On Editing Down

It was a quite wonderful week of conversations with students. The high school crowd kept me on my toes on Monday; Karen Rile's class at Penn was hugely well-prepared to peel the layers off process, to ask difficult questions about a narrative's seeming loneliness, say, about a river's gender, about the song writing that is story writing, about the honing of a voice.

Often the conversation circled back to editing. To the hard reality (hard on me, at least) that every page I write undergoes at least two dozen drafts. I'll spend weeks on a passage that ultimately does not serve the narrative, I confessed; weeks, and that prose is set aside. I devoted five years of my life to a novel, a post-Spanish Civil War novel, to more than 80 drafts of that novel, that ultimately did not sell, and why? Because I had not found a way (no amount of editing had saved me) to make that book authentic.

It is hard, perhaps, not to look at the work we set aside as wasted effort. It is perhaps hard to imagine that we've used that time well. But all these years, all these drafts, all these stories into this grand, confusing, sometimes exhilarating, often frustrating journey I'm on, I know this: We are kindest to ourselves when we are hardest on our selves. Be ruthless. Birth a poem.