Editing and being wordy

I am reading "Getting the Words Right: 39 Ways to Improve Your Writing" by Theodore A. Rees Cheney. Writer's Digest Books: 2005 that I bought from Powell's the other day. I spent some time at the store to make sure it would be a book I really could use. It is proving to be just that.

In the first chapter, it goes after a habit that I have and one that many writers have and that is including extra words, paragraphs, chapters, whatever. I will look at a chapter or a sentence and love the way it sounds or looks and hate to push the delete key. Not too long ago, I would not hit it at all. Now, I am getting better at it. One writer, Carolyn See, says it is "killing your children". Oh, I can tell you from experience it is exactly that.

Someone asked a friend of mine who is a published writer how he knew how he knew what to put in and what to take out. "Feelings will tell me every time. Make no mistake. When I write some incredibly beautiful prose but it makes me uneasy then I know it is something that needs to be removed. " Another writer who writes some of the best prose in the business removes more than she writes and she just puts it in a special file she keeps on her word processor so she can do it without tearing her nightgown (she writes in her bed clothes.).

I think that is where extensive reading comes in. A writer who reads as well as writes just knows what is working and what is not. If something sounds clumsy, it usually is. Sometimes, you have to put the writing down and take a break and eat some lunch or have some coffee but come back and look at it again. I knew one writer only who was drunk or stoned all of the time he was writing. When everything in his body began to fail, he took an overdose and left this world and he was stoned when he did. I think he was the rare exception. I don't think he ever wrote sober so never knew if he could nor not. He said he could feel his feelings better.

I never write drunk or stoned and when I tried it many years ago and read the result I was convinced that I was not one of those rare examples. I need to be sober when I write. I think I need to be sober when I exist. I often tell people I rarely drink because of the calories, but truth be told, I just don't like the feeling of an artificial high. I get high naturally although never too high because one can fall really fast and long and that is no fun.

Again, I am the kind of writer who depends on feelings. I also listen to what I am writing so I can see and understand what it is I am trying to say. I also put things away and then pick them up again and read them again. Often when I read old blogs, I re-edit them. It helps to put the stuff out there because I am practicing my writing and then publishing them. I don't get paid for my blog, but I try the best I can. I have learned so much blogging.

Of course, it is a one-sided conversation with myself. I often don't know what I am thinking about something until I write about it. If I write something and I feel good about it, and I put it down and come back and still have that good feeling about it then I did it well. The main purpose in life is to have a good time at it. Writing is something I don't have to do, but it is. Call it a compulsion but it is one of the treats of life as reading and listening to music. Editing can be fun too.

Writing to Deal with Problems

Ralph Waldo Emerson said that the more you travel, the more it becomes apparent you can’t escape yourself. I think when I was growing up, I really wanted to escape where I was, my family of origin and their craziness. Then because the insanity was with me in my mind, I walked right into more it when I established my own family. It took a lot of work on dealing with my inner demons to finally escape so that when I traveled, I did not take the twisted monsters of my family with me.

For the most part, I did most of the inner self work through writing. There was the journal writing, but there was other kinds of writing such as novels, poetry and short stories. I tried therapy at different places and with the exception of one hypnotherapist, I never found as much relief and self knowledge as I found in writing.

I always found words to be miracles in that one could put legitimacy to what was being felt and experienced especially when told repeatedly that it was not happening. It was. The words and sentences were the proof. I gathered all of the facts and put them down and I saw how what I was told was unreal was real. Writing saved my life. Other writers with similar backgrounds have said the same.

It isn’t just people like me with dysfunctional families but members of populations who have lived with the knowledge they are told they are not as good as the main population or that what they are feeling is not right or they should discount their own feelings of worth. I think that is why certain groups of people suddenly burst forth with great writers who express a counter opinion of worth from the mainstream or writers who write in secret in an oppressive government who tells them they are happy and free when they know they are not. Examples are the gay and lesbian populations of many countries including the United States. Women in many countries around the world write in journals . In China, women evolved their own special language so men would not read what they were writing about.

I am not writing here that expressing oneself on paper or on the computer screen is a cure all for depression or for other mental problems because it is not. It certainly did not lift Ernest Hemingway out of his depression. I remember where I was, walking the streets of Imperial Beach in California, when I heard on my small Japanese transistor radio when it was announced that he had died from a self-inflicted gunshot. Many writers could not write themselves out of their mental problems. I just know it helped me stay ahead of mine. Sometimes even writing can’t help. Still, it helps tremendously.

When I moved here to Portland, I did not take my problems with me or for the most part. Maybe I will find out next week I did. Who knows? If I did, I will write about it. What I do know is that I will have a new batch of them here. I will be starting my classes soon and have to deal with the impossible to ignore rejected manuscripts all writers get and the Battle of the Bulge that I have fought all of my life and the battles yet to manifest on the horizon.

Believing the Self

I grew up in a very dysfunctional family and was taught to disregard what was happening around me. Unfortunately, I learned too well and took those lessons with me into adulthood so that when I met adults I was involved in other people's sick games. I was astonished that I would be involved with the same things that I had tried so hard to escape. Again, what was happening me during those times as an adult I disregarded it especially when people told me that it was not happening. I believed them.

Things have changed. I write the things that are in my head now and I don't care what others say. I report it and take it as the truth. When I first found out that my house was stripped of its contents, I told my adult child that I was thinking of getting rid of some stuff when I got back. I did not want him to feel bad about what he did. When I got back to my house and saw the empty rooms where bookcases and books filled were I was heartsick. I saw the missing paintings, jewelry, television sets, furniture and sat in my room and became depressed and gained 20 lbs. Then I heard my ex-husband was coming back. I moved to Portland, Oregon.

I started to write in my journal and finally get mad. I began to see the enormity of what had happened to me. Then I had to get over the pain and detach and get on with my life. I did it with writing. There is still so much more to do. This morning, I started to edit some of my short stories. I got ready to take some art and exercise classes next month.

The family of my origin was such a dysfunctional family that my oldest sibling became a psychopath, my brother was a drug and alcohol addict who had issues with women and killed himself after a lifetime of unhappiness and depression. My parents are deceased now and although I ended up getting along with my mother during the last few years of her life, I never got along with my father and was glad when he died at 70 years or so. I was always afraid he would be a ghost and haunt me and I am glad to say he didn't. I had nightmares about him for years after his death. I never had nightmares about my mother after her death. I really believe she was a demon. I have nothing to do with my sister for she not only steals but does far worst and is better I stay away from her. All this I carefully note in my journals.

I am being more honest in this writing blog than I have been in the past. When I was a child, my father beat us all up with impunity. No one cared about this in those days of the early 1950,s and I still have the scars to prove it. My mother in her unhappiness beat us as well. Both of them were twisted sexually and abuse all of us from an early age. I worked hard to find help and did in Redding from providers that I paid myself. I could never get help from the Veterans Administration because there were so little help in Post Traumatic Stress Disorder for women although this has changed somewhat in recent years. I also found that meditation especially writing meditation was a god-sent for me.

Now, when relatives tell me I said this or that, I tell them I am not in the same situation and tell them I never said that. I no longer let them tell me what is real and what is not. I tell myself what is in reality and what is not. I wish I could have learned this earlier, but it is good that I learned it now than never.

Writing has and is saving my life. Writing dangerously is writing honestly. It is being honest with not only the self but the public. It is putting things down in one's own voice. I have a friend who is gay and was told all of his life that there was something wrong with him because he did not want to find a woman and settle down and have children. He would rather have found a man and had a good time because he does not want to settle down with anyone because like me he finds trusting someone enough to live with is very difficult. Also he finds that he is a very happy man enjoying his life and not beating himself up because he lets others judge him. It took so long for me to stop doing that too. He helped me stop that by reading his memoirs along with my own writing. His family is angry at him for writing about his past with them and uncovering all of their ugly secrets. The last lawsuit was recently thrown out of court. They always are.

Not all of us have such ugly pasts but we all have pasts. We also have presents and it is good to record them because the minute we shut our eyes at night the present becomes the past. I watched an old movie, "The Mating Game", on Netflix last night. Everyone in the movie are no longer alive. I could look up all of the stars such as John Lund and Gene Tierney and see what happened to them after the movie was filmed and where they are buried.

We all end up in the cemetery at one point and it would be nice to record the past so we can read it and learn where we were last year, five or ten years before. It was too bad none of those people in that movie recorded their lives for all of them had interesting ones. Those are the ones who have entries in Wikipedia. Many of us won't. We should be the stars in our own lives. We would be if we are recording our lives and if necessary writing dangerously those things that happened to us to not only release the anger but to help others in similar places as my friend did in his memoirs.

Writing Dangerously

Pat Conroy in his book, “The Reading Life” talks about his love affair with the English language: “I have always taken a child’s joy in the painterly loveliness of the English language. As a writer, I try to make that language pitch and roll, soar above the Eastern Flyway, reverse its field at will, howl and reel in the darkness, bellow when frightened, and pray when it approaches the eminence or divinity of nature itself. “

That is well and good for Conroy and I can understand how he loves language, but I didn’t start off with that love. Don’t get me wrong, I love language and the words on paper and how the meanings of words sing to me of things, ideas and even about people who lived long ago and even those who live now. I loved writing at first because it put terms and thus validation to what was happening to me. Language made me feel less alone in the world and the horror of my childhood became less of a nightmare because words made it seem like I could share it with others and that there were other human beings who were suffering as much as I was. Later I found out through words that people suffered far more than I did.

For instance, the words or term of post traumatic stress was a miracle when I came onto it and realized that this was what I had and why I acted the way I did. I went to see therapists at the Veteran Administration and would ask them what was wrong with me and the idiot would answer, “why do you need to know?” He would never say. Finally, in my reading I found the answer which was validated by a therapist in Redding, CA. I felt such a sense of relief and also that I finally knew after all of these years.

Perhaps that is why I found the concept of “dangerous writing” so appealing if I understand it correctly is that it seemed to give me permission to write the things that happened to me and to disregard the taboos that is placed on me if I was to tell the world and myself what happened and what still lurks in the shadows of my mind. Tom Spanbauer has his own reasons for writing what he wants to write and I have mine.

It’s ironic in that Conroy went through his own Hell with an abusive father but he had a loving mother. He wrote about it in his novels. I had no such thing. I had two abusive parents and attempts to bond with my mother did not work. I bonded with a brother to some extent and I bonded to books and to an inner world I would escape to during moments of abuse. What makes this whole process even worse was the way I did it. To escape the horrible abuse, I split into different and complete personalities and when I tried to get help for them the medical establishment, in part, disagreed whether or not this process even existed. I am talking about Dissociated Identity Disorder or DID or Multiple Personality Disorder or MPD. It was something to the public to titillate about and not something that saved me from becoming a psychopath. I survived and was abused further by an ex-husband.

I lucked out and I believed it was with spiritual help I found a hypnotherapist who helped me to integrate which I did. I then began to start the process of forgiving although I don’t think that is the right word. I wanted to stop being mad at those individuals so I can get on with life; but I needed to learn from those lessons otherwise I would be taken advantage as I was last year by my own son and his father. I needed to stop living in the same swamp of ugly hell my parents had put me in and escape from those who would attempt to put others including me for whatever reasons. I need further healing so I can let go. I also think I am not the only one in this particular place as I learned years before. There are others who went through what I want through. Maybe I can help others.

I think Spanbauer is right in that one can find redemption and detachment through writing through writing dangerously. If this is what is meant by dangerous writing then I agree. For such a long time I have been trying to figure out how to write what I want to write and was stymied by the inability to do so. Now, I am beginning to see a glimmer of light.

Using Writing To Think

I have often used my journal to figure out what I think about a certain matter or subject. Often, I will start to write about something and find out my opinion is different than what I thought it would be. Many writers have stated that they write to find out who they are and what they think about things and people.

Pat Conroy in his book, "The Reading Life", (Doubleday: 2010) states: "Good writing is the hardest form of thinking." I can concur on that. I have been writing on a daily basis for many years and it involves turning my thoughts into words and it is rarely satisfactory. It sounds so great, so steeped in wisdom and beauty once it is in the head and so mundane once it is on the computer screen or on paper.

Words are limiting and restricting in what they do to the thoughts. I am always reminded of the example of the word 'snow' and how the Eskimo people in Alaska have so many words to express snow and the English language have so few. When I first saw frost as a teenager in Southern California, all I could do was describe it as dew that is frozen on the ground and cars. I had no idea it was frost and was amazed when someone told me what it was. Another example for me is all the different hues of green of the trees. How do you describe the trees when there is a wind and they are all moving like a chorus of different textures and colors of green?

When you are saying things that are life changing or describing something incredibly important like the death of a parent or the love that you feel towards your child as he or she is being born, you have to put words together in sentences and make it mean what is in your heart and mind and that all depends on your word arsenal and your talents. You face the limitation of the language itself and your own ability to capture the magic.

Sometimes, it works. When you exercise those muscles that go into writing of mind and hands along with the heart and it flows with the spirit of the Tao, it flows freely and it full of the enchantment all magicians yearn for. It soars with the eagles, becomes the substances of rainbows and flies with the foam of waterfalls and in the clouds. Then you feel the extra amount of wizardry that writers feel now and then. It works best when you practice and practice every day and read the words of other writers.

Some writers write because they have stories to tell. I do that. But to be honest, I write because I cannot stop writing. I have to put my fingers on the keyboard or the pen on the paper. Even if no one else reads what I have written, I will still need to write. I also need to read no matter what it is that I am reading, I still need to read. For me, writing and reading is part of the same process. All of it is governed by the process of thinking. Writing and reading is thinking.

Pat Conroy looked at his world through his parents and family. I did not. I lived my life as an individual. I did not look for heroes although there are writers that I like very much, I have no need to see them up close and personal. I just want to read their words. When my sons were growing up, I saw many well-known people with my children and we met numerous ones. The most important reality is my own. I did not bond with any of my family but with books and music.

Conroy also uses novels and other kinds of writing to understand the world he lives in. I do that too. Conroy feels stories are paramount to everything else. Sometimes, I have found ideas to be important and have read novels which were written to express ideas. One of the most important elements in any story that I read is that I must like someone in the story. If I don't like anyone, I rarely stay with the story or book. The same goes for anything including movies. I need to think when I read so the writer must not do all of the work and I am a mindless and passive reader. It sounds too much like television which I don't much like. I want to wonder and question things and come to my own conclusions. PBS is a good example that has some programs that presents ideas and the audience must come up with their own judgments.

There is a lot of the world that I don't understand. That is a lot of motivation for me to keep writing. I like to think about what is happening around me and what it is that is really out there in the world and inside the inner world. I figure I have plenty of to write about. Every time I think I have reach a layer of understanding in my life, another layer is showing up underneath it and the whole process starts again.

Details

I have wanted to be a writer since the age of 7 years. Although I have read everything I could get my hands on, I knew at that age I was not very talented or capable as a writer. I couldn't spell worth a darn and knew practically nothing about grammar. What I had in my head never did translate onto the page. Of course, I had the excuse that I was a kid. Over the years, that excuse got weaker and weaker, but I wrote anyhow. It was the passion that kept me going.

I read authors that really have this wonderful gift and of course they work hard at it. I am reading "My Reading Life" by Pat Conway(Doubleday:2010) and he writes about books and writing since they are linked in many ways for a writer. He writes: "As a writer, I would have to walk many strange avenues, staying loose and keeping my eyes open, memorizing the names of streets and the faces of strangers, listening to unknown tongues, exploring severe, tended gardens, being aware of the traffic and the besieged faces pressed against windows in dimply lit houses."

I learned along the way, it was not a matter of just learning the words, grammar and way of putting sentences down; I had to learn to notice the details with my eyes wide open and see where I was and remember the people around me, the sounds of the music of life and the emotions of the moment. When I first started to write in earnest, I remember trying to write about walking on a forest path, on a busy street and although I have been there so many times I could not remember. I could not describe it as a writer. I was a big blank. I read other writers' descriptions and they put me as the reader on the forest path or on that sidewalk. I couldn't. They used words I knew the meanings and word structure I was familiar with but they did their homework by noticing the details of where they were on any given moment.

There were times as a young adult, I withdrew into myself and just worked on school work and did the least on whatever minimum wage job I had to get by. Of course, I did my homework but the world during those times seemed surreal. Noticing people and places were not considerations for me at the time and I noticed this deficient in my writing. I did not have a computer as they were not in vogue at the time. My writing suffered greatly. It wasn't a waste for I got through college and never did stop reading. Still, I would walk down the street and feel as if my feet did not touch the ground.

I have since married, divorced, had children and recorded details in my journals. I have found that worked best for me. I have gotten used to noticing my surroundings and my writing as improved tremendously. I even enjoy it now. When I travel, I pay more attention to my journal than the camera. I even sketch different places and love describing the places and people that I see. I am now a confirmed people watcher. I sit with my journal and just write what I observe. People rarely pay any attention to me especially since I have become a senior citizen. I would think laptops would be a great asset in the art of describing one's surrounding since there are so many people in restaurants and other places with their fingers on the keyboards just typing way and no one pays any attention to them.

I am not an expert on what writers should do but what this writer has done and what has worked for me. I know until I started to watch, describe and record my surroundings I was of no use as a writer. I wrote lifeless prose. I had to be able to describe a brick building and the windows in it as well as the doorway in a story. If I couldn't see it in my mind's eye, the reader could not see it either. If I could not see the character and describe him or her, then the reader could not as well. I often read how other writers do it, but it is actually doing it myself that makes all of the difference. I take what other writers do and apply it to what works for me. Everyone does it differently and there is no right or wrong way of doing it except not to do it at all.

The other day, I finished a murder mystery by Georges Simenon, "Maigret and the Apparition" (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: 1964). I have read many of Simenon's murder mysteries involving Chief Superintendent Maigret. In all honesty, I read this book to discover why his books were vivid and real to me when I read them. I have never been to Paris, but I can see Maigret and the streets and buildings as well as the people of Paris clearly.

It is a simple story involving a shooting of a police officer for an unknown reason. He describes the victim, Lognon, by his nickname, "Inspector Hapless" and he lies in a hospital close to death while Maigret probes the reasons why Lognon was where he was when he was shot. Each time the author describes the food that everyone eats, the buildings they are in and even the clothes they are wearing even the unimportant characters as one woman's husband who works as a night porter. He is sitting in a chair in a ugly purple robe, legs crossed and one slipper dangling from one foot. Yet, the description is not laborious and complicated. Simenon threads his descriptions through a lens that is concise and meaningful. Little does the reader realize that it is the marriages of the victim, Maigret, other characters that are being described. It is not a careless list of descriptions but carefully put together list of details that not only is part of the plot but gives meaning within the story itself. The crime is about art theft and murder but it is about marriage and how marriage differs with different people. There are good ample reasons that Simenon is considered an outstanding writer of this genre. In this case, he did it with details, effortlessly and almost without the reader's notice.

I learned a valuable lesson about the importance about details a while back. I took a speed reading course so I could whiz through my books in college and gain the important information about plots from the books I read. I had to unlearn all of those things I picked up in speed reading because I lost the flavor of the prose and because I missed the details of the book. Now, instead of reading a book just for the plot, I read it for the wholeness of the experience. I am the better for it. The same goes for writing. I put things down slowly and then come back to it with my editing pencil and put the details in it without being wordy keeping in mind the advice about not using adverbs unless my life depended on it.

The only enemy I have in reading is time. Pat Conroy's book is a library book so I have to keep at it and not go at it as slowly as I did with Simenon's murder mystery which I own. I also can't mark up Conroy's book since I don't own it. Still, I don't check out five or six books like I used to do when younger. The most I ever check out is three. I doubt if I will get to the third book before they are due.

I have never taken a creative writing class. I just let myself teach me what I need to know by doing the two essential things every writer needs to do, read and write. Other writers have done the same. When I was writing, I could see I was lacking in that area and needed to fix that hole before I could go on with what I wanted to do. I know there are writers out there that need those creative writing classes, but I am comfortable doing what I am doing now. I leave my options open, "staying loose and keeping my eyes open."

Memory

I am reading Pat Conroy's book, "My Reading Life"(Doubleday: 2010) and in it he writes about his life as well as the books he read and the books he wrote. He wrote about his life growing up as a military brat, the son of a U.S. Marine fighter pilot. It was a rough life which he describes in his book, "The Great Santini". His mother divorces his father after 33 years of marriage and one year after his father retired from the military.

During his childhood, his father was cruel to his seven children and to his wife and none of them ever told anyone of the hell they lived at home. Conroy wrote: "Because I was born to be a novelist, I remembered every scene, every beating, every drop of blood shed by my sweet and innocent family."(pg 195)

My father was not in the military, but he beat us and drank heavily. My mother finally divorced him after many years of marriage. I wrote about it in the journals I kept as no one cared about child abuse then. My mother never told anyone and denied it until the day she died including the alcoholic rage he would be in from time to time. Alcohol played a part in my brother's death as it plays a part in my sister's life. Luckily, it skipped over mine.

I was with a friend the other day and he had forgotten some of the times we had over the years. We had been friends since the 1980's and he is a very intelligent man and a few years younger than me. It seemed a little sad to me as he has not kept a journal. During the time that I have known him, he has been in a happy marriage to a wonderful partner and they are still happy together.

We were gazing at the journals that I had in a closet in my office in my new apartment. I still have them although I have no idea what will happen to them once I am finally gone; my youngest son saved them when my ex-husband and oldest son did the Purge in 2010 while I was overseas. I will forever be grateful to him for that. When my memories are disappearing, I can look over those journals and be reminded as I was the other day when I read the journal I wrote just before leaving for Korea in March 2010. I remember accurately what I was doing but not what I was feeling.

There were many times, I would look things up to be reminded of what was happening to me at certain times in my life and get a surprise at my reactions at a certain event or be re-acquainted with my feelings for I often remembered it differently. The events I usually got it right but my emotions were often different. Of course, I am looking at the past with hindsight. I could see how my first marriage was falling apart way before it really did. I just did not want to admit it to myself. The signs were certainly there. I am reminded of people who have since left my life. I often described dreams I have forgotten about. I wrote about my fears, angers and loves. I wrote about loving someone that I have long since forgot about. I wrote about the incidents of raising children, some very funny and treasured. My children are middle-age now. I am so glad I did.

Pat Conroy is a very gifted writer and although he is not one of my favorite; I can understand his book about his reading life the same as I can understand about being in a family in which the father was brutal and cruel. He still loved his father, but I never loved mine. I envy Conroy. I think this was possible because of his remarkable mother. I had trouble with my mother who beat us too. My mother came from another country and felt so disappointed in her choice for a husband and took her disappointment out on her children. Although we made peace before she left this earth, this estrangement left its mark on my life. I wrote about it in my journals as well. I don't know the end result of my writing life, but I do know that writing saved my life and continues to enrich my life.