Robert Root

 

When a publisher recently accepted my book about the Niagara Escarpment, expecting to publish in a year or two, I started rereading it. I needed to be specific about its history when I added entries to my Escarpment Log, so I opened that file to the first entry, dated March 18, 2013. I'd forgotten some particulars of how the book got started; reading the earliest entries reminded me how much a book may have a rather haphazard origin.

 

That first entry claims that, while lying in bed the day after having completed an advanced draft of another project, I thought about the mention I'd been making of an escarpment book over the past several years and decided to start this log as a way to figure out what information I had and what I needed to have "if I were to do such a book." I had journal entries about escarpment sites in Wisconsin, photos from a trip to Michigan's Drummond Island, the draft of an escarpment essay set in western New York, and a potential subtitle, A Personal History. By the end of March, I'd begun to imagine what an escarpment book would be like and to plan how to get material; April 1st's log entry was essentially a draft of the manuscript's prologue; in September I reviewed substantial research entries I'd made.

 

I scrolled a long way ahead to the October 25, 2018, entry where I claimed to have finished a full revision of the manuscript: "By my present count The Arc of the Escarpment runs 88,685 words and 350 pages, 357 with Acknowledgements and Works Cited, which I tightened up today." I thought pruning it down from 100,996 words and 383 pages had improved it and I had begun to submit selective and intermittent proposals to publishers. My subsequent submissions files—three different versions—record four outright rejections and a great many silences, until the end of 2021 when Cornerstone Press offered me a contract.

 

There's a hitch. The manuscript is still too long. I need to cut it down substantially. I'm not so much worried about shortening the book further than I did in the past but uncertain about what I'll be changing. Much of this kind of self-editing involves not merely deleting words or sentences but also replacing longer stretches of words with shorter ones, tightening up ideas already expressed, making substitutions as well as eliminations. The joke I've repeated too often suggests copyediting by removing every instance of "the" and "of"—Escarpment Arc in place of The Arc of the Escarpment, for example—not to mention "is" and "and" and "a," and using "I'm" and "I've".

 

I last read the book maybe two or three years ago. A curious thing happens when you've been that long away from your own manuscript. It seems less like your writing, more like someone else's. You don't tend to spot passages where you think, "No, what I meant to say was . . ." because the prose strikes you almost as if it were another writer's expression. You need to read the manuscript entirely to be certain what the author is driving at, how the various parts fit together, what the cumulative effect of its chapters adds up to. You may not completely recognize yourself in what you're reading.

 

For example, at times I will reread a long sentence and start wondering how to condense it but then realize it sets up a sequence of sentences leading into other sentences that follow it; it's expressed exactly the way it is in order to develop a thread of specific ideas or a certain narrative immediately after it. Revising won't simply be getting rid of something superfluous—it will be replacing something essential in fewer words than expressed in the previous revision.

 

To figure out where things stand, I've gone through the manuscript, correcting obvious errors like spacing problems or occasional misspellings and counting the words in each chapter of each section. The sections include a prologue and an epilogue, nine introductory segments, and 25 chapters. Two days ago, at the end of the sixth section and the 20th chapter, I reached my preferred word count for the book with three sections, two introductory segments, and five chapters yet to be reviewed. Yesterday I completed the word count for those portions. Today I know roughly how many words I need to delete—the equivalent of two segments and five chapters and the epilogue. All I have to do now is delete that number of words throughout the entire manuscript, shortening everywhere so that the epilogue ends at the exact number of words where the 20th chapter now ends. Piece of cake.

 

I wonder how many "the"s and "of"s are in the manuscript.

 

 

In my weekly column, cleverly titled "Root '66," for my college newspaper, I wrote short pieces. An advantage of that task was constantly wondering what to write about and continuously imagining new entries. Later, as a college professor, for several years I wrote short essays for local public radio meant to run around four minutes long once a week. Once, a potential script was so compelling that I kept composing until I needed to break it into three scripts to record and broadcast sequentially. It made me aware of my format's limitations, but I stayed with it.

 

I wrote about 40 scripts throughout fall and winter semesters and worked on convention papers, critical articles, or a scholarly book in the summer. The academic writing earned me tenure and promotion; few people ever commented on the broadcasts. After eight years I gave up the radio spot to work on longer, larger projects. One year I was lucky enough to follow a semester-long sabbatical in spring with a semester-long research fellowship in the fall and spent a lot of time on research and travel and editing projects, which led to more personal writing, especially about place.

 

Eventually, during my final sabbatical, I started a project exploring a comparison of the Rhine and Hudson Rivers across both history and literature, gathering abundant material. But then our lives began to change. I retired, we moved to Colorado, and I wrote a different book about place; then we moved to Wisconsin, I taught mostly remotely for a graduate program in Ohio, and I wrote essays and taught essay writing. I compiled other books, became fully retired, and started this blog, my approach reminiscent of my college column and my radio broadcasts.

 

My unpublished writing is largely stored on cassettes and disks and hard drives and also in travel journals and daybooks. Every so often I wonder about that rivers project. In twenty years, I've published only one short essay recounting my travels on either river. Every so often I flip through the files about the project on my laptop. The theme of the research project had been "Time and Timelessness on the Hudson and the Rhine" and I can find a prologue, an introductory chapter about timelessness, and typed copies of the journal and daybooks handwritten during my travels. Somewhere are stored envelopes filled with slides of the sights we saw (but no working slide projector). The first entry in a Rivers Log on my computer is dated October 10, 2002.

 

I keep a lot of project logs, including a Blog Log now for entries I post or imagine posting online. I worried about how much ground I'd have to cover in the rivers book, The Endless Landscape, and hoped to discover an organic structure to build upon. I once pondered composing the book as a myriorama, a collection of countless views of the two rivers. I've been a proponent of what I call the "imagessay" (say it as if it were French), a kind of haibun-like subgenre where the prose is accompanied by an image rather than by a haiku. The log I started during my final research semester stopped in July 2003 and a second series of entries began in December 2016 with two entries that month and no further entries until April 2019. Many of the later entries—the log ends in November 2019—discuss that single essay, "The Marksburg Photo," and its publication in the Ascent Special Issue. My logs chatter a lot about the project as a whole, but the most recent entries offer little constructive contemplation.

 

If I look through my files and check the musing in various logs, I'd likely find references to other projects I never followed through on—notes that suggest such and such would be worth pursuing, connecting this with that would be rewarding, looking closely at something or other would be illuminating—but The Endless Landscape accumulated a mass of material and took up an amount of time and expense and energy equivalent, on a beginning level, to other projects I completed. My manuscript on the Niagara Escarpment, a project on so similar a scale, was completed, and my frustration with it only involved the time it languished unpublished. Somehow—despite its voluminous resources—somehow the rivers book can't find viable expression. I'd have to do all the background reading and notetaking and national and international travels all over again in order to discover—to recognize—what I'd need to be writing about.

 

I won't do it over again. I'll just try to acknowledge that not everyone finishes everything they started before they themselves end. I'll try to learn how they accepted that as they moved on to something they might finish. Someday, I might even try to delete all those files.

 

Notes: Robert Root. "The Marksburg Photo." Ascent. November 6, 2019.

 

I do crossword puzzles first thing in the morning, hoping to trigger some sort of thinking. I also do word search and scrambled words puzzles, all on AARP's games site, then work a jigsaw puzzle or three elsewhere online. I don't challenge myself by picking harder crosswords or jigsaws of more than 24 or 48 pieces—I shouldn't burn through too much of the morning before checking the weather (Why are weather videos always interrupted by ads preventing you from seeing the videos?) and finally opening my email (most of which I delete without reading since few are actually addressed to me personally). Then I'm ready to do something useful, like writing or editing.

 

Is it obvious that I'm retired? Composing weekly blog entries is my major preoccupation. I don't know why I need to post one each week. Maybe, like the crossword and jigsaw puzzles, I need to have some habits beyond occasionally walking in my neighborhood.

 

Sometimes I'll compose something to send to an editor hoping to have it published or I'll edit something a writer has submitted to The Humble Essayist Press, the project Steve Harvey and Kathy Winograd and I committed to a couple years ago. In the past few weeks I've both edited and also been edited, and this morning, having completed my puzzles, instead of reflecting on a book I recently read (It was a very good one!), I've been thinking a lot about editing.

 

I've been edited in the past. Sometimes editors steered me towards a stronger, smarter manuscript; sometimes an editor's vision of my text was insistently at odds with my own. Although I'm comfortable with most of the books and essays I've published, a few have portions or passages I regret having been forced to delete or forced to have added. Both personal editing triumphs and editing defeats often rise up in memory whenever I start editing someone else.

 

The truth is that every reader reads every text differently than the original author would read it. I once had to negotiate through a senior editor a sentence in one of my manuscripts that their copyeditor (someone worried about the correctness of the language in the writing) felt was ungrammatical or awkward and wanted revised. I'd deliberately worded that line as an allusion to something in the text I'd been discussing but she was more remote from my manuscript and its subject and concentrating on achieving extratextual stylistic conformity. I've noticed that kind of distance surfacing in book reviews where a reviewer insists on reading a text differently than the author intended it. I once was forced to delete a sentence in a critical essay that the editor found funny rather than academic—I'd actually written it to be funny rather than academic. I suspect that a manuscript's acceptance or rejection usually depends on an editor's personal taste rather than on some imaginary universal standard of literary quality being adhered to.

 

When the first edition of my textbook Wordsmithery was accepted by Macmillan, two peer reviewers disagreed with elements of the book in ways contradictory to one another. One thought it needed to be more assignment oriented, more directly instructional; the other thought it ought to have less emphasis on composition research and theory. I approached Barbara Heinssen, my editor, with frustration—how could I revise the book to satisfy demands in opposition to one another as well as in opposition to my manuscript? She advised me to listen to whatever comments I felt made the book stronger, more readable, and ignore the comments that undermined what was already unified in the manuscript. Her advice has stuck with me through the revision of every subsequent book I've written since.

 

Recently, in a matter of weeks, I've heard back from the reviews editor at River Teeth about my review of two new books. Most of his suggestions were grammar- or style-related, many of which I accepted, many of which I ignored. One passage troubled him, and I responded with an explanation that eased his concerns. The review now satisfied us both. In the same period, I heard back from an essayist whose manuscript I'd edited for The Humble Essayist Press, explaining his resistance to some of my recommendations and acceptance of others. At THE Press the author ultimately decides. We both seem satisfied with the manuscript as it's been evolving. The editor's involvement hasn't changed my sense of that review being mine; my editorial involvement hasn't altered that writer's sense of his manuscript being his.

 

Both my review and his manuscript say what their authors want them to say. That's what editing should make happen and, happily, just happened twice.

 

Notes: River Teeth: A Journal of Narrative Nonfiction. Book Reviews

 

The Humble Essayist Press