Love in Revision By Holly Current
“It’s not long enough,” the man says with confidence. No, arrogance.
“Elliot, it takes the best to get noticed,” says the girlfriend. Strike that. Make it fiancé. Betrothed? Affianced? Right. Fiancé. Three months since the diamond incident, and I still can’t keep that one on the front burner.
The confident/arrogant guy shuffles pages with a critical eye. I imagine him reading the chapter I just finished. He never wrote, but he taught me to love literature as a sort of desired nourishment for survival. I would agree that the second to last paragraph could be fleshed out. I prefer to keep my work short and to the point.
Wait, I can do better than that:
I avoid unnecessary verbiage.
Sometimes my use of Hemingway’s iceberg principle backfires and I don’t know whether a moment needs less or more. But…less is more. So the paragraph stays the way it is. End of discussion.
“This won’t work.” The man shakes his head gravely. “Boil it down to a numbers game.”
I want to say—to scream—I want to caterwaul (too much). I want to tell this man: you boil life down to a number’s game! Work, love, sex—it’s all a matter of figures to him.
I observe my fiancé as a statistic. At the moment, Corrine is giving me her “it’s for the best” static smile. Our marriage has a fifty percent chance of working. Our stock goes up fifteen percent if we don’t have to argue finances. But it plummets to forty since I love jazz and Vladimir Nabokov. She, on the other hand, harbors a passion for chic business apparel and aggressive marketing tactics. My day job, my “profession” was how we met, after all.
Chances dive to thirty-seven percent if she gets annoyed that I play Woody Allen’s Manhattan in the background constantly while I write.
I love these things. I can go so far as to explain why I love them.
Why do I love you?
I only imagine saying this to her. I play the scene in my head—on stage with a black background. Corrine pounds her fists on my shoulders. It’s the most passionate moment we’ve shared.
Best to apply the iceberg principle to love as well. So many marriages would be saved if we only knew a tenth of each other, edited as needed.
“Businesses go under,” the man—my father says. “We won’t let you go under.”
There’s been a slew of killings. Cause of death: financial wrist-slitting. Monetary failure window-leaping. Foreclosure overdose.
My loved ones are afraid I’ll be next. But there’s too much to create. Too many books on the bedside table. We always have “How does it end?”
Finally: my time to live.
“Time to be aggressive,” Dad says. “Revise this.” He shoves the papers in my face. Not my novel, not the poetry I write in order to better inhabit life. The man shakes—brandishes!— my business résumé. “Starving artists can’t feed their wives.”
Copyright Holly Current 2012
“Elliot, it takes the best to get noticed,” says the girlfriend. Strike that. Make it fiancé. Betrothed? Affianced? Right. Fiancé. Three months since the diamond incident, and I still can’t keep that one on the front burner.
The confident/arrogant guy shuffles pages with a critical eye. I imagine him reading the chapter I just finished. He never wrote, but he taught me to love literature as a sort of desired nourishment for survival. I would agree that the second to last paragraph could be fleshed out. I prefer to keep my work short and to the point.
Wait, I can do better than that:
I avoid unnecessary verbiage.
Sometimes my use of Hemingway’s iceberg principle backfires and I don’t know whether a moment needs less or more. But…less is more. So the paragraph stays the way it is. End of discussion.
“This won’t work.” The man shakes his head gravely. “Boil it down to a numbers game.”
I want to say—to scream—I want to caterwaul (too much). I want to tell this man: you boil life down to a number’s game! Work, love, sex—it’s all a matter of figures to him.
I observe my fiancé as a statistic. At the moment, Corrine is giving me her “it’s for the best” static smile. Our marriage has a fifty percent chance of working. Our stock goes up fifteen percent if we don’t have to argue finances. But it plummets to forty since I love jazz and Vladimir Nabokov. She, on the other hand, harbors a passion for chic business apparel and aggressive marketing tactics. My day job, my “profession” was how we met, after all.
Chances dive to thirty-seven percent if she gets annoyed that I play Woody Allen’s Manhattan in the background constantly while I write.
I love these things. I can go so far as to explain why I love them.
Why do I love you?
I only imagine saying this to her. I play the scene in my head—on stage with a black background. Corrine pounds her fists on my shoulders. It’s the most passionate moment we’ve shared.
Best to apply the iceberg principle to love as well. So many marriages would be saved if we only knew a tenth of each other, edited as needed.
“Businesses go under,” the man—my father says. “We won’t let you go under.”
There’s been a slew of killings. Cause of death: financial wrist-slitting. Monetary failure window-leaping. Foreclosure overdose.
My loved ones are afraid I’ll be next. But there’s too much to create. Too many books on the bedside table. We always have “How does it end?”
Finally: my time to live.
“Time to be aggressive,” Dad says. “Revise this.” He shoves the papers in my face. Not my novel, not the poetry I write in order to better inhabit life. The man shakes—brandishes!— my business résumé. “Starving artists can’t feed their wives.”
Copyright Holly Current 2012