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Newsletter #552
The Crack of Dawn
[This was written about 20 hours ago in Amsterdam].
I just posted newsletter #551, but I want to keep writing.
I’m three rewrites beyond when I was going to publish, The Gospel According to Judas. Although it has taken me over 25 years to get the manuscript to where it is, the total rethought rewrite I started a year ago has gone very well. Maybe too well. It is said on movie shoots that if something seems funny on the set, it won’t be funny on film. Filmmakers are superstitious people. On the very first day of shooting Hercules in 1993, very first thing in the morning outside on perfect day, I joyously proclaimed to a fat grip walking by, “What a lovely day.” He angrily replied, “Shut the fuck up!”
OK, here's the thing with Judas – my final approach to the story was to go for laughs and make it a full-fledged comedy, along the lines of Monty Python’s Life of Brian, which is both smart and silly. So, having taken a completely new, comic approach to the story, I rewrote it from Judas’s point of view. Somehow – and this has never happened to me before – as I wrote it rather quickly, I laughed my ass off every day. Of course, I kept flashing on, “If it’s funny on set, it won’t be funny on film.” Still, it’s not as though I laugh out loud at much of what I write, even if I think it’s funny, so this was surprising. When I was finished writing that draft, I thought, “Either this is actually funny, or it’s a total piece of crap.”
Truly not knowing which it was, I paid a professional editor (in this case, interestingly, it was Alan Arkin’s son, Matthew) to critique it. The same editorial company, My Two Cents, critiqued another book of mine, and the result was so terrible, and utterly dispiriting, that I didn’t even rewrite it, let alone publish it. I filed the manuscript away for another day. But in this case, Matthew Arkin seemed to like it, and thought it was funny. He may have even thought it was smart, although he didn’t come right out and say so.
All right, maybe it is funny. In any case, I knew that it certainly needed a rewrite, if for no other reason than to clean it up. If I’m writing a first draft, the point is to get all the way through it, not to create perfect copy. Anyway, that clean up became an all-out rewrite because parts of the story now didn’t make any sense to me. Also, it didn’t seem very funny anymore. I completed that rewrite, printed it, went back over it, made many changes, then input them into the computer. I then printed it out again and read it again to give it a final inspection. It was like I had never done the previous rewrite, and so now a new rewrite began. I’m halfway through that and there are many markings on almost every page. One could, ostensibly, keep doing this forever.
Now to pick on a good friend.
I have an old friend who is a musician. I picked on him recently for living among 11 out-of-tune guitars that he never plays. All he needs to do is procure 7 more guitars and he’ll have as many as The Edge (known to the New York Times as Mr. The Edge). In the last year or so my good friend (who, like me, is 65 years old) decided to write, “The greatest rock & roll novel ever.” OK, sure, why not? It’s not like rock & roll novels are a particularly expansive sub-genre. What he was really saying is that he’s going to write the best of maybe 20 books, I don’t really know, but it sounds achievable. Still, from my perspective, setting out to write “the best” anything sounds silly. Considering that my frind isn’t even a writer, how about just see if you can actually write an entire book that hopefully makes sense? No, he was utterly obdurate, “It has to be the ‘the best,’ and it’s already a third written [assuring me that it will ultimately be 100,000 words, which is kind of long], and that I must read it. I must.”
Panic. Please God save me, this can’t turn out well.
So, I turned into the old man from the sea and said, “Never show your work until it’s done.” No, no, no, I had to read it. All his friends thought it was great. They loved it. So then I gave him another pearl of wisdom, which happens to be true, “Writing is rewriting.” He flatly said, “No, I’m not rewriting it. That’s bullshit.”
I’ve spent my entire life writing and rewriting, with the occasional move or TV production thrown in. If rewriting is bullshit; I’ve dedicated my life to bullshit. Seriously, I’ve never met a writer who thought that rewriting was bullshit. Spitting out a first draft is one thing; rewriting is where the writing part comes in. Rewriting is insanely necessary. Similarly, I think, rewriting is to writing, what practicing is to playing the guitar. If you want to be good at it, you must suffer. With Judas, as I explained, I it took me several drafts before I realized that my basic geography in a big scene didn’t make sense. It wasn’t all that hard to straighten out, but it was entirely necessary.
I finally relented to my good friend, and he sent me 75 pages. I read 20 pages, although I knew it was in trouble on page one. When I expressed some of my concerns, he went out of his way to make me feel like an aged old asshole who was part of the outdated, old fashioned, patriarchy – and maybe I am – or maybe I’m just a writer who has been around long enough to pick up a few facts along the way. My buddy had used something like 18-point Dom Casual font, which looked beyond ridiculous. I said, “A manuscript is in 12-point Times New Roman.” This was like when I said to another friend, “Stories are told in three acts,” and he said, “There are no rules in art. There is no ‘must’ or ‘have to.’” Writing a book is certainly art. Writing a manuscript for publication is not art; it’s a set of rules. Manuscripts are double-spaced, 12-point Times New Roman, and the reason for that is it translates to the length of a printed page, and it’s what everyone in publishing uses. His final word on fonts was, “I’m a rebel. That’s what rock & roll is about.”
My friend also would not stoop to doing what all of the rest of us foolish writers simply humiliate ourselves by doing, which is this: “Are you out of your mind?” said Josh. Or “Every writer,” Josh explained, “uses basic conventions to be understood. And when I say ‘every,’ that goes from Fyodor Dostoyevsky to Jane Austen to Stephen King.” I’ve read writers who dispensed with these conventions and mainly what they achieve is confusion.
Anyway, in less than 20 pages I knew that my friend – my good friend – was clueless of what he was doing, and I told him so. That’s when he informed me that I was just part of the old fashioned, out-of-date, patriarchy following idiotic “rules.” “Art,” I was informed, “has no rules.”
If indeed we were creating art for art’s sake, then that would be true; but we’re not. He and I are both writing books for publication. Screenplays are written to be produced, generally for a lot of money. We are creating product, or as it’s now even less elegantly termed, “content.” Thinking of ourselves as artists, unfettered by anything but our raw imaginations, is pure nonsense. Jokes are told in a certain way – set up, then punchline – just like screenplays. It’s not the Mona Lisa, it’s a blueprint. Manuscripts are in 12-point Times New Roman. If you can’t understand that, then you’re trying to reinvent the wheel, except square.
L-7. Square.
"Writing is rewriting" is less a cliche than a pithy reduction of the facts of life. Anyone who believes they can go through the painful process of writing an entire first draft--all the way from the beginning to end--then feels that they simply need to tweak and massage to complete their work is naive. I've encountered any number of people throughout the years who thought the same thing--you write it once, and it's done--like my mother. It's a common misconception. Writing is rewriting is not a cliche; it's a cold hard fact. You don't want to do it, then don't do it. You don't want to practice the guitar, then don't. Who cares?
As my good friend -- a relative for quite a long time -- said of his book, "My friends love it." I replied, "It's good to have friends." And indeed it is. I think it's wonderful that you're commenting in defense of your good friend, and more people should. I do know what our friend went through back in the 1970s -- making it into the actual music business in L.A., alongside of many artists I admire -- and I've always been impressed and told him so. And if you like his book, good on ya. But when you put your art forward, your songs, books, paintings, whatever -- prematurely, in this case -- then you'd better be ready to take whatever comes at you. I imparted two pearls of widsom, and was poo-pooed for both of them: 1. don't show it until it's done, 2. writing is rewriting. As I sit here, day in and day out, rewriting, I often think of our mutual friend. To be so gifted as to not have to rewrite, like me and all the rest of those bums. It must be thrilling.