Indulge us in a little meta-media commentary here: while writing this piece on Fallingwater for the good folks here at Jesuit Media Lab, I was forced to excise two ideas that I really wanted to include. They were, to wit: autumn. I mean, come on, what essay would not benefit from a little poetic waxing about this season of mists and mellow fruitfulness? Guillotining my rhapsodies about scarlet trees under the delete button wounded me to the quick.
The second item that had to go was the seedling of a theme about two pieces of folk-pop: “Fallingwater” by Maggie Rogers and “So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright,” by Simon and Garfunkel. In a piece meditating on a full sensory immersion into an artistic experience, it made sense to go for a layup of an extremely topical Maggie Rogers and S & G twofer.
But, alas, “All writing is editing,” as said Mary Karr in her impeccably edited guide to writing, “The Art of Memoir.”
Editing a piece is often described in surgical, butcherous — or maybe even homicidal — metaphors: “take a knife to,” “trim the fat off” or “kill your darlings.” Indeed, in my own commentary on these two exclusions of music and autumn colors, I said I had “excised” my darlings.
There’s a reason an editor wields a knife along with a red pen: to write something very good — to truly write, as Mary Karr would claim, means hitting that backspace button and applying whiteout with a generous hand.
Why is this?
As the saying goes, even an infinite number of monkeys typing with infinite time could produce the work of Shakespeare. To just pound out words — even if we are not monkeys and are Shakespeares at the mic — is not writing. It is about the application of an idea, or a thought, onto the page. And time is a part of our thought process.
Let’s look at that verb I chose: “forced to excise.” Was I indeed forced?
Well, technically, no. I chose to excise them. That is what Karr means by all writing is editing — all writing is choosing.
To write may be simian, but to edit is divine: We fill in the gaps, connect hanging ideas, rework the portrait of our idea on the page, we adjust it so that it more closely translates the idea we had hung in our minds.
My verb “forced” is a metaphor. No one was forcing me; I chose to remove my Keatsian ode to autumn. But the force that was acting upon me was the form: to write a short essay is a different undertaking than a book. If I wanted to write a book on Fallingwater, I could include a whole chapter on seasons and another two on musical architecture. But the form of a short essay exerts a pressure: You do not have infinite typewriters or infinite time (or infinite attention) — what does one say here and now?
To write may be simian, but to edit is divine: We fill in the gaps, connect hanging ideas, rework the portrait of our idea on the page, we adjust it so that it more closely translates the idea we had hung in our minds.
What would Shakespeare’s plays look like if he could have reworked them endlessly? Or if he knew the attention span of the groundlings wouldn’t last much longer past the four-hour mark?
As a writer, I have been shaped first and foremost by dramatic writing. Writing is never finished, only abandoned, my playwrighting professor taught me. You can’t let the infinite be the enemy of the real: Ideas stretch on and on, they are not confined by the number of monkeys or typewriters in the universe. But words — they have a beginning, middle and end. The most infinite idea — God — became a man with a beginning, middle, end (and strange coda). Even God is okay with being forced into the form of a genre. Creatures with an expiration date have limited time in which to represent our big ideas. We rush to commemorate a beautiful vision, a perfect phrase, an exchange of dialogue before the hourglass runs out. You can never make it perfect — not even Shakespeare can — just make it sing.
So what if we imagined metaphors for editing that helped us see this process as just that — more of a process?
Going back to that iMessage I sent my editor about “excising my darlings.” Lo and behold, 10 minutes later (time), I noted that I had actually written “excuse my darlings,” instead of excising them. But he (good editor) thematized on the typo: What if instead of killing our darlings, we excused them? What would that change about our approach to writing?
Playwriting is a communal writing experience — you write words on a page, and then you give them to actors, and — look at that! — the breath another human body has breathed into your words literally lifts them off the page. Words, freed from paper and walking around a room, have been sublimated into bodies: It is an inverse — or twin — of the process that occurs when your ideas are condensed into words. It’s revelatory: You learn something about your idea when you see the words expressing it staring back at you from the page. You learn so much more about your words when they grow legs and cadence and occupy 3D space. You write velveteen words, and your collaborators make them real.
What if instead of killing our darlings, we excused them? What would that change about our approach to writing?
Playwriting teaches you that you can’t write a story without editing: because the time lapse between writing a scene — throwing ink onto paper — is incarnate in the actors who hold the physical pages and bring the words to life. Listening to them, you hear the gaps in sense and lapses in the rhythm that become clear as your words become less notional and more human. After seeing the real text on stage, you go back to the page and rewrite what you have more closely in the image of the real.
And, in the process of making a play, the actors play. They try things: imagine moving here and not there, turning this way, not that — one day, we are in a fight, the next day (same page) this is a love scene. The director says try this, scrap that, and eventually, slowly, you land on something that is all of our ideas combined and even something better than we all could have imagined together.
Playwriting is a communal writing experience — you write words on a page, and then you give them to actors, and — look at that! — the breath another human body has breathed into your words literally lifts them off the page.
We welcome our ideas as our long-awaited guests, open our pages to sentences the way we do our living rooms, and say: Thank you for coming. Like any good guest, many of them have an expiration date. Like an actor’s performance, it changes over time. But they often arrive at a crucial moment, bridging us from one idea to the next, helping to smooth over a seam that we can paper over later. And as we usher them out, picking up solo cups, putting away the party hats, backspace, backspace, backspace, we can say: “Thank you for coming, for being here.” Thanks for the hand.