The Mystic Reviser at Midsummer

The nearing  time of midsummer is the most buxom time of the year. The light waxes luxuriantly and the days are full of endless possibilities in the long lingering moments of sunlight and shadow. This year, the moon is singing along. We will have the fullest sun and the fullest moon at the same time, a confluence of celestial delight I can’t recall happening since 2016. Which, as it happens, is also the year I created the calligraphy on the journal page above, a summer I was likewise steeped in revision.

I am deep in the thickets of reworking my novel. This time around the goal is to tighten it up and trim about 12,000 words. I court the mystic to help me, as I have done all along. The invisible world offers me comfort and encouragement by curious synchronicities and wild visitations, and in a stroke of good fortune, the perfect book of writing wisdom at just the right time.

But where once I entreated dreams and visitations from the ancestors who first gave me this tale, now I am in the forge of a final draft. (I foolishly wrote the final draft, so let’s just say it will be as final as I can make it.) It’s hammer and tongs, nuts and bolts, commas and repetitive words and the occasional sudden conviction that this chapter needs to be rearranged altogether, which throws out the previous comma corrections when a whole paragraph goes.

I search on my bookshelves for a page spread I made in a journal eight years ago when I contemplated the word RE-VISION and its alternates: amendment – correction – reform – metamorphosis – transfiguration – reworking – remaking – displacement. Between the word play I find an especially poignant reverie of myself as an infant gazing into the young faces of my mother and father. That year the word revision meant surgery and a rugged recovery. But during the summer days of healing I began to unearth my college drafts and pull out my old writing books, preparing to pick up this story again.

Somewhere along the line I saved this chakra chart for writers. I’ve no idea who made it, but here I am clearly in the sunny yellow midsummer days, doing the hard and boring work of revision. I’m concentrating every ounce of brightness I can on the murky corners of this novel. I tell myself, yes, this is very hard, I’ve been working at it on and off for so many years, I can be forgiven for having moments when I feel tapped out.

The tarot confirms the boredom theme with the Four of Cups, and I lay it next to my red pencil with the other three cards that have arrived frequently over the last six months, my colorful cheerleaders. I’ve been using the extraordinarily potent Greenwood Tarot, which in December came into my hands with a certain destiny, enough to satisfy the acquisition of any magical tool.

The wildlife also arrives with its auspicious messages. Surely these creatures are just going about their business being wild and have little interest in the eager seeker looking for omens from every corner. Yet in mid-May a string of evening sightings of this great white heron in the creek behind my house felt lucky, a benediction.  That she is also is the Queen of Cups felt felicitous.

And finally, this young red-tailed hawk came and perched on the fence outside my writing room door for a significant amount of time one morning in early June. This visitation excited a photo essay all its own, which you can see in my previous post, A Wild Hawk.

Any bird is a creature of air, the element of breath, communication, speaking and by extension, writing. This one was simply a juvenile who left the nest too soon and couldn’t quite fly away, but looked at another way, he was a messenger of Air who was there to remind me to keep my laser focus on my work and stay sharp. And as a Knight of Air in the Greenwood tarot, Hawk is the champion of the Queen. Such are the stories I tell myself about the pretty cards with the intriguing symbols. To complete the quartet of helpers, The Queen of Arrows is Deer, the wild creature that appeared to me when my mother had just died. She is the one who first told me the story I am writing so faithfully.

But hands-down the most practical assistance has been a book about writing suggested by my editor friend at exactly the right moment to pull me out of the doldrums and bring the magic back. Now the work of revision is exciting all over again, as I immerse in the sheer craft of bringing it all together in a sleek and supple form.

Alice McDermott’s What About the Baby? Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction is a book of essays she wrote over years of teaching creative writing, inasmuch as it can be taught. These essays taken as a whole have been a long deep drink of sweet water for a thirsty reviser.

Her essay “Only Connect” is a brilliant short course in revising by rereading, putting to rest the pitiless taskmaster who continually tells me, Just keep moving, move on, move on! No, she says, start at the beginning, again and again. Go back and look for the bread crumbs that will enlarge and connect the parts of your story to each other and to the larger humanity of the reader. “In the midst of composing your novel, for God’s sake, read what you’ve already written. Read it often—daily, if need be. Read it all. Read it thoroughly. Read it always with a keen and critical eye.”

In the process the reviser will “dismantle the scaffolding, so to speak, that allows us to scale our novel while it is still under construction: those paragraphs, for instance, that we set down before we know our characters, or our stories, fully, notes to ourselves but not necessarily to the reader…”

Obviously too, we must look hard at “those multipage scenes full of careening dialogue that seem, at first, to be inspired, but prove to be, on cool rereading, repetitive and unnecessary…” for in these cases perhaps a single line will do.

As we cut we will find ourselves “adding as we go, yes, of course, but also clarifying, revising, what we wrote last month in light of what we wrote yesterday, connecting what we wrote yesterday with what we added today.”

When I began my revision a couple months ago I fine-tuned my various-length synopses, making sure I’d gotten the bones down, the big-picture stuff, the things that need to be there to “make the reader SEE.”

When I wade in to book itself I realize in some cases I have let the murkiness stay because that’s where the juice is. I put myself in the way of the questions, with my winding sentences which are too full and unclear, unwilling to cut them too soon. I bumble along, but now encouragement arrives in Alice McDermott’s words, for she believes in the power of the humble sentence to open out into the larger story at any given moment. That’s where the magic is, where the story reveals itself, a word at a time.

I’m finding that in fact revising is the most fun part of all, spinning out the threads, seeing them catch on another scene 10,000 words on, knitting it all together into a coherent whole that sometimes shines with new meaning. I am delighted to return to the sentence level, and to recast my writing foibles as strengths, countering some pretty bad advice I got in my college creative writing classes. There might be something important in those “darlings” I am advised to kill, at least worth a hard second or third look.

And then I discover the best part of all, that Alice McDermott, for all her practicality, courts the mystic too. It’s in the essays, but I find it most succintly in a 2015 interview in which she said:

Oh! An incantation. An enchantment. This is my territory.

Writers use many little rituals and superstitions to accompany them at the writing desk. We bolster ourselves however we can to keep going in this long and solitary endeavor. And we treasure the words of other writers which at times are music to our ears.

I approach the overgrowth of words with a scalpel, a surgeon’s precision, not with a hacksaw, willy-nilly cutting for the sake of cutting. The words need to be clear and bright, considered for their potential to illuminate something that might still be trying to come through.

I look to the heavens for celestial reflections. I look to the dirt beneath my feet, scatter the rose petals from May’s great profusion of bloom to lead me to the bench by the water where I sit and ponder. I look to my cards, to wildlife, and to chance meetings with writers on the page, who have always been my best teachers.

And then I get back to work. Hammer and tongs. Scalpel and a stitching needle. Whatever works.

Postscript: A year ago on this date, June 19, I got the email inviting me to the exhibit reception at the Bodleian Library and booked my flight to England. ICYMI, my series of posts about this once-in-a-lifetime experience began here. I never did share much about the week after I was in Oxford when I traveled into the countryside for continuing profound experiences, including the Rollright Stones and a visit to my ancestral village in Oxfordshire. I plan to share some of those photos and tales for my next post at Lammas, since that is when I was there last year, tramping through wheat fields and communing with the spirits of the land.

If you enjoyed this post, I’d love to hear from you! If you are a writer, how do you keep showing up to finish the work? If you follow the Wheel of the Year, how do you mark Midsummer?