Revisions continue apace

After several weeks of not feeling good about my revisions, I am unexpectedly, today, feeling much better.

The problem I think is simply that I've grown a lot as a writer in the year since I last worked on this book. The book isn't at fault. The book is still good. I mean it got me an agent, and it sold to HarperTeen. The book still contains so much of what I wanted to say and do and feel.

But in the last year I've learned a lot about storytelling. And what I mean by that is the simple mechanics of aligning character, plot, and image so that they're all working on the same level and working with the same themes. Right now the book is sort of all over the place when it comes to the actual events on the page. Although the essence of my story is still buried in there, it needs a lot of work to really come out. In this revision, I'm essentially doing what I've done with every revision to this book: I'm pulling back, making it less dramatic, more character-oriented, making the characters less powerful and less sure of themselves, less archetypical and more complex. The characters were already, even in this draft, much more complex than anything you've seen in YA before, but in the next draft they're going to be so human.

Over the last year, in the interval when I was waiting for this book to sell and waiting to get comments back, I worked on a novel for adults--tentatively titled The Storytellers--and in that book I really pushed myself to write only about the things that mattered the most to me. And I think it's that experience, in which I learned to recognize and follow the heart of longing, that's now influencing this book quite a bit.

I've been writing and submitting for fifteen years. For at least eight of those years I've been writing novels. And this is the tenth novel I've written, the fifth to go on submission, the second to sell. And I'm still learning. Although maybe it's safe to say that at this point I'm not so much learning "how to write a novel" as I'm learning "how to write my novels."

Anyway, for right now, at this moment, I am happy with how the work is turning out.

In other news, I've been reading a lot of John O'Hara lately. I started with Appointment in Samarra, his most famous work, which was good, despite its rather severe flaws. John O'Hara was a novelist of manners who wrote in and about the 30s, 40s, and 50s. He is most often compared to F. Scott Fitzgerald, but I'd say he's more of a realist than Fitzgerald. O'Hara was quite famous in his lifetime and had a very high opinion of himself--every year he stayed awake on the day they were announcing the Nobel Prizes because he was positive that a call was coming. Nowadays his books are still in print--I've been reading them in Penguin Classics versions--but I think it'd be fair to say his literary stock is rather lower than it was.

This is, to my eyes, largely due to fashion. From any era, only a certain number of writers can remain well-known, and the writers who remain known are largely the ones who, to our eyes, embody the literature of the time. O'Hara's time, at least in America, was the hey-day of modernism, which frequently involved conscious experimentation with form and language. As a result, the survivors have been Ralph Ellison, Faulkner, Hemingway, Salinger, Mailer, Shirley Jackson, Nabokov, Kerouac, Capote, Flannery O'Connor, etc. John O'Hara, in contrast, is writing wonderful, highly-polished, highly-mannered novels that would not have been too out of place at the turn of the century. He's more the heir to Edith Wharton, early Henry James, Sinclair Lewis, and the realist half of John Steinbeck. I venture to say that if he'd written either fifty years later or thirty years earlier he'd be a lot better remembered. Instead, like other realist writers of his era--Louis Auchincloss comes to mind--he hasn't fared as well.

I like his work a lot though. The novels of his that I've read BUtterfield 8 and Appointment in Samarra have been marred, to my eyes, by an insistence upon the dramatic. Appointment in Samarra involves a half-baked gangster subplot and BUtterfield 8 ends in a nonsensical suicide. Both books are best when they dwell on the simple minutiae of their characters' lives and desires.

His short stories, in contrast, especially in the volume I read (The New York Stories) don't have this defect at all. They almost never outstay their welcome. Nor do they do this modern thing of hitting the ending too hard. They slip out quietly at the end, trusting to the narrative to do the work. I'm thinking, for instance, of the janitor who wins an office pool, fifteen dollars, and instead of taking it home to his wife, uses it to buy baseball tickets for himself and his son. It's a quiet story that focuses on very simple and human dramas: it's a story that elevates an ordinary day in an ordinary life.

Many of his stories feature female protagonists, and most of them were quite good, but seeing all of his female protagonists lined up end to end was a little exhausting. They were universally either beautiful women or fading beauties, coasting on the past. Too many of them were actresses or singers. In aggregate, the stories felt a little bit too much focused on the effect these women had upon men.

Oh, but I forgot to mention the most interesting thing about the collection. I listened to it on audible, and the audiobook has an incredible cast! The stories are narrated by a diverse set of film and TV actors. About a third seemed to be voiced by Dylan Baker, a character actor with a slimy drawl that is perfect for these stories. Jon Hamm makes a surprise appearance as the narrator of one story. And I particularly liked Gretchen Mol, who narrates many of the female parts.

This is going to sound middlebrow, but I have a preference for celebrity narrators (over work-a-day voiceover artists), and it's because I find they tend to give the performance a little more personality. The problem with professional audiobook narrators is that in their career they need to voice alot of books, so they can't be too distinctive. You can't think, every time you listen to a Grover Gardner book, "Oh, here's Grover Gardner again." But that means their narration tends to be quite workmanlike and efficient (They do tend to be a lot better than the stars at doing all the disparate voices in piece however). Whereas TV and film actors are only going to do 4-5 audiobooks, so they're free to be themselves. Thus, if you listen to Jeremy Irons narrating Brideshead Revisited you are definitely gonna be listening to a voice that's unmistakably Jeremy Irons. But that's fine, because Jeremy Irons is great!