Poetry, Meditations, Fiction…teacher as writer, writer as teacher
Wax like burnt sugar
It’s a round pregnant belly with
white mold-like coating,
a scoop dug out of
the heavy bottom,
a thread of black umbilical cord
protruding—
it sits on a
saucer of Portuguese crockery.
~Lynne Viti
Reprinted from Punting, Origami Poems Project, January 2018. Download the chapbook and assemble it!
Three nights ago I wrote the last chapter—for now—of my novel. This is the full first draft of something I’d been working on, intermittently, for two years, and for the past three months, every day except Christmas. It’s in need of a rigorous edit, the next stage of the project, but I felt an endorphin high for a day after I put the period at the end of the last sentence.
Congratulations, friends acquaintances, and relatives wrote on my social media pages. I heard from fellow writers, former students (including one man, who as a silly sixteen year old, was a student in the creative writing class I taught decades ago, at Westhill High School in Stamford Connecticut), cousins, my former pastor, the respective fiancées of my two nephews, colleagues, and one of my grown children.
And I loved that.
But congratulating a writer who has merely produced the messy first draft is like congratulating a woman who has announced her pregnancy. Good news, but–
The truly hard work, the pain, the challenging process of finishing the work lies ahead.
I’m starting on all that today: the adding of quotation marks to replace the Joyce-esque dashes I used for dialogue when I began the draft months ago; the correction of typos, “form” for “from” and the like. The search for consistency in the names I gave minor characters. Was that guy called Charlie or Gene? Was the father’s business partner Dan or Dickie?
Did the bachelor uncle from Pittsburgh ever marry, or did he stay single?
Then I’ll print the 500 –plus word behemoth out, mail it to my beta readers, and work on other projects—a short story, a poetry collection—while I wait for their critiques. Then, the real work begins–tweaking the plot, rewriting whole sections, cutting extraneous things even though I loved them. Excision. Trashing. Pruning. Polishing.
Recalling my first pregnancy, I remember a friend who had two daughters saying, ”You’re going to like being pregnant a lot more than having the baby.” I liked it best after I had the baby, my dear, firstborn, now thirty-year old son.
I think this may be the case with my latest baby, my as-yet-untitled novel.
Now, for me, it’s back to inserting double quotation marks and deleting those Joycean dashes.
