While microwaving a frozen entree for lunch on Monday, I read an article in the local paper about a gang rape that occurred in California.

The victim was a young girl.  Maybe she was nine years old; I forget.  Another girl, older, lured had her into a park with the promise that she'd do her fingernails up with nail polish if she went.  Once they were in the park, the older girl texted a bunch of boys, who jumped over walls and fences and proceeded to rape the girl.

Whenever I read articles like this, I imagine myself as the victim's father.  I get so mad.  I'm not prone to violence but I swear, if someone did something like to one of my children, I'd buy a gun or knife and hunt down the perpetrators while they awaited trial.  Or I'd hunt down their parents and siblings, taking a whole family hostage while I hacked away their body parts. 

Really—that is what makes me so fearful, realizing how uncontrollably angry I’d be in such a situation.  Violence begets violence.  I’m no fan of vigilante justice, mind you, and I’d certainly not condone anything that I might do in such a situation, but it takes a village to raise a child and I’m mostly thankful for the mercy that village has so far provided.

After lunch, I went back into my office. An email had arrived.  The subject matter of that email was blank, and the sender’s address was a series of digits I didn't recognize. The email came with an attachment.  For all intents & purposes, I thought it was spam or malware that would screw up my hard drive something bad.

Normally, I’d delete something like that email, but this time I was curious. 

I clicked it open.  The email exploded into a .jpeg of two of my children, Stephen and Ellie, sitting on the steps of what looked to be an older apartment building that I didn't recognize.

My thoughts leapt in terrifying directions.  I imagined that the person who snapped the picture was sending it to me, alerting me that they had my children.  I thought my worst fears were coming into life.  The senders were probably at that very moment performing heinous acts on Stephen and Ellie.

I looked at the sender’s email address again, trying to figure out who would do such a vile thing.

Then I noticed that the address looked suspiciously like a phone number.  Sometimes I’m not as wise as I hope myself to be.  I started to call that number.  It was my wife’s cell phone.  She had snapped the picture over the weekend and was sending it to me in hopes that it might brighten my day.

Errata: The Collagist just published my review of Weston Cutter's debut story collection, YOU'D BE A STRANGER, TOO.  Again, I owe Gabriel Blackwell (The Collagist's book review editor) major gratitude for his editorial guidance, but also please check out Cutter's book.  It's a great collection marking the debut of a great talent.

Alison, my wife, was just leaving the kids' elementary school today, where she had been doing some volunteer thing.  Controversy has developed on the recess playing fields over the last week.  Some of the boys want to play two-hand-touch football, which, owing to the propensity of such games to devolve into football of the full-tackle variety, the school prohibits.  Liability issues apparently make everyone so cautious nowadays.  Now, the boys play one-hand-touch football during recess.  Still, football fields being so very big and boys being boys, I have my doubts that one-hand-touch rules always prevail.  A teacher, after all, can only see so much on a bright sunny day with dozens of children running all around them.

Sebastian, my nine-year-old, has really gotten into these games.  Coming home from school yesterday, he was exuberant.  He had scored a touchdown during recess and had the mud on his knees to prove it.  He wanted to talk about nothing else.  I almost thought he was going to demand that we drive him back to school so he could show us the very ground on which that touchdown was scored.

So today when Alison was leaving school, someone pulled her aside.  During today’s football game, someone head-butted Sebastian.  His nose swelled up something bad.  Alison is now racing him to the ER.  The nurse doesn’t think it’s broken, but everyone is so very cautious nowadays.

I’ve been revising, furiously, something big-ish.  Spindly eraser rubbings now cover the top of my desk for all the corrections and re-corrections, as do several notebooks and the 399 manuscript pages I’m now revising.  Until a few weeks ago, I hadn’t looked at these pages since December, when I last revised them.  Back then, I remembered the manuscript as being just perfect, which I know sounds ridiculous—but really, that’s how I felt.  Now, seeing the pages afresh, I shudder.

Some passages I can read without cringing, but much of the writing strikes me as lazy.  When writing previous drafts of this material, I opted for a bloated style jam-packed with adjectives and adverbs and a whole lot of ramble—it was a decision I consciously chose, but now I haven’t the foggiest reason why.

God, does it have ramble.

Plus there’s a boatload of flab: empty gestures, stray sentences interrupting narrative flow, and too many characters “wondering” about too many things.

It makes me want to apologize to all my friends I had foisted the manuscript upon, many of whom devoted considerable attention to it.

[But thank you, dear friends, for your reading suggestions.  I’ve been reading and/or re-reading the Bradbury, Huxley, and Ishiguro titles you suggested.  Yesterday, I started on Terry Eagleton’s ON EVIL, which is actually quite engaging.  And to my brother Mike, I admit it: I haven’t read enough Gramsci.]

Besides tightening the sentences, I’m strengthening the characters’ relationships to one another, inserting a few different plot elements, and doing a whole lot of cutting.  By the time I’m done, it may even have heart.

                                                                                                ~~~

Years ago, Tony Earley talked with me at the Sewanee Writers Conference about the revision process.  Earley’s suggestion was to look for ways that elements within a work can refer back to themselves.  At the time, I was writing a story that featured a character reading off a set of new-agey affirmations from an index card.  Earley advised that I look for other ways to use an index card in that story.  So I had another character, a salesman, read off a sales spiel from an index card.  The reappearance of certain images and effects, if not overdone, can provide greater narrative and thematic coherence.

I’ve been thinking about this advice a lot over the last few weeks.  Thank you, Tony.

                                                                                                 ~~~

Last week, George Saunders gave a couple of programs at Hollins University.  Saunders is easily my favorite short story writer.  Thursday night, he read “Victory Lap,” a story that appeared in The New Yorker a couple years back while I was at The MacDowell Colony.  For those who haven’t been, The MacDowell Colony is as close to heaven as I’ll likely experience on this planet.  People are just so generous there.  I remember talking a lot with others there about “Victory Lap.”  It was while at the Colony that I completed the last 20,000+ words of the novel.  Hearing Saunders read the story brought back memories of how elated I felt back then.

The reading itself was fantastic.  No one should pass up the opportunity to hear Saunders read.  Everyone laughed, and everyone just about cried, all at the right places.

On Friday, Saunders gave a craft talk.  Among other things, he talked about his revision process.  He’s a rabid reviser.  For some stories, he says he goes through a hundred drafts.  Which I can believe—really, his work can be that good.  His strategy is to print out story drafts and go through them with a pencil, working on all the parts that make him cringe.  If on one day he can go through eight pages without cringing, his goal for the next day is to make it through page nine.

I wish I had brought a voice recorder to his talks. 

Among the things he watches for when revising are characters and situations that condescend to readers.  Which, looking at my own work, I am guilty of doing.

It’s kinda neat, actually, realizing that I’m going through the same process as he goes through.  As every writer probably goes through.

Saunders news of note: he’ll have a new story in The New Yorker in the next few weeks.  This particular story stemmed out of the same original project that produced his last New Yorker story, “Escape from Spiderhead,”  but he says that the two stories are wildly different. 

Hollins cool thing of note: 2011 Hollins MFA Ashley Good gave perhaps the best introduction to a reading that I’ve heard.  The art of introducing a reader is, sadly, vastly overlooked.  Too often, introductions are nothing more than bullets points extracted from the reader’s CV--Jane Doe’s stories have appeared X, Y, and Z.  Her novel, ---, won the PDQ Award for Fill-In-The-Blank.  Good’s introduction had heart, touching upon Saunders’ uniqueness, but also touching in its own right.

Someday, may we all be so lucky as to be introduced by someone as thoughtful as Good. 

And may we all live to give such an introduction for another writer.

                                                                                                        ~~~

Okay.  The rub about revisions is this:

This is not the first time I revised these pages (which, in previous incarnations, numbered almost 475 pages).  Twice last year I tackled them, both times vastly improving the manuscript.  Both times though, I was just as shocked at, well, how shoddy my previous drafts appeared.

There’ll come a time, surely, when the draft I’m cobbling together now will seem just as bad.  I’ve seen this also in the stories I’ve written.  I don’t even send out stories anymore that just a few years ago I classified as the best I’d ever written.

Over time, this recognition of one’s writerly fallibility leaches over into other aspects of one’s life.  If my judgment of my writing could be so suspect, how can I trust my judgment in other areas?

                                                                                                 ~~~

Last month, I wrote about collaborations.

Revising is a lot like collaboration, but instead of collaborating with another writer, you collaborate with your past writing self.  I’ve felt this in all my previous revisions as well.  It startles me to see how much my inclinations have changed just over the last couple of years since I began this project.  I am no longer the same writer.

Stephen King gave an interview earlier this week at The Atlantic Monthly.  He says, “I never started a book that I expected to finish. Because it always feels like a job that's much too big for a little guy like me.”

Although at times I want to throttle my past writing self (especially for that horrible penultimate chapter!), I’m also grateful for all the heavy lifting he did.  The material is fresh, the story (mostly) compelling, the structure largely sound.

My present-day self looks at the manuscript that my past writing self produced and thinks, Wow!  I would never have been able to finish something that big by myself.  Thank you!

When Stephen, my oldest, was eighteen months old, he was captivated by a nursery rhyme.  He wanted me to read “Humpty Dumpty” to him every night.  His language development was such that he referred to himself in the third person, an affectation which lent a certain seriousness to all his pronouncements.  I would no sooner finish one Humpty Dumpty telling when he would demand another.

     We had three different picture-book versions of the nursery rhyme and often he had all of them spread open on his bedroom floor.  He studied each picture with a grave intensity.  Hearing and seeing Humpty Dumpty was not enough—he had a need to absorb it into his body.  As I read, he ran his fingers over the pictures of the brick wall on which Humpty precariously perched.  He touched the king’s men who gathered to rehabilitate the broken egg.  And then he would stand back and flap his hands at the pictures.  He was doing that a lot then, flapping his hands, and the way he did it, stiffly and with utter concentration, brought to mind  a mini sorcerer conjuring a transformation spell.

One night, after reading Humpty Dumpty for the umpteenth time, he closed the largest of the three books.  I expected him to request another reading, but he was silent.  Eye contact did not come readily for him and there were times I had no idea what he might be thinking.  Sometimes he’d play for hours with his crayons, lining them up according to their height in the front hallway and staring at them.  He could stare at them for hours, literally, and I was amazed at what I took to be his powers of concentration but, try as I might, I could not get him to explain what he was doing.  Then he closed the other two books and sat down with his back against his changing table.

“Daddy?”

“Yes, Stephen?”

“Stephen fell down today.”

Though he could not articulate it further, I understood: he had been falling a lot lately.  Whether it was more than any other child who had been walking for only seven or eight months, I dared not speculate.  Each day brought a new scrape on his elbow, a new bruise on his knee.  He was big for his age, registering in the 98th percentile for both height and weight and was otherwise healthy, but his bigness meant that when he fell, he fell harder and heavier than 98 percent of other children.  

Mouth ajar, he looked at the picture again of the broken Humpty.  

He might have been suffering through his first existential moment, wondering if he too would not be able to be put back together again.  My heart went out to him, my son, for I too knew what it felt like to be broken.