Editing as Discovery
How I found my way to new meaning through the dreaded task of organization
An excerpt from my book, Frontier, was featured the other day on Memoir Land, and as I read through it for the first time as a standalone piece, it struck me that much of the material wasn’t part of the original version (or really first several versions of the book). Instead, it emerged during a late stage of revision, years & years after I’d started the writing process. Now the excerpt, part of a longer chapter about luck and bargaining, about trying to grasp at control when it’s elusive and the dangers of believing in that control, feels essential to the project. It explores something so fundamental to my experience of birth trauma and early parenting and coming to terms with medical (life) uncertainty that it’s hard to imagine the book without it.
For context, a bit about my (shaky?) discipline when it comes to outlining and structure: I went into memoir writing without much experience with long-form work. My identity was that of a short story writer and I’d given up on my handful of half-hearted attempts at novels after maybe 40 pages (and that’s honestly generous). My only real experience with creating the scaffolding for a longer work came from attempts to put my short fiction into a collection for my MFA thesis, which I ended up abandoning for what eventually became this book. And anyway, that’s an altogether different kind of structural work, concerned more with tonal connections and pacing than any kind of narrative or argumentative momentum.
Drafting my memoir, then, was a bit of a learn-on-the-job situation. At first, I had no idea that I was writing a book—I thought maybe it would be an essay—and so I did no planning work. After I realized I was working on something longer, I followed a chronological set of events, but also had various other strands looping their way in and out of the text. I went by intuition for the first round, letting my mind/pen go wherever the factual events led me. Godspell? The Wild West? Sure! Of course I revised ad nauseam, and in that process moved things around quite a bit, but still I had no grand plan or blueprint to work from.
That is until the book landed at Barrelhouse with my two insightful editors, Lilly Dancyger and Lindsey Trout Hughes. Together they encouraged me to consider how to give each chapter a more cohesive thesis. They challenged me to do more than simply drop an idea or series of linked ideas into the text—to let them build towards something more. What arguments did I want to make in each section? What evidence did I want to marshal to make said arguments? Argument, of course, I’m using loosely here, because this wasn’t an academic work. But still, that framing helped me understand my job in each chapter as one of wrestling with a distinct idea or question and moving it forward until I came to a new place, a more nuanced understanding. Some of the chapters already had emerging themes that only needed nudging to bring to the fore. Some I discovered needed to be broken into shorter, separate chunks so that each question or idea could get its full, un-muddled due. But others required more building.
Enter the chapter that now examines luck. It comes later in the book, when we’re inching towards the end of the NICU stay with our son. Initially I’d had a bit of material about luck in the book—some stuff about how much I hated when people called us lucky because it felt so phony, a conversational filler for when friends or nurses had nothing else to say, that sort of thing—but it didn’t really amount to much, and in retrospect had more than a tinge of a self-pitying whine in its prior form. I hadn’t dug into the larger meaning behind the observations, and I’d been content with the superficial. At that point, luck wasn’t the defining framework of the chapter; there wasn’t much of one at all, which was the crux of the problem.
Approaching the chapter with an eye towards ferreting out an “argument” led me to land on luck as the central question. There I found a whole trove of material ripe for exploration. Narrowing and naming my focus forced me to think more deeply about exactly what it was about the concept of luck that was so off-putting to me, about which aspects of luck I’d actually bought into without realizing it. I also discovered a deep well of historical material about superstitious practice around birth. For instance, I learned about Jewish practices involving the figure of Lilith and red string used to ward her away from vulnerable infants that totally fascinated me.
Through this lens, I could reflect on my own experience and see that what I had done vis a vis luck and bargaining was part of a much broader human tapestry that stretched way, way back. I hope this widening of perspective also provides context, some softening, for the part about friends saying “Jonah is lucky to have you as his parents,” which I left in the final draft. Now I understand that they were, like me, only trying to make sense out of the nonsensical.
In the end, it turned out that editing—the nitty gritty structural part I’d dreaded—didn’t just make my book more streamlined or help it flow from one part to the next. It enriched the meaning behind the work too.
Here’s luck excerpt:
Other excerpts from the book can be found at LitHub and The Sun.
And you can buy the whole book here or at your local independent bookstore!