The Face in the Woodshed Window: Eric Raymond
Note: Having been part of yesterday’s “woodshedding” post, writer Eric Raymond offers a response with a sinister title!
The Face in the Woodshed Window
Some thoughts about Debenham’s Woodshedding—advice which is deceptively simple to hear and very hard to practice. But first, step over here, and I’ll let you in a little on this “being an early reader” business.
I’m honored to be one of Matt’s early readers. Most of the reasons are completely selfish, but so far I’ve been clever enough to disguise my self-interest as fellow traveler. Matt is the most conscientious and talented short story writer I know personally. I suspect he may turn out to be the same sort of novelist, in which case, I’d advise Caissie to take out a substantial term life insurance policy on Mr. Cake for Breakfast, because I’ll kill him if he’s as good a novelist as he is a short story writer.
All incriminating evidence aside, getting to see Matt’s drafts before they become Matt’s stories is a privilege. I get to read him first. You get to wait a year or maybe two. Or even ten. I am assured he is human, and not some Murakamibot of immaculate drafts. (See also: “I wandered into a baseball outfield and decided, ‘Hey, why don’t I become a bestselling and critically acclaimed author?’”)
I also get the immense pleasure of thinking about his work with Matt, of dreaming along a bit, and writing him a letter, which is among my greatest “working” pleasures in life. And then, of course, I get to see his stories when they’re published, and I am astonished when I do. I’ve never seen him lose anything raw and vital. Never a step backwards. He’s willing to destroy an early draft to try see it all again.
I will never forget reading The Book of Right and Wrong for the first time on a cross-country flight. I was stunned by the progression from draft(s) to prize winners. I don’t think until I read the published collection that I had a full appreciation of his work.
First off, I was relieved. Every time you read a friend, you think, “Oh, please, please, please, let me like this.” The stakes go up when it’s in print. After the flood of gratitude for how good the book was came the fear: Shit, this guy’s really working! I’ve got to get off my ass and get serious. There is nothing so motivating as seeing someone you like and respect flat out kick your ass. (And yes, in case you’re wondering, you’re in a mortal, artistic deathmatch with your friends. But that’s a different letter.)
While I’m “helping” Matt, I’m secretly stealing from him. I always learn from his choices. What you don’t get, and I do, is the benefit of seeing what he’s kept and what he’s killed. I’ve hidden out, a stowaway spook in the eerie after hours of Debenworld, when all the David Lynch characters scuttle about, fixing the place up for the tourists. (Mostly, as you might imagine, they’re wearing D&D costumes. Orc drummers, paladin rhythm guitarists, etc. [Never seen a furry, for the record.] Anyway.)
Of course, everything he says I do for him as a reader, he returns. I am not as patient as he is, and I have, at times, sent him “bleeding-on-the-plate” when I owe him the perfect medium he’d probably prefer. I am eager for encouragement, insecure about the work, desirous of a sniff test to see if the work merits the next hundred hours. I am impatient. I am certain silence is an ill wind. Just when I’m sure he is pinned by the dilemma of being honest or soft-pedaling it, I always get a generous letter which makes the work better or helps me come to the conclusion it may be better to abandon camp. Mind you, he’s never said, “glue factory” about a draft, but it’s his questioning that helps me see where it could, and then should, go.
Oh, did I mention that he sends me short stories and now I send him novels? Moving right along.
This woodshedding business of his. It’s necessary. First, there’s a value in not sending a piece out too soon. If it sits, you’re liable to see its problems yourself, before it’s been burned with an editor or forty. Second, you don’t want a piece published that you wish you’d kept in the woodshed. Far worse than rejection is the desire to retract a published piece. Finally, you owe it to your trusted early readers.
Here’s why. You need to remember your trusted readers can’t read a piece again for the first time. They will consent to read it a second time, a third, maybe even a sixth (I’m looking at you, “Depot Island”), but the only time they will encounter the piece as your Reader In The Wild will encounter it? The first time you send it to them. This is the purest reading you will get. This is when they dream. After that, workshop mode kicks in. Pen uncaps, the analytical mind clicks into place. You want to give them the best first read you can possibly give them because it is the purest reaction you will get. (I’m gradually learning to do this.)
So where do you find your trusted readers? Matt has good advice on this, and I think his instincts are right. Workshops are both useful and inherently flawed. Roughly eight out of eleven student workshop members in a given class will be utterly useless to you. Personalities, lack of respect for their work, nine cats, oh, they’re batshit crazy.
One will probably so outstrip your talent that you’d never presume to try and strike up a longer relationship. Concede.
Of the two remaining, you’ll want to look for the one whose work you genuinely admire. You must admire their work. You must have moments when you read their work and think, “Damn, I wish I had written this.” It doesn’t matter if they’ve been published ten times. You must respect it. Without this, you will never honestly trust their reading of your drafts. On some level, you have to believe they possess the ability to do what you’re doing better, or at least as well through their own lens. If you find this person, email them. Stay in touch. Ask them if they will read you and offer to read them.
There are other ways to find people. People at readings in the audience. Writing letters to writers you admire, especially those published in journals and small presses. Indie lit websites like The Rumpus and HTML Giant.
Facebook seems terrible to me, but Twitter is actually interesting in that it depends almost solely on voice. If you follow and are followed by people who can tolerate, or even enjoy, your voice in 140 character bursts, you might find yourself in good company eventually. If you’ve never met these people face-to-face, it can also somehow feel like a more “legitimate” reader than your nearest friends and family. I have found not only one incredibly insightful and generous reader this way, but also a publisher of a forthcoming novel. The point is not to “get your social media guru on” (die! die! die!) but remain open to voices and human connection. You may be surprised by what you get.
When Matt and I attended the Bennington Writing Seminars, the very first sub-zero semester in 2003, Robert Bly and Donald Hall gave a reading in VAPA, one of the winter venues for both faculty and student readings. Of all the readings I have been to, none have so encapsulated what I most admire and covet in the writing life.
I hadn’t known how long The Bly & Hall Show had been reading one another’s work, how many letters they had exchanged, how many decades they had been doling out criticism and support. They knew one another when they were shivering students in the blue dorms of their first forays into poetry. Now they were elder statesmen; Bly sonorous, Hall haunting.
That night at Bennington, they read in a kind of round-robin format as I recall (and I may be wrong). They didn’t discount the audience, but they were in some fashion reading for one another. It might have been the lighting, all pooled forward, the deep seats in the dark. While one took the podium, the other copped a chair in the front row, gently heckling and praising.
Bly, upon hearing Hall finish a poem late in the reading, said: “That’s a beautiful line. Let’s hear that one more time.”
Hall read the final stanza again.
“Beautiful,” Bly said. “I haven’t the damnedest idea what it means, but it’s a beautiful, beautiful line.”
Eric Raymond is a working writer in San Francisco. He is @pontiuslabar on Twitter.