I don’t usually write about my writing except as an example in a text or instructions for students. I generally find writing about writing self-indulgent at best and deeply, wearyingly boring at worst. There is so much else going on in the world! And Proust already did it, and Roth– ending a book by saying and Now we begin, presumably this book Maybe that doesn’t fit Portnoy’s Complaint.
Anyhow, I like novels that include a lot of life other than writing. If there are no writers in the story, I’m happy as a clam. But this is different. I’m doing something wonderful that most people will never have the opportunity to do, which is to revisit, simultaneously, my adolescence and my thirty-something self reflecting and recreating our adolescence.
And I’m doing this because of the necessity of digitalizing our literature.
I have a couple of books that are in one-book-at-a-time print format that don’t have digital versions. First published between 1979 and 1983 or so, they were scanned in, but never made digital until now. The immediate impetus to make e-books of my Blair Morgan novels, but who knows what else in the future– but whatever the else, is, it will be digital.
I paid a company to scan Higher Ground in as doc file, and they did it for what felt to me like a pretty reasonable fee (I hondled, which is the oldest of commercial transactions– I can’t afford your price what can you do for me?–and one of the things this experience is teaching me is how many words and phrases I’ve substituted with Yiddish or standard English– have lost a lot of West Virginia).
So I got the raw .doc file, and I’m going through the manuscript looking for ‘s turned into asterisks, and page numbers and page breaks I don’t want– you can pay the company to do this too, but it seemed like an opportunity to look for other kinds of egregious errors. What’s happening, though, is not so much that I’m finding errors, but that I’m getting this wonderful sense of being with myself thirty years ago and with myself forty-five years ago– the self that wrote the novel, and the teenager whose experience was the material the novel was made of.
My thirties self was before Joel, during my years of pretty intense psychotherapy. I was relatively close to my teen years, especially to the language and imagery I used at the time. I really got the intense ambition that was expressed by wanting to be a princess AND a class officer– also the painful and embarrassing class-ism, which is one of the subjects of the novel. The ambition, though, surprises me.
I was also excited by some of the stories I didn’t write: I found myself wanting to do a story about Bunny, not told through Blair’s alternatively envying and condescending eyes, but really about Bunny.
In the actual language, I find a lot of overwriting, and I’m cutting passages that just get overblown. I’m cutting sentences and phrases but only rarely adding anything. I don’t want to change it, but to tighten a little. Some of the tightening that I wouldn’t do then because I wouldn’t type again.
And, along with all this, I had just forgotten a lot of the story. I’m more than half way through– in the middle of the teen part– and I feel sort of stunned by the power of the past come to life like this.
Thanks be to the Digital Gods for this opportunity.