The DEEP FEELING Saga, part two

And so I have been working on DEEP FEELING, the novel I wrote some years ago, gave up on, and came back to again recently.

I made a hard copy, also some years ago, for safekeeping. And with a pen in my hand I have been reading it and making changes.

I have not reversed my position on this book manuscript, in my prolonged exposure to it. I still think it’s good. I think I shouldn’t have given up on it, back when I did.

Still, I have been working on it. Revising things.

Much of that revision consists of alterations that aren’t completely necessary.

Since I last worked on DEEP FEELING, I’ve changed as a writer. On the whole, I’ve gotten better; we’re always getting better at the things we do, or so I like to think.

But my approach to writing has also been changing in all sorts of arbitrary ways, the way a goat or worm species will evolve over time and, sure, get better at climbing rocks or digging through dirt, but also just get different in ways that make no difference at all and are even retrograde.

I write shorter paragraphs, now, than I ever did before.

There’s nothing wrong with long or medium-length paragraphs. They’re great. But I’ve been writing shorter ones. And so now the paragraphs in DEEP FEELING are mostly briefer than they were.

There are things we do as writers that matter to us more than they do to other people. This might be one of those things.

But I like to make those changes, because it means the book is now more recognizably mine. It’s more aligned with the work I’m doing now, and the person I am now. If I’m going to send this book out (more on that in part three of this beautiful, utterly necessary saga), I don’t want to feel, as I do it, like I’m submitting a novel to publishers that’s the output of a former self. So I’ve updated it in that mostly arbitrary, but still important, way.

But I’ve made more substantial changes, too.

DEEP FEELING is divided into two parts. It always has been.

In Part One, the protagonist is a teacher at an elementary school. She does not like her eight-year-old students, which makes her scenes in the classroom fun to write. She’s worried that the students might be getting fanatically devoted—not to a religion, but to the conviction that there’s an unrecognized gland in every human body that’s responsible for feelings of compassion and fraternity. The kids seem to think they must do something terrible in the service of these glands, because a book called Deep Feeling has been circulating among them that tells them to do it. And the teacher has to try to stop them. But she fails to do that. She has to leave her job, instead, and she’s left out of the conclusion of the drama that’s been playing out in and out of the classroom.

In Part Two, the protagonist is no longer a teacher. Ten years have passed. She moved away from the small town where she was a teacher, and she lived a decade’s worth of life. But now she’s moved back home. And the children she once taught reassert themselves into her life. Two of them, who are now eighteen, are convinced that two others, also now eighteen, are once again going to try to do something terrible in the name of the compassionate glands.

As you can see from that description, this is a perfect novel, and agents were out of their minds when they didn’t take it on with great enthusiasm. My name should be in lights.

But as I was rereading DEEP FEELING this time around, I caught a few scenes that were unfairly abbreviated.

There’s one scene in part one in particular where the teacher-protagonist interrogates several of the students. She takes them aside, one by one, and leans in.

The way it was written before, that scene was the closest thing I could make to a montage. I moved through it as fast as I could; in a rapid-fire fashion, the narrator describes making one kid cry after another as she treats them like criminals and fails to get from them what she wants.

This time around, I realized there was a big missed opportunity, there, for comedy and for heightening tension. So I stretched that scene out, took my time with it. Now she only makes the first kid cry; the other kids are more resilient, and more resistant, and the narrator’s failure to get from the kids what she wants is thrown back in her face, rather than lying there in front of her.

It’s not tremendously different from what it was. But it takes a little longer, and the different characters involved have more space in which to reveal themselves—which is what I’m after, now, when I write a scene like that. I didn’t know I could go after it, when I first wrote the scene.

I did more or less this same thing with the novel’s climax.

Whereas I previously tried to force real action into the ending—having a character draw a gun and threaten people—I was more meticulous with the climactic scene, this time around. The former teacher returns to the old classroom with the kids—now teenagers—whom she failed to teach anything when it was her job to teach them. She tries to finally get some things across to them, now that they’re all reassembled there, one of those things being that they’re a bunch of shitheads.

In doing that, I made the climax more closely match the rest of the novel, for the most part.

And, in making all of these changes, I increased the word count by about 7,000. It’s now at roughly 69,000 words, which is a more appropriate number of words for a novel than 62,000.

I still have more work to do. I need to reread the whole thing and make sure all the parts fit well, the old things and the new things joined together. Something will come up, at that point, and I’ll have to fix it.

But there are things I don’t want to change, things I know I could alter, but which wouldn’t necessarily make the book any better than it is currently.

One of the odd features of DEEP FEELING is that its two parts were written several years apart from one another. I wrote part one when I was still an essayist trying his hand at fiction; by the time I wrote part two, I had figured a lot of things out. I was comfortable with writing dialogue, for example, which I’d never really done in the essays I wrote. And that’s a pretty important thing.

It’s not a problem, that DEEP FEELING’s two parts look different. I haven’t changed that, or been otherwise fanatical about ensuring that the book is perfectly even. I kind of like it, that when you move from part one to part two you feel suddenly like you’re hearing from an entirely different narrator.

That effect serves the novel well. The narrator changes a lot in the intervening ten years, and most importantly she herself is convinced that she’s a virtually different person, by the time she resumes narrating the novel.

And so I don’t want to change that. I think that changing that would seem right to plenty of people, but would ultimately detract from the book.

It’s really hard to write stuff. It’s hard to revise stuff. One of the things that makes it hard is that it’s never clear exactly where and when the revision should stop. It’s hard to see the difference between what must change and what could change, between where you’re being stubborn and where you’re being reasonable, and between where you’re sabotaging yourself and where you’re not.

I really should get paid more, for doing this stuff.

But I don’t.