I’ve been trying to write about something that happened two weeks ago. I was in therapy and I did something I’ve never done before: I told my shrink what my screenplay was “about.” Actually, I told her the plot, more specifically about the two main characters and how I couldn’t write what I had planned about them. Just as I said it, I knew for the first time what the story was really about, who these characters were. I had led myself right back into the central drama of our family (once again) even as I believed I was writing about entirely different creatures.

I raced home and wrote the ending. And another new experience: it wrote itself. All the plot lines like a row of dominoes falling in a long line of deeply pleasurable inevitability capped off with the pure satisfaction of the final tile hitting the table. Done. Only then, an angel descended and gave me a final image so strange I could have never thought of it.

Are you in therapy? Does it help you? Your work? Do you think it’s bad for your work? Did you ever sleep with your therapist. Do you give your therapist your writing/books? Have you ever solved a specific writing problem in therapy?

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I finished reading the fourth draft of a novel this weekend. It was amazing to see, even at this stage, where the writer held fast to her vision and where she was willing to make some radical changes. As well as many small changes. And how those small changes changed everything. I’ve always nursed a pet theory that writers exaggerate about how much they revise, how much they throw out, and how much editing they actually take. Put another way, there’s revising your work and playing with your food. Reader, this writer revised.

I was weeping at the end of this book. The power of it caught me off guard. Every moment in the novel found its fulfillment in the last seven pages. It was like watching a master chess player dominate the board in a series of swift, confident moves. What is the sound of a marble King falling upon a marble board. I reread those pages again, slower the second time, looking for the sleight of hand, the bouquet up her sleeve, the doves released. How the hell did she do it?

I will always be a sucker for this: for words to take me away from me as they console me, to make me forget myself and remind me who I am, to be trustworthy and manipulative, to seduce and destroy, to implicate and complicate, to come alive. When a writer does all this, and when I have had the privilege of clocking it, I am reminded of why, even after years of sweeping shit, I’ll never leave show business.

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Today, I met with a writer who said she read my book, Food & Loathing. She said she couldn’t  “go there,” and that it must have been very painful to write. Defensively, perhaps perversely, I said that I had fun writing it. I loved figuring out the structure, moving the story along, recreating scenes.  Okay,  maybe a few fat tear drops fell on the keyboard from time to time; that too was satisfying.

I’m also very pragmatic and I had twenty-plus journals from that time that I wanted to use. I used to write in my diary every day until my mid twenties, and I had kept notes after every therapy session I ever went to. He said, she said. There was something else that motivated me: competition. All these people were writing about depression and two week hospitalizations. I was bi-polar with six months in the bin. I’m not saying I climbed Mt Kilimanjaro first with no gorp or oxygen, but I felt I knew something, had something to say, especially where food and mood collided. So, there you have it, my less than idealistic reasons for writing my book. Did I mention the money? Or the rage?

Why do you write? What really drives you?

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When I wrote poems, what I really loved was revising. Counting syllables, interior rhymes, turning quatrains into couplets, scrutinizing every line break for its potential drama or opportunity. I just loved the shit. Revising prose is another animal completely. There is nothing more thrilling than to read a work that has been transformed through the art/craft of revision. On the other hand, there is nothing more disheartening than to send away a writer with meaningful notes and have them return weeks later with a “revision” when you the know the work required would take a few months.

Sometimes, writers will send me a memo with the revision outlining everything they have done and explaining why they didn’t take certain notes. These documents are as boring as synopses. My only interest is the revision and I want to read it without the benefit of a road map. After all, there won’t be a note for the reader: took out that detail about my mother because she would kill me. Sometimes if you address one change, other problems automatically resolve. I never care if a writer takes my notes so much as uses them. There’s a great charge from working with a writer when the collaboration produces something more powerful than originally anticipated. I think editors live for this feeling; it’s akin to consummation.

There are six basic types of revisers with many variations. They are: the “pay as you play” meaning your revise each sentence again and again before moving forward; the “slasher” who mostly cuts; the “tinkerer” changes one word such as cup for mug and back to cup; the “padder” who keeps adding sometimes to good effect, sometimes not; the “architect” who drastically alters the structure; the “mule” who can not change very much; and the “hawk” who sees it all and kills it.

How do you go about the work of revising? Any advice? Nightmares? Successes? Secrets?

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