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pameladeanDavid is fond of referring to the joke, or parable, or whatever it is, that begins, "I wish I could afford an elephant." The victim or interlocutor then responds, "Why do you want an elephant?" and the perpetrator replies, "I didn't say I wanted an elephant, I said I wished I could afford one."
All right, put that up on the shelf where it can wave its little trunk at you in a beguiling fashion from time to time when my sentences get too long.
When I looked at my Friends list entries today, I saw that both![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
matociqualaand melymbrosia both have links to this set of remarks by Anne Rice about her working methods:
Discussion is quite brisk, and, the last time I looked, pretty universally condemned Rice for self-indulgence and having an elevated opinion of herself, or at least of her work. Since I have written and deleted about four responses as being too long and possibly too heated for other people's comments sections, I'm putting them here.
I don't actually like Anne Rice's work and never have liked it. This does mean that no matter what I may hear about her working methods, I will not have that moment when I realize why I had such a sense of betrayal when I read this or that work. I don't have any personal stake in whether she has gone off the rails or off the deep end into some mirrored cave, wasting her substance on navel-gazing and self-satisfaction rather than being humble enough to write better books; or whether she has made a difficult decision to trust herself and be true to her work as she understands it. I have in the past felt about once-adored writers that they had taken the trip over the cliff into the cave (miraculously not breaking any mirrors, metaphor being the flexible thing that it is), and it is indeed a painful sensation.
However, my sympathy in this matter is almost entirely with Rice. Writers operate along an infinite number of continuums, one of which has to do with what one might call feedback, or outside input, or merely consultation. Some can hardly function without it; others can bear it only at certain junctures in the work; others can hardly bear it at all. Some can move from state to state, depending on their mood or, more often, I suspect, on the work in question. That is the case with me -- I have finished some books only because I got constant encouragement, and others only because I completely disregarded all commentary.
Where I sympathize with Rice, however, is in her description of how she writes, of how everything is put into its proper shape as she goes along, everything is related to everything else as she conceives necessary; so that the finished work is one whole thing, not readily susceptible to requests to make this character older or add more stage directions to long conversations. I don't work the way she does, because I do in fact do successive drafts, recognizable as such to me and others. But my sense of the work as a whole thing, of its parts as connected at every level, so that a lack of stage directions here points up a plenitude of them there, and a character's stated age forms the way in which zie sees the world, is similar to what she describes.
This sense of the whole five-dimensional object is very fragile. It's hard to hold it in one's head. The very best and most necessary commentary disturbs one's grasp. I've refused to make changes to keep my grasp on the object I had made, and I have hared off eagerly to make changes I acknowledged as essential, and then found that there was no longer a whole object there and that in a number of ways I needed to start again from the beginning and envision the book all over again. This process is difficult and scary, and I have lost my grip on several books I was working on and had them plunge into the abyss, never, or at least not yet, to return.
I want my books to be good, and I understand that my conceptions of goodness in books, even in my own, are incomplete and askew and flawed. But sometimes it feels more important to retain my grasp on the whole living object, even if it has six eyes, than to let it go and make something with only two. I don't think that this is self-indulgence; I think it's a hard choice among imperfect outcomes.
I wish I could afford to do what Anne Rice has done. And because she can afford it, I am really not at all sure that it was the wrong choice for her to make. Some people really do want an elephant.
Pamela
All right, put that up on the shelf where it can wave its little trunk at you in a beguiling fashion from time to time when my sentences get too long.
When I looked at my Friends list entries today, I saw that both
matociqualaand melymbrosia both have links to this set of remarks by Anne Rice about her working methods:Discussion is quite brisk, and, the last time I looked, pretty universally condemned Rice for self-indulgence and having an elevated opinion of herself, or at least of her work. Since I have written and deleted about four responses as being too long and possibly too heated for other people's comments sections, I'm putting them here.
I don't actually like Anne Rice's work and never have liked it. This does mean that no matter what I may hear about her working methods, I will not have that moment when I realize why I had such a sense of betrayal when I read this or that work. I don't have any personal stake in whether she has gone off the rails or off the deep end into some mirrored cave, wasting her substance on navel-gazing and self-satisfaction rather than being humble enough to write better books; or whether she has made a difficult decision to trust herself and be true to her work as she understands it. I have in the past felt about once-adored writers that they had taken the trip over the cliff into the cave (miraculously not breaking any mirrors, metaphor being the flexible thing that it is), and it is indeed a painful sensation.
However, my sympathy in this matter is almost entirely with Rice. Writers operate along an infinite number of continuums, one of which has to do with what one might call feedback, or outside input, or merely consultation. Some can hardly function without it; others can bear it only at certain junctures in the work; others can hardly bear it at all. Some can move from state to state, depending on their mood or, more often, I suspect, on the work in question. That is the case with me -- I have finished some books only because I got constant encouragement, and others only because I completely disregarded all commentary.
Where I sympathize with Rice, however, is in her description of how she writes, of how everything is put into its proper shape as she goes along, everything is related to everything else as she conceives necessary; so that the finished work is one whole thing, not readily susceptible to requests to make this character older or add more stage directions to long conversations. I don't work the way she does, because I do in fact do successive drafts, recognizable as such to me and others. But my sense of the work as a whole thing, of its parts as connected at every level, so that a lack of stage directions here points up a plenitude of them there, and a character's stated age forms the way in which zie sees the world, is similar to what she describes.
This sense of the whole five-dimensional object is very fragile. It's hard to hold it in one's head. The very best and most necessary commentary disturbs one's grasp. I've refused to make changes to keep my grasp on the object I had made, and I have hared off eagerly to make changes I acknowledged as essential, and then found that there was no longer a whole object there and that in a number of ways I needed to start again from the beginning and envision the book all over again. This process is difficult and scary, and I have lost my grip on several books I was working on and had them plunge into the abyss, never, or at least not yet, to return.
I want my books to be good, and I understand that my conceptions of goodness in books, even in my own, are incomplete and askew and flawed. But sometimes it feels more important to retain my grasp on the whole living object, even if it has six eyes, than to let it go and make something with only two. I don't think that this is self-indulgence; I think it's a hard choice among imperfect outcomes.
I wish I could afford to do what Anne Rice has done. And because she can afford it, I am really not at all sure that it was the wrong choice for her to make. Some people really do want an elephant.
Pamela
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no subject
Date: 2003-09-27 01:42 pm (UTC)I can't quite isolate what it is that irritates me--whether it's just that I have so little respect for Anne Rice as a writer that I'm offended by her pontificating, or whether that pontifical tone would irritate me from anybody, or what.
I think maybe what both
You don't seem to have gotten that from the essay, which may mean that I'm reading in something that isn't there. But I hope we can agree that there's a difference between saying, I cannot allow anyone else's opinion to come between me and this book, and No one else's opinion is worth anything. The first is something I'm totally on board with; the second is fine, IMHO, only for someone who isn't going to publish, and genuinely doesn't care, personally, financially, or in any other sense, whether anyone else reads the book or not. Publishing books, being wildly successful, knowing that you have a wide and fanatical fan-base, and then saying that no one has the right to criticize your books in any respect ... I'm not okay with that.
And what I saw her saying was the second, not the first. Which may be just me.
It's also true that I have very little patience for the more mystical ways of talking about the creative process, and her saying stories "poured" out of her got straight up my nose. That's a personal idiosyncrasy, and it may have caused me to read more harshly than warranted.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-27 02:14 pm (UTC)I absolutely agree that there's a difference between saying that nobody else's opinion can come between one and one's book, and saying that nobody else's opinion is worth anything. I don't see Rice saying the second, as is no doubt wearisomely obvious by now.
The reason I don't is that she says she looks forward excitedly to hearing her editor's opinions of a finished work, and takes them seriously as indications of the direction she's heading and so on. Now, why I don't cynically interpret that as meaning that she excitedly awaits unstinted fulsome praise, I don't know, except, well, that I am just as interested in objections to my work as I am in praise, so why shouldn't Rice be too? It's just that some objections can't be encompassed during the writing of a particular book; they have to be applied to between-books cogitation, or to the next book, if they are generalizable.
I didn't like the mystical language either, even making allowances for how very difficult it is to talk about the writing process at all. And I can quite see that that language in company with a declaration that one asked one's editor to stop editing could produce a very decided negative reaction. As indeed it has.
I plan to ponder why I view the whole essay so tenderly, but I think I'll spare you all the intermediate steps.
Pamela
Aha.
Date: 2003-09-27 06:40 pm (UTC)And there are actually people who do this. Because obviously their golden prose needs no editing, no fact checking, no revisions for plot--
--and so forth.
Now, the people who write these missive of unearthly glory are probably one tenth of one percent of my slush pile. There are actually more people who send thank you notes for rejections. (Which is also a little freaky, from the editorial perspective.)
But I don't think it's a nonsignificant correlation that they represent a partially overlapping set with the bottom tenth of one percent of the slush I receive.
So I have it now, and it is a squid I'm choking on. A bad case of slush-hives.
Re: Aha.
Date: 2003-09-28 10:50 am (UTC)It's very interesting that you should use the term "hives." I have held off on that metaphor or on using the term "violently allergic," but that is how some of the reactions have struck me. I have my own allergies, goodness knows; this just isn't one of them.
Pamela
Re: Aha.
Date: 2003-09-28 11:21 am (UTC)Which seems to have been much less violent than that of many others, actually.