- Reading notes from "My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation" by James Baldwin, the short opening essay in The Fire Next Time, which takes its title from the old spiritual, the old hymn:#
- God gave Noah the rainbow sign,
No more water, the fire next time!#
- First paragraph's lesson: Do not let them tell you the name you will be called by.#
- Second paragraph's lesson: The powerful do not want to know who and what, how much and how many, they destroy. Their protestation of innocence is a great crime.#
- Third paragraph: Those who protest their innocence don't know us, even if we have been among them working for generations.#
- Fourth paragraph: When any child such as yourself is born to us, we love that baby hard, "at once and forever, to strengthen you against a loveless world."#
- Fifth paragraph: But the powerful who protest their innocence do not love you, and they set you down in a ghetto knowing that there you may very well be destroyed. These heartless and innocent people "are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it." But to understand this history they will have to face themselves, and see that they are not the people they think they are, nor is this the nation they think it is. Do not be beaten down by them or by the definitions they have for you and your life. Great and difficult things have been done in this country and such things must be done again.#
- Final paragraph: Our country celebrated our freedom many decades too soon.#
- My work habit here in this space is to write every day, to keep thinking about how some portion of the writing might find its way into a longer project, and to revise a modest amount before posting each new piece. I usually don't revise an older posting here. To try to write decent or better sentences, knowing that sometimes I'm writing too fast to count on that happening.#
- The other day, however, I wrote a paragraph about a horse I saw from the window of a bus heading north from St. Louis to Iowa City, where I was in school in 1980. I told the story focusing on the horse and its experience, but on rereading a few phrases seemed wordy or needlessly formal or abstract, and I started tinkering. More rereading, and I noticed more about the posted version of the brief story. In part, I noticed that except for the horse at the edge of the field the experience was kind of disembodied. As a portrait of experience, it felt thin and gauzy. #
- More revising, then, brief phrases about being on the bus, about reading and looking out the window. More cutting of the words in the horse's part of the story, realizing that the description could be more spare, more cut to the essential. Less editorializing about what was happening--let the reader do some of the work, eh? A reader will notice things, probably exactly the same things I noticed on that bus 40+ years ago. Show the reader some respect, stop overwriting.#
- And the ending phrases, change the order. End with the most important five words. Use less grammatical complexity so as to focus on the resonance of the details. English (as a language) allows for (any number of) parenthetical constructions, but the more these intrude, the less immediate the impact of the main parts of the sentence. Get rid of them.#
- Open the scene wide, then zoom in, when you can, in a description. Pay attention to the order in which a reader will experience things in a sentence--there are better paths through ideas, through experiences, and worse ones, and the sentence will take a reader through the worse one if that's what you type.#
- But it's hard to notice these shadings without reading and rereading the draft. Listening to it over and over, noticing when it's less interesting, less clear, less immediate. Having noticed a weaker phrase, trying a new version and then living with it for a few rereadings to see if it's any better.#
- Some of the revisions made the paragraph longer, and some made it shorter. Like playing the accordion, air in and air out.#
- But as I said, I don't usually revise blog posts after the first few minutes of writing.#
- Reading notes from "My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation" by James Baldwin, the short opening essay in The Fire Next Time, which takes its title from the old spiritual, the old hymn:#
- God gave Noah the rainbow sign,
No more water, the fire next time!#
- First paragraph's lesson: Do not let them tell you the name you will be called by.#
- Second paragraph's lesson: The powerful do not want to know who and what, how much and how many, they destroy. Their protestation of innocence is a great crime.#
- Third paragraph: Those who protest their innocence don't know us, even if we have been among them working for generations.#
- Fourth paragraph: When any child such as yourself is born to us, we love that baby hard, "at once and forever, to strengthen you against a loveless world."#
- Fifth paragraph: But the powerful who protest their innocence do not love you, and they set you down in a ghetto knowing that there you may very well be destroyed. These heartless and innocent people "are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it." But to understand this history they will have to face themselves, and see that they are not the people they think they are, nor is this the nation they think it is. Do not be beaten down by them or by the definitions they have for you and your life. Great and difficult things have been done in this country and such things must be done again.#
- Final paragraph: Our country celebrated our freedom many decades too soon.#
- My work habit here in this space is to write every day, to keep thinking about how some portion of the writing might find its way into a longer project, and to revise a modest amount before posting each new piece. I usually don't revise an older posting here. To try to write decent or better sentences, knowing that sometimes I'm writing too fast to count on that happening.#
- The other day, however, I wrote a paragraph about a horse I saw from the window of a bus heading north from St. Louis to Iowa City, where I was in school in 1980. I told the story focusing on the horse and its experience, but on rereading a few phrases seemed wordy or needlessly formal or abstract, and I started tinkering. More rereading, and I noticed more about the posted version of the brief story. In part, I noticed that except for the horse at the edge of the field the experience was kind of disembodied. As a portrait of experience, it felt thin and gauzy. #
- More revising, then, brief phrases about being on the bus, about reading and looking out the window. More cutting of the words in the horse's part of the story, realizing that the description could be more spare, more cut to the essential. Less editorializing about what was happening--let the reader do some of the work, eh? A reader will notice things, probably exactly the same things I noticed on that bus 40+ years ago. Show the reader some respect, stop overwriting.#
- And the ending phrases, change the order. End with the most important five words. Use less grammatical complexity so as to focus on the resonance of the details. English (as a language) allows for (any number of) parenthetical constructions, but the more these intrude, the less immediate the impact of the main parts of the sentence. Get rid of them.#
- Open the scene wide, then zoom in, when you can, in a description. Pay attention to the order in which a reader will experience things in a sentence--there are better paths through ideas, through experiences, and worse ones, and the sentence will take a reader through the worse one if that's what you type.#
- But it's hard to notice these shadings without reading and rereading the draft. Listening to it over and over, noticing when it's less interesting, less clear, less immediate. Having noticed a weaker phrase, trying a new version and then living with it for a few rereadings to see if it's any better.#
- Some of the revisions made the paragraph longer, and some made it shorter. Like playing the accordion, air in and air out.#
- But as I said, I don't usually revise blog posts after the first few minutes of writing.#