{"id":424,"date":"2010-09-23T08:10:08","date_gmt":"2010-09-23T12:10:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.old.caraghobrien.com\/book\/?p=424"},"modified":"2010-11-16T08:41:30","modified_gmt":"2010-11-16T13:41:30","slug":"learning-revising-from-picasso","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/writing\/learning-revising-from-picasso\/","title":{"rendered":"Learning Revising from Picasso"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Postcards

Postcards of Guernica<\/p><\/div>\n

In the Reina Sofia Museum<\/a> of Madrid, in the white-walled gallery that showcases Picasso\u2019s Guernica<\/em>,<\/a> across from the masterpiece is a series of six photos Dora Maar<\/a> took of the painting while it was in progress.\u00a0 If you have the stubborn tenacity to thwart the crowd, you can stand in front of each photo and examine it closely, then go on to the next to see what Picasso changed and what he kept the same.\u00a0 The horse rises.\u00a0 The eyeball light emerges from a sun shape.\u00a0 Shadows and flames appear.\u00a0 The corpse-like figure at the bottom switches direction from head to toe.\u00a0 The horror and loss and anger intensify painfully with each draft.<\/p>\n

When I saw the painting and the photographs this summer, I was inspired and troubled, but also enormously relieved.\u00a0 Here was proof that an artist did not know, at the beginning, how things would turn out at the end. Clearly, Picasso had powerful ideas right from the start, but he was willing to change them, and change them again, and let a change on one part of the canvas set off an effect elsewhere.\u00a0 He didn\u2019t just polish in a delicate way.\u00a0 He massively reworked the canvas, and only near the end did he fine-tune the details, like the texture of the horse hair.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t paint and I\u2019m no genius, but I do write novels, and I swear the process is the same.\u00a0 My first draft of my latest novel contained a middle-aged woman who changed to an old man with a peg leg, and a horse rancher who became a mortician.\u00a0 Four other characters disappeared completely, taking their problems with them.\u00a0 In the third draft, a new ending replaced the pre-existing sixty pages.\u00a0 A birth scene was given to a different pregnant woman.\u00a0 A final chapter was added, and massive stream-lining happened everywhere.\u00a0 In the sixth draft, a key character who had consistently appeared on page 150 surfaced earlier on page 72, influencing everything in between.<\/p>\n

When I discussed my latest draft of Prized<\/em>, the sequel to Birthmarked<\/em>, with my editor last week, I discovered that an issue which has hovered at the edge of the book for over a year could come forward and significantly alter the story.\u00a0 It has meant scrapping fifty pages yet again, writing several new scenes from scratch, and rippling the repercussions through the rest of the book.\u00a0 One character\u2019s pivotal choice makes me re-see and grapple with the entire novel in a new way, as I never could have before I reached this point, and this is my eighth major draft.<\/p>\n

A book isn\u2019t as smart as a writer is at one moment.\u00a0 It isn\u2019t the performance of a gymnast whose skill learned over years must be demonstrated perfectly in one 60-second routine.\u00a0 Not even Picasso could paint Guernica<\/em> right the first time.\u00a0 A book is the work of a writer\u2019s ideas in layers, over time, and so I take comfort in knowing I can revise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the Reina Sofia Museum of Madrid, in the white-walled gallery that showcases Picasso\u2019s Guernica, across from the masterpiece is a series of six photos Dora Maar took of the painting while it was in progress.\u00a0 If you have the stubborn tenacity to thwart the crowd, you can stand in front of each photo and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,13,3],"tags":[17,37],"class_list":["post-424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous","category-prized","category-writing","tag-prized-2","tag-writing-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=424"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":598,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424\/revisions\/598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}