A funny thing happened on the way to a revision

Change happens slowly and often imperceptibly when the change acts on you

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

— T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”

There’s a truism among writers: the book teaches you how to write it. Like most such sayings, it’s both obviously true and hopelessly vague—flexible enough to fit almost anything. Still, I’ve realized this week that I’m not the same writer who first drafted Chapter Two of Pennhollow. It’s been jarring.

Have you ever picked up a battered copy of a book you once loved, its margins crowded with notes from twenty years ago, only to feel destabilized, reading both the book and your comments and not recognizing yourself in either? The book has changed, because you have. What once stood out now seems dull; what once passed unnoticed now anchors the entire story. You read your notes and reel: some are painfully clumsy, others uncomfortably brilliant—ideas you wouldn’t have thought of today. Neither you nor the book is what it once was—yet both feel eerily familiar. Quicksand, all of it.

Now imagine the book is yours. Your work. Your words. You come back to it years after having written the first draft, with all of the experience and knowledge of having finished the entire book. The core of Chapter Two is the oldest writing in the book, some of it dating back to 2005. Twenty years! Almost none of it is salvageable. It might be cause for mourning, but really: is it any surprise that bits and pieces written twenty years ago no longer fit in a book that has taken form? That the writing of a 23- or 24-year-old kid doesn’t match the register of a story completed by a man in his 40s?

Still, it’s strange to sit with these words, dragging the pieces from Chapter Two to the “Discarded” folder in Scrivener. Words that helped give birth to this thing, but are no longer of it. Midwives of the new Chapter Two.

I’m nearly done revising the chapter. Ninety-five percent of it is new. Almost everything that happens in it has changed. I even cut a version of one of my favorite stories—adapted from my own youth. It no longer belongs. It adds nothing to the story this novel is finally ready to tell.

More than that, I realize that the narration in the sections of the book written further in my past lacks the narrative confidence that the later work does. The earlier work sounds like it’s writing, like an author is sitting there meticulously placing words just so, finding bon mots to impress someone. The writing is conscious of itself in a way the rest of the book isn’t. Some of that, I’m sure, was a lack of confidence on my part. But some of it, I think, is that I picked up the tone and the narrative voice of the book as I wrote it. I learned what the book wanted to be and how it wanted to be told.

Last week, I wrote about getting my editor’s edit back. The more I sit with it, almost all of the comments amount to: get out of the way. Let the book do its thing. So, I will continue with these revisions, the tool needed to get the book where it needs to go. At some point, I will drag myself into the “Discarded” folder. Just another midwife no longer needed.

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For shits and giggles—and as a small act of mourning—here’s the story from Chapter Two I mentioned above, now relegated to the dustbins of Pennhollow:

There was, to give a very early example, the time James escaped from the care of his parents at Kaufmann’s, rushing off beneath the racks of clothes and out into the main hall. James was not a day older than three―a red-faced, puffy-cheeked, blond-haired child with a penchant, even then, for exhibitionism. (After showers, he used to dance, naked, to the radio perpetually playing in his parents’ room, reveling in whatever crowd watched on, astonished.) This mad dash through the racks was great fun: how often could he roam the world guided by his own light? His parents forced him into a torturous cycle of observation, with never a free moment to explore. He was like an animal tethered to a leash loose enough to give the illusion of freedom but one wrong move away from correction.

Darting through the lines of steel and clothing, James looked much like he did years later on the field, weaving through a maze, his black felt pea-coat brushing against the shins of the adults scurrying around doing their Christmas shopping―eliciting surprised yelps, which were the only way Mr. Cavan could track his son. Kaufmann’s was unusually crowded and there would have been no possibility of Mr. Cavan hunting his son amidst the forest of legs and shopping bags without the trail of squeals.

After chasing James nearly the entire length of the third floor, Mr. Cavan spotted him ducking under a rack of skirts and rushed forward, knocking men and women out of his way, not a little violently. He grabbed James by the wrist and jerked him up, holding the child against his chest.

A rush of spite flowed through the three-year-old’s petulant face, hatred for this man who dared to interrupt his gallivanting.

James immediately began screaming at the top of his lungs.

“You’re not my Daddy! You’re not my Daddy!”

Mr. Cavan, not a little taken aback, slapped his hand to James’s mouth, who, after a struggle and a well-placed bite, wrested his father’s hand away.

“You’re not my Daddy!”

Now, James, even from his infancy (when he would cry twenty hours a day, his parents were sure something was wrong with him), had a penetrating voice. Still, the reaction was startling. Never had Mr. Cavan heard a public space turn silent with such celerity. It was like a scene from a movie, the whole floor turning slowly to a single point on set. The world seeped into black and white. The women looked at him with unadulterated hatred. Mr. Cavan, with cause, worried about a lynching and sputtered something about James throwing a fit because he hadn’t bought him a toy earlier. With James still pressed tightly against the meat of his shoulder, stifling his cries, he retreated with the haste of an escaped convict. When Mr. Cavan told the story, years after the fact, he would joke that he must have looked guilty of the charge, speeding away from the scene with the suffocating child.