Back to Basics: Changing Meaning with Prose
Anything can mean anything. Welcome to madness.
This post is happening today, Monday, instead of yesterday, Sunday, for one simple reason: I thought today was Sunday.
Yes, I am still fully in the full-body immersion stage of my next novel’s final chapters; expect me to become even more imaginary up until I leave for the Texas Book Festival, which is also when I hurl this manuscript to my editor and assume a corporeal form once more.
(this video is neither relevant nor important, but I do spend a lot of time standing around outside staring at nothing during this part of a novel’s process, which means I get to see Athena doing her fall rituals firsthand. WHEN IS THE LAST TIME I HAVE EXPERIENCE THIS SORT OF UNCOMPLICATED HAPPINESS, ATHENA, WHEN)
This week, I wanted to simply demo a thing I’m spending much of my days doing right now: changing the meaning of events.
In previous posts, I’ve talked about how sophisticated storytelling happens when we begin to understand that a novel is not a series of events but rather a narrative that is proven by events. Right. Okay. I know. That sounds . . . abstract. I KNOW. But once we realize that editing is not about making things “better,” but rather about making chapters “do the most amount of work possible for where they are situated”— one we realize editing can be about tweaking the meaning of events rather than having to change the events themselves, we can do really splendid stuff.
Today, I’m going to take a page from THE DREAM THIEVES and rewrite it four different ways to show how the same page can be made to mean five different things.
AND THEN WE CAN DISCUSS.
For those of you following along at home, I’m focusing on the first page of Chapter 8—page 57 in my US hardcover edition of THE DREAM THIEVES, which is the only one I can find inside my house. That page number (57 of 437) places it solidly inside act one, which means that Adam Parrish, our point-of-view character, is still in the process of laying down evidence of what might change in his life.
Why might I edit it for meaning? Perhaps, after getting more of the draft in place, I realize I want a different character arc for him. Perhaps it needs to better offset the tone of the previous or following chapter. Perhaps this description has been moved to a different act in the book, so we’re in a different place in character arcs.
This week, I’m just going to show examples of how the tone could be shifted in editing, but if you guys want me to talk more about why I’d do these things, you know where to find me (floating in a cloud, hugging my manuscript, barely human).
Version 1 (the published page)
Adam Parrish had bigger problems than Ronan’s dreams.
For starters, his new home. These days, he lived in a tiny room above the St. Agnes rectory. The entire place had been built in the late seventeen hundreds and looked it. Adam was constantly smashing his head heroically against sloped ceilings and jabbing lethal splinters into his sock feet. The entire room had that smell of very old house—plaster must and timber dust and forgotten flowers. He had provided the furnishings: a flat IKEA mattress on the bare floor, plastic bins and cardboard boxes as nightstands and desk, a rug found on sale for three dollars.
It was nothing, but it was Adam Parrish’s nothing. How he hated and loved it. How proud he was of it, how wretched it was.
Adam Parrish’s nothing lacked air-conditioning. There was no escaping the heat of a Virginian summer. He was too familiar with the sensation of sweat trickling down the inside of his pants leg.
And then there were the three part-time jobs that paid his Aglionby tuition. He crammed in the work hours now to afford a more leisurely fall when school started. He’d spent just two hours at the easiest of the jobs—Boyd’s Body & Paint, LLC, replacing brake pads and changing oil and finding what was making that squeaking noise there, no, there—and now, even though he was off, he was ruined for anything else. Sticky and sore and, above all else, tired, always tired.