Fast or Great? Pick One

But maybe sometimes, fast IS great

Photo by Elizabeth Weinberg for The New York Times

I spend way too much time writing The Jubilarian, and I’ll tell you why. Because I think if it isn’t great, why bother? Not “why bother” in terms of you or of the world, but for myself. Why would I do this if I wasn’t trying to make it as good as I possibly can?

No one’s watching. No one’s paying me. No one (really) cares.

Which is exactly why I love doing it, because no one’s looking over my shoulder and the only person I have to please is myself. So I think hard about what I’m really trying to say, and if I’m saying it as clearly and engagingly as I can.

Take that phrase, “clearly and engagingly”. Maybe that says what I mean, but it doesn’t say it very lyrically. Except instead of spending an hour expanding and rewriting that sentence, I’m going to leave it, because today I’m trying to be fast, not good. Or at least not as good as I can be.

My friend Alice Dark, who is one of my writing heroes, says she spends no more than an hour and a half on her wonderful Substack. Her life, as the director of the MFA creative writing program at Rutgers-Newark and the author of the forthcoming story-as-a-book In the Gloaming as well as the novel Wherever You Are, is too busy to allow for more time than that.

So is mine, though that doesn’t always stop me from spending, for instance, three days writing last weekend’s post What the Body Knows. That was worth it, too, because it made me realize something central about Old Woman Naked, the show I’m devoting most of my time to. I never realized before writing that piece that the story of my body was the secret history of my life, that all of my secrets were concentrated in my body.

That’s pretty major, but I don’t always have time to think that hard or to keep rewriting until I get at the most essential truth and the most eloquent way of saying it. So today, I’m following Alice’s lead and giving it an hour and a half and then I’m stopping, so if I leave you in the middle of a sentence, you’ll know what happened.

I’ve always been able to write pretty well when I write fast — maybe a B+. But that facility got me into trouble. Coupled with my impatient, impulsive nature, I’d write a novel in, say, two weeks or a TV pilot in a weekend and it would be good enough. I wrote Younger in less than a month. I was incapable of serious revision. I’d have to bribe myself with three days at a luxury resort to read my own work.

But writing something that fast is like sleeping four hours a night. It feels efficient, until you realize what it’s costing you. Time to be creative without knowing the point, to peel back layers of meaning until you get to the truest kernel at the center of everything. To find the perfect word, reach for the most pleasing rhythm, to make every sentence and sentiment as funny or as moving as it can be.

Ironically, I learned to do this via what was probably the worst editorial experience of my career. I was forced to rewrite a novel I was working on 11 times — and I mean what we in the biz call Page One Rewrites, aka rethinking the entire book. Changing it from third person to first person, from present tense to past tense. Making the inciting incident a death and then an abandonment and then a kidnapping. Having characters fall in and out of love.

It was really hard. I really hated it. A lot of the changes made the book different, but not better.

But along the way, I learned some things that turned me from someone who was satisfied with being a good-enough writer into one who is always (usually) trying to be as good as I can be. I learned to see writing as an assemblage of small decisions rather than one big energetic romp, the way an actor works line by line, scene by scene to create the illusion of reality.

Which reminds me of someone who saw my play asking whether I’d scripted it beforehand, it felt so natural, as if I was just telling the story off the cuff. That’s a great compliment. In fact, I’ve been working on the 8000 word script for nine months now, on and off. I’m going to work on it some more when I finish writing this, in, oh, about….37 minutes. When will it be finished? When there’s nothing wrong.

If you’re trying to push your own writing from good-enough draft to great finished piece, here are some tricks that work for me:

— Write out of order. Isolate and elevate a random scene, and let that lead you to the next scene, chosen by impulse and idea rather than chronologically. Or write on character’s scenes in order, as if you’re telling only their story. It forces you to think differently.

— Write and take notes at the same time. I do two kinds of writing, real writing that is intended for the book or play or article, and NOTE TAKING IN ALL CAPS. The notes are ideas, stage directions, working out questions, anything I want to get down in the moment without pressure to be “good”.

— Fix everything that bothers you. You might hope that nobody notices that issue because you know that fixing it will be a lot of work, and maybe nobody will notice. But if YOU notice it, something’s wrong, and you owe it to yourself and your work to figure out what it is and make it better.

I’m going to stop there because I only have 25 minutes left and I have a lot to say before I go. The reason I’m writing this is not to ultimately delete everything I just wrote (I do that a lot) but to say some things while they’re on my mind, before they get buried under the sand of another week or two.

First, that gorgeous picture from the New York Times

My real motivation here was not to give you a writing lesson but to brag about the wonderful article about Old Woman Naked in the New York Times Style section by Tammy LaGorce. Having my creative work featured in the NYT is the ultimate honor and Tammy asked me the questions everyone wants to know, giving me the opportunity to answer them in my own words to a receptive audience.

Thank you, Tammy, so much, for being interested enough in my work to write about it.

And the photo! The amazing photographer Elizabeth Weinberg took those pictures in her Los Angeles backyard on a chilly, soggy late December day. I’d seen her other work so I had reason to hope I wouldn’t look as awkward as I felt, but wow, she made me good enough that I hope my ex-boyfriend sees it.

The story was posted online this morning but will be in the paper one day soon — I’ll let you know when it’s scheduled.

Meanwhile, Mother’s Day

Making soup earlier, I thought I’d write my fast-not-great piece about Mother’s Day, namely, how much I hate it along with most holidays that obligate people to do things. If my kids ask me to do something on Mother’s Day, I can’t help wondering whether they really want to or just feel like they have to. I honestly would prefer if there were no Mother’s Day, and I’d pretend it didn’t exist but that feels defensive and preemptively self-flagellating.

I was going to go out to Palm Springs by myself and sit in a chaise at poolside gobbling up Christina Baker Kline’s The Foursome and Emma Grey’s Start at the End, two fabulous new books by two fabulous friends and writers. But then I found out that it was going to be 104 in Palm Springs Sunday and Monday, so scratch that. I’ll just have to read here, but somehow a pool and an umbrella make the whole experience more delicious.

Everyone with a difficult mother should read Meredith Maran’s wonderful essay about her mother in The Persistent. I witnessed the transformation of Meredith’s relationship with her mother over the past five years, when Meredith was already in her 70s and her mother in her 90s. It doesn’t get more “before it’s too late” than that, and I hope the piece inspires all of you to try to find the kind of imperfect peace that Meredith did with her mother.

My mother died before I got that chance, and though that was 40 years ago, it still makes me sad and always will.

I’ve got three minutes: One more thing. A stranger on Instagram asked if it was okay to ask for attention as a new mother instead of or as well as honoring her own mother as her father had asked. To which I say, absolutely, you must honor your own motherhood, and if your father doesn’t recognize that, or your mother thinks it should be all about her, or your husband doesn’t insist that it be your day too, then they’re all wrong.

Okay, my timer went off.

One more thing: Maybe something, with writing and with Mother’s Days, fast is great,