All those hours away from family and friends or at least video viewing or home repairs or whatever writing I intended weren’t like sitting there simply yet pleasurably reading. No fault to other authors, by the way.

As for riches, I would have been better off financially by investing those savings I had back in Baltimore and later by working an overtime shift once every week or two, back when they were still available, an option that had vanished by my last five years in the newsroom, a time when I had instead thought I might indulge in fattening the nest egg for retirement now that the kids were off on their own.

Back to that urban studies certificate. I loved big cities, at least the ones I had visited. Museums and classical music, especially, were the big draw for me, along with the kinetic buzz of a place. I might not be able to afford all the fashion and bling, but I could admire. Binghamton afforded repeated opportunities to hit Manhattan and its other boroughs.

What New York City had new for me was the subway, an initially terrifying underground that turned into a kind of amusement park, once I acquired a few ins and outs for navigating it. So much for a prompt.

How ironic, then, to think that I’m now living in a very small city where the entire year-‘round population would fit aboard a single NYC subway train.

By the time Hitchhikers appeared in print, I was living in New Hampshire and had added the subways of Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Washington plus the Seattle monorail to my rail mass-transit rail checklist.

I had even lived in Iowa, not far from where I had placed Kenzie’s childhood.

For the most part, my creative writing focused on poetry, which fit around my paying and crazy work schedule better.

An intense round of editing reshaped the book to its original scope and produced a lacy air, something that reminded me of the Robert Rauschenberg pop art collages of the period. But it also left me with many pages of outtakes. Could I salvage them? I believe I did and then some.

For half of my life now, I’ve felt the time for literary success was running out, both on the project at hand and my own life. I could start with one apartment’s neighbors and a fire and the new owners in bankruptcy. After that, just as I was moving across town, I got a nibble. But no sharp editing help.

In terms of writing fiction, I’ve been solo. Believe me, I would have loved to have had an editor, someone to guide me through the ropes and help me see what I was really hoping to develop. Instead, I worked on a manuscript, put it aside to season, and came back to it months or years later, usually on a vacation week dedicated to the project.

Curiously, working in that role that guide for a friend who has a truly amazing concept, I recently got a look at an evaluation of his manuscript by a literary agent and her two associates. While they were passing on the book, their reactions fit in that old-fashioned close combing of the manuscript and pointing us toward a right pathway for the next steps on transforming the opus. I’d be envious if I weren’t so impressed and grateful.

~*~

Much of this series of posts has reflected the role of deep revisions.

An insight I haven’t yet mentioned is what I’ll call “finding the zipper,” a perspective that pulls everything into place – a new, better place. A big book might have several.

In What’s Left, the zipper appeared when Cassia’s childhood black clothing of mourning evolved into goth during her adolescence and then Eileen Fisher when she starred as a young adult high-finance exec. That move also spurred some crucial scenes in her teen years and helped bring her oldest cousin to the fore as a character. Another zipper came in peppering the dialogue between Cassia and her best friend with texting slang. WTF, but I feel it works.

Another helpful approach is the use of photo prompts, especially when a stretch of dialogue falls flat. Online searches are helpful in building look books, which in turn can provide sharp details I would otherwise overlook in real life. Just how does a particular character look in contrast to another? It definitely stretches my thinking.

Satellite photos have also helped me reconstruct physical locations and also revealed how many of my residences in my moves across the country have been razed. Health hazards? Fires? Condemned? Mine really has been a tenuous journey.

One other technique I’ll mention is editing from the last chapter forward, especially in a later revision. We tend to put most of our effort into the opening chapters and then peter out toward the ending. Reversing that provides some extra sharpness and also encourages foreshadowing in the earlier parts of the work.

~*~

In the old days, when I began, newspapers had copy desks, which was where I wound up working. They were usually U-shaped, with a chief editor, called a slot man slash copy-desk chief, sitting in the middle surrounded by the rest of us. A lot of serious editing and rewriting still took place, especially at the first paper I interned at, but already I was hearing the laments of how standards were declining. I can’t help picturing Harry Perrigo, sucking on his pipe while evaluating a headline and story before sending them up the pneumatic tube to the composing room or casting them back to the rim editor for another try. Once computers replaced typewriters, that physical configuration generally faded from the newsroom. Still, I now see that as my introduction to intense revision. A story had to go through a series of hands and eyes to make it into print, even on tight deadlines.

In contrast, in my literary efforts, I was working solo. As I’ve said, the best I could do was work intensely on a piece, put it aside for a while to season, and sometime later to return to it afresh.

Much of my work fell under the label “experimental,” along with the accusation that I’m more of a poet than a novelist, as I heard from one of the best novelists.

Whatever the case, having something of my own in hand still feels good.

Looking back, I am surprised to realize how much of my fiction remains, at heart, reporting. Yes, despite elements of surrealism, fantasy, even absurdity.

Do I regret all the time and effort that have seemingly gone nowhere?

Sometimes, yes, but there’s also a sense of pride and a better sense of identity because I have these in hand. The sense of loss would have been greater otherwise.

Along the way, family and friends were slighted, along with public service or political activism. Even outings to the mountains or beach became less frequent. From what I’ve seen, writers make lousy spouses or partners. Consider yourself warned.

I am surprised by the amount of labor that took place in my odd free hours after my sabbatical. Also, by what a bold and risky move taking that year off had been. It did nothing to enhance my resume, for one thing. And I’ll return to the lack of health insurance but spare you the rant about how the current system, even with Obamacare, inhibits entrepreneurial advances. It’s something I couldn’t have done if I weren’t single, not unless I had a very supportive partner. (And then I would have felt guilty. Go figure.)

Let me confess my obsessive (Pollyannish?) looking for natural beauty, wherever; my need to have a connection to soil and water while overlooking the obvious ugliness. Applicable to the hippie thing, too.

And then there was the emotional pain buried in my psyche, a deep well to tap.

I’ve said nothing of the years of therapy since leaving Baltimore or the ways they’ve enriched the writing. Here I had thought such “healing” would impair my writing, but it’s not so. Both long rounds instead opened emotions to me, not just the intellect.  

I’m still baffled by the lack of novels by others closely reflecting the places and experiences I encountered.

Jeffrey Eugenides has come closest, though he was still off in the future. Not just his Greek-American perspective, but his Midwest roots not that much different from mine.

Richard Farina’s Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me and Norman Gurney’s Divine Right’s Trip catch other corners. Tom Wolfe’s Electric Acid Kool Aid Test misses altogether, and, besides, it wasn’t even fiction. Or was it?

Well, I can go back to Richard Brautigan, at the outset of the ‘60s, including his Pacific Northwest flavor.

Beyond that, though, I turn to the poets.

Also, what if I had recast my novels more as a genre? Or even taken the big books apart for shorter series?

Well, it’s still one writer’s life. Make of it what you will.

It’s a fair question, though for now, I’d rather be plunging into a reading orgy. My to-be-read stack is huge, both paper and digital books and periodicals. I’m feeling rather famished.

As for fiction, nothing since my mid-30s seems to suggest a hot story. Most novels, by the way, seems focused on life under age 30. Or at least rediscovering it. As for growing older, as in aging? No sex? Well, depends on the hook. For now, everything I’m seeing points toward nonfiction.

If I did another novel, I’d want to limit the number of named characters. Just two? Perhaps four or six or eight max? It’s obviously character-driven, not action. The volume itself would be thinner, too.

~*~

There are some other drafts I could clean up, but would any of them be worth the effort? The endeavors  to build readership can be quite exhausting.

I’d love to hear other novelists and short story writers discuss their reasons for selecting the names they apply to the figures in their stories.

For that matter, I’d love to hear readers’ reactions. Like what’s your favorite connection there?

I’ve avoided using names of people I’ve known well. Surprisingly, it became a problem especially in my ashram novel where the best Sanskrit names had already been given to my fellow residents. Elsewhere, it eliminates a wide swath of common names, starting with John, James, Robert, Thomas, and William for males. Or Jack, Jimmy, Bobby, Tommy, and Billy, more colorfully.

Had I known they wouldn’t be reading my work anyway, maybe I should have used the names and left people guessing. I’ve tried to be gentle, though, and perhaps that’s a weakness.

Though I’m not one to apply nicknames in everyday life, I have found them useful in my fiction. As examples, I’ll offer “Big Pumpkin” and “Elvis” for the swami in Yoga Bootcamp.

~*~

There’s also the matter of which figures get named and which ones can pass through unnamed. We don’t want to tangle a reader, do we?

A major consideration in revising my output was an attempt to reduce the number of named characters. For a big book, like the five-generation span of What’s Left or the four-year college life of Daffodil Uprising or the burgeoning social life of Kenzie in Pit-a-Pat High Jinks, this was a challenge.

I did find myself shading Greek tradition in What’s Left: repetition of a name within a family is common but would have been utterly confusing here.

As an alternative, I tried to limit some to a single chapter, treating it like a short story; when it was done, so were they.