Lessons in editing and delay when writing a novel

On the luckiest days, you come across a book that you know you’ll return to endlessly. In the spirit of Fénéon, I’ll begin with the following:

Her thoughts dipped like starlings. 

It was an ordinary Tuesday, raining I believe, that slid into forever -

That book lives like a pier in her. 

In 1906, the daily Parisian newspaper Le Matin published over a thousand faits-divers, novels in three lines, as ‘fillers’ between news stories. These were anonymously written by the war clerk Félix Fénéon, who was also the editor of Revue Blanche. With Debussy as a music critic and André Gide as a book critic, he was in excellent stylistic company. Fénéon was the first French publisher of James Joyce, he translated Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, and discovered the genius of Georges Seurat. He edited the work of Proust, Rimbaud, Jarry, and Lautréamont, to name a few. In short, he knew a thing or two about editing, though one might question that on the Proust front!

Here are a few photos of novels in three lines that I recently wrote for stories I’m working on:

If you’re stuck on a particular theme/character/chapter, describing the section in three lines is a good way to highlight exactly what you mean to say.

What are the lessons gleaned from this exercise? Well, so much of my editing is about structuring a plan of removal. What I remove will determine the shape the work will take. My work, like myself, has many forms that I can’t wholly see by remaining inside the emotive subject, especially if that emotion or character is vital to the life force of the project. I liken this to how the heart pumps blood (think, sentences) around a body it has never seen. The point is the heart does a job, but it is not the skin or the eyes or the room or the voice. To mold, which is to edit, requires leaving the body of work and seeing it from all aspects.

What’s fascinating is that when I leave the body of the work and summarize the plot in three lines, I realize I am writing two books. I know there is The Story alongside The Story. I know this and speak about it often. But my stories were living inside two different shapes, one of pure descriptive and one of pure emotion. My job now is to find the artery that links the two. It’s difficult because I’m writing about a very ordinary woman making sense of extraordinary events, which brings me to delay—

Writing out various shapes in three lines has taught me as much about delay as summary. Delay is the pièce de résistance of the editing toolkit. I aspire to delay like Fénéon. Look at this:

Eugène Périchot, of Pailles, near Stint-Maixent, 

entertained at his home Mme Lemartrier. Eugène

Dupuis came to fetch her. They killed him. Love. 

Perfect delay, right? He withholds the necessary verb until the very end, and if that verb were to change, so too would the shape of the story. Imagine if ‘love’ was replaced with ‘war,’ ‘disease,’ ‘incest,’ ‘duty,’ or ‘religion.’ The list goes on, and each shape is different.

The goal is to drop necessary verbs like perfectly timed little bombs that will carve out the shape of the terrain through which my audience will flow. Okay, great. Easy peasy. No, really, it’s not as bad as it sounds, and nothing is irretrievable or unusable—just keep a separate cut-and-paste file. I’ve named mine “My Murdered Darlings.” It’s safe on my desktop. 

It takes courage to remove and whittle down to the bone, but that’s editing, and as is often the case with writing, it mirrors the objective of my living day, for I am in the process of removal. I am removing the layered permeation of early trauma. Similarly, re-categorizing my place within my story offers me a different view of my body, the body, from outside of myself or selves. Why? Because the body remembers trauma in ways that the story does not. It shapes you. It keeps you inside the summary of that time like something categorical, accessed by a type of reportage, until you leave and see the shape anew. Sometimes, we get stuck inside the rut of our own storyline, and just like in novel writing, we need to exit.

What I realize is how seldom my position in my story has been of my choice. How seldom have I chosen my shape. There is an element of this for everyone because we are the stories we live within, but if you have experienced early trauma, you become the story you’ve had to create to survive or reconcile the truth. I don’t want to make this mistake with my characters because my personal objective is to remove the untruths or the inherited truth through my writing. The impenetrable stain cannot be separated, but the color of it can lift and wash, and the shape of what’s left can become a part of the overall design. Precise and succinct emotion has a powerful shape.

An example from my novel-in-progress, Autobiography of a Drone, is of succinct emotion with careful delay (I hope). This was bone whittled from three pages of ‘flesh,’ and I think it’s much stronger as a result.

Where does my trauma live?

It lives in my physical body as a lack of breath, in the place behind my eyebrows, my right ankle, and my shoulder. It resides in my organs: my large and small intestines, my stomach, my liver, and my colon. It exists in the diaries of my grandmother and mother, in words I have not written but have internalized as my own. It lives in their record-keeping of household finances, recipes, and in their silence-keeping. It also lives in my throat. My tongue was cut out, just like my mother's and grandmother's tongues. It is in memories of memories poured from gaping mouth to gaping mouth, wordlessly and known as a contour of territory just beneath the surface. It exists like a tectonic plate of violence and fear. My mother might have saved me, but she needed saving, which is not an excuse but a reason. And reasons are necessary when you're learning a new language, and that's what you do when you're tongueless; you use your hands.

Thank you very much for reading my blog. I really appreciate the support I’ve received, and I’m so pleased you’ve found my experience useful. I wish you the best with your writing! Please feel free to share this with anyone who might find it helpful.

All the best,

Gret x