Susan Stinson

07:48 am: Insight
Over a few weeks, I got into a rhythm with this round of revision of my novel. I had already gone through the manuscript, moved big chunks around, marked passages with ideas or just the desire for more depth, and made a table listing all of the chapters with their dates (refining an effective grasp on when actual events happened and how that relates to the narrative needs of the novel has definitely been one of the ongoing challenges; for instance, how to keep continuity and a sense of urgency when I'm making leaps of years...), bullet lists of each chapter's content, and ideas for editing. I'd never done anything like that before, and it really helped me to have a way to see the structure of the book at a glance.

The book had twenty five chapters at the start of this revision, and twenty three at the end of it. The first four chapters went more slowly, but I got into a rhythm of revising a chapter a day. Since my lap top crashed, and I work much better out of the apartment, I was going to the public library every morning with with folders full of paper. Every morning, working in 45 minute chunks with 15 minute breaks (I love that!) I'd read and edit what I'd done the day before, then start to work on the next chapter. When I finished, I'd usually swim or go somewhere on the trike, then at night at home, I'd type up the changes I'd made and print them out to read the next morning.

I was pretty immersed, and making big changes (I've cut more than seventy pages over the course of two revisions), and it became pleasurable in a kind of light, stringent way. I kept getting clear ideas that seemed simple and right to me about things that I'd been struggling with, in the pool or on the trike or in bed. A lot of the work was about pushing the emotional and dramatic tension that I feel pulsing so strongly in the story closer to the surface so that it helps pull the reader with human urgency through a story about religion in the eighteenth century. No one else has read the whole manuscript yet, but I've got some really strong, good response to the beginning of the book. (I knocked on the side of the wooden drawer of my desk when I said that. No jinx.)

Last week I read an article in the The New Yorker about scientists trying to trace how insight works in the brain. Here's an abstract of the article. I was interested because a lot of what the journalist, Jonah Lehrer, was describing was consistent with the experience I was having of solving difficult problems in the book. This is one thing I found interesting:

[Psychologist Jonathan] Scholler had demonstrated that it was possible to interfere with insight by making people explain their thought process while trying to solve a puzzle -- a phenomenon he called "verbal overshadowing." This made sense to Jung-Beeman, since the act of verbal explanation would naturally shift activity to the left hemisphere, causing people to ignore the more subtle associations coming from the right side of the brain.

For me, something about that feels true, even if everything is happening in words.

Tags: writing