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Gabby Gabby (Tipping, Nov. Issue) shit-talks Phillip Roth for no reason while feeling nervous and bad at counting in a way her parents think is unchristian.
1) When you reread something you’ve just written, what are you looking for?
When I reread something I’ve just written I think the first thing that I try to catch straight away is if the sentences I wrote are objectively coherent. Unless I’m working with a specific memory, when I first sit down to write a story I have a vague idea of what I’m trying to convey through the story but I don’t really have the concrete details laid out or outlined. When I write I usually have a feeling or theme that I want to express and then I gradually try to build the concrete story around it. So, a lot of times I’ll start off with rambling incoherent sentences and then I extract the best bits and then edit those down into coherent sentences. After I have a few sentences that don’t seem shitty to me then I can think about how those sentences will dictate the narrative. That may be why my prose comes across as flat. I usually edit down my sentences to the bare-minimum of what I need them to be. I had an editor over at Spork magazine reject this story before I sent it to [PANK]. Their reasoning was that my prose was flat but not so flat that it was stylized. I don’t think I understood the criticism fully.
I don’t like to write extremely long sentences burdened with adjectives just for the sake of it but nor do I feel much interest in writing in the style that Tao Lin wrote “Richard Yates.” I worried a lot about the readability of “Tipping” especially when it got into the paragraphs explaining the types of love. To me those paragraphs seemed extremely incoherent and like how a person talks when they are standing near or on a cardboard box outside of the metro. I tried to edit those sentences down as much as possible and make the ideas more concise.
I appreciate precise word choices. I think that there is just as much beauty in how Tao Lin chose to use language in “Richard Yates,” very sparse, as there is in something with a higher word per sentence density like a Phillip Roth novel, although, I don’t care very much for Phillip Roth’s prose. But, what was I saying, I think, I was just trying to make a point about preference and choices one can make when writing.
Sometimes, vindictively maybe, I start off with Phillip Roth-esque sentences and then I cut them down until they seem non-pretentious and bearable, to me. I think my fixation on Phillip Roth stems from one of my ex-boyfriends always reading Phillip Roth novels aloud to me- especially the bits with the sex and masturbation. I distinctly remember my ex boyfriend saying, in regard to Roth’s novel Portnoy’s Complaint, “…It is written in stream-of-consciousness self-loathing Jewish-American continuous prose. What is with male writers and their cocks? I’ve never felt the urge to write about jacking off. But it is a perennial fixation for Updike and apparently Phillip Roth.” And so it was like I had two rambling and incoherent men going on, unsolicited, about their penises.
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