Couldn’t help it. Had to butt right into the top of my own newsletter to announce I made a hole-in-one on the golf course! Skip to the end of this email if you must read the riveting tale right away. If not, let me get into the guts of today’s blog first. It begins with non-golfer Andy Warhol...
Sometimes the little times you don't think are anything while they're happening turn out to be what marks a whole period of your life. - Andy Warhol
When artist Andy Warhol said this I wonder if he was recalling his childhood. When he was a little boy he was so sick with scarlet fever that his mother kept him home from school frequently. She set up a sickroom for him next to the kitchen so that he'd be nearby. This room became his first art studio. Andy and his mother spent hours in constant art-making, cutting up comic books, forming flowers out of tin cans. Many years later Andy credited his fascination for pop culture from these kitchen-art experiments. I love this image of a mom turning a quarantine into a cocoon of creativity. How she turned a sad situation on its head. Instead of mourning her son's loss of a typical childhood, she created moments of exploration and creativity using everyday things at hand from the cupboards in the kitchen. Neither she nor Andy knew that their play -- all of those little moments easing the boredom of a bedridden child -- would become the impetus for him to become a leader of pop culture, a whole new visual-arts movement. The culmination of those countless moments of discovery and love made the sum bigger than the whole of its parts. “The little times that don’t mean anything” - Andy said. Sounds like a description of lots of my days. Especially since the focus of writing my book is revision, not creation. Revising is not glamorous. This is a period of unromantic, day-in/day-out, slogging along. It starts with me opening up a chapter's Word document, then renaming it by doing "save as" to add a "v3" (version 3) to the file name ("v1" is the first version; "v2" is the version with editing comments from Sheila, my book coach). My first edit: I very authoritatively type Chapter (and the number) in bold, centered, in 16-point font at the top of the page, and then sit back and admire it. Excellent progress. Then the trudging begins. Midway through writing the first draft of the book I changed from third-person to first-person — so I’m updating that — and also from past tense to present tense. So those are fairly rote corrections. But I do have little moments of discovering bigger issues. Here are a few examples:
I realized there are three “Camille's" in the book - the artist Camille Pissarro; Claude Monet's first wife, Camille; and a third fictitious Camille who is a snooty, high-society ex-pat Dutch woman living in Paris. Since I made up this last Camille, she's the one who must change her name... do you have any suggestions? (Just googled "Dutch female names" There's Sofie, which means wisdom. Rebecca, which means a young woman whose beauty ensnares men...now there's a contender!)
Secondly, I've discovered I'm out of control on the seasons. I just read through a scene when my protagonist Jo goes into the countryside outside Paris: "Grasshoppers jump out of my way and the whirring sound of insects rises and falls in the hot air when I step down onto the train platform." (please don't judge that sentence) Just note that this scene take place in February! Winter! When the temperature is in the 30's and 40's and all those insects are dead. What was I thinking? Well, I was thinking about Jo. What was in her head and what she was trying to do and how she was scared and at her wit's end but toughing it all out anyway.
Which leads me to my last revision discovery.
My writing got better. As the months of writing my story went by, I got better. Each week when Sheila sent me edits, I read them, but didn't go back to make the corrections. I was scared that if I didn't keep writing forward I would stall out and stop. Besides, I had to turn in new pages every week. So, I saved the documents ("v2") of Sheila's versions knowing I would be making her corrections in the future when revising. Reading them now I see I must have absorbed her coaching instructions because I know I didn't make as many of those early mistakes later on. Here's one of her instructions:
"Always be suspicious of adverbs. Sometimes they are needed, but usually not. If you have a strong verb, you usually don’t need the adverb. In this case, 'race' is strong. It tells us things are moving quickly. Therefore, you don’t need ‘abruptly.’" As you can clearly see, my writing deeply absorbed her lesson so that my verbs are pungently, eagerly, fragrantly accurate and don’t need superfluously decorative adverbs. Ha! What are your “little things”? What are the moments that come to memory that define a period of your life? As Andy says, “The little times that don’t mean anything at the time they’re happening?” I just had a bunch of those little moments at my nephew Doug’s wedding in Lexington two weeks ago. I had dozens of little conversations — with my Brother who bought a new company, with Sisters I hadn’t met before (my Brother-in-Law’s siblings), with my Navy Nephew contemplating life outside of a submarine, with the Bride Mandy’s lovely mob of delighted family and friends — lots of details and updates and trivia were shared that over time will likely fade from relevance. So what remains? A residue of connection, tendrils of common ground, to be picked up again next time we meet. The little times — making up a whole period of life — are everything.
LOOK HOW THAT BALL NESTLED RIGHT IN FOR MY HOLE-IN-ONE! MEANWHILE, I VISIT A ST. LOUIS LITERARY SITE, 4504 WESTMINSTER PLACE, MEETING PLACE FOR THE WOMEN'S CULTURAL LITERARY WEDNESDAY CLUB (AUTHOR KATE CHOPIN WAS A MEMBER) WITH FELLOW WRITER ASHLEY.
How I'm Writing the Book Incorporating Art History Research into the Manuscript. I pulled together 12 pages of art-history questions into a Word doc, attached them to an email to my PhD frie
nd Sara, held my breath and hit Send. Would she freak out by the quantity? A week later we met at a coffee shop, and I thought it was to review my questions. Instead, she'd answered them! Neatly typed with links to references, of course. Now I have to incorporate her insights into my story. I'm thinking of pulling out the 3-inch binder that holds a hard-copy of my manuscript and write the art-history notes into the margins. It's old-school, but in the long run, I believe faster than trying to incorporate the ideas straight from a keyboard. Some of her insights rattle the plot, but don’t derail it. Need to think it through a bit. Books on Strong Women by Female Authors. My neighborhood bookclub just read, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows). The book’s title hints at its charming style. You guess it will be a playful; you find out it's inventive. The story is told through a series of letters, which makes it all the more impressive how the authors paint background and context and character cleverly all through the voices of the letters. The story takes place just after WWII in which a London writer, Juliet, begins a correspondence with members of the society, people who lived through the German occupation of their Channel island. Eccentric and kind, the characters radiate wit even as they depict the hardship and sadness they lived through. This is one of those small classics. Wonderful book, especially if you’re looking for witty summer reading. Personal: THE STORY OF THE HOLE-IN-ONE It was partly-sunny and in the low 90s when Husband and I decided to take advantage of a low-humidity day and tuck 18 holes into the afternoon. I am still so new at the game I don’t have a handicap so have been trying to get playing time in to gather enough scores (you need to play ten 18-hole games to get a handicap calculated). That afternoon we were both concentrating on each stroke, trying to make every shot count, when we came to Hole 5 — a simple par 3 — but ominously set on a little peninsula, its three sides surrounded by water. For me, its about 105 yards to the flag, so I chose my 7 hybrid club, ran through my mental checklist (club-head aim, grip, weight to the left foot, body still), I swung back and let the club glide - thwack! — that sweet sound of centered connection! The ball sailed over the water and bounced near the flag. “Good shot!” said Hubby. We jumped in the cart and buzzed over. But after we grabbed our putters and were walking up onto the green, Hubby’s ball was there, but not mine. Oh no! I hit it too hard and it rolled into the water! I ran over to the green’s edge to peer into the watery muck, looking for the ball’s white shadow. “Hey, Joan,” behind me came Hubby’s voice. “You’re not going to believe this...” I turned and he was standing over the hole, grinning and pointing down, “You made a hole-in-one!” Couldn’t believe it! Dashed over to the hole and sure enough, there sat the ball, coyly cradled inside the pin. Woot! Woot! We high-fived a few times then continued playing and were set to celebrate at the clubhouse when we were done except the temperature plummeted 20 degrees on the 17th hole, and a thunderstorm broke out over the course sending us all scurrying. Doesn’t matter. I’ll be celebrating for awhile! Now would be the time for me to make the analogy of practicing golf swings and concentrating on each stroke as similar to the “little things” this blog is about. I’m not going to. That game is not a whole period of life. Just an awesome afternoon! Better is the parting advice of Andy Warhol who says,
It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop.
Little by little,
