Negotiating with the Dead - Part Three

Dear Margaret Atwood,

Today as we talk about our unseen selves and the monsters we hide within, we're in a costume store.  It's not like one of those tacky places where both of us would be concerned about contracting an illness placing unfamiliar masks over our faces.  Everything around us is glittery and clean.  We're Canadian girls in our hearts, so we like the fox's pointed faces and the deer horns.  We wonder which one of the masks suits us best as we go from being virginal princesses to devils with a wave of our hands.  I settle on a raccoon face because I have always thought of a raccoon as my spirit animal.  In creating my art, I have always sorted through trash with my hands and broken crabs on the rocks.  I feel a raccoon suits me best with black and white fur outlining my eyes.  You look at everything and decide on nothing.  As a polished author, you've turned yourself into so many things, choosing one when we've no place to wear our costumes seems unnecessary.  You wear all of them at least once.

The jekyll hand, the hyde hand, and the slippery double

It's very interesting to me that you didn't capitalize any of that.  Once a poet.  Always a poet.

I found your observations on this subject most intriguing because I have never thought of the version of myself that writes as something different from the part of me who cleans the toilet.  Sometimes my characters clean toilets.  They come along with me and I go along with them.  They're not real.  I'm imagining them.  I'm alone.  I'm talking to myself and I hear myself.  Sometimes I think I sound stupid.  Sometimes I think I sound mean.  I am the self observing myself, but I can't make my left hand do something my right hand hasn't already done.

However, after I considered duplicity in regards to writing, I discovered a few different ways that it applies to me.  I am curious about what you might think of them.  Are they the same thing as what you describe or something completely different?

Here's one way.  When I write the first draft of my book, I am the creator--the writer.  I don't often keep track of how many drafts I've done, or if I do so, it is only in the broadest way.  I often do extra that I don't keep track of, going through the novel with the intent to correct one particular aspect.  I go and go and go and then I stamp FINAL DRAFT on it.  I'm satisfied with the story.  It's going out like that.

I send it to the editor.

Except, I'm the editor.  There is no point in sending it to a professional editor before I've edited it myself.  I'll edit it five times and by then, there's very little work for an editor to improve upon that has much importance.  I've already cut 10,000 words and trimmed all the fat.

When I become the editor, I can't believe the crap my writer self thought was brilliant.  I'm stunned as I slash sentences, whole paragraphs, and sometimes, whole chapters.   I look at excerpts with a crook in my eyebrow.  Did I really write that?  I make notes for what is missing.  Sometimes my editor self can fill in the missing parts.  Sometimes she can't.  She has to wait for the writer to wake up.

I've always thought this was the difference between my right and left brain.  That one half of me is a novelist with a beautiful word resting like a caramel on her tongue, and the other half of me is a stodgy accountant with a runny nose and bad news.

The other way I show duplicity is that I am supplying the dialogue for our sweet princess, but I am also supplying the dialogue for the wicked witch.  This means that though I look like a perfectly ordinary person on the outside, I am capable of saying something that is so awful that if an onlooker were watching and I delivered my line and was thereafter immediately slapped, the onlooker would nod and say, "That's fair."  Heaven help the person who provokes me to say the worst thing I can think of, cause it is bad, and it's personalized, so it's extra bad.

Actually, I haven't had cause to say something like that out loud in so long most people would scarcely believe that a monster of that strength and foulness exists under my pale skin

Naturally, this runs me into your next chapter, so I'll save the introduction to the half of me that is an accountant for the next entry.

I think the mermaid mask looks best on you.

With love,

Stephanie Van Orman

Novelist