t see the yellow car at all.  No hood.  No bumper.  He thought that he wanted to focus on the wetness of the street and the yellowness of the car was interfering with the wetness.  Maybe he should have painted the car a less explosive color.  Maybe he should have experimented with a blue car!  He talked about doing that

You get the picture.   

Over the years, Tony moved the car forward and he moved it back.  He changed the shade of the yellow.  He made the bricks on the buildings across the street slightly redder to balance the brightness of the yellow.  He made the street less wet.  He put a person in one of the windows across the street.  (When my daughter Lillian was growing up, she always thought that she was the girl in the window and that her poppy had put her there, so she would always be in our home looking down on my wife and me.)

And this experimenting never stopped.  

He’s 82 years old now and every time he comes to visit he sets to work on the paintings.  His current project is a picture of a rowboat in a stream.  There were 3 trees in the painting.  One on the extreme right, one on the extreme left, and one in the middle.  He’s moving the trees around.  Currently, the left tree is still in the picture, but the right tree is gone.  And the tree in the middle?  It’s a stump.  But you see more and more of the rowboat.  

This is the way artists and poets and film makers and musicians work.  If you’ve ever known any musicians, you know they spend endless hours practicing—but that practicing is really experimenting.  They’re listening to the sounds in their head and trying to get the sounds in their instruments to sound the same way.  And they do this through experiments.  

Let me tell you one more story: Yesterday I was listening to an interview with David O. Russell, a film director who’s up for an Academy Award for his film American Hustle.  If you don’t know that film you might now one of his other films, The Three Kings or Silver Lining Playbook.  

He was talking about shooting a scene in American Hustle with Christian Bale.  In his heart and in his brain, he knew exactly what he wanted.  He shot that scene 100 different ways.  

You and Your Poems

A lot of poetry is this sort of experimentation.  You write a poem, it takes you 5 minutes, but it’s not right for some reason.  Or you write a couple pages for a story, and it’s not right for some reason.  What’s on the page doesn’t match up with what’s in your head or your heart, so you experiment.  And the experimentation takes an hour or two; or if you are a sometimes obsessive compulsive like me, it takes 5 or 10 years.

When you do a first draft of a poem or a story, it’s just that: a first draft.  It’s your first attempt at that piece.  You look at it, and you see it, and maybe you think, this looks pretty good, but you also know that you don’t know what the poem will eventually look like.  

There are a million thing you can change in any poem or short story.  A million different experiments you can run.  And what most writers and most artists will do is try to consider how some of these experiments will change a piece of writing.

The Story of My Experiments with “Lovers”

Let me give you an example.  I wrote a poem called “Lovers.”  It was a long skinny poem.  It had short lines, 6 syllables each, and it was about 70 lines long without any stanzas.  I looked at this poem and thought, “This poem looks pretty good but how would it look with a longer line.”  So I put it in 12 syllable lines—but then it looked too much like a short story or long prose poem, so I put it in 10 syllable lines and 6 line stanzas.  

• Then I tried it with 4 line stanzas.  
• Then I tried it with 3 line stanzas.  
• Then I decided to make the first 3 stanzas the last three stanzas.  
• Then I decided to drop the middle 2 stanzas.  
• Then I decided to make all the lines skinny with 6 syllables each.  
• Then I decided to change the title.
• Then I decided to flip around the last 2 lines.
• Then I decided to….

If you want to see the finished poem, it’s online at

http://www.thedrunkenboat.com/guzlowski.html

(just click on the above)

This is a pretty typical process.  It happens in poetry and it happens in fiction.  Things change between the moment of writing and the moment of publication, and even beyond that.

My recent poem Brief History of Sorrow started out as a sestina called What is Sorrow: 39 lines long, 6 6 line stanzas and a three line stanza.  The end words in the 6 line stanzas get repeated according to a particular order, and these 6 words then appear in a certain order in the last three lines.  And if that’s not enough, the sestina had 10 syllables in each line.

Where did it end up?  When it was published it was called brief history of sorrow and it was a free verse poem (no form) –

first stanza – 7 lines

second stanza – 2 lines

third—4 lines

fourth—5 lines

fifth—3 lines

sixth –5 lines.  

The longest line is 7 syllables, the shortest is 3.  There are no repeated words or rhymes.

What I was doing with my poem was experimenting.  I didn’t know what it would finally look like, but I needed to see it in a variety of “poses” so that I could decide which pose (which look) I liked the best.  

And the more you know about poetry and the more poems you’ve written and read, the more ways of experimenting are going to be available to you.  

It’s the same thing with fiction.  I wrote a novel about a German soldier in World War II.  The novel focused on his trying to get back to his lines after getting lost behind enemy lines.  There was a lot of action in the novel, lot of shooting and killing and running and fighting.  When I revised the novel, I ended up with a novel about a german soldier separated from the woman he loved.  The novel alternates between a chapter about him in the war, and a chapter about the woman he loves living in Berlin during the same time period.  

It’s a much better novel and it wouldn’t have been written without my experiments with the book.  

Summary

No work of art is ever finished, and that's true of poems.  There are a million things you could change in any poem or any story.

• Poems without stanzas can have stanzas put in them.  
• Poems with short lines can be made poems with long lines.
• Poems with long lines can be given short lines.
• Poems with 6 line stanzas can be converted to poems with 2 line stanzas.
• Stories without a sound track can be given a sound track – just add a CD player
• Stories without a sense of the past can be given a sense of the past
• Stories with one major character can be given a second
• Stories filled with paragraphs and paragraphs of descriptions can be broken up with dialogue.

There really are a lot of possibilities.

So, when you start doing revisions for this unit, try thinking of them as experiments.    What writers do is experiment with their own poems.  They try it one way and then they try it another way--just to see if they can do it differently.  And maybe doing it differently will spark some kind of idea!  And that idea will help the poet create the poem that will stop the world or make someone love someone a little better.

The 3-Step Process of Experimentation

1. Step One: the actual experiments:

When I do revisions, I usually do them in 2-steps.  The first step is the actual experiment step.  I do a lot of different things to the poem to see what kind of things are possible with that poem.  I change so many of the things in the poem just to see if I can spark something that will help me see the poem clearer, help me see what my poem is capable of.

Here is a list of some of the things I do.  Other poets do other things, and as you keep writing and growing and changing as poets you will find your own list of things you do when you revise.

Guzlowski’s  22 Commandments of Poetry Revision

1. Remember: Revision is experimentation.  You don’t know what the poem will look like until you’ve looked at what the poem can look like.)
2. Try the poem in 2 different forms  (If it’s got 4 syllable lines, try it as 10 syllables or 6 or 8)
3. Change the position of a stanza  (For example, make the third stanza the last stanza)
4. Cut out three lines
5. Take out all the adjectives
6. Cut out 10 % of the words.
7. Cut out 10 % more
8. Try the poem in a different tense (if it’s present tense, try it in past, for example)
9. Try it in a different pronoun (if it’s all in first person singular “I,” try it in second person singular “you.”  Or if it’s all “she,” try it as “he.”)
10. Turn a free verse poem into a formed poem
11. Turn a formed  poem into a free verse poem
12. Write the poem backwards (I’m not kidding—start with the last stanza and end with the first.)
13. Take stuff from one poem and stick it in another (Got some great stanza in a weak poem?  Try it in another poem)
14. Take a stanza with lots of particulars and double it
15. Make 1 line break change
16. Make 1 stanza break change
17. Add 1 particular
18. Add 1 metaphor or simile or comparison
19. Add 1 near rhyme
20. Add 1 disconnected detail (a lot of times you can get something interesting going in a poem by just throwing in something that is completely unexpected.)
21. Add 1 internal rhyme
22. Do 1 crazy thing to the poem

Guzlowski’s 18 Commandments of Fiction Revision

1. Recopy your story — open a new word doc file and start retyping your story.  you’ll immediately realize that you are changing stuff as you go.  
2. re-write the first sentence  – most important sentence try it a different way.
3. Take a paragraph of description and change it into dialogu
4. Pause the story – have the main character think about something that happened long ago that has some relevance to the story.
5. Cut out the first paragraph of the story
6. Cut out the transition paragraphs that get you from one place to another
7. Add a description of some object that doesn’t seem important to the story—make it important
8. Add a paragraph at the end
9. Summarize a dialogue scene into a single paragraph or Take a longish description from your story and present it entirely in dialogue
10. Introduce a new character
11. BOUNCE—description of action, description of place, characters thoughts, dialogue—are the 4 elements you usually see in a story—too often one will go on for too long—bounce it.  Introduce dialogue into a block of description, thoughts into a action etc.  
12. Cut out a scene
13. Change the title of the story
14. Re-write the story from a different point of view—my World War II novel was written in the third person.  After I finished the first chapter, I re-wrote it in 2nd person and third.  Went back to the first.
15. Rearrange the action.  Try out the story starting it in the middle.  Or starting with the ending and working your way back.  drop the first paragraph
16. Re-write the first sentence – the most important sentence.
17. Choose a character from your story who is the least developed right now. Write a list of everything your character resents or is ashamed of in the entire world.
18. Write in the voice of this character twenty years later, describing the events in the story that’s being told in the present. How does the character feel about these events now? How important was this day in the context of his or her life?

2. Step-two:  Looking at what you have

Once you do a bunch of the sorts of experiments that I describe above, take a look at what you have and see if it works.

Normally, what I will do is take all my versions of a poem or story and spread them out in front of me.  Sometimes I’ll have 10 sheets of paper, sometimes 15 sheets with variations of the same piece of writing.  Sometimes, only 2 or 3.

What I do then is decide which is the versions that works best for me.  Different poets do this differently.  What I look for is the sound of the poem.  So I read each version out loud, and determine in that way which is the version I’ll go with.  If I’m comfortable reading it out loud, if it sounds like something that comes easy to my lips and throat and speech rhythms, then it’s the one I take.

What I also do sometimes is go through the various drafts and circle what seems to be working best in a draft, and then I work up a super-draft, that is, I work up a draft that tries to bring together the best things from all the drafts.

3. Sharing your Experiments:

Most of this experimenting happens when you’re sitting at your desk.  Writing alone.  

But there’s a part of the revision process that’s public.  And should be public.  

I don’t know if Barry Koplen mentioned it but every writer needs a writers’ group to run things by.  

Sometimes getting involved with writing and revising is so overwhelming that you really can’t tell what’s working and what’s not.  I’ve written and rewritten poems and have come up with 15 different versions.  My head’s spinning by that time.  

I need somebody to look at the stuff and let me know if it’s working.

That’s where a writers’ group is essential.

I’ve never known a writer who didn’t share early drafts of his or her work with friends, other readers.  

Different ways of doing this: you give the friend a draft and wait for comments or you read the thing and get comments.  

Either way – it helps.  

Conclusion:  Here’s an important thing to remember: don’t think of any draft as your final draft.  I’ve never met a writer who didn’t change something in a draft even if that draft was already published.  Sometimes we make decisions about a poem and realize later that that decision was the wrong one—and we go back to an earlier draft or even try something new.  

Our writings are fluid, they are a thing in flux, alive and growing and changing as we think about them and work our experiments on them.  

In fact, I think poems and stories like to be experimented on.  It’s like when you take your dog out for an unleashed run or a walk: it loves being out in the free air and moving across the countryside like a furry bolt of happiness, seeing what it can do—seeing what miracles of movement it’s got in it.