In the past month, my sister and I have spent fifteen or twenty hours a week sorting through, packing up and donating the material things of our mother’s life. Things that surrounded her with some sweetness, comfort, and perhaps grace, nothing she’d had in childhood. Things she collected, admired and loved, all part of her life’s story.
Scenes of our lives with our mother came back to us during those hours, scenes of life as it was and scenes of her attempt to create the life she wished for.
Each of us, two sisters and an out-of-town brother, took only some of those things into our own lives. We couldn’t take them all.
We sorted, saved, divided, donated, and gifted the rest. It’s been exhausting yet energizing. We’ve worked hard and enjoyed the time together. The process stirred and allowed many feelings, including pleasure, anger, frustration and a huge variety of sadnesses.
We had to let go of so many of the things of my mother’s life in order to move on into our own futures. We had to move past the things she surrounded herself with in order to discover our own life stories that will include her absence and only some of the things that belonged to her.
Doesn’t this experience visit us as writers all the time, every time we revise? Just before my mom died, I began a revision of a middle grade novel in verse. I set aside huge chunks of words I loved. My heart ached as I ran big “x”s through poems that offered sweetness, comfort, and grace, but had no place in the novel I hope to write. They were pieces of the past, pieces of the process of moving into the future of the story I want to create.
When we dismantle the things of our loved ones’ lives, or dismantle our manuscripts, we define a path into our future. And we can’t do it without passing through the pain of letting go.
How tender, heartwrenching, and powerful an experience revision can be.
Welcoming the process and finding meaning in the most difficult of experiences, gives depth to our lives and to our process as writers.
Great Analogy, Carol. It sounds like you and your siblings had an intense but rich time.
I’m rewriting a novel now. Changing POV from third person to 1st person. It’s definitely a new path, a whole new book, really and I’ve had to delete passages that I loved. Really, almost nothing is the same, style wise. The premise remains. The original spark.
Thanks, Carol.
Thanks for your response, Paul. Same experience here: my middle grade w-i-p, now verse, was prose in the first draft. I’m so loving the verse format (my original published writing, long ago was always verse) that I’m planning to revise my first novel, it’s 13th draft sitting in a drawer right now, in verse.
I know for lots of young writers (thinking of my 4th and 5th grade afterschool students) it’s hard to believe in the possibility of something that doesn’t yet exist. Would you agree that a big part of ability as a “revision-er” can be learned the same way we learn positivity, for example, by taking leaps of faith via specific revision practices and through that process, learn to tolerate the anxiety of moving towards something that doesn’t exist yet? If we can do it in spite of anxiety, and we’re successful – i.e., the story improves – then it’s easier (not easy, just easier!) to take the next step.
I’m so sorry for your loss. What a heart-wrenching few weeks you’ve had. Thanks for sharing here and being such an encourager to others.