Ann Beman interviews Jeremiah O’Hagan

Jeremiah O’Hagan’s essays “Pink,” “White,” and “Blue,” appear in Issue 7 of The Los Angeles Review, and his “Essaying” is forthcoming in our 10th issue (October 2011). This summer, Jeremiah sat down with Nonfiction Editor Ann Beman to discuss the essay, the craft, and the writing process.

Ann Beman: In her Introduction to In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction, Annie Dillard writes, “Tear up the runway; it helped you take off, and you don’t need it now.” What does that mean to you? Is it good advice?

Jeremiah O’Hagan: This is a great quotation. Reminds me of another Dillard bit, from The Writing Life: “One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.” Not because “spend it” is really related to revision, but because Dillard’s recklessness is charming. Inspiring. (“Bring on the lions,” she shouts at another point.) But if “spend it” doesn’t apply to revision, it certainly applies to drafting. Get it all out — there’s no other choice.

Here’s the deal, in my experience: occasionally (more honestly, rarely) I sit down to write knowing more or less what I want to say, I say it well, and then I tinker a bit with it and it’s nice, and finished. Most often, though, the first draft is a draft of omission: when you sit down to write, even when you ‘know’ what you want to say, the possibilities for saying it are endless. Anecdotes are numerous. You’re juggling with infinite possibilities, and infinity is an unwieldy number at best. So you type, and for everything that inks the page, infinity-minus-one other possibilities vanish. At the end of the first draft, the page looks back at you: This is what you have to work with.

As you revise, some of those ‘vanished’ bits might creep back in because they work — there’s a place after all — and because you remember them, but many, most, won’t. So when you’re drafting, and a good phrase or word or image flashes, and it fits, spend it. Get it down before it’s gone.

Then, yes, tear up the runway. Writers in love with themselves are dangerous to themselves, deadly to their own ambitions — it’s crippling to love your words too much. I’m always reminded of Marvin Bell, who said, “On the one hand, it’s poetry, it can save your life. On the other hand, it’s only poetry.” Same with words — they’re everything and nothing, all at once. Spend ‘em, tear ‘em, finesse ‘em, discard ‘em — the story is the thing that survives, that matters, and everything else has to serve it. (But seriously, save those cut out flashes of insight and images — there might be a place for them later. I like David Wagoner’s story about the journals he kept as a young man; as an old man he’s rereading them, realizing, ‘oh, I know what to do with that now,’ and churning out poems.)

In a Rolling Stone interview, Ray LaMontagne said he considers himself “a craftsman” when it comes to song writing: He’s striving for songs that will still move people it 20 years. They’re not necessarily autobiographical, or personal, so much as they’re crafted to endure. I like that idea. Revision is about craftsmanship, too. For some reason, I equate craftsmanship with making furniture. Consider the elegant leg of a piano — sexy, curvaceous, strong. And a lot smaller than the piece of wood it used to be trapped in. Which was smaller than the branch it was cut from, in turn smaller than the tree. Infinite, manageable, intentional, gorgeous.

AB: How many drafts does one of your essays go through? What are some of the differences from your first draft to, say, your 5th draft?

JO: No less than five, no more than five and a half.

I’m kidding, but wouldn’t that be grand? To know?

My essays generally don’t go through a terrible number of genuine drafts (I don’t consider banal copy-editing a ‘draft’), though I’m anal about cataloging my changes. “Pink” was written in one shot. It was always what you read now, save a couple nitpicks. I think two words changed, total, and maybe a couple punctuation marks. “White” was revised twice: I wrote it, revised it twice in about an hour, just tightened it, really, and sent it. But that’s not to say it came effortlessly. Both those piece are about instances that had profound impact on me, experiences I’d relived and contemplated and articulated out loud and to myself in various ways and contexts countless times. It’s safe to say many drafts happened in my head. I guess that’s what I meant previously, when I said I sometimes sit down to write knowing what I want to say, more or less, and a little microevolution takes place during that inevitable process of omission. Other times, the first draft is me trying to figure out what I think. The second draft is me trying to articulate that clearly. Then more clearly.

“Blue” took three difficult drafts, all widely different. It’s a good personal experience with “tearing it up.” The piece was first a poem, and not a very good one. Second, it was an essay that picked apart and unpeeled the poem, teasing its layers and trying to figure out what I really wanted to say. Finally, it became what you read now.

I think 10 drafts is my record, if we call that sort of thing a record. I work at a newspaper now, though, so I write often and quickly and don’t have the luxury of drafting. We change on the fly, and I think that creeps into my essays. Mostly, we’ve gotta get shit down, as close to perfect as possible the first time. Then, off to the editor. A “revision” might entail adding quotations from someone who finally called back, or plugging in two sentences of back-story. Not real involved. Often, copious phone calls, interviews, researches and notes go into that one shot, though.

Many of my essays are similar. I’d say three and a half is the average number of drafts for me, the half-draft being final copy edits and last-minute tightening. During the progression, the piece is focusing (ideally). The first draft kinda captures the essence or philosophy of the piece, the loose memories, maybe, and the drafts coax that into something concrete, burnished, certain. Focused sometimes means shorter, but not always — often, I need to add in order to articulate my stance, illustrate abstractions or build transitions. And I want to varnish — I love playing at the level of the sentence, the words and marks of punctuation. It’s beautiful what a comma can do, or a verb. LaMontagne’s craftsmanship again. Blank pages and blinking cursors are empowering, sure, but also terrifying. I’m much more comfortable once the boundaries are established and I can start straining them.

AB: When you’re recalling an experience, how do you decide which details to keep and which to leave out?

JO: Not to be cheap on words, but keep the ones that advance the piece. Toss the rest. A good portion of writing serves only the writer. My former co-worker said, “Words tire easily.”

Why am I writing? What’s my point or what story am I telling? The answer to those questions is the answer to “how much” or “which.” If the details start to change the direction of the piece (assuming we’re not still in the exploratory first draft), or distract from the purpose of the anecdote, they’re superfluous to the writing, no matter how treasured they are to the writer.

Here’s what I told my friend once, when I’d had more wine than I likely needed:
Sometimes, when I can’t write or when what I need to write is too much, too hard, too fogged, I quit worrying about writing it. I just try to describe it. I focus on the craft, not the story … I make a game of it with myself: to describe [experiences] in a new way, a perfect way, to capture in wild original images all the abstractions I can’t name, and which hurt so damn much, and which no one — no one, I convince myself — would understand anyway. Once the images are there, they seem to free my mind, my pain, my pen, and I fill the void between them with the absolute least amount of prose needed to make sense.

AB: What’s the smartest tip regarding the revision process that you’ve ever been given?

JO: “Re-vision.” My professor, Jeanne Yeasting, wrote in on the white board as a hyphenated verb rather than a noun, and I finally got it.

Revision is not a noun that describes a product or process. It’s an act. To take that first draft and envision in anew, angled, slanted, torn up, re-imagined.

Words are often all writers feel like they have — we think we’re better at words than we are at talking, interacting, or going to brunch. Words are our everything, so we hold them tight in the long lonesome hours. Or they’re elusive, and we shake to think of turning them loose once we’ve captured them. But once that first draft is down, black on blank, they’re just words. They’re no longer scary, or a savior — they’re ours to revise.

Revel in the craftsmanship.