INTRODUCTION TO THE OLD STORY SERIES (McSweeny’s Quarterly Concern, Introduction as Explanation, Inspiration, Struggling Writer)
Yesterday I started reading the current issue of McSweeny’s Quaterly Concern and Wells Towers had this brilliant thing to say about rewrites:
“When I sat down to give it another look before signing off on my collection of short stories, I read the first few pages and was horrified. After all the work I’d done on it, the story looked cheap and inadequate and shameful. Reading it, I suffered the breathless revulsion that some of us feel when looking in the mirror, thinking ‘Oh my God. I can’t believe that’s my actual face.’ An emotional niggardliness seemed to pervade the story. A brief synopsis migh have read, ‘A smug narrator perceived his brother to be obnoxious, and his perceptions are ratified when his brother ultimately ingests a ration of possibly lethal mosse flesh.’ The story aspired to stingy ends, a kind of glib, just desserts satisfacation at best. The stuff i’d liked most, the gag lines perpetrated by the Bob character, looked on second glance like a bunch of shucking and jiving: ha-cha-cha-cha! You could hear where the rimshots were supposed to go.
“One questions a smart teacher of mine liked to ask in ficiton workshops is, “Was this written in good faith?’ I took this to mean: did the writer make himself vulnerable to the story’s possiblities as he wishes his readers to be? Or, more simply put: does the writer believe in what he wrote? That first draft, with the bitter younger brother narrating, felt like it flunked the good-faith test.
“So i took another stab at it, tasking myself with a mission of greater narrative generosity, a more complicated balance of sympathies, fewer cheap tricks. In order to liberate Matthew, the older brother, from his simple role as a bungling blowhard, it seemed necessary to let him tell the tale. It struck me as a sadder and more interesting story if we could get to know Matthew as a plenary human being, an aware, discerning narrator who nontheless can’t stop alienating people despite what he believes are his best intentions.
“It may be the case that the first draft, the younger-brother one, is the more succesful story. Nevertheless, I prefer the second. It feels to me as though it grapples harder with our universal tendency to vex ourselves, or at the very least, the last time I read it, I didnt get that sinking, face-in-the-mirror feeling, which is enough for me now.”
I hope to take you on the path of my revisions and revival as a writer. Without, of course, ever losing sight of the future. Future of my life as a writer, lover, student, teacher, dreamer.
