Everyone wants to be elite, no one wants to be elitist

Or: don't revise, just start over? Or just stare at some clouds.

The other day my daughters and I went to my parents’ house for lunch. In the last few years, my dad has taken over all the cooking and household work. This was, for a lifetime, strictly my mother’s territory, but she can’t do it anymore. She’ll leave the stove on or worse. By the time the girls and I arrived, the table was set on the screened-in porch: rice, kebabs, two types of salad, bread, cheese, pickles. Glasses of lemonade with ice. When did he learn to make such good food, set such a pretty table? Fifty-plus years of watching my mom, I guess. Over lunch he was uncharacteristically talkative. He was telling the girls about friendships, and more broadly, about work, the thing by which his life has been defined. “Always choose people better than you, smarter than you. They’ll make you better and smarter.” Famously in family lore, my mom was second in their medical school graduating class, my dad first.

This notion of “better than, smarter than” is easy to gloss over aphoristically but much harder to talk about in specifics. Better than, by whose definition? So much depends on subjective value systems and questions of privilege. And yet the idea persists, in the marketplace, in our homes, in our restless selves. What’s progressive today will seem regressive in ten, twenty years. We can only think so far ahead, solve for the x in front of us. Some have reconfigured the problem of comparison by resolving to be “better than I was yesterday,” to compete foremost with one’s own self. But that suggests that the self is a stable, static entity, askew in some stable, static way, one that can be tweaked and tuned like an unused guitar. What parts of myself, tomorrow, do I want to be better than today? What parts, while addressing those items, will I somehow get worse? Progress is recursive if it exists at all.

This is why novel revision, for me, is so difficult. It’s hard for me not to simply (not simple at all) just start over, shoot an entirely different story out of the cannon. I don’t want to believe in first thought, best thought, and I’ve been writing long enough to know what a fallacy it can be. But separating what doesn’t work from what does work begs all the same questions as “being better than.” A character might be pitch perfect but only if they’re being accommodated appropriately by the narrative. A narrative might flow beautifully forth—you have so much to say about that fateful lunch with those chambray napkins!—but ultimately gum up the overall pacing. Add (real) time to the equation—will you love in three months what you love today—and the possibilities become even more overwhelming.

Mostly I’m always worrying about time. How to really trick it out, for the reader. I used to try not to focus on the reader, when I wrote. But that’s sort of silly, right? You wouldn’t create, say, a cup, without considering the mechanics of drinking, of mouths and hands. When I read something “propulsive,” I take note of how scenes move, the “hidden machinery,” to borrow a Livesey phrase, that makes it all go. Marvelous to imagine the swaths of text that got cut in order to manufacture that exquisitely rare wheee. Marvelous, too, to tarry in a single moment, stretched across pages, when the micro-moments are handled just right.

This isn’t really a craft essay and I don’t love writing advice, giving it or getting it. I feel like I always say the same two things: read more, and write less. Walk away. Find other joys. The world has way too much laborious writing, perfectly-calibrated writing, polished writing, stylish writing. Maybe your story is ugly and clunky and will not get published, but maybe it’ll set you free to write it. Maybe it’s beautiful and memorable and absolutely deserving and still won’t get published, and that’s fine, too. I for one am weary of code-cracking and life-hacking and the idea that everyone’s story is worthy (maybe it is, I’m just tired of it, philosophically). I’ll probably deny ever writing this. There are too many of us—we know this. Is it world or time that I lack, or some secret, third thing? Both feel scarce and endless all at once, which makes it both easy to persevere and easy to quit. Each can be noble.

Every time I write about writing a very kind, well-meaning person will message me and say, “oh, I hope you don’t give up!” To be clear, I’m not discouraged, or unhappy. I guess sometimes my writing may make it seem like I am? I feel like I have gained a lot of clarity, which is worth a lot to me right now. And this month I had the good fortune of having an essay about Joan Baez and my mother published in Still Alive, which is my favorite piece of writing that I’ve done in recent memory. Speaking of better than, Erin Somers is one of those geniuses among us who inspires me with her perceptiveness, range, and humor. Read as much of her as you can and feel, truly, better. An honor, Erin! Thank you for including me.

Shout-outs to a few books (plus one essay) that have recently made me feel/are making me feel better (smarter, more capable, with a greater capacity for delight, see also: excited to write), specifically for how they handle the weighty beast that is time, since it’s time, after all, that’s the subject of this Substack. All of them, in vastly different ways, prove to me the basic yet overlooked idea that time is perhaps the most decisive element of a story’s success.

The Gospel of Orla by Eoghan Walls

The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni, trans. by Michael F. Moore

The Guest by Emma Cline

From the Shadows by Juan José Millás, trans. by Thomas Bunstead & Daniel Hahn

Death Valley by Melissa Broder

Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au

What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez

Whose Time Are We Speaking In? (essay) by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi