The toughest choice - Building a book, finishing a book

The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014

The toughest choice
Building a book, finishing a book

During a day’s work, a writer makes hundreds, even thousands of choices. Keep this, change that, move this paragraph here, toughen up the language there, split this paragraph in two, rewrite this, chuck that. Many writers do this automatically without realizing that every choice affects the meaning of a work. Nor should we be self-conscious or it will inhibit us.

By the time we declare our work finished—or declare ourselves finished with the work—we’ve made a choice about every element—the characters and their presentation, the setting, the dialogue, the structure. We’ve considered every word and mark of punctuation. Sometimes these choices are difficult; sometimes they are nearly paralyzing. If I tell myself that making choices will become easier as my work progresses, it helps. And many of my students have noticed that when they’re nearing completion, they’re sure (or surer) of the choices they make.

But whatever choices we’ve made aren’t the only ones we could have made. And this can make the end of the process difficult as we assess the effect of our choices and decide whether we need to make major changes in our work.

After Mary Karr finished a draft of Cherry (2000), her memoir about her adolescence in Texas, she realized she was “superimposing a forty-year-old woman’s libido on a twelve-year-old girl.” As it stood, Karr judged that the way she treated her sexual awakening was perverse and she realized she needed to radically change the voice of the work because she’d “misrepresented the experience” of adolescent sexuality. Karr rewrote the memoir, now focusing on what that young girl’s desire felt like, using “lyrical language.” Rewriting Cherry was a tough—but necessary—choice.

The final and perhaps the toughest choice a writer must make is whether to declare the work finished, or whether to revise it one—or several more—times.

Virginia Woolf worked for years on a novel she called Melymbrosia, about the sexual initiation of Rachel Vinrace, a young woman, who travels to South America with her aunt. She could have published it: it’s a fine first effort. But she made the difficult choice to completely revise it into the version she published as The Voyage Out.

Melymbrosia is more overt about same sex love and more critical of imperialist politics than The Voyage Out. Perhaps Woolf lost her nerve and feared criticism; perhaps she justifiably feared censorship; perhaps her aesthetic had changed—the sexuality in the published version is more ambiguous than in the earlier text. The Voyage Out and Melymbrosia treat the same subject, have the same narrative arc, and deal with the same events—a central moment is Rachel’s being kissed by a married man and its profound negative effect on her, perhaps because she was sexually abused by her father, which is far more obvious in Melymbrosia. The books are different; one is no better than the other. But Woolf made the tough choice not to publish the novel but to revise it yet again.

James Joyce’s Stephen Hero is another earlier version of a novel that could have been published. But instead of declaring his work complete, Joyce revised that manuscript into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).

Stephen Hero is far more approachable for the general reader. In the earlier version, Stephen’s mother, sister, and brother play a more prominent role, and his father, a lesser one. In Portrait, Joyce emphasizes the father-son relationship to strengthen the Daedalus theme in the work. And there is also a “more dramatically immediate rendition” of a love affair that is “merely hinted at” in Portrait. Stephen is a far different character earlier, too—he’s more social, more gregarious, more a man of the people in Stephen Hero.

When Joyce transformed Stephen Hero into Portrait, he used Stephen to illuminate his view of “the role of the dedicated artist in our society as pre-eminently heroic.” Portrait shows the evolution of the boy into the artist, and the sacrifices he must make along the way, among them discarding religion, to realize his destiny. This necessitated stripping away the social aspects of Stephen’s nature.

The Nobel laureate William Faulkner remarked that the writer’s “obligation is to get the work done the best he can do it.” Yet he believed a writer should “never be satisfied” with a completed work because “[i]t never is as good as it can be done.” Still, it’s essential to complete a work because an incomplete work, Faulkner learned, can haunt a writer.

When Faulkner was asked how he knew when he’d arrived at the standard he’d set for himself, he replied that “objectivity in judging his work” is essential for a writer, “plus honesty and courage not to kid himself.” Faulkner admitted that no work met his standards. Still, he published them, but not until he was satisfied that he couldn’t improve the work.

The novel that caused Faulkner the most difficulty was The Sound and the Fury (1929), which he wrote “five separate times.” He wanted to relate the “tragedy of two lost women: Caddy and her daughter [Dilsey].” Faulkner believed that unless he got the story right, it would “continue to anguish” him until he did.

The inspiration for the novel was an image Faulkner had “of the muddy seat of a little girl’s drawers in a pear tree, where she could see through a window where her grandmother’s funeral was taking place and report what was happening to her brothers on the ground below.” He first wanted to write it as a short story but realized that the necessary backstory of “who they were and what they were doing and how her pants got muddy” meant he’d have to write a novel. Another image came to him, that of a “fatherless and motherless girl climbing down the drainpipe to escape from the only home she had.”

Faulkner first tried telling the story from the point of view of one of the brothers, “the idiot child,” because that narrator would know what happened, although he wouldn’t know why. Then he tried to tell the story through the eyes of “another brother.” And then, again, through the eyes of “the third brother,” but when he finished, he realized the novel still wasn’t working.

He rewrote it a fourth time, by making himself “the spokesman.” And still, the novel wasn’t working to Faulkner’s satisfaction. Still, he reworked it and published it, and fifteen years later, because the story wouldn’t leave him, he wrote an appendix included in The Portable Faulkner (1946) in a “final effort to get the story told and off my mind, so that I myself could have some peace from it.”

Though The Sound and the Fury caused Faulkner the greatest agony, and though he “couldn’t leave it alone,” he still felt “tenderest toward” it, even though he “never could tell it right,” though he’d “tried hard.” Even so, though the challenges he faced were often difficult, Faulkner accepted them as necessary because he knew he had “complete liberty to use whatever talent I might have to its absolute top.”