Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 4: The Order

I was sitting at the San Francisco Giants baseball game the other night with poet Judith Serin, and we started talking about the order of poems in a book, and almost lost track of the outs and balls and strikes on the field.

“You have no idea how many problems it solved just to change the order,” Judith enthused, discussing a series of poems she’s writing based on dreams and how they illuminate her waking life.

Writers are generally a rebellious bunch. “Order” is something we like about as much as a hard drive crash. But the order of pieces in a book is as important as the batting order of a baseball team, or the order of dishes in a meal. In baseball, you don’t want to have your power hitter bat first, where no one would be on base when he hits a home run, or your pitcher hit leadoff, where he’s likely to start the inning by striking out.

Writers assembling a collection of poems, short fiction, or essays for the first time are drawn to putting the selections in the order they were written. This can work in certain limited cases, when the writer is telling a linear story and begins at the beginning and ends with the story’s conclusion. But that’s rare outside of the novel or a book-length work of nonfiction.

For a collection of short stories, poems, or essays, it’s best to let go of the chronology of when you wrote the pieces. You wouldn’t serve the dessert before the appetizers, even if you’d baked the cookies the day before the meal. When you're serving a meal, you consider the experience of the diners, not your preparations. Similarly with a manuscript, think about the reader’s experience of your book, not your experience writing it. What is the story the pieces tell as an ensemble, rather than individually? How do the pieces fit together to create the curve that shows that a transformation has taken place, from the beginning to the end of the collection?

When I have a fairly good idea of which poems I want to include in a book manuscript, and I’ve got a reasonably finished draft of each poem, I go back to the old school way of choosing an order. I print them all out, and lay them down one by one on the floor, where I can see all of the pieces at once, or at least their first page.

Oddly enough, the pieces begin gathering themselves into groups almost on their own. They choose companions they have something in common with, like kids on a playground. These groups are fluid—they can shift around. One way of looking at the overall arrangement can produce a very different order from another. Make sure you’re telling the same story that the pieces are telling.

Once the pieces begin forming into groups, it’s much easier to see the way the groups want to line up. And within each group, there is also the question of an order. But that’s a much easier problem to solve than an order for all the poems or stories or essays. Once you see the arc of the whole collection, the order of the sections is much clearer, since each section needs to move the story forward.

By the end, it’s like the final step of a card trick. You’re sweeping up poems or stories or essays quickly into bundles, and collecting the bundles into one sheath.

There could be an individual piece that doesn’t fit into any of the groups. That suggests to me that the piece may not belong in this collection at all. It could possibly stand apart as a prologue or an epilogue, but that requires a certain tone, an introductory or conclusive note that very few pieces are likely to have. Consider saving the piece that doesn’t advance the story for a different project, even if you like it on its own. No, don’t just consider it, do it!

In my next blog, I’ll discuss the beginning and endings of book manuscripts.

Other recent posts on writing topics:
Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer

Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 3: The Longer Work

Writing a full-length book of any genre is not like writing a chapter of a book of prose, or like writing a short story or poem. You can’t polish off a first draft of an entire book in one sitting. You’ve got to pace yourself.

You don’t actually know when you start to write a full-length book how long it will take. Most likely it will take years. To embark on and finish a project that lengthy you have to be patient with yourself. You’re not going to do your best work every day, or even every week. Maybe not even once a month, depending on your work habits.

Some books spill out of a writer like the Trevi Fountain, others an author has to gather one morsel at a time, like an ant carrying bits of ripe leaves to its nest. The novelist John Fowles once said in an interview that he wrote the entire first draft of The French Lieutenant’s Woman in three weeks. That's very unusual. Marcel Proust spent his entire adult life writing one many-volume novel, In Search of Lost Time, also translated into English as Remembrance of Things Past. That's equally unusual.

However long it takes to write your book, keep at it, accumulate that manuscript one page at a time. Build towards the complete vision you have of the finished book.

If you start to get bored with your project, that’s a sign you’re heading down a dead end. You can’t get your reader interested in a part of your book that you don’t enjoy writing, or that doesn’t satisfy or fulfill some deep impulse in you. Go back to where you started to get bored, cut the part that doesn’t interest you, and find a more exciting direction. Do something unexpected, off-balance, kooky, kinky—as long as it fits with the rest of the project.

Writing about something that interests you may seem like a simple proposition, but there are times when that question can create an earthquake in your life, bursting all the pipes.

I once went to hear the New York School painter Larry Rivers speak. Larry Rivers was a friend of several writers, especially the poet Frank O’Hara. In fact, Rivers drew the cover illustration for The Selected Poems of Frank O’Hara, a sketch of the poet naked. That night I went to hear him, someone in the audience asked Larry Rivers a dumb question, probably one he’d heard a hundred times before: “Why do you paint?” But Larry Rivers’ answer deeply impressed me: “Because there’s something I want to see.”  So simple, but so precise. Yes, we write because there’s something we want to see in a book, there’s something we wish we could read. Write the book you want to read.

Other recent posts on writing topics:
Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer

Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 2: Stick to Your Story

Assembling a manuscript for a book is a bit like getting interrogated by the police about a crime that’s been committed. Figure out your story, and stick to it. Decide what it is that you want to tell the reader, and keep only what advances the book along that story arc.

That doesn’t mean you have to have a simplistic narrative. You can still go off on wonderful tangents at times. But all the tangents should intersect on one plane or another.

Thomas Mann, in his novel masterpiece The Magic Mountain, has many chapters where he meditates on topics such as the nature of time. These might seem like complete digressions from his story of the tuberculosis patient Hans Castorp in a sanatorium and his adventures with the doctors and the other patients. But since the patients are confined to a spa in the Swiss Alps with nothing but time on their hands, it makes perfect sense that time should be a vein that runs throughout the novel. The ruminations of the third-person narrator fold beautifully into the plot and the setting.

Another example: Mark Doty, in his unforgettable poem “Fog,” weaves together imagery from a flower garden, sessions with a Ouija board, and HIV testing of the narrator and his partner.  Some of that material may at first seem disconnected, but if you read the poem over, the themes of life and death and blood and illness are tightly braided.

So when I say, Figure out your story and stick to it, I’m not saying, Be simplistic, or Don’t change your plot. Surprise yourself. Robert Frost said, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” But once you do glimpse the book’s arc—and that may not happen till you’re several drafts into the manuscript—pull out anything that does not fall on that curve or very close to it. If your story breaks down, you’re going to be the one who takes the fall.

Other recent posts on writing topics:
Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer

Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 1: Write More Than You Need

If you’re writing a book, no matter what the genre, you probably have a page length or word count in mind. 

If it’s poetry you’re writing, your target is probably 50 to 70 pages.

Estimates vary about how long a novel should be. According to Deborah Ritchken, an agent at the Marsal Lyon Literary Agency, “There really is no set rule but the average novel runs about 110,000 words. Obviously, there are novels where the word count runs much higher!” 

If you’re J.K. Rowling, then the sky’s the limit. (Some might argue that the later Harry Potter books needed a good editor.) A book of nonfiction should also clock in around 100,000 words. I would think a collection of short stories should be closer to 60,000 words.

Whatever the genre, you should write much more material than you actually need. You want to have the luxury of cutting work that isn’t up to the quality of the rest of the book. For my collection of poetry My Mother and the Ceiling Dancers, to arrive at 50 pages of published poetry, I wrote about 135 pages. I cut two thirds of it. That wasn’t easy for me. There are still poems in that 85 pages of crossed-off material that I get a twinge of regret when I read and remember that I couldn’t include them in the book. But I know the book is better off without those deleted pages.

The trick is to write more than you need but not to get so attached to what you write that you refuse to part with the sections that are weaker, or extraneous to the direction of the book as a whole. Ultimately, it’s the reader’s experience you have to prioritize, not your affection for your own words.

All writers create bad drafts, and/or writing that is not up to their best work, or doesn't mesh with a current project. The challenge is to keep that work somewhere private, rather than try to publish it.

I have a file I call “Uncollected Poems,” which is my euphemism for poems that never made it into any of my books. Ultimately they didn't make the grade or fit in the collection I was working on at the time. I’m not throwing those poems out. Some of them I continue to polish. I enjoy revisiting many of them. I occasionally will send one or two out to magazines or anthologies. But I realize they rarely end up in any collection of my work.

In the literary world, the quality of your work is judged not only by what you publish, but by what you don’t publish. If you establish a consistent standard for your writing and keep to that, readers will see that sheen in your work, and be drawn to it. If you don’t keep to that standard, you risk being judged by the worst of your creations.

Continue reading: Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies

Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

Other posts on writing topics:

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

For the Russian Writers Protesting Putin’s Crackdown on Dissent

A remarkable event happened in Moscow on, May 13, 2012. Twelve Russian writers organized a walk to protest President Vladimir Putin’s recent attacks on dissidents, and 10,000 Russian citizens turned out to join them, defying police and the recent mass arrests and physical attacks on demonstrators in Moscow and elsewhere. I salute all those brave human rights protestors.

That amazing event in 2012 was an attempt to reverse the Russian government’s brazen crackdown on dissent, including the military’s statement that they would conscript any young men protesting Vladimir Putin’s third inauguration as president, and the arrest of more than 650 who were demonstrating against the swearing-in.

The turnout for the May 13, 2012 walk by the Russian writers, from the statue of poet and playwright Aleksander Pushkin to the statue of playwright Aleksandr Griboyedov, was testimony to two important facts. First, a great many Russians revere their writers and love literature. Not a small thing, in the age of reality TV and gladiator-style entertainment. Second, Russian writers have often stood side by side with the people of Russia. From novelist Leo Tolstoy freeing his serfs, to poet Vladimir Mayakovsky’s revolutionary politics, to Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelshtam circulating secret poems to protest Stalin’s purges, to Solzhenitsyn’s documentation of Soviet prison camps, Russian writers have taken a strong stand in support of human rights. 

The bond between Russian writers and the Russian people is closely connected to the moral vein in that country’s writing. When I say “moral,” I don’t mean “moralistic.” I mean bravely speaking out in the face of dictatorship, or dictatorial actions by the current government.

North American authors have much to learn from the example of the dozen Russian writers who called the 2012 protest walk. Where are the writers of the United States protesting the enormous weight of debt that burdens so many households in our country, when annual interest rates on credit cards soar above 20%? Where are the writers calling for demonstrations against the U.S. dependence on fossil fuels? When are writers going to announce a protest of our military budget, now $700 billion annually, while our people lack health care and quality schools, and the number of homeless is in the hundreds of thousands?

Yes, writers are marginalized in the U.S., but part of that we have inflicted on ourselves, by avoiding the issues that are most pressing for our people.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer

How Our Writing Trails Along After Us

Most writers get excited about the work we’re doing right at the moment. That work usually feels like the most urgent, authentic, and developed. Our previous work often seems to us out of date, sophomoric, passé, even at times something we would like to forget or walk away from.

The writer André Breton, in his “Preface for a Reprint of the Manifesto” of Surrealism, distanced himself so much from his earlier writing that he proclaimed, “Those [books] attributed to me do not seem to me to exercise any greater influence on me than many others…” Our earlier works sometimes seem to us as if another person wrote them, a person much less wise than we are now.

But the reality of the writing world is that it can take years, sometimes decades, to get a work published and publicized. When I worked with the poet Bill Zavatsky on translating André Breton’s principle collection of poetry, Earthlight, it took me and Bill seventeen years from the time we first sat down at a café on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village to begin the project, till we finally held a printed copy of the book in our hands. There were many reasons for this long gestation period—our personal lives intervened; it was difficult to get the rights from Breton’s French publisher; Bill moved to Texas for two years, making it impossible for us to meet (this was before Skype and email).

We usually have to edit and submit and publicize older work that feels like it’s not our most mature. It’s as if our writings are younger siblings trailing along after us, embarrassing us with their lack of grown-up knowledge and behavior. Sometimes we wish those juvenile writing would just get lost and leave us to our more urbane current work. But, like younger brothers and sisters, they won’t. They keep following us, wanting our attention.

So, give them that attention. While the less-current work you are sending out, or publishing, or reading from may not seem that fresh to you, remember that it’s new to your readers or audience. When you read from your recently published but not recently written work, inhabit again the emotions and ideas that sparked it. Open up to that hurt and laughter. If you devoted that much time and energy to write them, those earlier works must still have a claim on you, and their energy and innocence might even be able to teach something to your more sophisticated current self.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer

Working with a Writing Mentor, Part 5: Dances with Mentors

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You can dance by yourself, and that can be creative and fun, but it’s much more fun to dance with someone else. Why? Because the pooled energy of two people working out a dance together is much more than the sum of the parts. You find yourself inventing steps you didn’t realize you could do. You have cartridges of adrenaline you didn’t know existed.

It’s similar when you’re working with a creative writing mentor. The concentrated energy of having a person focused on your work for a sustained period of time produces results you would have a hard time achieving all on your own. Just knowing that someone who is knowledgeable about the field of literature is waiting for your new work is an enormous incentive to do your best and even to exceed your own expectations for yourself. That kind of directed concentration on all the details of your work is a rare opportunity.

Use that energy you get from your mentor’s attention and interest in your work to produce both more and better work than you’ve done previously. 

That doesn’t mean at all that you have to imitate your mentor’s dance steps. You have your own dance as a writer, and that’s what you’re developing. Your dance may in some ways mirror the steps of your mentor’s work, or the concerns of your mentor’s work, but it also needs to be your own, or you risk stepping on your mentor’s toes. 

In what ways does your work have to be your own? In the same way that your childhood is your own, or your ancestry is your own, or your family history, or your cultural and religious heritage, or your circle of friends, or your values. You have so much that is your own to draw on, there is no need to imitate anything about your mentor’s work.

Your mentor can also step on your toes in this dance. A mentor can overstep his or her authority, making comments that are too personal or too much in the vein of asking you to write the way he or she does. But if that happens, that’s your mentor’s problem.

Your job is to explore your own project as a writer as deeply as possible, even more deeply than you thought possible. Your job is to polish your work as thoroughly as possible, even more thoroughly than you thought you were capable of. That’s where that attention from your mentor gives you energy you didn't know you had.

Eventually, you need to move on to dancing solo, to filling the stage on your own. But even when you’re dancing solo, your mentor is still in your mind sitting front row center, watching every step, and the first to lead the applause for you if you’re dancing the way you know you can.

Later on, you can also regain some of that dancing energy by collaborating with other artists, creating texts that can be acted, illustrated, sung—or even danced.

Other recent posts on writing topics:
Working with a Writing Mentor: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 , Part 4, Part 5

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer

New English Translation of Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo”—Learning from Rilke, Part 2

One of Rainer Maria Rilke’s most famous works is “Archaic Torso of Apollo.” In that short poem he solders together radical opposites. The Apollonian (pure abstract art) and the Dionysian (sensual, physical) are often thought of as opposites. But in his description of a statue of the god Apollo, Rilke uses Dionysian language to depict that artwork. He combines the cool energy of classic art with the hot energy of the body, and then Rilke pulls off one of the greatest endings in the history of poetry.

The word “archaic” in the poem’s title resonates in different ways. It refers specifically to the Archaic period in ancient Greek art from 600 to 480 B.C.E., when it was standard for sculptures of human figures to have a smiling face. In fact, that type of expression is called The Archaic Smile.

Greek statue with "The Archaic Smile"

But the word “archaic” is also partly ironic in the title of this poem, since nothing could be as immediate as this statue the way Rilke describes it. The poem is contemporary in its diction, but it’s a Petrarchan sonnet, another fusion of opposites. I’ve tried in this new version of Rilke’s most frequently translated poem to bring out the poem’s oddly indirect directness (almost every statement except the last is a negative). I’ve also tried to include the poem’s sensuality, often censored in translation. To emphasize the impact of the poem’s last phrase, I’ve brought it into contemporary English. Here’s my translation:

Archaic Torso of Apollo

by Rainer Maria Rilke

We’ll never know the incredible head

where his eyes ripen like apples. No,

but that torso is a lamp, and in its glow

his gaze does appear, turned down instead,

but hovering, glistening. Otherwise the arc of his breast

wouldn’t dazzle you, and in the slight

twist of his loins a smile wouldn’t alight

in the center, where the virile parts nest.

Otherwise this stone would be stunted, marred

under those shoulders that plunge hard,

wouldn’t flicker like a wild animal’s coat;

wouldn’t burst from its edges, knife

like a star: there’s nowhere on him so remote

it doesn’t see you: you’ve got to change your life.

(translation © 2017 by Zack Rogow)

            “Archaic Torso of Apollo” derives its force from a particular electricity generated when the directness of life collides with the distance of art. The one object Rilke describes in this poem, an ancient Greek statue of a male torso that he saw in the Louvre Museum in Paris, combines the vitality of the body and ripe fruit (the apple eyes) with the world of ancient art.

            To me it seems that Rilke is deliberately emphasizing the sensuality of this statue, drawing our attention to its breast and crotch, comparing its glow to the pelt of a predatory beast.

            The torso in Rilke’s poem may be buff, but it’s beheaded and de-sexed. It has neither the power of thought, nor the virility of its genitals, nor lips to kiss, nor arms to hold or legs to clench.

            Then why does this broken block of stone mean that we must change our lives—demand that we change our lives? Rilke begins by telling us we can’t see the statue’s eyes, but then reverses direction by saying the torso can see us, with its nipples like eyes and its pelvis curving upward in a knowing smile. The poem continually picks up momentum as it displays the miracle of a headless body that looks at us, smiles at us, even pierces us with its invisible glance. The poem tells us that art strips us bare, throws light on the deepest caverns of our souls, and only when we accept that are we ready to change our lives and begin the trek of our destiny. But that knowledge also produces a smile, even in the most unlikely place: a headless torso.

Other posts on Rilke:
Rilke's "Autumn Day"
Learning from Rilke, Part 1

Other recent posts about writing topics: 

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry? 

Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer