return to page 2 of conversation

Michael : In the past couple years you've written some longish articles, and I know you've recently been working on some fiction. Have you ever gotten to a point in a piece of writing ("by ear") where you start to get lost because you can't hold enough of it in memory?

Joel : My memory is challenged at every stage of composition. I hold what I've written in my mind as I go, continually back-tracking to have the computer recite the last bit to me again, or everything from the beginning. Over and over. Only by constant review can I know if my words make sense at all, let alone whether they attain anything beyond that. Then I push forward a little more, hoping fervently not to overshoot the limits of retention and create too unwieldy a mess to revise. I wish my best thoughts came to me in declarative journalistic sentences and orderly, utilitarian paragraphs, or even in the terse staccato outbursts of David Mamet's dialogue, and so were easier to manage. But they mostly don't. It's a very labor-intensive process, as they say.

Joel's screen reader reading a piece of his
fiction back to him

Michael : On the other hand (to put a Polyanna spin on it), what you do now is closer to oral tradition, and (for instance) to Homer, who was blind. I know the process is tremendously difficult, but have you occasionally discovered some real advantage to relying so heavily on your ear and memory?

Joel : Composing by ear and memory can yield prose as smooth, hard, and inevitable in every detail as a well-cut diamond. But the cost in stress is high. Using that method to write an essay of a thousand or so words, not to mention a short story five or six times longer, is tedious and frustrating. First drafts are especially difficult, because the freer I've been in letting those initial thoughts flow, the harder it is to discover, by repeated listenings, what it was I really meant to say, and how I should have said it. And what I write, unlike ancient legends, archaic poetry, or a Stevie Wonder song, follows no conventionalized template of stanzas, rhythm, rhyme, and repetition that would prevent me from getting lost or tripping over the tangled thread of my own ideas. But when it works, I'm really proud of what I've accomplished.