Why We Write
With deepest gratitude.
her every thought and feeling, smelling and tasting and hearing as if I had crawled into her skin. The revisions exhausted and thrilled me. I knew I had succeeded. While that first unnamed girl, Maddie Version 1, had been objectified—used by me, consciously or not, to shock the reader—this new girl was real.
Now, four years later, having rewritten the scene in a longer dramatized form for my new novel, The Gypsy Moth Summer, I hope the unnamed girl (Maddie Version 3, Final) has the redemption she deserves. The broom scene in The Gypsy Moth Summer is the most difficult scene I’ve ever written, and the most important. I forced myself to linger in that dark kitchen for an entire chapter, made myself feel every blow of the broom, wrapped myself in the girl’s terror so the reader would feel trapped just as she does. Just as I did. So that, instead of pity, the reader will share the girl’s pain, making it impossible for the girl—victim or heroine or both—to be dismissed. The scene has a new ending. It may be difficult for readers to understand the triumph this recent finale represents. For me, it is everything. The girl hits her father back—a battle neither I nor the first two versions of Maddie had the strength or courage to fight.
The Gypsy Moth Summer has been out for only a short time and I am still waiting for someone, a Cutting Teeth reader or a former Iowa classmate, to call me out. Wag a finger at me and exclaim, “You can’t rewrite a scene again and again like that. You can’t rewrite life!”
To which I’ll answer: I’m finished now. Maddie is free. That was the last time her father hit her. I am free too, and at the end of a decades-long journey— if not to rewrite my life (though I haven’t given up on the possibility), then to make sense of a moment in time that has shaped me. When I was forced to forgive my father in that long-ago kitchen—a burden no child should have to shoulder— I knew the power of empathy, and that understanding has made me into the person, and writer, I am today.
Can that glimmer of redemption leap off the page and into real life? Perhaps it is a necessity for a writer, even the most cynical, to believe in a little magic, to believe that she can rewrite the past. Rewriting that scene from real life hasn’t changed the past, but it has taught me to hope. As a younger writer, I wrote fiction to reveal the flaws I saw in the world, and in myself. Now I write in the hope that I’ll discover a better world, and maybe if I keep searching, the unnamed girl I find will be even stronger and, finally, safe. Can you think of other authors who have rewritten scenes and included them in multiple novels and/or short stories? Here’s one: Raskolnikov’s dream of the beating of a horse by drunken peasants in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866) appears again, briefly and in a different form, in The Brothers Karamazov (1880).