Just in time for my galley proofs to arrive on Monday, A. L. Kennedy explains the stress associated with reading proofs in the Guardian:

Proof pages – nearly the finished article, but not quite. They’re a good sign: they mean your book is almost done, almost ready to pack up its things, get published and amble out to meet the reader. But, then again, proofs are also a source of almost primal panic for the writer. If your proofs are awful, wrong, badly-spelled, oddly-italicised and otherwise dysfunctional, they are a very real demonstration of both your complete powerlessness within the editing process and your witless lack of talent within the writing process. They alarm, containing, as they do, all manner of peculiarities and absurdities which have been added by strangers for no clear reason, along with the plethora of screw-ups which are utterly your own fault. How did you miss that non-agreeing verb? Did you ever know what this final sentence means? Will that character stand up to even the most cursory examination? Why did you ever think this was any use? Can anything within the compass of your meagre abilities be done to remedy this papery hellsbroth of shit?

I’m hoping my reaction will be a little less extreme.

Via Justine Larbalestier, Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk on genius, inspiration, and “mulish” work. It’s a beautifully presented talk, though I’m not sure that I agree with her final premise of talent as a kind of transitory gift. I do agree, and I’m pretty sure I’ve gone on about this before, that the post-Romantic (Gilbert says post-Renaissance) conception of the artist has led to an absurd cultural insistence that all writers be damaged in order to create. (See this great New Yorker article on writer’s block and the invention thereof.) But I also think that placing “genius” or “inspiration” entirely outside oneself is a little sad. We are human, and we do create beautiful things. Inspiration is the work of our brains, and that’s worth celebrating, even if we don’t understand how it functions.

But I do agree with both Justine and Elizabeth Gilbert that the most important thing you can do as a writer is keep doing your work, or, as Justine says, make it the best book you can.

Now I’m off to make the best dissertation chapter outline I can. I hope.

Justine Larbalestier on when a writing project is finished. Justine is answering questions about writing for the whole month of January, and doing so in an awesome and informative fashion. Highly recommended. She begins her response to the question of how to tell when a project is finished:

My immediate response is that no book is ever “well and truly done”. They could all be made better. Every single one of them, yes, even Pride and Prejudice.¹ There is not point at which “you shouldn’t tamper with a story anymore”.

(The footnote is Justine’s: “1. Austen rushes the ending. There. I’ve said it.” Yep. Oh, Jane.)

I mentioned the idea of knowing when a project is finished the other day on Twitter. When I first started writing fiction — and non-fiction, including academic papers — I didn’t know how to revise. I knew how to edit in a superficial fashion, and I knew how to abandon projects that weren’t working. Sometimes I would rewrite sizable chunks of something, paragraphs or pages. But the idea of completely re-envisioning and rewriting a project didn’t make sense to me. This is partly because I edited as I wrote, which is still true. But it was also because the projects I was working on then were college papers, poems for poetry seminars, or stories that would never be published. The stakes were not high. I cared a great deal about my academic performance and I worked hard on the papers I wrote, but I didn’t fundamentally understand revision.

This began to change when I worked at the writing center at Smith, and it changed even more when I got to grad school, taught creative writing and composition, and worked at the writing center at UT, as well. If you want to learn to revise, try teaching others how to do it or practicing it on the works of others. (This is why I think workshops are extremely valuable, even though I found the structure of a semester-length workshop frustrating as a long-form writer.) I still revise while I write, but I’ve also learned to rewrite. I used to think the idea of obsessively polishing a project was absurd, but now I see its impractical appeal. Justine is absolutely right; every individual work can always be better. But she’s also right that time is finite. Sometimes things just have to be done.

For example: my soon-to-be-published article on Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote began as a seminar paper, then became a conference paper, then a drastically different full-length article, then a revised full-length article. It’s done and ready to be published, but of course it could still be improved if I had boundless time and resources. While I was revising, I caught odd glimpses of the article, perfected: the shining, beautiful, spare thing it could be, every word necessary and incisive… if I could only spend months on it alone. It was like a mirage, or maybe the grad-student version of scorbutic nostalgia. So I revised it to the best of my ability and declared it complete, and I went on to the next project with a much stronger (and, okay, weirder) understanding of why it might be difficult to stop polishing a piece of writing. I promise not to turn into Casaubon if I can help it.

It’s been a weird fall and winter.

Lots of exciting things occurred, not all of which will be written about here. The book deal you know about, and the dissertation prospectus exam. The biggest thing in my life for the last few years, though, has been my father’s illness. He was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma in 2003, just after he retired (and just before I graduated from college). He had loads of chemo, a stem cell transplant, treatment with monoclonal antibodies. In the end, nothing worked — or rather, nothing worked for long enough. The cancer always came back. He died on December 23, 2008, at home in Oregon.

He was an amazing man and an amazing father. If you’d like to read his obituary, you can do so here.

And in December — I had a book to revise. I know that sounds strange; how could I, while Dad was so sick? And the answer is, really, that I could because I wanted to and because I had to; that’s how we’ve managed everything for the last three years, the years when he was really sick. I spent a lot of time at home whenever I could, but my parents felt strongly that I should not abandon my graduate work, and I did what I had to in order to manage both responsibilities. My father kept going, despite feeling like crap most of the time, because there were still things he wanted to do. My mother kept going, which in her case meant “kept taking wonderful care of my father and being an awesome human being.” You just keep going, and you do what you can to be happy.

It made my father tremendously happy, by the way, to know that this novel was going to be published.

I turned in the revised manuscript of Alcestis this last Sunday and then promptly thought of about eight other things I wanted to add to it. So this week I wrote up an acknowledgments page, toyed with and then discarded the idea of adding a note about why I chose to use Romanized Greek names (which I guess should really be called Anglicized Romanized Greek names), and fixed one weird naming choice I’d made — and now I think I’m done, at least until my lovely editor lets me know if she wants any other last-minute changes. Soon there will be page proofs, and I’ll need to ask some of my very favorite writers if they might be willing to look at the book and say kind things about it. And oh god there are so many other things I have to do this semester. One of those things is to post here more often. I know I say that all the time, but I really will do my best. I’m hoping it’ll be a better spring.