The Physical Writing Process: Maxine Hong Kingston - From Drawings to Words Across a Multitude of Drafts

"Instead of a woman warrior with a sword, I could create one with a pen who would be just as dramatic." - Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston is such an accomplished writer that she has been awarded by two presidents. She's best known for her book The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, but I tend to associate her with the novel Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book. While we might not classify her as part of the Beat Generation per se, she was quite close both in chronology and location (San Francisco), and Tripmaster Monkey is her take on the Beat Generation, which provides readers with a fresh perspective. 

As Jimmy Fazzino writes in World Beats, "Kingston has also written what I consider to be the quintessential work of post-Beat writing: the 1989 novel Tripmaster Monkey. In this novel Kingston talks back, but lovingly, to the Beats. Her novel critiques certain blind spots in Beat writing dealing with race, gender, and ethnicity, but at the same time, her novel redeems the Beats by recognizing and then transforming their transgressive, liberatory spirit to suit the author's purposes. Kingston's protagonist is Wittman Ah Sing, a fifth-generation Chinese American and belated beatnik who wrestles with the ghost of Kerouac in 1960s San Francisco as he attempts to find his voice and make his way in life. The title, Tripmaster Monkey refers in part to Sun Wukong, the monkey king (or monkey god)."

This photo of Kingston working at her computer is from the 1990 documentary Maxine Hong Kingston: Talking Story. This must have been her writing setup around the time she was writing Tripmaster Monkey. However, she usually starts on paper, and not necessarily with words. When she was young, Kingston wanted to be an artist before she got into writing, so traces of that remain with her. When she's facing the blank page to begin telling a new story, she'll often start with images. She'll sketch doodles and pictures until they begin to form into words. As E.D. Huntley explains in Maxine Hong Kingston: A Critical Companion, "Kingston does not write from an outline; instead, she conjures up visual images that she afterwards 'translates' into her luminous prose. She had once wanted to have a career as an artist, and she still frequently begins the creative process by drawing and sketching ideas, producing visual representations of her thoughts."

"I draw a blob and then I have a little arrow and it goes to this other blob...it's like a doodle." - Maxine Hong Kingston

By all accounts, Kingston writes a huge number of drafts. She wholeheartedly believes in the power of the writing process, and the discovery it brings. As Betty Ming Liu explains, She rewrote her memoir at least 15 times, from beginning to end — every single time. If no one published it, she planned to xerox the manuscript and save it. Maybe someone would discover it 1,000 years from now, she told us." 

Kingston is able to discover to stories she wants to tell and the characters she wants to depict as she continually revises her drafts. She says that at the beginning she doesn't know where she's going, and by the end, she is surprised by the conclusion. In the book Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston, she explains, "As I described people, I found that I understood them more and more because I gave them so much attention. I even began to see things from their point of view, why they did some of the things they did. And then I thought, 'These are loving portraits.' So by the time I got through--and this would take about ten drafts--I thought, 'What I've written isn't a lot of embarrassing gossip. I've made a piece of harmony in the world.' And then I thought, 'Yeah, now it's ready to publish.' / What I'm hoping by saying this is that you will realize it's OK to write about the very worst people in your family and worst feelings that you might have about your loved ones. The writing process and the form itself will guide you to what it all means. And then inside of you resolution take places, and you are at peace with all of that. And what you publish is showing human beings how life took place, and how life and love and positive things came out of the negative."

I'd love to see some of her preliminary sketches or her manuscripts in various states of revision, but it doesn't look like that will happen until I have a chance to visit the University of California at Berkeley's Bancroft Library and view their collection of her papers. 

An Activist for Peace

Before we part, I mentioned above that Kingston was awarded by two presidents. For her entire life, Kingston has been an anti-war activist. She was arrested outside of the White House for protesting the Iraq War. Unlike poet Adrienne Rich, who was the only person to decline the National Medal of Arts, stating presciently that ''democracy in this country has been in decline,'' Kingston accepted the two occasions presidents honored her with medals. However, she had some surprising words for President Clinton when she met him in person. As reported in The Guardian: 

She astonished the draft-dodging president with a message from Vietnam war veterans. "They said, 'Tell Bill Clinton we're proud of him; he was right and brave not to go to Vietnam'." "But I thought they felt I'm a son of a bitch," he replied. 

Their forgiveness surprised Kingston too, aware of the bitterness of many veterans towards the anti-war movement of the 1960s. Yet these men had taken part in the 1990s in her war veterans' writing workshops. 

The power of the pen is a motif throughout Kingston's work. She explains in Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston, "And in my stories the pen is always problematical. It's always on the verge of not winning. But I think maybe the frustration I feel is that writers have the power to change the world only a little bit at a time. We conquer a reader at a time. We change the atmosphere of the world, and we change moods here and there, whereas the people who have the guns and the bombs have so much direct power. We're using images and moods against the bombs. If only the word had as much power." 

---Other Entries in this Series---

The Physical Writing Process: Donna Tartt - Multicolored Pencils, Polychrome Paper

The Physical Writing Process: Jack Kerouac – Typewritten Scrolls

The Physical Writing Process: William Gibson – Hemingway’s Typewriter

The Physical Writing Process: Neal Stephenson – Fountain Pen and Malfunctioning Typewriter

The Physical Writing Process: Jonathan Franzen – Destroy the Internet

The Physical Writing Process: James Joyce & Jorge Luis Borges – Writing with Eye Trouble
The Physical Writing Process: Franz Kafka - Quartered Onionskin Paper
The Physical Writing Process: Writing in the Bathtub - The Duality of Dalton Trumbo as Screenwriter and Novelist 

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Joseph Patrick Pascale - How to Get a Promotion When Your Boss Is Trying to Kill You (Accurate Accounts of Office Work: Book 1), a comic literary novel coming from Waldorf Publishing on September 1, 2018.

Witold Gombrowicz, Trans-Atlantyk - They’re Only Pretending to Use the Urinals: Comic Moments in Literary Fiction

A beautiful image by Gerddanigel

Witold Gombrowicz’s novels are chock full of absurdity, so perhaps it’s natural that we find some hilarious moments thrown in. His writing styles are highly original, and his own personal philosophical concepts underlie the characters and events in his fiction, providing a lot of depth to what may appear to be silly, farcical stories on the surface.

Any look one takes at Gombrowicz invariably focuses on his unique biography, but in Gombrowicz’s novel Trans-Atlantyk, Gombrowicz himself presents to his readers the most fateful decision of his life. Of course, Trans-Atlantyk is absurd, fantastical, and written in an archaic Polish form as a mockery (the English translation is written in a kind of ersatz 17th Century English), but it does feature a narrator named Witold Gombrowicz, who finds himself sent to Buenos Aires as a Polish literary representative, and when World War II breaks out in Europe with the Nazis invading Poland, Witold does not choose to get back on board the ship with the others and return to Europe to join the war. He remains in Argentina for dubious reasons, just as the real Witold Gombrowicz did, where he found himself poor, unable to speak Spanish, and in exile for more than 20 years. (He also wasn’t doing himself any favors by writing a novel in Polish that could only be read by his fellow Polish émigrés, but using such ancient Polish that it was difficult for even them to read, and insulting the whole Polish immigrant culture in Argentina while he was at it! It seems safe to say he didn't get into writing for the money!)

Museum Witold Gombrowicz in Wsola, branch of the Museum of Literature in Warsaw. Photo by Zoobek

As Jerzy Jarzebski writes in The Exile and Return of Writers from East-Central Europe: A Compendium, "All of the actions of the protagonist-Gombrowicz described in the novel are outrageously unworthy and dishonorable from the point of view of the patriotic tradition of emigration." This fits in with Gombrowicz’s iconoclastic themes. The novel pits the “Fatherland” against the “Sonland.” In the book’s introduction, Stanislaw Baranczak describes Gombrowicz’s decision thus, “What Gombrowicz the narrator refuses to suffer any more—taking the dramatic yes-or-no question of his return as an opportunity to make a clean break with his half-hearted compliance—is the overwhelming power of stereotype, of What Is Expected from You, of (to use the term Gombrowicz adopted in his essays and diary) Form.”

I’d just like to note that my Gombrowicz quotes are from the original translation of Trans-Atlantyk by Carolyn French and Nina Karsov, but a second translation by Danuta Borchardt was published in 2014. This article in the Quarterly Conversation discusses the two versions.

Nevertheless, highly relevant to our discussion here—to this entire Comic Moments in Literary Fiction series on this blog—Susan Sontag writes in the introduction to the new translation, “[Gombrowicz's] third, tongue-in-cheek, message has a more universal portent: issues between individuals and nations can be so horrific that nothing but humongous laughter may deliver salvation."

The narrator Gombrowicz of Trans-Atlantyk finds a job with other Polish émigrés, and he has a lot of dealings with three of the employees (The Baron, Ciumkala, and Pyckal), who the narrator finds quite buffoonish. They encounter him at a dance hall and insist on buying him drinks. They start arguing with each other about who will treat Gombrowicz, and Gombrowicz tries to give them the slip by excusing himself to the restroom, but he can’t get away:

“...and I quickly made off. I enter the Privy, they after me. There was one man who was making water into a Urinal. I to a urinal. They to urinals. But when that man who had been making water left, they jointly at me.” 

(FYI, this is all [SIC] per above note on his style and all ellipses are in the original)

Now that they have Gombrowicz alone, the three employees try to give money to each other, which can be used to treat Gombrowicz so they can get into his good favor:

“And Ciumkala to the Baron: ‘Here, have six hundred.’ And Pyckal to Ciumkala: ‘Here seven hundred, have seven hundred. Take when I’m giving!’ They take cashes out, brandish them under noses for themselves, for me, and press them each on the others! Haply they are Madmen!

“I reckoned then that, although they are giving these Cashes each to the others amongst themselves, they would fain give me these Cashes to purchase my favor . . . save that they feel awkward for want of daring with me. Ergo I say: ‘Do not fever yourselves, Gentles, easy, easy.’ Yet they were but seeking a way to press these Cashes on me, and at length the Baron clasped his head: ‘Aye me, my pocket is torn. I’d better give my Cashes to you as I may lose them!’ . . . and he started to press the Cashes on me. Seeing that, the others also press theirs: ‘My pocket is torn, too. Take mine’ —‘And mine.’ Say I: ‘For God’s sake, gentles, to what end do you give?’ . . .But at this moment someone came in for the need, so they to Urinals, unbutton, whistle, as if naught, as if for the need . . . Only when that someone who had come in went out, they at me again, and since they have become more daring, they indeed thrust the Cashes on me and ‘Take, take’ they chorus. Say I: ‘In the name of the Father and the Son, gentlemen, to what end do you give, what purpose you your cashes with me?’ In this moment, however, someone came in for the need, so they to Urinals, whistle . . . but as soon as we were left alone, again they lept at me and Pyckal roared: ‘Take, take when you are given, take, take for he has three hundred or four hundred Millions!’—’Take not from Pyckal; take from me,’ cried the Baron, whirring and buzzing as a wasp, ‘from me take, as, for God’s sake, he may have even four hundred or five hundred Millions!”

This plays out like a side-splitting skit in my mind’s eye. At first, they’re trying to be coy with the money to impress Gombrowicz, but then they realize someone is coming into the bathroom and they all run to a urinal and cartoonishly whistle, pretending to use the facilities until that guy leaves. Then, like a cartoon character coming up with a new scheme, one of them says there’s a hole in his pocket, so Gombrowicz should take the money, and like clowns, the others say they’ve also got holes in their pockets and shove their money at him—But they all need to put the money away and rush to a urinal as they realize someone else is entering the restroom!

This goes on for a while longer until they finally wear him down:

“Wishing not to be disagreeable any longer, I let them press the Cashes on me. Then all to urinals as Someone was just coming in.”

Things after this continue to intensify for the narrator, as the guy he’s there with shoves him some money under the table and tells him to invite his countrymen over to drink with them, and the wild ride continues, but the scene in the bathroom really tickles me. I also noticed the ingenious way Gombrowicz uses the “In the name of the Father and the Son” curse like a standard “OMG!” curse, but it serves the double purpose to reinforce the struggle between Fatherland and Sonland that lies at the heart of the narrative. If you liked the taste of Gombrowicz offered through this wacky scene, you would certainly enjoy reading more. An easier read would be his novel Ferdydurke (translates to something like “Fiddle-Faddle”). The hook is that an adult’s old schoolteacher shows up at his house and transforms him back into a little kid.

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Joseph Patrick Pascale - How to Get a Promotion When Your Boss Is Trying to Kill You (Accurate Accounts of Office Work: Book 1), a comic literary novel coming from Waldorf Publishing on September 1, 2018

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Other Entries in the Comic Moments in Literary Fiction Series:

There Are No Cups in Kafka's Amerika

See also:

The Physical Writing Process: Writing with Eye Trouble

The Physical Writing Process: Octavia Butler - Inspiring Oneself

Octavia Butler's groundbreaking writing continues to captivate readers as they rethink humanity and society through the lens of her work. She paved the way for those who would follow in her path, being the first science fiction writer to be awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant, the first woman to receive both the Hugo and Nebula awards, and the first African American woman to rise to prominence as a science fiction author.

In 2008, the Huntington Library in San Marino, California acquired Butler’s papers, which demonstrated how meticulous she was with her notes and manuscripts. The Huntington said that her papers arrived “in two four-drawer file cabinets and about 35 large cartons. Butler’s papers required intense processing over the next three years.” These include everything from short stories she wrote when she was twelve to programs from her lectures.

This manuscript page has the novel's original title To Keep Thee in All Thy Ways handwritten at the top, which was apparently not an appealing title to Butler's publishers. They wanted to name it "Dana" after the main character, but Butler didn't like that. They eventually agreed on Kindred.

Clockshop hosts great pictures of a section Butler wrote in a notebook called "How I Write."

It's surprising to see that the majority of her research time would be taken up on figuring out what the minor details were like in the lives of slaves in the antebellum south. In my DYSTOPIA post, I discussed some of the horrific details of slavery that Butler discovered in her research.

This page provides so much insight into Butler's creative process. She's typed up her plans for the novel Parable of the Sower and she's gone back to both add some more notes as well as emphasize what she wants to do with the book. She's used different highlighters to color-code themes and ideas, as well as writing different ideas in various colors of marker, and then going back and highlighting those as well. The whole page brims with life. I could imagine her referring to this as a guide while she drafted the novel, the colors inspiring her to remember how the different threads of the novel will ultimately come together.

However, as awesome as all of that is, what I found the most inspiring and heart warming are the motivational notes and mantras that Butler would write to herself.

This shows so much about the power of setting goals for oneself. Who among us hasn't written in a spiral notebook like that? It's so common and familiar, even down to the end of the spiral starting to become unraveled. And ours probably have stray notes, but do they have these proclamations of what we will achieve with our writing? And she's even included selfless things, "I will send poor black youngsters to Clarion or other writers' workshops." / "I will help poor black youngsters go to college."

You can see similar themes on this page from ca. 1975, around the time Butler sold her first novel. When you read about her background, it's even more inspiring. As a young girl, she saw the mistreatment of humiliation and racism that her mom suffered as a maid and as a child said, "I'll never do what you do, what you do is terrible." In school, she was tall and bookish, making her the target of bullies. As a young adult, she was working the sort of odd jobs she describes Dana working in the beginning of Kindred. This meant she would have to wake up at 2:00 AM to make time to write. I picture her sitting there in the dark, in a world that doesn't support her and doesn't believe in her. She needs encouragement and the only person there to support her is herself, so she writes down her goals to push herself to keep writing until the day she sees those goals come true.

---Other Entries in this Series---
The Physical Writing Process: Donna Tartt - Multicolored Pencils, Polychrome Paper

The Physical Writing Process: Jack Kerouac – Typewritten Scrolls

The Physical Writing Process: William Gibson – Hemingway’s Typewriter

The Physical Writing Process: Neal Stephenson – Fountain Pen and Malfunctioning Typewriter

The Physical Writing Process: Jonathan Franzen – Destroy the Internet

The Physical Writing Process: James Joyce & Jorge Luis Borges – Writing with Eye Trouble
The Physical Writing Process: Franz Kafka - Quartered Onionskin Paper
The Physical Writing Process: Writing in the Bathtub - The Duality of Dalton Trumbo as Screenwriter and Novelist 
The Physical Writing Process: Maxine Hong Kingston - From Drawings to Words Across a Multitude of Drafts

See also:
DYSTOPIA: A look at some dystopian literature 

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Joseph Patrick Pascale - How to Get a Promotion When Your Boss Is Trying to Kill You (Accurate Accounts of Office Work: Book 1), a comic literary novel coming from Waldorf Publishing on September 1, 2018.