Writing Workshop: Day Three

Wednesday. Day three of my writing workshop with Andrew Todhunter. Today we spent the afternoon talking about the first twenty pages of The Appassionata. What a pleasure to have so much attention! Andrew is legendary, at least among the writers I know, for his "cut to the bone," attitude toward prose. I was prepared to hear something along those lines from him, and in fact, his emphasis was on what he could cut from my prose, but he was talking a word here, a word there, occasionally a phrase or sentence. The most exciting thing about his cuts, actually, was the fact that when he read my prose out loud with the cuts he suggested, he was right. The text was stronger, his editing made the language sing. Several times I found myself thinking, "Wow, did I write that?"

He stopped to read places where he really liked my prose, complementing me on the tightness of my language—saying there was nothing to be cut. That was exciting too. And I've never had a writing instructor or editor rave about my choice of punctuation, but Andrew pointed out places where my use of a comma, a semi-colon or a dash was "perfect," and explained why.

I left the workshop this afternoon feeling different about myself and my writing. I suppose I shouldn't be so dependent on the opinions of others, but, I was pretty blown away to be absolutely honest by Andrew's assessment of my writing. He liked it. He was excited as he talked about it—and the fact that he's won a PEN USA Literary Award doesn't hurt. It helps me trust his opinion.

One of the things he's providing as part of the workshop is a one-on-one consultation and mine is tomorrow evening. I'm looking forward to that too, of course. It's an opportunity to follow up on what happened today. Part of what was important about today was the time we had to look at my work. Andrew talked to me and to everyone in the workshop about my writing for well over an hour. In fact, the group spent the entire afternoon discussing my writing. In the end Andrew used my prose as a teaching tool, going through it very carefully, pointing out what was working and why, and also talking about why he would cut this word or that phrase, talking about how he works with his own writing. It was eye-opening.

He directed me to Tolstoy more than once. Study War and Peace, he said, like a painter copies the masters to learn his art, like Gericault, who spent six years copying masterpieces in the Louvre. Tolstoy and Balzac. I'm already studying Hugo at that level, and, of course, when I was working on Requiem, I was obsessed with reading 19th century British literature. I couldn't stop, actually.

The other happy happenstance is that Janine, the British woman who has lived here for so many years, was able to catch the "Americanisms," in my dialogue and turn them into "Frenchisms" for me. We came up with a trade: she's so French at this point, that she needs help with English grammar and structure, which I can provide, and in exchange, she can help me with the French element. I don't mean French words, per se, although that too, but even the way a sentence unfolds if it's trying to capture the sense of the French language in English.

For example, changing "Come" to "Do come quickly," or "Who is that?" to "Would you know that person?" We talked a lot about my dialogue, which she thought was mostly working. It's the subtleties, sometimes because they're out of time, too modern, other times because they're too American or simply don't reflect the way the French language shapes thought and communication. I'm very excited to have the possibility of this kind of assistance. I hope it works out.

The upshot of today's events is I'm going to sleep feeling happy, maybe happier than I've felt since arriving here. That's because today's events reinforced the feeling that I should be here doing what I'm doing, that it's worth the effort and the gamble—that I'm on the right track. That's something I needed. I needed to feel that I was worthy of this undertaking. I'm feeling that tonight.

Paris is a challenge—that's not going to change, and the very audacity of my project overwhelms me at times with doubt. Who do I think I am? But much of that doubt got put in its place today. That doesn't mean it won't come back. And there's much left to do to bring this book to fruition, but I see the way forward. I feel like I understand what I'm doing much better this evening than I did even this morning and, most importantly, I feel capable of pulling it off, of doing it well.