Feb 222013
 
 Article, Uncategorized Comments Off on Draft Dodging

Anne Lamott, bless her heart, offers single best piece of writing advice: “Writ a really, really sh***y first draft.” Her point, more or less, is that the first draft is going to be dreadful no matter what. You aren’t going to make it better by enabling a bunch of nagging and critical voices inside your head.

That’s particularly true of the first paragraph. Something has to go in the first paragraph of the first draft—it’s the whole space/time continuum thing. But it’s hardly ever what should ultimately be there. Writing is a process of discovery, and you won’t really know what you want to say until you’ve said it.

Most of the time, the first paragraph can simply be cut away. The real beginning is one or two or three paragraphs in. If you listen carefully, you can hear the place where the writing shifts from neutral into forward gear.

But you can’t listen carefully when you’re writing, anymore than you can listen carefully while you’re talking. We all know people for whom our end of the conversation is just mental prep time for their next monologue. It doesn’t make for satisfying communication.

In writing, you can’t be a writer and an editor at the same time. One activity is spontaneous and messy. The other is analytical and precise. Most halfway successful grownups really do have both skills, but it’s a rare person who can practice them both at the same time.

Feb 052013
 
 Article Comments Off on Calling all Jewish writers

This year’s big movie was Lincoln, the film about the sixteenth president and his bold bid to pass the Thirteenth Amendment. I went to the film looking forward not only to Steven Spielberg’s directing and the star turns of Daniel Day Lewis and Sally Fields, but most of all to the Tony Kushner screenplay.

I have been a die-hard Kushner fan since I saw Angels in America back in the early 1990s. I drove 500 miles round-trip for that production and it was worth every mile. When the Guthrie Theater stages a Kushner festival a few years back, I went to every single event, from Caroline, or Change starring the brilliant Greta Oglesby to the evening of Tiny Plays in the Dowling Studio. What I remember most about the interview of Kushner by Joe Dowling is that, when someone in the audience rose to complain that a music stand was blocking the view, it was Kushner himself who leapt to his feet to move it—a gesture so instinctively good-hearted that I loved the man as well as his work.

Kushner had been commissioned to do a new work for the Guthrie festival. But Kushner had also been hired on to the Lincoln production not long before. Rumor was that Kushner showed up in Minneapolis with a blank notebook and wrote most of The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to the Universe with a Key to the Scriptures in the Guthrie bar. The result was sort of a mess, although not at all unwatchable, and the “premiere” was also, as far as I know, the finale.

One of the on-going devices of the Kushner play was to have two or more characters talking over one another for long stretches—just as Abe and Mary do when their grief over their son’s death overflows. “Ah, the last vestiges of the Guthrie commission,” I thought. I also swear that Mary Todd Lincoln sprang full-blown from Kushner’s imagination. She is the sort of loopy, tormented yet sage and insightful female that Kushner first introduced as Harper in Angels in America.

No hard feelings about the Guthrie commission, Mr. Kushner. I completely understand why the Lincoln project compelled you.

Kushner is a secular atheist Jew (he used to claim to be Bolshevik but I think he has mellowed to socialist with age). He recalls growing up using the Freedom Seder at the family Passover celebrations. The Jewish liberals of his parents’ generation tied their own liberation story, told in Exodus, to the civil rights struggles in the south. That’s why Abraham Joshua Heschel walked at Martin Luther King, Jr.’s right hand. It’s why Michael Schwerner died along with Andrew Goodman and James Chaney in Mississippi.

Tony Kushner is uniquely qualified to tell the story of the Emancipation in the same way that Arthur Miller was uniquely qualified to write about the Salem Witch Trials. There are no yarmulkes or Torah scrolls in sight, but these are expressions of Jewish ideals and beliefs, make no mistake.

And reading them makes me hope that I, too, can be a Jewish writer someday. I’m going to start here (and you can, too!):
http://thewholemegillah.wordpress.com/tag/kar-ben/