The Gardener
for LHD
How I love to read! I plunge into the
novel’s world, I breathe the protagonist’s air, I move their movements, I feel
-- or recoil from -- their feelings. I love the adventure of a different walk
of life. I inhabit the novel’s reality while I read and I feel a kind of
clarity and openness even after re-entering reality.
When I was ten, taking another stack
of books home to devour, the librarian smiled and said, “You’re going to be a
writer when you grow up, aren’t you?”
My mother stood up a little
straighter and they smiled at each other. My mother gazed proudly down at me.
“Oh, yes!”
That thought stayed with me as I grew
up and started college. It would be cool to do that, I thought, to give readers
the tools and materials to live another life for a while. Words came easily to
me. In my writing, the setting would be beautifully rendered, inviting my
reader into the world I was dreaming.
But I could never seem to get into plot.
I knew I had to have one, so I’d build one, but I’d feel myself, placing my
characters in too-predictable quandaries, faced with too-predictable
challenges, overcoming them too easily. Maybe I was just lazy, committing the
sin of sloth, where a more virtuous person would have buckled down and made the
outlines, made the story boards and get the plot done.
Writing was what everybody expected
me to do. Teachers, family, classmates sounding a unified chorus. I knew that
they wanted the best for me and I felt that they could somehow sense or see
further than I could.
I loved my literature classes and I
was taken aback that I found my creative writing classes a chore. To outline or
“storyboard” was at best mechanical. I
could go through the motions responsibly and successfully, but my heart wasn’t
in them. Then in spring of my junior year, I took a different kind of writing
class. At every meeting we wrote, then swapped stories with an assigned
partner, and had to give the partner detailed specific advice about how to
improve their story. Reading my partners’ stories and thinking how to make them
better was the best part, uplifting, a physical feeling of lightness. Professor
Frenzel would ask students who gave the best advice to present to the class; I
was proud to be often among them.
Late in the semester, he invited me
to spend a Friday editing stories submitted to a literary journal, a try-out
for a summer job. Till then, I hadn’t specifically named the advice-giving as
“editing”, but that is of course what it was. Or at least a seed that could
grow into editing, a natural summer job for an aspiring writer.
“Most writers give us gardens
overgrown with weeds and sometimes with strange empty spaces,” Profesor Frenzel
said. “Our task is to find the intrinsic theme of the garden and guide it to
becoming a coherent whole around that. The theme is our guide to snipping out
or uprooting irrelevant, distracting plants, to focus on the plot. We also seek
the specific aesthetic, swapping some plants out for others that are equivalent
but fit better with that vision. When we are done, the garden is a coherent
whole.”
Instead of putting me to work, he gave me “The
Wasteland” to read, side by side copies of Eliott’s original version and of
Pound’s editing. The thrill was unmistakable, as though the deepest string of
the universe’s harp had just been plucked. Then we talked and talked about
Pound’s decisions.
I was startled when the alarm rang.
Lunch time.
Over soup and rolls at the commons,
he asked when I had first thought about a story taking a wrong turn. “Sirius
Black, it was Sirius Black in Harry Potter! She killed him off because he was
getting too interesting, but she wanted to keep the focus on Harry. I’m sure
that’s why she killed Sirius. It never rang true to me.”
He laughed and laughed, but with joy,
not with ridicule. “That was a great start,” he said. “Now for our
constitutional.” We walked briskly for half an hour.
We began the afternoon by each
reading a double-spaced (paper) copy of a new piece called “The Kindness of the
Devil”, without commenting. “To get the shape of it in our heads” he said.
Then I watched over his shoulder as
he began to edit. He struck through a word and explained why he had taken it
out. After several of these, he next asked me why he had taken a word out. I could feel the joy in my very marrow as I
began to see which words were obstructing the story and to anticipate their
excision.
We went through the story with his
pencil tip pointing where he was reading. He narrated as he went, demanding an
alternative to a cliché here, slashing an adverb there, changing a verb to a
synonym more closely related to the theme, pausing to talk about why one bit
was good and how we might fix another. Like a fast-motion video of clearing out
the poison ivy and rank weeds that were choking a garden, I was seeing the
possibilities in the story come to life. The process was thrilling! His blue
pencil wrote a good deal.
He gave me a blue pencil for my own
and a copy of a fresh story. He tasked me with pretending to be him and editing
it for half an hour. Anxiety seized me: How could I take on this load of
responsibility? What if I made their story worse, stunted its growth, yanked
out the graden plants instead of the weeds?
But I was game. To be honest, I was
thrilled. I played at being fierce and
confident. I was just pretending, not crippled by responsibility. As I began to
edit, both myself and my pretend self evanesced. The story was all.
Discovering the first weed to uproot,
suddenly made the whole shift slightly. Joy and power! I could reveal the
hidden beauty.
What a garden! The story showed more weeds
to uproot, words that didn’t belong, that were marring it. My vision also showed
me some twisted trunks to straighten. I almost laughed aloud when I glimpsed an
important plant hidden behind a flashy distraction. Some parts were faint and irritatingly
hard to see until I shifted the angle of vision. Some parts lurked sulkily in a
jungle that needed to be hacked away. A few times I jangled and faltered,
briefly aware of trying to impersonate him, but managed to quiet my mind and
let the task guide me again. When the alarm rang, it was almost like waking
from sleep. Momentarily disoriented, I became aware of myself and the story as
separate entities. To my dismay, I had only edited a page and a half.
Next, I guided him through it line by
line. I told him what choices he would have made and why. Showing him those
edits gave me an echo of the feeling of discovery. He corrected me from time to
time. Several edits he said were exactly what he would have done, but several
times, he commented that an edit did not move the narrative forward.
When I’d finished, he glared at me.
“You did not read the whole story first, did you?” I mumbled something about
not wanting to waste time, wanting to get straight to work. “The editing is
good in itself, but it is not going anywhere. Remember Aristotle’s wisdom: The
plot is key. Just after lunch, we read the story through before editing it. We
did so because that practice enables you to keep the entire garden in mind, to
guide you to the edits that will serve the whole.”
He handed me a fresh story to edit
while he worked on others. Afterward I took him through it. He listened
carefully, making only few comments, but at the end said, “You did an
especially good job finding the right cuts. Your other changes were excellent
as story building, but it wasn’t THIS story. Deeply listen to the story and let
it take you where it is going. Pruning it as a different plant will always feel
wrong, like you felt about the death of Sirius Black.” So I did it again on a
fresh copy.
By the end of the weekend, I
inhabited the stories much more quickly and fluently. I was able to help their
plots come to life much better than I had done with stories I had written. Yes,
the Friday had turned into a weekend and he invited me back for Monday. More
and more fluently, I was cutting and making suggestions to help a story become
more fully itself. Every morning, I woke, excited to be coming to work. Could
it be true that I would actually be paid to edit? The editing process began to
fit like a glove. I still made mistakes, but there was a resonance between the
tasks and my soul that told me I had found my calling.
My father visited, took me out to
delicious French meal, set me down for a serious talk. Why had I taken this job
instead of spending the summer at the family cabin writing? When I told him how
much sheer delight I was finding in editing, he” pinched his lips. “Why settle
for being the king’s attendant when you could be the king?” he said. There was
something morally wrong, faintly disgusting about choosing the lower status
role. It would be one thing to be a failed writer, turning in shame and sorrow
to editing. But I wasn’t, I hadn’t really given it a try. Listening to him
trying to be fair and trying to hide his repulsion pushed me into thinking more
deeply about what was happening to me. I was loving editing, but I hadn’t
thought about the future. He was acting like I’d “come out” as an editor. We
ended with a truce and a fragrant port: It was just a summer job, after all.
Then Professor Frenzel started to mix
some duds into my inbox. Rejecting was hard. I kept projecting potential, more
my hopes (or the story I would have written if I had been the author) than
something germinating in the narrative itself. I even spent one entire weekend
working in a story that never came alive. On Monday, he read it and my editing.
“Fool’s gold,” he said. “I can see what lured you in. The writing is beautiful,
but there is not enough story to build on. Remember Aristotle. Be ruthless.
Your time is precious! Separate the seeds from the pebbles and throw the
pebbles away. Learn to value your gift and strive to hone your skill.”
I began to resent being corrected,
but I also found myself more clearly seeing which stories were blossoming
(easy) or a least contained a live seed pushing at its shell. And which to cull
out as pebbles.
Later that week I was particularly
proud of an amazing editing job I had done on a story. “No,” Professor Frenzel said.
“The plot editing is good, true to the story, but this writer is not Virginia
Woolf. Edit the writer into herself, not into a different voice, not even an
excellent, but different, voice." More and more, I realized that my soul
is at home in editing.
Summer merged into the autumn of my
senior year. I am still editing with him. And I am also writing, but not a
story. Writing an application to the renowned graduate course in editing at
Radcliffe.
Moss Springmeyer’s fiction focuses on
taking first steps down a new path and on emerging self-knowledge. Moss’s
“Choirboy” probes the glory and cruelty of a very special gift in story block 2
of the Spring 2024 issue of The Green Silk Journal https://www.thegsj.com/current-issue-spring-.html.
Moss also recently explored other worlds in “Fur-Break” concerning a
resourceful, ageing werewolf in the Spring 2024 issue of Altered Reality (p.
16) https://www.alteredrealitymag.com/spring-2024-issue/
. “Mountain Mail Runner” will appear in Academy of the Heart and Mind (Autumn
2024).