I’m on Draft 6 of my book now, which you’d think would mean I’m close to finishing it—but I’m not so sure. Sometimes I think I’m close, but other times, the book still seems so far from what I want it to be.
Ann Patchett describes this difference perfectly:
I make up a novel in my head… This is the happiest time in the arc of my writing process. The book is my invisible friend, omnipresent, evolving, thrilling…like an oversized butterfly whose wings were cut from the rose window in Notre Dame…. It is the greatest novel in the history of literature, and I have thought it up, and all I have to do is put it down on paper and then everyone can see this beauty that I see.
And so…I reach up and pluck the butterfly from the air. I take it from the region of my head and I press it down against the desk, and there, with my own hand, I kill it. It’s not that I want to kill it, but it’s the only way I can get something that is so three-dimensional onto the flat page… Everything that was beautiful about this living thing—all the color, the light and movement—is gone. What I’m left with is the dry husk of my friend, the broken body chipped, dismantled, and poorly reassembled. Dead. That’s my book.
For me it’s like that, too, but it’s also like the exact opposite of that.
For me, writing a book is like giving birth to something. The book takes on a life of its own. When I was writing Draft 5, I could feel myself breathing life in.
I was reading Anthony Doer’s Four Seasons In Rome at the time, absorbing his magnificent rhythms, hoping his incredible muse might send just a little magic my way. I recrafted sentences and paragraphs with new vividness and authority.
I was a bellows, pushing oxygen into my two-dimensional book. The story was already there; I was just breathing into it, like God, breathing life into me.
But now, as I hone it further in Draft 6, I’m finding this new life stubborn, intransigent. The book is fully formed, its structure intact, its voice already chosen. It’s nearly impossible to move anything dramatically around, or to insert a new style, without essentially needing to rewrite the whole darn thing. I’m helpless! All I can do is smooth the language here and there, give it little haircuts, little nips and tucks, then watch it ride off down the street on its wobbly bicycle and eventually grow up and leave home for college.
That’s what makes me feel I may not even be close to done. There’s something frightening about being close to done with my first book, because I’m not sure it’s the book I actually meant to write. I fear the butterfly is flat on the page, dead.
And in this case, Dad is my butterfly.
Dad is in the book, but only pieces of him. I’m not sure he’s fully the man he was in real life, in all his glory, and I want him to be. I’m afraid the reader won’t fall in love with him, that he’ll be too two-dimensional, too much of an antagonist, not enough of a tragic figure.
How do I make sure that a complete stranger who reads my book will see Dad the way I see him in my mind? A capable, compassionate man with soft hazel eyes. I see him so vividly, pulling out a mechanical pencil to note something in his pocketbook, his mind full of information and ideas about how to get things done. I see him researching what’s wrong with my computer, how to fix his car, how to navigate Grandma’s complex medical care.
In my book, there is definitely the other version of Dad, a version equally real and present in my life. That’s the man nervously smoking cigarettes, pushing his eyebrows up to make deep creases in his forehead, straining forward to forcefully make a point, picking his nails, ranting about politics. That Dad has become vivid in my book. He’s the instigator of the story, which is about how I needed to heal myself from his alcoholism and to heal the gulf between us as he was dying.
But is the other Dad there, too, the man beneath the dysfunction, the man I love so desperately? Because it’s vital to me that he be there. Even if it takes me more years to capture him accurately.
So I’m either close to done with my book, or light-years away from being done.
It depends. If I like the new life I’ve created, I’ll set it free into the world. But if I don’t, then by golly, I will kill it again, smash it up like a potter’s unglazed jar collapsing back into a cool, wet lump of clay. I will just have to craft it anew.
Even more than I want to write and publish a book, I want to write and publish a good book. Or at least, I want this one, particularly personal book to be really good, really true. I can’t ask Dad’s permission to publish it. The least I can do is try my best to do him justice.
