In a message dated 3/1/10 6:04:57 PM, [email protected] writes: 1. Do you experience a difference in the a.e.'s you get when you observe another person's work than when you make your own work?
2. Do you experience a difference between the a.e. you feel when you make your work and later when you see or hear the same work? My answer is a rather bleak but firm "yes" to both questions. 1. It's notorious that editors and writers with very reliable sensibilities when judging the work of others can't see their own work clearly. I used to talk about "editors' novels": usually "well made", but with all the resonance of balsa wood. A stipulative definition of "reliable sensibility": the ability to anticipate the reactions of a script's ideal intended readers. As an editor/publisher I could do that with a high batting average, but as a writer judging my own effects, I'm not dependable at all. (For some reason I do tend to be right when I think I've been funny (i.e. the audience does indeed laugh), but on much "bigger" factors my judgment is a crap shoot.) 2. I revise repeatedly, and after every revision I cry, "Ah - at last I got it right." On my hard drive there are forty or fifty revisions of almost every play. There are many remarks about why this should be so. Here's one. When we write, we are liable to be thrilling to a scene running in a vivid mental movie through our heads - without realizing that the only things our readers are seeing is the words we put on paper. When WE read those words, they evoke for us much of that vivid associated notion - but those associations have been forged only in OUR heads - not in our readers'. Dylan Thomas wrote some poems I love - but Fern Hill is not among them, and the reason is that in Fern Hill he repeatedly uses words that in his childhood were obviously associated with a treasury of sights and sounds that arose anew in his mind when he used those words again. They have no such associations for me. That error - the writer's entertaining in his own mind notion that isn't evoked by his written words - has broader manifestations. We're often astonished to observe a writer failing to realize a given development in his story is unbelievable. This sometimes happens because the writer has supplied to his own mind explanatory data that it hasn't occurred to him needs to be conveyed to his audience. As an editor when I asked a writer to explain some turn of events, he has said, "Oh, that's because -" and I've had to advise him: "Don't tell ME - tell the READER." The writer is "so close to" his material he often fails to see the necessity for certain preparations, set-ups. Sometimes the writer's failing is in assuming his audience shares his avid interest in a topic. Imagine my enthusiastically creating a scene in which two scholars wrangle for eight minutes about an abstruse puzzle in ontology, and thinking this must be great theater because look how excited I am. Almost everyone writing on this forum must have, upon seeng one of their lines reasonably misinterpreted, murmured to himself, "That's not what I meant at all." You'd spot a similar ambiguity in another, but not in your own locutions. Perhaps you as a visual artist recognize hints of this sort of thing in your own experience. (But you're not stuck painting with words - "symbols" that you count on to evoke the visual thing you have in mind. You can paint that visual thing directly.) How about you: Have you ever "finished" a painting and loved it, only to look at it again months later and wonder how you were ever satisfied with that?
