Re-visions

Thoughts on new ways of looking, plus my weekly shareables: Tupac's murder, Matthew Perry's friendship, and a sweet child o' polka

The Freelancer’s Law is that you should try to use every piece of material more than once. In that spirit, today I’m reprinting a slightly edited version of the keynote speech I gave last week to the North Carolina Writers’ Network convention here in Charlotte. I’ve been thinking a lot about revising and what it really means. Hope y’all get something out of it. My 10 shareables are down at the end as usual. — TT

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Thanks for having me here, y’all. I just want to set the scene for a moment. It’s a Friday night in a city of 2 million people. Some folks are still getting dressed for their night out. The clubs will soon be hopping, there’s gonna be booze and romance and illegal substances and all sorts of other fun things. And we are here in a hotel ballroom to talk about writing. We know how to live the life, don’t we?

As Ed Southern said, I’m working on this book DOGLAND, which is due out in April, and which you can and should preorder right now at a bookstore near you. DOGLAND is a book about the Westminster Dog Show, but beyond that, it’s about the relationship between people and dogs, which goes back as far as 30,000 years. There’s no other creature on earth that humans connect with the way we do with dogs, and I try to look at what both sides get out of that deal. So I turned in the first draft of my manuscript last week, and I’ve just started revising. Revising, in many ways, is the fun part of writing for me. I read a profile once of a guy named John Swartzwelder, who wrote many of the greatest episodes of “The Simpsons.” He had a writing method I wholeheartedly endorse. Here’s how he describes it: “I always write my scripts all the way through as fast as I can, the first day, if possible, putting in crap jokes and pattern dialogue. Then the next day, when I get up, the script’s been written. It’s lousy, but it’s a script. The hard part is done. It’s like a crappy little elf has snuck into my office and badly done all my work for me, and then left with a tip of his crappy hat. All I have to do from that point on is fix it.”

There’s a lot of truth there. Those of you who know Anne Lamott’s book “Bird By Bird,” and her concept of a “shitty first draft,” will be familiar with that crappy little elf. But I do also think there’s something deeper going on when we revise. And that’s what I want to talk about tonight. 

My jumping-off place for this conversation is a quote from the brilliant short-story writer George Saunders. He has an excellent Substack on writing called Story Club, and a few weeks ago, talking about revising, he said this:

We are revising in order to come out of the valley called How Most of Us Think, at First, and move toward that peak up there called What I and Only I Can Do.

Let me repeat that.

We are revising in order to come out of the valley called How Most of Us Think, at First, and move toward that peak up there called What I and Only I Can Do.

That’s a pretty inspirational verse for me … so much so that I printed it out and put it on my desk where I can see it every day. But I think what hit even harder for me was the simple act of turning revising from a verb to a noun. Revision. I turn 60 years old next year, and I’ve been writing for a paycheck since I was 20. I have done countless revisions to everything from 70-word newspaper briefs to 70,000-word books. But in all that time I never thought much about the word itself. It’s blindingly obvious once you really look at it. Revision is re-vision. It’s a new way of seeing. Or maybe to put it a little more precisely, it’s choosing to see in a new way.

And I think re-vision is not just something we have to apply to whatever piece we’re working on, but it’s something we also have to apply to our whole approach to writing, and maybe our approach to life as well.

Most of us who write start out as copycats. We write stories like the stories we love, whether they’re Marvel comics or Judy Blume novels or anything in between. When I was 16, about to go on a long bus ride, I picked up a book of short stories by a writer I’d never heard of before, a guy from Maine named Stephen King. Two things happened after reading those stories. The first one was that I was afraid to get off the bus. The second one was that I spent the next couple of years trying to write stories that would scare the hell out of other people the way those stories scared the hell out of me. I was no good at it for many reasons, but mainly because I could not go all the way like Stephen King does. In his novel “Pet Sematary,” the protagonist’s 2-year-old son wanders out onto the road in front of their house and gets run over by a speeding tanker truck. It’s an incredibly traumatic scene. Then he writes a scene showing that it never really happened, it was just a bad dream, and everything was fine. And THEN he writes another scene showing that the happy ending was the actual dream, and that yes, that little boy did get run over and killed. Stephen King can be one ruthless bastard. I was not willing or able to be that bastard. So for the first time of many, I had to re-vision myself as a writer. I had to reconfigure what I wanted to do and how to get there.

This has happened throughout my writing life. I set out to be a newspaper reporter. Then, after a while, I re-visioned and wanted to try being a columnist. Then I re-visioned myself as somebody who would try to write for magazines. Then I re-visioned as someone who hoped to do a podcast, and then to write a book or two. This kind of thing is rarely a linear progression. Sometimes you might be doing two or three things at once. Sometimes you might be doing none of them because the rest of your life gets in the way. There’s a constant need to re-vision your creative work, to get as close as possible to the path you want to take.

When we’re in the muck of it, we often go back to our old copycat ways. It’s easy to fall back on old habits when you’re tired. I could go back through my old newspaper columns and see when I was worn out or having a bad day, because they’d be cheap imitations of Leonard Pitts or Lewis Grizzard or whoever I needed to make the deadline. Also, when you’ve got a lot of words under your belt, you start copycatting yourself–trotting out your favorite writing tricks to prop up ideas that might not be as solid. It’s like lending your brand name to a knockoff version of your own product.

I also realized along the way that maybe I had the wrong goal in mind. I always thought about it as figuring out the next thing I wanted to do. What George Saunders is getting at is something deeper–figuring out who you want to be.

He frames it in a doing mode, but listen to the words: “move toward that peak up there called What I and Only I Can Do.” That’s not a category of words. It’s a category of self.

And here’s my inspirational verse for the night: I believe that the closer you get to that peak of what you and only you can do–as a writer, and as a human being–the better chance you have of being successful at both.

This is where we get into murky areas like confidence and courage. The wrong kind of confidence can trick you. Years ago a newspaper invited me to be their visiting writing coach for a week. Part of my job was reading clips from some of their writers and giving them suggestions on how to get better. Almost everybody there was eager for feedback. But there was one guy … when we sat down, I started out by asking him what he thought he needed to do to improve. He said “To be honest, I can’t really think of anything.” I just smiled and said, “Well, I have a couple of ideas…”

So you will meet people with irrational confidence now and then. But by and large the problem is the opposite–we don’t trust our own ideas, we don’t believe other people will care, we don’t think our own voice is strong enough to carry the tune we want to play.

Here’s the truth: Your true voice is the only one that will play that tune.

If you read the origin stories of successful writers, they tend to fall into one of two categories. One, a writer fails over and over until he or she finds her true voice; or two, a writer finds his or her true voice and gets rejected over and over until somebody believes. The reason Stephen King has sold hundreds of millions of books is because nobody else sounds like him. The reason we’re still reading Jane Austen more than 200 years later is because nobody else sounds like her. You probably know that Margaret Mead quote: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. It is the only thing that ever has.” Never doubt that a writer’s true voice will succeed. It’s the only thing that ever has.

This is where I have to stop and say that your writer’s voice will probably never make you a millionaire. In fact, it might never make you a nickel. There’s a reason you don’t see pictures of writers running around in their yachts. A scant few authors–the 1 percent of the 1 percent–make a mint. A fair number of others–and I am lucky enough to count myself in that number–make enough to pay the bills. Many, many writers make little or nothing from their work. But that work still has tremendous value … if you work to get to that place of what you and only you can do. Even if no one ever sees it, that work is important if it gets you closer to your authentic self.

I’ve been doing revisions long enough that I have a few tools I always fall back on. But it hasn’t been until lately that I realized those tools are good for more than just writing. Here are three things I always think about when I’m trying to reach that peak of the best I can do.

One, it’s all about the verbs. I know writers who do a search for the letters -ly so they can get rid of as many adverbs as possible and replace them with strong and precise verbs. A good story, like a good life, is less about talk and more about action. And it doesn’t matter so much how you do something as the fact that you’re doing something. Don’t worry so much about the modifiers. Focus on the actions.

Two, make sure every scene has a point. One of my writing gurus, the late Jay Lovinger at ESPN, taught me that every scene in a story should do two things: Advance the plot in some way, and tell you something new about one of the characters. A scene that does neither one of those things isn’t useful to the reader. When I was in high school we read a bunch of so-called classics, books like Thomas Hardy’s “Return of the Native,” which started with a long description of the heath in the countryside where a couple of the characters would eventually run into each other. It was six pages long but felt like 106, because there was no real point. Don’t write long descriptions of the countryside unless you have a real good reason. And don’t live a pointless life. Make sure that you’re advancing the plot of your life a little at a time, and that you learn a little more about yourself with every step along the way.

My third and final tip is, always be thinking about the ending. Sometimes it’s helpful to basically write a story backwards: Do the ending first, then figure out all the steps that naturally lead to that place. But even if you don’t have the literal ending figured out, always be thinking about the subtext of the story, the larger lesson you want readers to come away with. Aim for that spot. Stories don’t always have happy endings. But I think you do want your story to end with a satisfying ending, with the main character having changed in some way since the beginning, and having learned something important along the way.

When I think about the ending when applying this to life, I’m not thinking about death. This is not about figuring out how and when you want to cross through the curtain. It’s about your life being a lesson in some way about how to live, a lesson you learned and then can impart to others by, among other things, telling stories in your authentic voice. That’s the reason it’s so important to reach for that peak of what you and only you can do. Because no matter what subject you’re writing about, the voice of the story is part of your legacy. So it damn sure ought to sound like you.

10 things I wanted to share this week:

1. My guest on this week’s SouthBound podcast was Max Marshall, whose new book AMONG THE BROS is a wild true-crime tale of a massive drug ring operating out of fraternities at the College of Charleston. It’s a movie waiting to happen. And we also talk about Max’s friendship with Steve Miller. Yeah, THAT one.

2. My weekly for WFAE was about Halloween, and how we all need some kind of candy.

3. My friend in words Kathryn Miles has started a Substack called 100 POTS, about her attempt to lift herself out of trauma through pottery. I can promise you that this will be worth your time.

4. Another friend in words, Jonathan Abrams, reassesses the legacy of Tupac Shakur, now that his murder might have been solved. (NYT)

5. DOG NEWS: From now until DOGLAND comes out (April 2024!), I’m devoting this slot to dog stories. This week: A history of presidential dogs. (NPR)

6. Barton Gellman’s profile of Peter Thiel is understated, if anything, but still paints Thiel as a terrifying and terrible human being. The good news: Thiel has stopped giving money to Donald Trump. The bad news: He wants to live forever. (The Atlantic)

7. Hank Azaria on the friend who helped him get sober … Matthew Perry. (NYT)

8. Nate Bargatze did a fine job as host of SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE last week … my favorite part was George Washington’s vision of a country with completely baffling measurements.
   

9. The trailer for JACK REACHER season 2 is out and we are so damn ready:
   

10. Last week I gave you MEUTE, the German marching band doing techno covers. This week, thanks to Shedhead Chris Lakin, I give you The Heimatdamisch: A German polka band covering “Sweet Child O’ Mine.” (I tried to look up what Heimatdamisch means and got so many possible answers that I will just give my own definition: “maker of bangers.”)
    

    
    Have a great week, everybody.