On Taking Notes Pt 2

the editing homestretch

One thing I wish more people knew about boxing is how much time fighters spend on the details. Blunt force, aggression: these qualities are important, especially in amateur boxing, when you only have three rounds to accumulate points, but also: boxing is a sport of inches and seconds. We spend so much time tightening our slips so we miss the punch by only a hair, sharpening our pivots and our L-steps, keeping our blocks and our parries close to our faces, maintaining the exact right distance from our opponents, never too close or too far. Few things are more lethal in the ring than a fighter with a perfectly calibrated understanding of distance.

I’m in the editing homestretch with my new book, and this stage is all about the details (I wrote about the first stage, the macro edit I got back in March, here). I got line edits back from my editor last week, which means a document full of track changes looking at everything from commas to small clarity questions to character details. Notes that highlight where the language could be a sharper. Notes that put everything under the microscope: word choices, transitions. The placement of a single paragraph. Should it go here or there?

All of a sudden it’s summer in the Hudson Valley. We’re coming to the other side of a little heat wave. Everything is green-green-green. The sunsets are neon. I’ve been at my desk early, windows open, going through one edit at a time: accepting, rejecting, reimagining in a different direction. Then once I do 50 or so pages I print them out and read them aloud, input those edits and keep moving forward. I’m so close to turning the novel in but also this is the time to go slow.

I once heard a boxing coach say that “small things are all things.” If a fighter doesn’t understand distance then it’s going to be hard for them to land any punches. If their defense isn’t tight, if the reach out to block their opponent’s punches, then they’re leaving themselves open. A faultline in the details can create bigger problems.

This is why the slowness is so important in the editing homestretch. Sometimes a line edit is just a line edit, and sometimes the edit evokes a bigger question. A handful of my editor’s track change notes, for example, made me realize that there was something about a character’s voice that I had not quite fully untangled. In Garth Greenwell’s excellent “How to Become a Better Stylist,” he writes: “A highly functioning style, I like to say, gives the impression of an entire life, and therefore an entire world, condensed to a voice…In all great writing, I think the prose itself conveys a particular quality of existence, the texture of a psychology, the essence of a world.” Where does the voice have the heft of a world behind it? Where does it convey a “particular quality of existence?” And where is that substance absent? Where does description and observation feel like it could come from anyone and not only from this specific person?

I’ve always preferred concision at the level of the line. I love a maximalist novel (Life & Fate, 2666) but I want to read sentences that pull me in a particular direction. Directionless prose is one of my least favorite things in literature. Ring of Night will be the longest novel I’ve written and the most densely plotted and I knew from the jump that I wanted the pacing to crack. So I’m also searching for areas where the sentences can become more distilled. This is less about cutting and more about making sure the language is energetically intensified.

In the ring the two hallmarks of skilled and experienced fighters are relaxation and efficiency. This is another reason why the details are so important. Fighting is exhausting; you don’t want to waste energy. Slipping a punch so that you miss by a mile is using more energy than needed. Highly skilled fighters move in such a way that every step and shuffle and block and counter contributes to the realization of their game plan, their vision. This is my favorite kind of boxing to watch, where all the technical units pull together and create a movement that feels transcendent in its accuracy.

Line editing is the time to look at all the technical units of storytelling and to see how they are creating (or not creating) the desired mood and feel and emotion and vision. On a practical note, looking at hundreds of pages of sentences can feel overwhelming, so breaking the work up into specific chunks really helps me; looking closely at 50 or so pages at a time is a lot less daunting. After I finish this first cycle of editing / reading aloud I’ll print the whole thing out and read it through again and see how it all feels. And then in a few weeks it’ll be back in the hands of my editor and by then I’ll be fully in camp for my next fight, working on all those details.

The Final Bell:

Some exciting film news: FirstGen, a production company whose credits include The Testament of Ann Lee, is developing a feature adaptation of my second novel, The Third Hotel. Michelle Garza Cervera will direct and Isa Mazzei is writing the screenplay. I’m really excited about this team.

I’m teaching two 1-day seminars this summer: Making a Scene on July 22 (because I think we don’t always talk enough about what scenes actually are and the many different ways we can approach scenic writing) and How to Revise a Novel on August 2nd (because I know what it feels like to be lost in the revision wilderness).

If you’re looking for more essays on style I also love Garielle Lutz’s “The Sentence is a Lonely Place.”