kind are demolished in crowds, no matter how gay and riotous they are. […]
January 12, 1975. A lazy thought-filled Sunday. Having finally begun the third part of The Assassins , having figured out the personality of the narrator, so far as possible, now the organization of scenes is all, the texture of the revelations, not exactly familiar territory but no longer as maddening and frustrating and dismal-seeming as it was only yesterday. The break must have come during the night but if so, it was symbolic, an odd refraction of consciousness with no specific content involved. Of course this is everything ; yet one cannot speak of it, or even point to it.
Now that I write in a new way, in a really new way, I wonder that I ever had the patience to write in any other way.
In the past, I wrote a first draft straight out, laboring and blundering through difficult scenes, passages, transitions…going from Chapter 1 and to the last chapter and the last page. Often the last page had been written in some vague form, the last paragraph generally known or sensed (which is still the case: but there are so many “last” paragraphs now, so many possibilities!). Then, with the first draft completed, I went through it with a pen and X’d things out and wrote in the margins and added extra pages and plodded and toiled and made my way through what I believed to be (but I was deceived) my final vision of the novel. If my more informed consciousness was impatient with anything, I simply re-wrote passages, expanded and contracted and edited, as all writers do, I suppose, not always liking the sense of heaviness, density, the sense of doing combat …. What I did not know at the time was that any newer, more developed consciousness (even if it is only a week’s development, or a day’s) finds it naturally very difficult to accept the old limits and expectations, let alone the accomplishments, of the old. So I did battle with the “old” and, once again, got through the entire manuscript to the end, often with innumerable inserts and paragraphs crossed out and question marks in the margins and tiny notes (often so tiny I could hardly read them, thenext time through) to expand a point, to describe more fully…. The manuscript at this point looked like a hideous conglomerate of hieroglyphics, codes in red and blue pen, frantic notations and indecipherable queries…but it was there, and accomplished, a mission accomplished temporarily. Then I set it aside, usually for weeks, and worked on stories or poems…all the while thinking at the edges of the novel, or contemplating it directly, and taking out the ms. to make still more notations…always more, more…until after six months or so (really can’t remember now; and of course there were one or two novels I never bothered to rewrite, being caught up with the excitement of something new, and I threw the first drafts away after a few years, no longer interested in them…. ) I began the not-always-very-interesting process of rewriting and revising (but never extensively, since I had already done that—or so I believed) and completing a final draft. With the first novels I was almost religiously faithful to the early draft, changing only words here and there, usually shortening, condensing. And I went through in chronological order, working. It was enjoyable but at the same time work. Then, with the completed manuscript, it was complete in my imagination…whatever it was, to me. A series of events, a single large and encompassing and profound experience, a group of people, a setting (usually imagined as part of the characters, with its own role to play, subtly)…and thematically intelligible. No confusion about that, ever. I knew what the novels meant or what they meant to mean. The characters were sometimes partly real, partly fiction…they did exist, in their own beings…but they also participated in a larger context, which had meaning, which was meaning.
Hence the
January 12, 1975. A lazy thought-filled Sunday. Having finally begun the third part of The Assassins , having figured out the personality of the narrator, so far as possible, now the organization of scenes is all, the texture of the revelations, not exactly familiar territory but no longer as maddening and frustrating and dismal-seeming as it was only yesterday. The break must have come during the night but if so, it was symbolic, an odd refraction of consciousness with no specific content involved. Of course this is everything ; yet one cannot speak of it, or even point to it.
Now that I write in a new way, in a really new way, I wonder that I ever had the patience to write in any other way.
In the past, I wrote a first draft straight out, laboring and blundering through difficult scenes, passages, transitions…going from Chapter 1 and to the last chapter and the last page. Often the last page had been written in some vague form, the last paragraph generally known or sensed (which is still the case: but there are so many “last” paragraphs now, so many possibilities!). Then, with the first draft completed, I went through it with a pen and X’d things out and wrote in the margins and added extra pages and plodded and toiled and made my way through what I believed to be (but I was deceived) my final vision of the novel. If my more informed consciousness was impatient with anything, I simply re-wrote passages, expanded and contracted and edited, as all writers do, I suppose, not always liking the sense of heaviness, density, the sense of doing combat …. What I did not know at the time was that any newer, more developed consciousness (even if it is only a week’s development, or a day’s) finds it naturally very difficult to accept the old limits and expectations, let alone the accomplishments, of the old. So I did battle with the “old” and, once again, got through the entire manuscript to the end, often with innumerable inserts and paragraphs crossed out and question marks in the margins and tiny notes (often so tiny I could hardly read them, thenext time through) to expand a point, to describe more fully…. The manuscript at this point looked like a hideous conglomerate of hieroglyphics, codes in red and blue pen, frantic notations and indecipherable queries…but it was there, and accomplished, a mission accomplished temporarily. Then I set it aside, usually for weeks, and worked on stories or poems…all the while thinking at the edges of the novel, or contemplating it directly, and taking out the ms. to make still more notations…always more, more…until after six months or so (really can’t remember now; and of course there were one or two novels I never bothered to rewrite, being caught up with the excitement of something new, and I threw the first drafts away after a few years, no longer interested in them…. ) I began the not-always-very-interesting process of rewriting and revising (but never extensively, since I had already done that—or so I believed) and completing a final draft. With the first novels I was almost religiously faithful to the early draft, changing only words here and there, usually shortening, condensing. And I went through in chronological order, working. It was enjoyable but at the same time work. Then, with the completed manuscript, it was complete in my imagination…whatever it was, to me. A series of events, a single large and encompassing and profound experience, a group of people, a setting (usually imagined as part of the characters, with its own role to play, subtly)…and thematically intelligible. No confusion about that, ever. I knew what the novels meant or what they meant to mean. The characters were sometimes partly real, partly fiction…they did exist, in their own beings…but they also participated in a larger context, which had meaning, which was meaning.
Hence the
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