New Powers Enabled! I’ve recently had the practice of rewriting one manuscript and one story–I’ve been toying with each for years. This time, unlike all the other times I’ve edited and rewritten stories, something new and magical happened: I knew what I was doing in such a deep way, it felt like my bones were typing. It took a bit to process what had shifted within me. Firstly, I knew what I was trying to accomplish. I had a unifying sense of direction, without ambiguity. Once I understood where I was going, I was able to make deep and rapid changes to the story that I had labored over for a decade unsuccessfully. Where had this control and clarity come from? Well, my honey pushed me to be clear about the overarching point of my story.
What I understood this time, so late into my writing life, was that when I write fiction, I hold multiple possible directions for my story in mind, and they all come across in the text. When I was writing a story about love, part of me thought love was worth snickering about, it was cute and all, but silly and could collapse under the right pressure. I had affection and snarky dismissal for my heroes in equal measure. Part of me liked the poetry of romantic gestures and was celebrating that self-expressive potential. Part of me wanted to write a story about cities being alive and having their own magical agenda (note to reader, I wrote this story long before NK Jemisin’s lovely The City We Became). Part of me wanted to write a loving ode to Philadelphia. Part of me wanted this story’s love to be perfect and eternal, and expansive, while deep and private. Part of me was thinking about performing love, in public and in private. So it took my honey shaking me a bit for me to clarify which ideas I was going to include, and which ideas should be abandoned, in service of my final story. I had to know the story inside and out, upside down and backwards. The story and all its pieces had become part of me, well worn and familiar, like a favorite mug. I knew its exact shape in my hand and mind. I could write my key themes on the front page, and then read the text with those filters on and cut the chaff.
Some of this was the result of long exposure to my text, reading and re-reading and writing and re-writing, shaking the contents over and over again, trying to get a pleasing configuration. I think my deep familiarity with my stories liberated my power. It took knowing all the layers and all the pieces, and treating the story like the puzzle I could invent, and shift and re-imagine. So what does this mean for future writing?
One, it means I need to get clearer faster. The reasons my stories have lingered half finished, almost, but not quite satisfying to me and my readers, is that all possible futures I held in my head for the stories were on the page. Once I get a first draft down, I need to rip out the ambiguities. Stick to one story madam. And then I need to envision its final shape and write towards that. I recently decided what I wanted the key takeaways to be for my manuscript, and that act, once again, helped me clarify the direction of my final edits. The manuscript now had a purpose, and organizing principles, and under those directives, I could shove it here and there into the desired shape, with the desired resonance, like a prayer bowl with one fine note echoing into the summer eve.