It’s not stream of consciousness, but it’d be a simple mistake if someone thought it was. It’s not channeling, but we’d be getting warmer. It’s not meditation (though I wish it was), not nirvana (but I wish it was), not peace. It’s a conversation with an entity that moves faster than you do, reveals quicker than you can write. It’s the shedding of assumptions, the biggest being a foolish idea that you, the writer, can know how the story plays on the page before you trap it there. No different than a musician who needs to hear the playback to know how the record really sounds, the cinematographer who’s gotta wait for the film to be developed. Did you get it? And how much editing does it need? It’s not something us writers can feel, though we feel emotions as large as love and loss as we write. It’s something we can’t judge, though we’ve read so much, know so much, are truly the people to discern, if anybody could discern.
But the rough draft doesn’t let you do that.
Not as it happens. The wrestling match in the mud, the exhalations of joy heard even in quiet scenes. The energy pouring so fast, so monstrously, you’re absolutely gonna spill a lot of it on the office floor.
The rough draft for Pictures of You was written in the immediate days following the end of another rough draft, that first one being some five hundred and fifty pages. There was still so much energy pouring into the office, but that other story had been told, and so where to go but into and onto new pages, that paper rounded like cups, catching the overflow, the story of an artist as mad as the rough draft itself, a woman who believes an empty frame is more of a painting than anything we can paint because the images in the empty frame move faster than we can create, faster than we can come up with, faster than we can write? The artist in Pictures of You ought to be ashamed of herself for the way she treats her subject, but maybe she should be acknowledged for acknowledging in herself the holy rancor of the righteous rough draft, the candid photo, the canvas-less painting that is not born of laziness but rather awakening, undiluted, so that just as artists across the globe attempt to immerse their audience in scope and size, so the artist of Pictures of You does the opposite and says, you are already and always immersed, why not frame you?
A living rough draft, the artist star of Pictures of You. The embodiment of unruly vision, tempestuous ideation, even cruel pace. For, how can Emily escape a story that moves at the speed of life?
An empty frame, a blank page, filled instantaneously.
A prism, then. Perspective.
It’s the same here in the office. Lugging the rectangular frame about, corner to corner, until I’ve got an angle on all that energy.
We read faster than we write. Story moves faster than we do.
But an empty frame, and the angle through which to see all that passes, and the chance then to catch as much of that righteous energy as possible.
The artist in Pictures of You is perhaps misguided. But so are perhaps our rough drafts. Intellectual Ids. All of them operating from a place just out of reach: the greatest movie directors don’t know how it will look until it’s shot. Who are we to judge what we write that first time (every new book has its first time) while trying to keep up with… story?
The plan then: happily surrender. Not to stream of consciousness, no not to the stream. But to the overwhelming unknown of what might pass before that empty frame.
And the moment we tell ourselves we can’t know if it’s right or wrong, flows or doesn’t, lives or doesn’t, is the moment we break free of the frame.
And what is a book steeped in themes of encouragement and discouragement if not a mirror held up to the mud wrestling match with that, the first draft?
I love the rough draft for its barbarism, its doggedness, its flood.
I try to keep up, but really I just try to frame it. Like our artist in Pictures of You and like the rough draft of that very book…
I just try to frame it while awed, sweating, and smiling at the pace of story.
