Last week I got back a piece I had submitted to a gardening magazine. The editor was kind enough to mark it up copiously with comments, largely positive. He'd be interested in re-reading the piece if I'd just rewrite it to make it into something else entirely. Sigh.
And so I stared at the original on the screen this morning thinking it was not possible to sever one head and put it on another body and keep the subject alive. I would just move on to something else. Close, but no cigar.
But I couldn't leave it be. And so I went back and tweaked it here, deleted that whole paragraph or two, pulled in a nice turn of phrase picked up from earlier in the page that brought a kind of circularity into the finished piece. Yes, I think it is a finished piece again. The transplanted head looks rather stylish up there if I do say so myself.
And this is as close to the triumph of the hunt as this office-chair adventurer comes these days. There is a kind of victory in the feel of making something from the relative nothing of ordinary sentences about ordinary days. But like one writer said when asked if he liked to write: I like better to have written.
So, now it is time to tend both the woodlot and the garden: the twin topics that I am now finished writing about. Time for the rubber to meet the road. See ya later.
Posted by fred1st at March 3, 2004 09:49 AM | TrackBackCongratulations on getting past your first reaction to the editor's words. I'll bet the head transplant makes great reading! Perhaps not what you originally intended, but great reading.
I have figured out (somewhat belatedly) why you real writers agonize so over the process and the finished process while people like me merely agonize. You write for you. If something is not said your way, it need not be said at all. Some of us have always written "for" someone else. "They" need a proposal, "they" need a report, "they" need a presentation to achieve "their" ends. It has always been a simple matter for me to look at a person's face and see that I've missed the mark that they had set. All I must do, then, is to chat with them to try to divine what they think they really want and start over to write again. (I don't think that I've ever missed the mark more than once with the same person.) I can write well, for my purposes. (Actually, for "their" purposes!) But, you real writers are in a different category. You are the folks that we read for the joy of imagery and reading. Keep at it (as if you thought that you had a choice?!)
Posted by: Cop Car at March 3, 2004 10:39 AM
Congratulations on persisting!
It also sounds like you learned something in the process.
Good luck on future submissions.
Posted by: David at March 3, 2004 08:46 PM
I think you are so right about the triumph of the hunt, Fred. I just finished rewriting a piece for an online magazine and while she wasn't asking for a different focus, her suggestions put me on the path of a whole different approach. Sometimes, we don't ourselves know what we're attempting to say until some editor points at it and says, THERE, this is what I'd like to see come to the fore. And lo and behold, it's a better piece that emerges. The newspaper business gave me the attitude that lets me rewrite for an editor. Nothing, in that fast-paced writing marathon world, is ever set in stone, and no artist's sensibilities get in the way of the piece the editor wants. It is not the write-for-someone-else of the publicist or biz writer, but it isn't the touch-not-a-hair of the artiste. I'm glad to see you moving in that direction. Working with editors is part of our job. Even Hemingway had to do it.
Posted by: travelertrish at March 4, 2004 09:04 AM