Cutting by two thirds, and then some
I'm back in London after a few days in Vienna, where I read at Vienna Lit 2008 and gave a lecture to a literature class at the University of Vienna.
In the lecture, I talked about the various methods I have for getting ideas. I took out the index card that I had been writing on the evening before and read out the notes I had made regarding things I had seen while walking around in the city. One thing that had made an impression was a big hydraulic excavator with a demolition attachment. This machine was taking down a building that, in America, would be an historic treasure. In Vienna, it was a run-of-the-mill 19th century building of the most common sort. I was particularly impressed by the sound made when the pincers on the machine punched through windows, prior to seizing the sills to pull down a section of wall. The breaking glass reminded me of breaking ice in puddles on my way to school in Colorado.
Often I don't get a story out of such an observation for months or years, but in this case, I started to think about the demolition site as soon as I returned to London. I began to see the outlines of a story, and I drafted a story of about 1,000 words.
When I showed this story to Holly, she evoked the words of our friend, Ray Vukcevich. If you ask Ray how he writes a story, he says something like this: "I just write. Then I go back and take out the boring parts."
Holly said, "There are some good things here, but this story is mostly boring parts."
We talked about what she did like: The idea of the sound of things breaking. Breaking ice. Later, windows breaking at a demolition site. And the idea that someone could make music out of these sounds.
What was left out? Almost everything that I had thought of as "the story." The idea that I wanted to get across. The irony about a man who didn't understand the entire purpose behind his brother's art. The whole elaborate business about performances that are, like the breaking of ice, never to be repeated in exactly the same way. Impermanence as an explicit theme.
I had spent two days thinking up all that stuff. Now Holly was telling me that the good stuff in the story was actually those parts that were closest to the source material and my first thoughts. I knew, as she told me, that she was right. I was still irritated by what felt like wasted time and effort. Except that it wasn't wasted. Without the draft that was wrong, I would never have come to the Jack Daniels, which is what pulls the narrative together in its briefer, simpler form.
Subscribers have just received the final version of the story. It's a third of the length of the story below. That final version is simpler and, I think, more interesting. But I thought a few might be interested in seeing the path that I had to take through a mediocre story in order to get to the better one. So here is that earlier draft:
Legacy
By Bruce Holland Rogers
I don't get interviewed very often any more. I think the music professors and art historians who thought my brother was some kind of genius, they're starting to forget about him.
What are you after? A footnote for a dissertation? No? Oh, a newspaper. Well, good. Maybe you don't think you already know it all.
They used to ask me, What about music in the house when you were boys? No. I don't remember any music at all, unless you want to count the nightly shouting as a concert. No violins. No Papa Mozart for us. More like a fist and Jack Daniels.
All this talk of genius... If anything, I was the sensitive one. Winter mornings, we'd start for school early, before the other kids, so we could find the places where puddles had frozen on top and drained from underneath. I'd race him. He was smaller. I'd get to the best ice sheets first, and I broke them slowly, deliberately. I listened to the ice groan and crackle under my foot before it shattered and the pieces tinkled together like glass. Aran, he just wanted to smash through as many sheets of ice as he could. He liked smashing.
I don't think he was even aware of how bad it was between our parents until, one day, our father was gone. Meanwhile, he was sassing his teacher, knocking food trays out of the hands of other kids in the school cafeteria. He lit the living room drapes on fire once, for no reason. He never had a reason.
Interventions by Social Services, a stint in Juvie, jail when he was old enough. Does that sound to you like the life of a genius? Our mother was no gem, but it's not like she didn't try. I managed to turn out all right, you see. I had a steady job, wife, kids. Aran wasn't messed up because of our mother. It wasn't that single-mother business you hear.
Out of jail, he knocked around a while. This and that. I wouldn't hear from him for long stretches. Eventually he got his heavy equipment training, and he told me he was working demolition sites, operating something called a hydraulic pulverizer. I saw him at work a couple times. The pulverizer was a mean set of pincers at the end of a hydraulic arm, and Aran's job was to pull down buildings a little bit at a time. When he'd come to a window, he would punch through the center of it, and the sound reminded me of our childhood winters.
After years of demolition work, he came to me about the music. He said, You know business. How do I do this? How do I sell tickets and advertise and make it all work?
I didn't see how his idea could work at all. He had put wireless microphones on his machine and around his work sites to record the sounds of buildings coming apart. And that was music? Who would want to hear it? And he rejected a lot of what I did suggest. If he did get an audience, I thought he should try to sell them CDs, but he had this thing against recording. He said that if you heard a window breaking in his performance, you heard it once. You might hear a sound like it, but that was a different window. You can't break the same window twice. And once the performance was over, it was gone. No recordings.
I pointed out that the whole noise symphony was recorded, and he said, No, only the notes were. Like that made a difference. To him it was a big deal that there was no repetition of sounds, no duplication of performances. Demolition sounds were edited and arranged in sections, on different machines, and there was no master recording, no single digital medium containing the whole work. The sounds played from different sources, through different sets of speakers around the performance space.
I don't know why it caught on. His music was different, a novelty, sure, but to pay what people were paying at the end? For the sound of things breaking? And there was an arms race between my brother and people who were trying to sneak in recording devices at his concerts. You had to go through a metal detector. The performance couldn't start until his security guys swept the room for microphones.
Granted, it was a success. But Aran was also a bonehead. The way he drank, smoked, and did the other, which he never admitted to me, but I wouldn't be surprised...the way he did those things, you'd think he was trying to kill himself. And with his success built on all these recorded sounds, he stores them all in one place? No backups? That's genius?
After the fire, I even said to him, I said, What were you thinking?
You know what he said? He said, Ta-da! Like he was taking credit.
After that, he burned through all the money he had made. He went back to working demolition, pulling down walls and popping windows, but without recording the sounds. He died before he was old enough to retire. People who heard his music, if you want to call it that, can sort of remember the overall feel of a performance, but not the details. We'll go on forgetting the little bit we do still recall. The last of us will die.
I loved my brother. I don't have anything against calling him a genius if people want to think that. But, come on! Good luck calling something a work of genius if it doesn't last.
In the lecture, I talked about the various methods I have for getting ideas. I took out the index card that I had been writing on the evening before and read out the notes I had made regarding things I had seen while walking around in the city. One thing that had made an impression was a big hydraulic excavator with a demolition attachment. This machine was taking down a building that, in America, would be an historic treasure. In Vienna, it was a run-of-the-mill 19th century building of the most common sort. I was particularly impressed by the sound made when the pincers on the machine punched through windows, prior to seizing the sills to pull down a section of wall. The breaking glass reminded me of breaking ice in puddles on my way to school in Colorado.
Often I don't get a story out of such an observation for months or years, but in this case, I started to think about the demolition site as soon as I returned to London. I began to see the outlines of a story, and I drafted a story of about 1,000 words.
When I showed this story to Holly, she evoked the words of our friend, Ray Vukcevich. If you ask Ray how he writes a story, he says something like this: "I just write. Then I go back and take out the boring parts."
Holly said, "There are some good things here, but this story is mostly boring parts."
We talked about what she did like: The idea of the sound of things breaking. Breaking ice. Later, windows breaking at a demolition site. And the idea that someone could make music out of these sounds.
What was left out? Almost everything that I had thought of as "the story." The idea that I wanted to get across. The irony about a man who didn't understand the entire purpose behind his brother's art. The whole elaborate business about performances that are, like the breaking of ice, never to be repeated in exactly the same way. Impermanence as an explicit theme.
I had spent two days thinking up all that stuff. Now Holly was telling me that the good stuff in the story was actually those parts that were closest to the source material and my first thoughts. I knew, as she told me, that she was right. I was still irritated by what felt like wasted time and effort. Except that it wasn't wasted. Without the draft that was wrong, I would never have come to the Jack Daniels, which is what pulls the narrative together in its briefer, simpler form.
Subscribers have just received the final version of the story. It's a third of the length of the story below. That final version is simpler and, I think, more interesting. But I thought a few might be interested in seeing the path that I had to take through a mediocre story in order to get to the better one. So here is that earlier draft:
Legacy
By Bruce Holland Rogers
I don't get interviewed very often any more. I think the music professors and art historians who thought my brother was some kind of genius, they're starting to forget about him.
What are you after? A footnote for a dissertation? No? Oh, a newspaper. Well, good. Maybe you don't think you already know it all.
They used to ask me, What about music in the house when you were boys? No. I don't remember any music at all, unless you want to count the nightly shouting as a concert. No violins. No Papa Mozart for us. More like a fist and Jack Daniels.
All this talk of genius... If anything, I was the sensitive one. Winter mornings, we'd start for school early, before the other kids, so we could find the places where puddles had frozen on top and drained from underneath. I'd race him. He was smaller. I'd get to the best ice sheets first, and I broke them slowly, deliberately. I listened to the ice groan and crackle under my foot before it shattered and the pieces tinkled together like glass. Aran, he just wanted to smash through as many sheets of ice as he could. He liked smashing.
I don't think he was even aware of how bad it was between our parents until, one day, our father was gone. Meanwhile, he was sassing his teacher, knocking food trays out of the hands of other kids in the school cafeteria. He lit the living room drapes on fire once, for no reason. He never had a reason.
Interventions by Social Services, a stint in Juvie, jail when he was old enough. Does that sound to you like the life of a genius? Our mother was no gem, but it's not like she didn't try. I managed to turn out all right, you see. I had a steady job, wife, kids. Aran wasn't messed up because of our mother. It wasn't that single-mother business you hear.
Out of jail, he knocked around a while. This and that. I wouldn't hear from him for long stretches. Eventually he got his heavy equipment training, and he told me he was working demolition sites, operating something called a hydraulic pulverizer. I saw him at work a couple times. The pulverizer was a mean set of pincers at the end of a hydraulic arm, and Aran's job was to pull down buildings a little bit at a time. When he'd come to a window, he would punch through the center of it, and the sound reminded me of our childhood winters.
After years of demolition work, he came to me about the music. He said, You know business. How do I do this? How do I sell tickets and advertise and make it all work?
I didn't see how his idea could work at all. He had put wireless microphones on his machine and around his work sites to record the sounds of buildings coming apart. And that was music? Who would want to hear it? And he rejected a lot of what I did suggest. If he did get an audience, I thought he should try to sell them CDs, but he had this thing against recording. He said that if you heard a window breaking in his performance, you heard it once. You might hear a sound like it, but that was a different window. You can't break the same window twice. And once the performance was over, it was gone. No recordings.
I pointed out that the whole noise symphony was recorded, and he said, No, only the notes were. Like that made a difference. To him it was a big deal that there was no repetition of sounds, no duplication of performances. Demolition sounds were edited and arranged in sections, on different machines, and there was no master recording, no single digital medium containing the whole work. The sounds played from different sources, through different sets of speakers around the performance space.
I don't know why it caught on. His music was different, a novelty, sure, but to pay what people were paying at the end? For the sound of things breaking? And there was an arms race between my brother and people who were trying to sneak in recording devices at his concerts. You had to go through a metal detector. The performance couldn't start until his security guys swept the room for microphones.
Granted, it was a success. But Aran was also a bonehead. The way he drank, smoked, and did the other, which he never admitted to me, but I wouldn't be surprised...the way he did those things, you'd think he was trying to kill himself. And with his success built on all these recorded sounds, he stores them all in one place? No backups? That's genius?
After the fire, I even said to him, I said, What were you thinking?
You know what he said? He said, Ta-da! Like he was taking credit.
After that, he burned through all the money he had made. He went back to working demolition, pulling down walls and popping windows, but without recording the sounds. He died before he was old enough to retire. People who heard his music, if you want to call it that, can sort of remember the overall feel of a performance, but not the details. We'll go on forgetting the little bit we do still recall. The last of us will die.
I loved my brother. I don't have anything against calling him a genius if people want to think that. But, come on! Good luck calling something a work of genius if it doesn't last.