Something on a Monday

I’m again kind of drunk. I think I’ve been drinking too much. I still miss the possibility of life with Ariel. I don’t know why she abandoned me. I really hope she does and doesn’t find this; I hope she finds it so she can know how I feel and I can keep my hope of her returning alive. I hope she doesn’t find it because the exposure feels terrifying, specifically because I hardly know her. I feel like we’ve known each other for years, though. I still ask myself, why did she throw me out? Not important, ultimately, and I might never know the answer; I probably won’t know the answer.

I felt like I had to write something today. I’m stuck on editing Eulogy Chapter 1. Editing has taken forever with this one; I’m just so painfully unsatisfied with the work so far. I cut the chapter in half, and I’m ending it right as the boy gets to the recollection and sees his younger self. That felt like a natural place to end the chapter. I can then expand and contract where needed in just the lead-up to the memory and focus my efforts on the surrealism. I’m going to need an entire six-pack of ciders and half a pack of cigarettes to get through this chapter edit. It’s rough. We’re going to go through a few paragraphs together to see what that process looks like. I’m going to try to keep it to five; I was told by my old boss that I pontificate too much. Context is important, people. Get with it!

Where I’m at now is the five-rewrite. When I’m writing something—a book, poem, prose piece, essay, etc.—I actually write the same concept five times independently. I take the prompt or idea that I’m working on, put it down on paper, and then blind-write five paragraphs or stanzas at a time. I do this process five times, eventually writing about twenty-five paragraphs or stanzas that I’ll narrow down to five or fewer—or maybe more. You can go and see Eulogy 1v2 right now, observe its version history, and gather that I’m only laying out the core ideas. On my laptop and typewriter, I actually have those same pages written six other times, each with slightly different wording and thematic progression. I read through each of them over and over and over and pick out, first, the passages, then the paragraphs, then the individual sentences that I like the most. I finally end on words I think really convey the feeling through connotation and musicality. That’s a lot to do for longer passages.

After I’ve compiled that list of my favorites across all the writes of the topic, I start to put the pieces together. I’ll take a sentence from one rewrite and a paragraph from another, lay them down on a table, and think about how to get from one to the other or what I can steal from the other drafts that acts as a bridge between them. It helps because it’s kind of an outline, but not really. I hate outlines. This usually lays the groundwork for all the themes that are going to be present, but it leaves a lot of work to still be done. I liken this process to building towns along a highway: you get a general direction but not a defined path. Ariel told me she loves to get too focused on puzzles. Maybe this is just my puzzle: knowing the perfect word for the perfect feeling.

I’m going to interlude to ask the reader: is it weird that I’m in love with a girl I’ve met once and talked to for only five days, who built a future with me and then took it away? Do I just have abandonment issues, or is she thinking of me too? These are all things we can’t possibly know the answers to. These are actually the types of pontifications that move to other pieces. Is this theme that I have boiling in my subconscious due for another essay, or am I retreading broken ground? I would encourage you to think on that yourself and rip out pieces that don’t fit that puzzle and belong to another. Back to the programming.

The next part is connecting the cities, and this process involves another five writes. I’ll lay paths between each of them multiple times. That means taking paragraph nine from one draft, seeing that it fits well with chapter sixteen from another, and creating a new bridge between them. This gets more intense when I start to pick sentences from one paragraph that fit really well thematically with a sentence from another paragraph, or just with the paragraph or passage as a whole. Sometimes this process involves writing entirely new paragraphs, sometimes pages, that get you from point A to point B. Then you have to return to the road building until it’s somewhat coherent. You never really know where you have to stop along the way until you see it from inside the train car.

The next part becomes line-level precision. The time has come to scrutinize each line and make sure each has a purpose. I have a tendency to massively overwrite; overwriting comes across as multiple sentences, or even paragraphs, having the same theme. It’s a problem for lots of writers, coincidentally. You end up with four pictures of a flower from different angles in slightly different lighting when the flower would have been most impactful if you’d shared it once, in the best or worst lighting, and let that image sit. The process of narrowing these down is twofold: first, you identify which pictures are essentially telling the same story; then, you blend them together while cutting pieces entirely. If I’m being honest, this step is the longest for me, and I usually cut something like 50–60% of a chapter away. I add pieces back later by expanding on the images I really love in new paragraphs or chapters. That list of To-Do material gets put on a stack of papers on my desk that might exist only to gather dust.

Have you ever somehow known something without explicitly being able to say where it came from? I don’t know how, but I do. I think I’m channeling what my friend Krista calls my witch energy today. Spooky, spooky. It’s coming up on Halloween.

The very last piece is individual word selection. I keep going down the hole until I arrive at the bottom, which is how the connotation of each selected paragraph fits with the overall theme. I don’t always go word by word but instead read the selection as a whole. When I’m reading, bad words usually stick out. I read a paragraph, sit with it for a minute, read it again, sit with it, read it out loud, sit with it, and then make a list of the words I don’t like, either because of the sound or the implied meaning. The important part here is sound; that’s how this differs. I like my prose to mirror the emotional context of the selection, and that is dictated almost entirely by phonetics. Up to this point, the content is the important part; here, it becomes the way that content is spoken. I liken this to hearing the ping of the last railway spike being hammered. There’s a certain rhythm and cadence that indicates if you’re doing it right. My advice is to never edit silently: always read it out loud in different registers and tempos.

This produces a semi-final product. My products are never quite finished, and I’m always going back and editing them after the fact. I have some books I’ve written and published that I’ve later entirely rewritten a year or two later. They’re all in Ukrainian, so I don’t know that it would be relevant to most readers to see the works, or if you’d have enough time to read through them to understand the difference. I usually publish the work all the way through these various stages, including at least one of the five drafts. You can see this process with Eulogy Chapter 1 right now, where I’m at the stage of connecting the roads and doing line-level editing. This chapter has been a pain in the ass, so it’s taking me longer than usual. I’ve been unusually critical of this chapter. What’s published currently represents only one draft of the content; I currently have five or six in different stages that go through the same general events in different ways.

Hey, look, I pontificated too much again! It’s probably the ciders. Tonight was Portland Cider Co. Pumpkin Spice and Honeycrisp. This shit slaps. If you can get it, try it. I have a small house in Oregon that I’m at right now, so that’s how I have access.

Until next time.

Hasta la vista,

Baby