Howard restructures my great American novel by Dom Capossela
From:Howard Dinin <howard@bertha.com>
Sent:Saturday, February 13, 2021 12:40 PM
To:Dom Capossela <domcapossela@hotmail.com>
Subject:Brainstorm
So, a couple of things.
I’ve been thinking about your re-write project and your quest for a strategy on how to reshape the materials you already have in the finished manuscript, which you seem dedicated to continuing to work on…
I’ll say it explicitly one more time, and then I’ll try and refrain from repeating it in the future. You’re doing yourself no favors, from the point of view of expressing yourself as your best most articulate self, as a compelling, moving, expressive voice that is yours, and stripped of the worst features of what the language has become at its worst in the hands of the collective of internet users.
All that said, it doesn’t help, certainly not with my previous comments and notes of the last two days about what you can try to think about or be influenced by in your literary quest. As you said, to paraphrase, it’s not easy being you. It’s even harder for me to be you. I can’t make you analytical about these things in the ways that might be useful to you in doing the hard work of crafting a way of shaping this material and then doing the even harder work of grinding out the words so it’s a credible and engaging rendering of this tale of an adolescent religious warrior…
However I did have, as the subject line indicates, a brainstorm about what you might think about as a way of doing this. And it will, you’ll be delirious to learn, be easy as it calls for you to use practices and skills you’ve acquired or ginned up on your own (hampered as you were by technological challenges that still, apparently, beset your efforts – no one’s fault, least of all yours, as you simply don’t have that kind of brain, just like others of us unfortunates with shortcomings in areas that others find effortless can’t even take baby steps, say, in understanding how to make music).
The brainstorm is this: you’ve spent the past two years-plus evolving a blog format and palette of blog writing styles, and a framework for this material that somehow makes it easier for you to meet your self-defined obligation not to miss a day posting something, even though, if I may say, it doesn’t make it easier for someone who visits only occasionally to keep track, never mind find what he missed in order to catch up.
So why don’t you, in your imagination, when you enter that space where you go to tell the story of Diana, your heroine, imagine what her blog would be like, and reshape all your material that you have in one form, which, for reasons of your own, you want to re-craft into some other form. If you use your own blog “template” as it’s evolved even only in a rough way, you’ll have a chance to tell some pieces of it in first person, some in third person, you’ll be able to drag in illustrative and descriptive explanatory information from elsewhere (though you can also simulate or make-up, say, your own Wikipedia articles on the arcane allusions in this narrative – especially about the mystic Christian stories and legends and practices and ceremonies you have made part of the story.
In other words, rewrite Conflicted as if it were Diana’s blog.
xo
h
A thunderbolt.
I immediately responded to Howard: I love it.
and immediately started the rewrite.
With the first two lines I felt the tremor.
I immediately sent Howard the two lines:
Have you ever been shocked awake?
Of course you have!
He responded that I finally understood.
Three minutes later I wrote eight more lines.
Sent them.
Same response.
Finally, I sent this:
From: Dom Capossela <domcapossela@hotmail.com>
Date: Saturday, February 13, 2021 at 1:16 PM
To: Howard Dinin howard@bertha.com
Subject: last one submission until the Chapter is done. Sorry.
tell me if i'm too far afield
And then the exhilarating answer from Howard D:
perfect
Perfect.
I spent the afternoon on Chapter One and went to bed smiling.