The DEEP FEELING Saga, part one
I spent some of this weekend rereading a novel I wrote. It’s an old novel.
I finished revising it two or three years ago, queried agents for a while afterward, and ultimately gave up on the thing.
The novel is called DEEP FEELING. And for anyone who’s into this stuff, this is how I described it in my query letter:
DEEP FEELING is a 62,000-word literary novel with an arch sense of humor, in which an elementary school teacher learns that her students have formed a cult and want to incite a violent revolution.
Alice Frost, a reluctant, young third-grade teacher, lives with a mountain of student loan debt and a mounting alcohol dependency. The last thing she needs is for Travis, a frequently bullied student, to bring for show-and-tell an enormous book about the filoguelle. The filoguelle, it claims, is an obscure gland in the human body that inspires feelings of love and affection in all human beings. The book circulates among the kids, and Alice reads it, too, suspecting more and more—based on its stranger, edgier contents—that its true purpose is to stir the collapse of civil society by poisoning young minds. The children begin acting strangely, and Alice grows afraid they are building an enormous machine that will burn down the city and spark a violent uprising.
There was a little more to it than that, but I’ll cut it off there. Not a perfect query letter, but good enough, I thought.
The last agent who asked to see the whole manuscript—which a decent number of them did, I’ll have you know—gave it a pretty damning assessment. There’s a scene at the end they took issue with, where, years after the events described in the above query, the teacher-protagonist, who’s no longer a teacher but still a protagonist, shouts at her former students, who are now teenagers, and holds them at gunpoint and harangues them in the room that once was their classroom.
I don’t recall exactly what the final agent said about that scene—something like that it seemed it was just an opportunity to have a character yell at other characters.
They weren’t entirely wrong about that.
They were mostly wrong, though.
I came away from the whole experience—agents saying they liked aspects of my book, but not being won over by the whole—feeling pretty dejected, feeling embarrassed that I’d ever thought that what I’d made could work, that people would want to read it.
I gave up on the novel. I moved on to other things. I wrote short stories and essays, and published them. A different novel I’d written won a contest. I published a short story collection.
It’s not a tragedy, that I didn’t publish Deep Feeling. But I realized this weekend what a tragedy it is that I gave up on it.
Rereading Deep Feeling for the first time in a long time, I’m finding it’s actually really good. There’s not even much I want to change in it, now.
As any self-loathing writer like me will tell you, if you can look back at something you wrote more than a month ago, and not want to change everything, let alone anything, then that means you did a good job writing and revising that thing.
Deep Feeling is a good book I should not have turned my back on like that.
I’m realizing what a betrayal of myself it was, to yield to the opinion of another person and move on.
Some years ago, I spent a great deal of my precious time on Deep Feeling. I poured into it as many hours as I could; I labored hard to ensure it was as strong as it could be. And it was good. And I knew it was good, enough that I put as much work as I did into trying to get it into people’s hands.
And all it took, to convince me to stop doing that, was for someone to tell me they didn’t get it? To give it a bad review, in an email, that made it as clear as could be that it just wasn’t right for them?
That is what embarrasses me, now. That is what I have a hard time forgiving myself for, now.
Richard Rodriguez once spoke about this, and did it beautifully, in a way that I can’t do justice to here. But he said, essentially, that it’s wrong to do the sort of thing I have done—to dismiss your prior self, and to revise your work so thoroughly, so maniacally, that you go beyond correcting what ought to be corrected and overrule a prior sensibility you had that may, in fact, have known better than you know now.
The idea he presents in that video haunts me—the notion that maybe my younger self, even my recent younger self, knew better about certain things than I do.
Every day I learn, all over again, how much I still have to learn.
