Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem in Conversation

and now welcome Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem hello hi there we're actually doing something very dangerous here I have it as it occurred to you because we had weirdness we are very frequently confused two weeks ago I had a guy come up to me you know with his hand over his heart and he said I just I'm so excited to meet you your books have meant so much to me especially Yiddish policeman's ball and motherless Brooklyn and that's only the I'm thinking now I should write a book called Yiddish policeman's ball I'm the title is available and it's not it's not bad I mean we're just perpetually cross identified misidentified and to the point that the photo app on my computer you know how it will do face work I mean we're friends we've known each other for my time and it'll say like this is is this Michael is this I yell it and then it'll say is this Michael and it's no it's a picture of him so and I don't even think I like that I have to like I fully expect to be accidentally buried in your grave we could have just pretended I wonder how but we haven't told them who were claiming true yet right Jonathan and meet them I'm Michael no no when I walked up when I walked up I haven't seen Michael a little while I said oh thank god I trim my beard just before cut because it was a few days ago it would have been even worse well um I mean maybe we should we could talk a little bit about what things that we don't have in common ways that were not a layer or we could talk about the things we do have in common because I think the first time we ever met was at a book festival in Florida Amy and I had read motherless Brooklyn which had just come out the year before and I had read some of Jonathan's earlier books and we just dropped into this conversation I don't know if you remember this but we started talking about how the 1970s people tend to think of it as this sort of disco and cocaine and and all the things you think of it the 1970s but how there was this sort of like back woodsey Jeremiah Johnson kind of strand to the way things were in the 70s and a lot of things were made out of wood and leather and I don't we just fell into this conversation right away and and we did discover there's this kernel of connectedness that's partly generational part and the popular culture that we both grew up loving and admiring and similarities of temperament there there really is it there whenever I do get misidentified as you I don't have a sense of like outrage or oh my god again I there's always a part of me that goes like well of course duh cuz then there is a there's a yeah well and probably as we get older we're converging because of generational things I mean one of the things that I think about when I think about first meeting you is that now we seem approximately to be two guys in the rearview mirror of literary time but when I first met you you doll ready been a famous writer to me and to the world for a long time I I was a bookseller selling your books when your first novels came out and I was like oh there's a new guy in the firmament who's not me one of these days I'll stop being a bookstore clerk who is this fresh-faced impudent guy and you know and and is he any good and then I read the mysteries of Pittsburgh and was demolished by Oh brilliant it was and I was like okay I guess there's a reason why I'm in the bookstore you know so when you when you greeted me so warmly at the Miami Book Festival I was also that was a moment when I was first becoming welcomed by other writers I hadn't had very many such encounters really I mean I tore I'd had them in a microcosm because I'd had a pre a kind of kind of tidal pool version of a literary life which is that I published science fiction stories in the traditional pulp magazines and I'd gone to conventions so I'd fraternize with other science fiction writers which was a kind of a really marvelous for me it wouldn't in a way it was like a farm team a triple-a version of I mean for many people that is the place to be but I always knew that I quite situated what would I say I was incompletely situated there so then when I wrote motherless Brooklyn and some other kinds of readers and venues wanted to meet me I was I was excited in a new way I was like I was a second it was a second start for me I mean we in a way we've talked about this before but we've had these kind of Criss crossing trajectories in some ways because I started out being a writer wanting to be a science fiction writer thinking I would be a science fiction writer or fantasy writing science fiction stories that in some ways that weren't comfortably science fiction any more than your science fiction was ever quite comfortably science fiction but and not being certain about where that was going to get me or where that was gonna leave me and I went into this writing program at UC Irvine where you know the stories that I first turned into the MFA program under the inspiration of writers like JG Ballard and Italo Calvino and um ya or so that Kayla Gwynn were met with like not just in comprehension but with active resistance and like and distaste and and people the kindest thing people said to me is I would like to be able to help you yeah but I can't because I hate science fiction I don't like science fiction so I jumped like I thought okay I'm in this program I want I need to be able to take advantage of these people who are here and they can help me and I do like to read mainstream fiction I love Cheever and Fitzgerald and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor and I have written in those modes before too so let me just stop this put this to the side I wrote the mysteries of Pittsburgh which is pretty mainstream and then that's what I was doing been for the next little while after that even though I had I didn't intend and then I've kind of have trekked backward you know not backwards not the right word but I made the crew I went to the other side of the mountain and have gotten closer and closer to johnner fiction as I've come a long way you've you sort of went in another the other way yeah he's suddenly striking me they're talking about what's similar but reverse it's like a mirror image that that's that's it's pretty striking because I did and of course your move was much more self protective in a way right I decided perversely to you know at that moment which I experienced in college mmm-hmm when people in a what was then a traditional literary context saw the stories I was writing precisely under the spell of Calvino Stanislaw LEM philip k dick JG Ballard but also Kafka you know Bohr Hayes they were like this isn't okay we can't really get comfortable with this and especially since you're also mentioning American science fiction genre which were at that time as my friend David Bowman later said to me it's like you walked into the party with on your shoes mmm-hmm why would you do that right it was so in such disrepute but I decided I had the counterculture every action I decided but you can't fire me I quit I'm gonna be that person now and prove you wrong and I cherished this ideal and talked about it all the time that you could come from there and then be so stupid superbly appealing a writer that would demolish the you know I thought I was gonna single-handedly break the curse you know and you know and I I thought about a few careers that were examples like League wins examples of kind of walking into the party with that on your face I'm still finally being like the belle of the ball is the hardest way to do it yeah the way that she chose or that you chose I decided that was my my my goal was to prove them wrong instead of coming from the you know it and and and and then I would just talk about it it inordinately I think must have bewildered people because I was constantly saying yeah here's the plan and they're like that's a terrible plan because not only will the the main of quote-unquote mainstream never welcome you on those germs they'll never agree that it's okay that you started over here but the people in the genre are gonna be insulted that you're like trying to climb over their bodies exactly I was like no but I like them all and I'm gonna be really friendly and garrulous and just make it okay and you're not rejecting yet where you came from yeah in that sense so I think that way you just had points to another very significant difference between us which is that unlike you I am a nice Jewish boy and you are not at nature no that's a frequent misconception about you that I think furthers people's tends not just the Jewish but but the nice I think that it really is true that the simplest deepest way to tell us apart is that you're much more of a pleaser exactly and I I usually actually look for opportunities to remind people that I and I'm uncomfortable or or that something I feel or think might be uncomfortable to them I don't smooth those things down and the work reflects it and I think my my personality reflects it and that's that's the truth yeah I'm just my elders were we're telling me you know this is not gonna work for us and we can't dumb help you and I say okay well I'll make an adjustment you're a nice Jewish boy and I'm a I'm a dark Quaker guy but what do you do well how'd it what like I mean so many people think you're Jewish they and you put on lists there's Jewish right but I know your mother I that's the thing is Lauren June I make it very difficult i I what what I have done is is offer every contradictory cue because I've written about Jewish characters again and again characters who are much more Jewish than I could ever have a claim to being and then again on certain technical grounds recognized universally my mother was Jewish great but she was third generation secularized you know commie she was a red diaper baby I was a Paisley diaper baby mm-hmm it was so distant from the world of identification that I was right there there you know I was I was I grew up in a hippie household my father was a practicing Quaker and I followed him into that practice for a while and I was in New Yorker and you but the trick is when you're a New Yorker you're also you know the register of your sense of humor your your your food tastes your your sarcasm registers as Jewish so there's all these signifiers that go with that but I you know I just really am very I actually was certified as not Jewish because I was I was once now this is a real story I was once to marry in in the Jewish practice and I went with my bride-to-be to the to the rabbi who had to agree to marry us under a chuppah and after a conversation with me he he rejected he said to the he said to the family of the bride I can't marry this Wow yeah you didn't yeah I'm actually like unlike a lot of people who might have to wonder like Madeleine Albright I know that I'm not yeah yes a rabbi I'm like not kosher that's funny do you were not talking about writing at all no we had the writing life that was our assigned topic yeah right you know we're also having a difficulty which is that were following George Saunders who was so stunningly brilliant and beautiful and everything was on the writing life that all I want to do is just paraphrase him and did I know I know is it is it you know one thing I thought was interesting that that they were talking about was this idea that the practice of writing when we do it when George does it when anyone does it if any of us do it so if you do it long enough that it increases your empathy do you think that's true well I I mean empathy is a really charged issue right now right there's there's this whole system of relations between you know because we're in a very oppositional world and empathy is often offered as a kind of a path to the middle in an oppositional world and I and I'm very anxious about paths to the middle these days and what I think about instead that works for me and this is again to fail to talk about writing itself specifically but we'll find our way back there I just think about another word that that George offered that I really like which is kind kindness you know there's a Henry James quote that I think about all the time where he said they're just three things in life be kind be kind become and/or Vonnegut said god damn it babies just be kind yeah yeah and I've also seen it described exactly in the same formulation as the Henry James to Mister Rogers so choice Henry James had a thing that you could that you could pretend mr. Rogers said be kind be coming I'm at the three in it is what interests me because I pulled over that that little trick the little stunt of three and I thought why are there three and I and I thought there's three to point out that we already know how to do two of them we can be kind to baby's movement animals if we're not sociopaths like we know to be kind to helpless things that are under our care and we can be kind at the end to the dying parent no matter what their intimate crimes in our lives we can be we can take care of people when they're helpless again it's the middle kind the the the kind that we're searching for in the space and that's maybe different from empathy because empathy argues that you need to think that someone's thinking makes sense to you and I mean does it or is it simply a matter of saying I can't for example torture this person or throw the right well off of their medical the bottom lines of empathy absolutely and of course but also the practice of thinking in a kind way about the people who you are having difficulty empathizing with I think that slight gap for me is is now where you know that I I want to just imagine them either on their deathbed or as a child I mean that sounds gross but could I get there where it's like and of course the difference what's the difference why is the middle kindness difficult it's because of the power relation they might have power over you and that's very difficult and but naming it is a path not to the middle to some average doubt well the truth lies somewhere between these oppositional places but that the kindness would matter anyway yeah I mean I think I think in a way and I mean empathy is a very commendable admirable thing that we are in very short supply of generally speaking but it to me it's ultimately up is about imagination yeah I mean to me that's what's required first of all to write your way into another imagined human's life and there there are circumstances and that's something that I think writers as a faculty that writers call upon repeatedly in their work but I had what I think is great is that it's also the faculty that's most called upon in readers that the reader is participating in that act of imagining what it's like to be another person what it might be like to be another person and I do I I mean I do think the more you are able and willing to imagine yourself into another what and empathy almost is the secondary result of that it's simply the things you need to do just to imagine what it might be like to be the person yeah I think maybe my key my resistance to empathy as the goal is that it actually it's it's like a placeholder it's like between the the acceptance of a real other the confrontation with difference mm-hmm that's not the a fear of confrontation but a okay I'm I'm with you in this moment and the total mind meld that you're describing which is I mean that's it a book is a device a novel is a device for making two brains temporarily confused and and intimately confused not just empathic like oh now I see how you feel but I am you right right now and maybe I'll never be the same because I spent some time being you and that's a mind meld it's much more than empathy it's actually three in a way because it's it's the it's the writer the reader and the character and you're sort of you know as your as a reader at the with the best writers I feel myself not only completely immersed in the life that I'm being invited into but I also feel you feel like you're in dialogue with the writer even if it's an imagined it's your imagined construction of the writer but the writer writers are my friends the writers I love most I feel like they're my friends and they've been my friends my whole life of its Arthur Conan Doyle or Edgar Allen Poe or Michael and OJ it was actually a friend of mine in real life but there's a there's a there's that when I go back to their books I feel like I'm going over Taurus when you're out you're spending time and that's in them totally imagined relationship it doesn't really exist and I think you know but on the other hand when I was listening to them talking about there's sort of the ameliorative power of of that kind of imagining of enough empathy but then and then the interviewer coy said something like you know what would it be like if we all were writers like if everyone was a writer and you know I mean there are two things I thought of while they were talking that I've found it before is like if if I'm writing really is that does strengthen that muscle then why are so many writers yeah and to then just imagine the world where everyone's alright at first I don't know if there's enough how many agents would you need exactly who would be the it would be the age and then you need a lot of them would have to be really angry writers pretending to be agents no seriously I mean that it's funny you made that joke which is not a joke about why can writers then be if they're engaged in this sublime operation all the time and it also reminds me of a joke that's not a joke that Karen joy Fowler once made where she said you know if kid is cute everyone opens their wallet it shows me their adorable kid and I or sends me of you know a little video file I mean I love your kid but some of them must be growing up to be the adults that I hate when does it when does the conversion happen funny so I another thought that I want to follow on and is this idea of the book it's a it's a space that the the minds meld in but that is genuinely a participatory active you know experience and I heard and I don't know maybe this is even a backdoor into why our writers I don't know if I'm gonna get it what you mean they're some of them but but so I I heard I'm forgetting his name the author of exit West Mosin huh me yeah beautiful beautiful book and remarkable speaker and he and he said I seemingly spontaneously it was probably the kind of shtick I have and he just did a good job of making it seem spontaneous he said I don't really write novels I write half novels the the the the reader writes the other half and this made me think also George saying if you furnish the room completely it's a hotel room and someone might like to visit it and admire it but it's not theirs if you leave space for them to put things in then they move in and it's theirs and I thought yes half novels that's what I do that's why I like to leave certain things under described and my editors draw often pushed me to describe things I've chosen not to and I actually don't have the answer let's say what does this person's face look like could you just tell us and I think I don't know mm-hmm and I often also face this question with what happened your character after the end of the last page if you write an endearing novel I wrote one endearing novel motherless Brooklyn people say Oh Lionel what happened to him later you know did he ever get a girlfriend okay I don't know I don't know anything about what happens after that last page that's the space that the reader's imagination moves in and completes but I then I took that thought one step further and I thought I write half novels because I am a half person hmm writers aren't very incomplete people and they write these books that we complete but then they have to come out of their rooms and walk around the world and it's frustrating and sometimes makes you really into a very unpleasant person to meet to be so incomplete you're in a state of wandering and work you're like a worksite you know is like the Big Dig in Boston someday there's gonna be a whole person here mmm promise but actually being a writer maybe is about it's I'm not sure what I just heard you saying but oh thank you so there's an idea in science called neoteny yeah neoteny is a sounds esoteric it's an idea from evolutionary science that some species advanced or anyway some new creatures emerge from staying in the child form of some other creatures which is sounds really weird but like you can think about in the Otton II as being like we we resemble the babies of certain ape species much more than we resemble the adults mm-hmm we're not as strong physically our heads are big and our bodies are smaller we have less hair and dogs resemble dogs resemble the puppies of wolves right that's neoteny well maybe writers are a little bit jnanis like we're kind of holding on to some very clumsy childlike parts of ourselves in order to do this work and that's also you know there this goes back to Karen Fowler the children are also sometimes because they don't know how to function being half people yet you know I mean I I do think I think George was suggesting maybe suggesting something like this to that when you write when I'm writing I'll just say I'm a much better person yeah but I'm not writing I'm much smarter I'm much I have much more empathy I can see farther I can understand things that were said and done in my own past or stories that I've heard from other people about things that happen in their past that that seemed purely to be a case of some kind of abuse or some kind of outrage er or whatever a disregard and then I can look into you know actually I get what was going on there to have that kind of and all the the thing that what's it called the les Breda les Calle like or Yiddish has got trap verdure like when you think of the thing as you're on your way down the stairs that you should have said yes 20/20 hindsight 20/20 a Mad Magazine version exactly when you're f when you're writing you're in yes Oh Monday morning quarterbacking yeah that's it so you're the whole job is Monday morning quarterbacking but and yet have the time and the leisure and the opportunity and you can say all the things you wish you had said and and and and you can have things come out the way they ought to have and you can look at others the way you wish you were looking at them when you walked or family life you know in full and stopping and just embracing them and and being like ah you know you can be you can look at everybody with the middle kindness I mean with rather with the the first and the last kindness even the middle people even the villains in your book you can look at them with the kindness of your you know your baby you're a kind of a baby mmm your child mm-hmm and even when it's a certain when it whenever there's this I might be looking back and trying to sum up in a short story an entire period of my life and by choosing one particular moment and then finding ways to fictionalize it and they actually make it into an interesting story and in the process of doing that suddenly a person that I knew for a long period of time that I never actually sort of sat and thought about and added up all the pieces of them they just coalesce and you get that kind of understanding and even if it's not like you're presenting them as now a wonderful person or the hero of the story they can still have done the same kind of harmful or negative thing there's a what you what I am able to find is the ways in which there I'm like that too and that we're all like that we have the same sort of so that's then you come out of that mode and you're still the same old idiot any trying to say this you dopes and not forgiving people when they need to be forgiving then right there you know there's another truism about writing and I don't know who the or originator of this is maybe it was mr. Rogers but that you write too to disturb the comfortable and to comfort the disturbed well do you know this is me think about that now okay some somebody that's why do they write to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed and again in my typical way if you have a theory about who that may be who's the afflicted afflict the comfortable and comfort be of evil that's a great magazine or the person the mother jumps oh yeah great I love that well I always think and you know what I love advice to Rogers it's I thought no it wasn't definitely wasn't mr. Rogers oh I play the piano to comfort the afflicted Friday the 13th yeah that that you are my afflicted your special no but what I wanted to say is just like the thought about my reader the book is a half book my reader completes it mm-hmm maybe that means I'm a half person great I thought I always think oh and you know what I'm on that team too I write to comfort my afflicted self or disturbed self and to disturb my complacent more comfortable self I'm also in the in the room mmm-hmm on both scores there so we take question let's take question yeah yes Oh take the aspect of empathy and add in the dimension of tension tension tension do you mean that a piece of writing yeah Oh in tension or tension tension just anxiety and crisis and conflict the thing that everyone will tell you first in a writing workshop this is meets the story needs conflict I think that is pretty much almost automatic it just has to be unearth because you have people in a room you have conflict and anxiety and neurosis and and it is true that a lot of young writers I'm in Georgia situation I teach young writers a lot don't put it in but it's not because it isn't implicit in the situation's they're writing they just tamp it down they put in all the safety stuff because I don't want anyone to feel bad so they write stories about unhappy people who are just okay and sit around and don't make trouble or mean people who never say anything mean and all you need to do is point out look you really want to put you really want to take the cork off this but to put two humans in a space in history in you know in a in a political reality you know you know you know psychosocial reality and gender relations is to find tension and crisis and conflict everywhere so you know it's it's just it's the stuff of of of the human I mean and I think that's one near most you're most called on to be empathetic it and when it's most difficult is in those moments where it would be very easy to sort of look at the superficial behaviors and say this person's being mean or this person's being cruel or that person's being inconsiderate or two people are getting into an argument and you know that's when you that's when it's most required that you stop as a writer if you're trying to write that scene and say well if I were this other person I'm writing I'm Sam drawing on in the version of an expiry said I had it so easy to stay in the fictional role that's closest to me and my own experience but I'm gonna actually write this story from the other person's get there's a cliche that you should give the devil the best lines yeah uh that you know writing against what you feel and know as I mean you know this is a form of rigor and a form of examination and a form of of truthfulness I think George was using that term truth a lot in that last session but it's also a craft its craft advice if you because the opposite would be what might be called shooting fish in a barrel he's just settling scores and proving things you already know and are comfortable reassuring you and your reader that you're better than this other thought or or attitude yeah great you know I haven't read the book so I feel like oh it's a questions about Americans dirt I just I feel like there for me there are too many people commenting about it without having read it and so I don't want to include myself in that group but yeah you take the words out of my mouth I've just always been very cautious to notice if I'm starting to have an opinion about it a book or a film or anything that I haven't experienced I haven't read the letter I haven't read the news stories like I have no knowledge the the dynamic well so the topic of appropriation I think is in a way starting to be implicit in one of Michael's descriptions which is that as you know and I always just index I try to index not as a writer and author who wants to you know have elbow room and you know gets all justified or defiant about people telling me what I can and can't do but what the core of the experience of wanting to tell stories is for me the index is my reading life and my the colonel of my reading desire my appetite to transmigrate myself my soul into this other person into any anything but myself to be surprised and and delighted and threatened and challenged and weirded out by other Ness was this drive as a reader so I don't think I can imagine not wanting to also experience that in my writing life it's not even that I I'm therefore like that I want the right therefore to give other people that feeling that I had it's more like my reading in my writing are so closely connected that inventing stories making up characters telling tales for me is a continuation of that appetite to be other than myself and I think that really without putting in some sort of ethical practice like and that's why we're all be better people after we read novels it's just really about a desire that I think funds the whole the whole space of my of my work yeah I mean it's about escape that's why I put it like I love as a reader first and then there's a writer it's this constant effort to get out of here and get into another life and to know and that's why I turned to reading initially that's why I think a lot of us turn to reading and that term escape escapism is often used in a pejorative sense but I think it lies at the root of of almost all of our initial motivations for why you start reading is to just you're trapped in here for your whole life there's actually no way to get up but the closest way the only way we've come up with ever to approximate that I think is through the experience of reading and and then through writing is just a is a version of reading in many ways for me so but I mean I think you know as in all things in life one of your primary duties is to recognize your limitations they acknowledge your limitations and do everything you possibly can to overcome those patience and then be willing to be judged on those limitations if you're gonna put something out there for other people to read and evaluate then you know you have to understand that there's going to be some kind of relationship between the amount of effort you've put into overcoming your limitations and degree to which various kinds of readers are gonna read what you produce and say you didn't do a good enough job that being said you know I think it's I think it's totally fair and reasonable to to expect that someone who is going to judge you or judge your work for having exceeded its your inherent limitations or not to have actually read the work I think it's like a minimum requirement hi yeah I I'll never I always pined for the glory days in my mid-teens to really the nth through the end of my 20s probably there was a 15 year period when it was I could credibly say that I was you know reading I was putting away you know 10 to 20 books of different kinds mostly novels in a month you know and it just was that was that and that's still the slag heap in my brain that's where all the energy that's the radioactive pile and I try to add stuff to it out of that same spirit of selfish interest and appetite but one of the things that falls upon you as a an author is a lot of dutiful reading and I don't mean that you necessarily reading bad things when you're doing dutiful reading reading friends manuscripts in galleys and commenting on them reading in my case reading my students writing or rereading texts that I'm teaching in the classroom because right now I'm teaching Kafka's the castle in a few weeks I'll start teaching Darce Lessing's of the golden notebook those are incredible reading experiences in every case whether it's for a blurb or for a student or to help someone with their manuscript or because I'm studying something or I'm going to write an essay or or a review of it there's an external conscience there's a super-ego saying what do you think of it and what are you gonna say about it when incident when your readings done which is so different from the absolutely excuse the term but kind of masturbatory glee of just gobbling down stories and language only for myself because of the appetite and I try to return when I can to that space where I something I just think I bet I would have a good time with that I bet I'll have trouble like stopping reading it and I'll like you know want to stop looking at my email and I try to reconnect with that as frequently as possible yeah I mean it's similar in in many ways with me I mean starting with that kind of golden peak period and you know reading constantly always with the book walking down the street falling into a ditch because I was reading while I was walking going to the library and checking out pile of books and then reading them as fast as I could and taking them back to the library now most of my reading is tends to be either two kinds either going back and rereading writers that I have this ongoing kind of relationship with and always it's to me every time I go back to a writer that I already know I've I love I've gotten a lot out of their work I go back partly in that at this point of expectation I'm gonna discover something that wasn't present to me when I was 30 and I read the English Patient and then I read it again when I was 40 and I read it again when I was 50 and every time I've read it I've it's been a different book to me that in itself is a kind of pleasure I get from reading that I couldn't have imagined getting when I was young and reading and and then I also most of my reading diet tends to be related in some way to whatever project I'm working on whatever book I'm writing or and it can be fiction still I might be reading novels where either have been told or I understand or I remember that the writer was wrestling with a way of handling time the passing of time and I have to do something complicated with the passing of time so like you go back and reread to the lighthouse you know to see how she does that that incredible middle chapter where all the years go by and 25 pages or whatever it is to to study in a sense so I'm either reading novels where I I'm hoping to get insight into problem solving that I'm facing how to handle a certain thing only through dialogue so maybe I'll go back and look at some Elmore Leonard or Richard Price or another writer whose dialogue I consider to be kind of the goal for dialogue or nonfiction that is the period I'm writing about or a social phenomenon that I'm writing about or whatever it might be a scientific concept I'm dealing with and then I'll read just how educate myself and I mean that's my primary one of my primary goals I guess now for reading in a way that it wasn't when I was young was it used to be purely for pleasure and education was like a side effect and now it's more often for education either because I'm looking for help in solving a particular writing problem from a great master or else to help me make my work better in some other way high sure shall I start I mean it it is it's it's so becomes the I mean first of all of course I think about it the way George spoke as something I'm imparting it's it's the primary thing I teach when people ask you how can you teach writing the answer of course you know the judo move is to say you can't not but you can teach revision and even before that I think of myself as a teacher of a practice that sounds like a duel like anyone can do that which is reading yourself you know my my students and of course I mean myself too we we we right believing that we're saying one thing or believing we're even interested in one thing and and believing convincing ourselves in order to keep going I'm getting it I'm nailing it it's all landing I'm making this work and you think you know every time you think at the end of the first draft you know I know I'm supposed to revise but I think I got it all it's perfect it's probably just all there and then you come down off the kool-aid and you breathe men you read what's actually landed on the page and that is your teacher and that's not an easy practice so what I teach in the writing classroom and what I practice for myself is the art of reading yourself not what does Jonathan leave them tend to write like him and he did it again you know look at that but what landed what what are these words saying what are these characters like once they came out of my brain and into language what are they doing what do they want you know what is this style trying to claim or what is it hiding and confronting my own draft as a reader precedes even the revision Act just absorbing it and saying Wow he believes that do I believe him or he wants this who are openness who wrote this and and and and and sometimes it's really also surely a question of interest oh I thought I was terrifically interested in making this thing happen well when it landed that was not energized but some other thing was coming to life some other relation maybe that's what this chapter is is for so it's really about abiding with your own results in material language paragraphs sentences scenes set pieces chapters and saying wow okay I can make that better but first I have to even see what it what it turned out to be um I mean you mention sentences and and that's really the key for me is I hate the first time through like the first draft is not even the right word just first like okay I have sit down and I know I got to write this scene where the characters finally meet whatever it is that first time through is so painful for me I hate every minute of it I get it down the second time through its pleasure like once it's there and I have a chance to evaluate the kinds of things that Jonathan's talking about but once it's once it's done I can relax like okay it I got something I can work with now to go back and to start rewriting is pleasurable for me it's like sanding you know if you do fine carpentry or something like when you're just trying to get that to be smooth and see the grain you come out and then to go back a third time is even more pleasurable and each time I go back it's much more pleasurable than the previous time and far more pleasurable than the first time so what I've learned to do is work one sentence at a time so I get that so it feels less daunting and horrible to imagine this whole new chapter this whole new scene I have to write that's gonna be so painful just I'll just try to start one sentence I'll just get that sentence and I'll rewrite it right there and then rewrite it again it reread it a few times so I have a sense of okay I'm I'm enjoying myself now and then go to the next sentence and [Music] really just proceed one sentence it's time now sometimes it happens fast like the whole thing from the first bit to the rewrites is a matter of seconds and other times it's hours but one sense at the time and time that's us that's it thank you thank you all thank you

Channel: Rancho Mirage Writers Festival

Views: 1,883

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: pDI1IpacHJ0

Length: 44min 57sec (2697 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 12 2020