REVISION

I’m revising my new book of short stories and hopefully my last on the Holocaust. I think it has some measure of character to it but I’m not sure. I believe the stories in which I allowed my fantasy to take over may be the better ones, again who knows. I may be strident in a few of them, trying too hard. In any case revision sometimes involves when to drop a story completely. I’ve done that and it hurts. Sometimes I feel I have a paragraph or phrase that has come from the mouth of the muse herself and it is so damn hard to let go of that, like an affair or a memory of an earlier heartthrob. Since I am an autodidact, completely self-taught, unwilling to take courses, et al I am aware of the defects of being such a fellow; however, I do like the freedom of not being conditioned of how to write and in what ways. The learnings I’ve amassed over 40 years have been hard won and I feel as ignorant of the requisite skills as I did when I began in depression so many years ago. Writing then was a search for release or mental health. I began in pain.

I am stubbornly intuitive; ask me about the arc of a novel or how to plan a novel or how to write a short story and you will not get much from me. I am just too ornery to learn all that it takes. I go my own way. What I know now has been essentially acquired over decades; youth is now gone and my old age shows the pock marks where writing skills have not been assimilated — or learned. I am not a practitioner of a craft. In the truest sense I suppose I am an amateur. I believe I am a very good writer, no more, no less. The weaknesses I have do not gnaw at me. I go my merry way. The journey has given me success, inner success. For someone who did poorly in English in high school in the desperate 50s, I’ve accomplished much. I recall how I felt “less” when I mistakenly and in an unhealthy way compared myself to the teachers about me who had majored in English (I majored in history) and had grammar down pat. I still am weak in that area; but in terms of imagination and empathy I more than compensate for that — I excel. So whenever I teach a workshop I stress the feeling aspect of writing, the capacity to enter the world of others, to feel, to palpate the meaning in others, to see through cant, to feel oneself as a self. It is here that I have my autodidactic strengths. I  didn’t plan for all this. Thoroughly serendipitous. And what is serendipity except surprise.

So revision, I guess, for me, is to extract feelings within my prose, to make you feel touch or sensate in some way. I trim, I whittle, I cut out words, but I have a hard time shaping or making a paragraph or page send the reader out of the park looking for the baseball. Consequently I am very good at deleting words, condensing sentences, of writing leanly, sparely but the weakness may be in that I may not have squeezed the feeling to the fore. I may just be pulling out lint from the dryer filter. It is here I may fall short or I do fall short because I am lacking the necessary writing skills. What can be done about that? When you throw the dice against the felt wall and they break out into numbers, all has been done. A part of me feels the loss of skills, a part of me regrets that, a part of me stubbornly clings to old feelings, or armor and becomes defensive. One sane part says, support the ego! How many lives do I have? At this point I am just trying to churn out books of some quality with posterity in mind, with the children in mind, with myself greedily in mind before I come down with the wrack and ruin of being aged.

I am driven to do a good job, driven in the sense that I put my ass down on a seat and write; that I make a commitment to myself to create some kind of literary art; to do, to be; a personal commitment to understand myself before I enter the world of electrons; to pay homage to the culture that I come from; to honor my heritage, secular and atheistic Jew that I am. I give my all and often it does not measure up in the very writing I struggle to make excellent — or just damn good. Why have I chosen to write, often part time, often late into the night, on Saturday mornings when the kids were growing up? I wrote to find me! And I have, to large measure, come to understand a few of the greater continents in my being. River valleys, mountain ranges and lowlands have escaped my investigations, of course. And I have the grandiosity to believe that what I have discovered about myself may be of use to you, or of interest simply because we are connected as a species. When I go to my sleep, it gives me pleasure to know that a Freese may turn to one of my books and examine a father or grandfather or a spouse, and revisit that soul within any character in a story or novel. I am in the very periods I write; I am the paragraphs; I am the darkness and light: I am in every nook and cranny of my work and yet most of this is unknown to myself for the writer is the last to know — human beings as a species are the last to know about themselves.

We are all in need of continued and continuing revision.