Revision
This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Bridges. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
This week, two years into the project of writing a novel, I started again at the beginning.
It’s not the first time this has happened, and it’s an exercise not in rejecting what is done already so much as bringing a new lens to what underlies it: the characters who, through the genesis of many words and reading of many more and the dreaming of many dreams and the running of many miles, are slowly firming into their reality.
It’s an obvious property of characters in process that they change as you do—that your life informs the way you see them, what they stand for, how they pay and receive attention, what they say when they speak, even their hobbies and habits. But strangely this quality applies also, I’ve found, to characters in finished texts. Reading one of my favorite novels, Marilynne Robinson’s landmark Gilead, to a dear person recently has opened reaches of the book’s mid-century protagonist, an old Iowan preacher, that in each of my prior readings of the book did not present themselves. I could swear the story this time has brand-new passages.
In my own case, what I’m writing has a historical reference point, and centers on a well-documented life: Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism. There are authorial choices to make about where to complicate or contradict the record in pursuit of the truth in the story—my project is not just to add a few paint strokes to the scholarship, but to perform on it an emotional and spiritual excavation—but even more numerous are the opportunities to create what simply doesn’t exist, the insight into untraceable motives and unmonitored conversations and the accounts of dreams he dreamed and roads he ran, that athlete, and revisions he made to the stories he was writing.
The parts I’ve written in earlier stages that are most likely to make it into the finished book are themselves revisional, in that they turned me from a person unclear about his own prospects for writing fiction into one who saw that he could; that the ghostly process by which a creative product emerges would consent to make itself present at my desk and kitchen table often enough to assemble, over time, a whole story.
And so much besides this text keeps revising itself. I can think of no two years in which more about my life or relationships or concept of self has changed more. In this light, an unfinished novel is not any kind of burden but a comfort—because, for example, both the guy who couldn’t possibly run and the guy who’s training for a marathon carried the same indelible desire to write this book. The guy who was Transcendental Meditation–curious and the guy who does it twice a day. The guy who wasn’t sure if his cats would ever really learn to use the toilet and the one who dispenses treats morning and night when they do.
Amid all this revision, that’s the fixed point: the story that must be told, even if the details are still revealing themselves. The creative work includes, if it isn’t just entirely, becoming the person who can do it.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.