Proust Was Right

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes

but in having new eyes.--Marcel Proust

I find this quote utterly brilliant. I thought of this particular Proust quote this morning, as I read the NY Times . . . specifically, this article on self-delusion in humans . . . and monkeys. Seems we're not the only ones who deceive ourselves, who need to see things with new, honest eyes.

And I thought of this quote as it relates to writing. When I think back over the years and all the authors I worked with, critiqued, edited, and coached, I think the ones who were successful had this ability. Most of the time, when someone hires an editor, they can construct a sentence, and hopefully it won't have too many errors in it. Sometimes, you may encounter a writer with a certain gap of knowledge--perhaps they don't use the comma in a compound sentence correctly, or maybe they have an abundance of dangling participles. And most of the time, that can be taught and corrected rather simply. What they need, with an editor, is a fresh eye.

And the writer who cannot look at their journey with fresh eyes? Often doomed. I can think of one author whose beautiful hardcover book I edited for months prior to its splashy publication. She was a very well-known old-time romance writer. And I can tell you that even though it was the year 2000, she was not going to budge at all--one iota--in her use of cliches, those heaving bosoms and swelling male organs, those sinewy thighs, and flashing eyes. And she has since disappeared from the landscape of publishing, I think pushed out by new writers who were willing to look at historicals in fresh ways with new plots and exciting language. I was sorry to see what happened to her, but it didn't surprise me, and when I met her in person out on the West Coast, I met someone who was very caught up in her status as author and famous person and who had forgotten the joy of the journey as a writer. She had lost whatever fresh eyes she had brought to her career twenty years before.

Having fresh eyes sometimes means parting with a work in progress. Literally tossing it. We've all met aspiring authors carting around a version of their first novel now ten years later. They tweak it--change the heroine's profession to one that is now hot in the romance biz, or the detective's quirks to something that seems new--but underneath it is the SAME novel just packaged slightly differently. They rail against the "system" and the "New York houses and agents" who won't give them a chance. But they don't take fresh eyes and look at the landscape--like the monkeys in the NY Times article, they can find a reason for their situation, and the reason has nothing to do with the novel at hand.

To me, fresh eyes means always learning. Every day. I restrict my blog-hopping mostly to the ones at right on my blog, but I will hop along to other writer blogs. When I find one that has a fresh angle, I add a link or visit it for a while. I visit the blogs I do because not a day goes by that I don't want an "ah ha" moment and some of the writers I visit have provided me with them. Edie Ramer's blog had given me some great moments . . . so has her other blog, Magical Musings. Spy Scribbler . . . where do I begin? In fact, because I will surely exclude someone, just link away . . . they're all great.

Fresh eyes means living passionately. I want to die of exhaustion. Not really, but you know, I want to be 80 or 90, in good health, still doing yoga and walking . . . and STILL volunteering and still writing, and maybe even with a half-dozen foster kids around. Or on a farm with horses and sheep, and my grandkids visiting me. Or living with my best friend in Tuscany for a year, drinking wine and eating good cheese. For right now, it means I want each day to count, to meet great and interesting people, to love with all I've got, so I have something to write about. Rather than just imagining a life, I want to really LIVE it. Doesn't mean I have to be a kick-ass private eye or any of the things I sometimes write about, but I want to live like there's no tomorrow and bring that to my work.

So does the Proust quote resonate with you? The monkey article? What does a fresh eye mean to you?