When
I found this in my ebox, I almost choked: “Do not respond to this email, sadly; we
are not able to respond to 1,000 emails
a day.”
“Yeah, I get a thousand emails a day too, but mine are all
trying to sell me insurance.”
I had
turned to my emails as a diversion from editing my
novel and saw that comment about not responding
to their emails.
Thank you. I won’t.
Back
to editing: I’m not an editor, I stink at editing, but I’m giving it my best
shot. A friend told me to read a manuscript from the back to the front, that
way you are more apt to see errors. Yeah, fine for a page or two, but 403 pages? I think not. I will keep my sanity
and throw discretion to the wind.
You
know how it is when reading our own material.
Your eyes glaze over, you slide past a
mistake without seeing it, for your brain fills in what you believe is there.
Let a typo slip through in a published book, though, and it pops off the
page like a boa constrictor.
This
work I’m editing has been in my computer,
on flash drives, in the file cabinet, and
worked on for over 40 years. It is titled
SARA. There are two Sara’s an old one and a young one. I was reworking the first
dinner date of the young lovers, Sara and
Ryan, at the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, California. For their menu, I
was using my daughter’s and my Easter dinner at the Anasazi
Restaurant in Santa Fe New Mexico.
Wait
a minute.
That’s not fair.
Don’t copy the Anasazi
The
Bonaventure might not be as good.
Readers
might go expecting this dinner. So, I
scrapped the menu, although it had me salivating, and it was doubly hard to
erase the dessert that was chocolate mousse served in a four- inch by four-inch chocolate grand piano—lid up.
However, courtesy of the Internet, I looked up the Bonaventure’s
La Prime Restaurant menu—a research option not present 40 years ago. Now Sara
and Ryan’s dinner is authentic.
The thrill of the Bonaventure is that a glass elevator
shoots through the ceiling at the fifth floor, and climbs, hanging on the side
of the building like Spiderman, up to the
32nd floor, home of their revolving restaurant.
If you sit in the restaurant for an hour, the entire
restaurant will make a complete revolution, and you will have a panoramic view
of the City of Angels. Someone commented that if you eat at the Bonaventure regularly
and have a daughter, send her to me—that was in reference to a steak costing 70
bucks.
While I can sit at the computer writing until both legs fall
off when I edit my butt goes numb in a half-hour or so.
Andy Warhol said, “Don’t think about making art, just get it
done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or
hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.”
Ernest Hemingway said to “Write drunk, edit sober.” Since he
was known to bend a few elbows, (he had only two, but he bent them often) he might
have meant that literally, but figuratively his principle works too. The
creative phase comes dancing in like a fairy—or maybe marching in like a
warrior. Either way, the artist is intoxicated.
A while back I read something Vincent Van Gogh wrote to his
brother. Vincent was sitting in a cheap little hotel room looking out the
window at a watery twilight, a thin lamp post, and a star. “It is so beautiful,” he
wrote, “I must show you how it looks."
And he the most beautiful, tender, little drawing of it.
When
I saw the movie Vincent where he
pointed his brushes with his mouth, I said, “That man had lead poisoning.” But
then perhaps his mental condition existed
before he began painting. Poor guy, his letters to his brother were so sweet, he
wanted love so badly, yet he felt continually rejected.
“There may
be a great fire in our hearts,” wrote Van
Gogh, “yet no one ever comes to warm
himself at it, and the passers-by see only a wisp of smoke.”
What struck me after reading about Van Gogh’s
lamp post view was that he wanted to show his brother what he saw. He wanted to
bask in the beauty of the scene, and share
it with someone else. “Do you see what I see? Do you feel what I feel? Is it
exciting you as it is me?” Once a teacher of a writing class said that “All art
is flawed.” I’m not sure I agree, for some paintings look pretty damn perfect
to me, but maybe that’s what he meant—a rendition can never truly depict what the creator sees, neither can it
adequately convey what is in his heart.
Have you ever had a dream or a soliloquy in your mind that sounded like God’s gift to man, but when you tried to
write it down, it stank like a dead whale washed up on the beach?
Van Gogh’s little drawing and later painting, was
his perspective, his rendition of the world. It wasn’t a photograph (not that
photographs can’t be art), I’m talking about that rarefied experience where a creator’s perception is heightened. It’s like sparkles
in your eyes. It’s where a painter wants to slap paint on canvas, a
musician wants to pound the keys, and a writer wants
to throw up. Are the images I see seen
the same way by others? How can I capture that? No wonder Van Gogh had a mental
condition.
A painting titled “The Girl on
the Pier,” in my novel sparked this line of thought. I
want the painting to ignite something ethereal
in the viewer, something, magical something that will make the painting more
valuable than the subject painted on the canvas.
I want people so awestruck that when they view
it that they will plunk down dollars for it at an auction.
This artist, Charlie Mackesy, is a genius, simple exquisite drawings, lessons on life. I was tickled to find them last night. I do not wish to infringe on a copyright, however I found his drawings scattered about over the Internet, so I'm hoping they are public domain. All credit goes to him.
Notice how in my effort to stay positive, I am refraining from comment about the spoiled brat in the white house who is punishing the American people by shutting down the government to get his own way.