Thank you Vicki Tull, Kyra Faison-Gardner, Dipika, Christie Scanlin Dobson, Jon, and many others for tuning into my live video with Di Kersey! Join me for the next live Author’s Table on Thursday, August, 13th ay noon Eastern Tine to hear Susan Kacvinsky’s fiction piece.
“I don’t think the minutiae matters when you’re hitting a point.”
Di said that to me on Thursday, at past two in the morning her time, on the Gold Coast. God bless her for staying up so late to share her wisdom (I don’t know about you guys but my midlife clock stops around 10 pm!)
Di’s essay won the non-fiction prize in the first issue of The Story Room. There’s a line in it that we chatted about, because it was really the core of the piece. She is forty-eight. Her marriage is ending. She is sitting in her bedroom with a man who just recently wrote in their tenth anniversary card all the ways he loved her more now. And he says: “I see you. I don’t love you.”
I had assumed that line was direct transcription. That she wrote it down because it was what he said. but it wasn’t transcribed. He said considerably more than that. Di wrote the long version first, a whole paragraph of his words, words and more words, and then she cut it to seven words. Because it was really only those seven words that mattered.
“She Got Her Hair Done” reads like a confession because it is one. Di put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard, either one works), and told the truth about her divorce, her self-doubt and the voice that has been heckling her since she was eleven (I call my voice “The Mean Girl”, I’m sure you have a name for yours). It was a tough essay to write (confronting, Di called it when it was read back to her) and it cost her something. But… she published it anyway.
That’s what I want all you gorgeous midlife heroines to do. Be brave and authentic.
Now, here’s what you can learn from Di about the editing process.
The manicure was an accident. The guardian in Di’s essay, the jealous frenemy who sits at her shoulder and heckles her in italics, gets her nails done. Then her hair. And, by the last page the talons are “neatly squared and buffed,” and that manicure is how you know the relationship between her and Di has changed. The arc they travel together reads like a conceit designed in advance and carried the length of the piece, but it was not in the first draft at all. Di broke a nail while she was typing. When she noticed it, she thought: anyone that committed to putting you down wants to look good doing it. Her words: “If you’re going to point at someone, your nails want to look good.”
The ending is a rejection. Her first version ended on the guardian saying “well done,” and she read it back and changed her mind. “There’s no way she’d just suddenly turn and go, nice one.” So she made her frenemy a tad more grudging. She says, “’til next time.”
The gut punch is a cut. She included only seven words of her ex-husband’s monologue. That’s so the reader can take the hit rather than watching Di take it. The detail that matters most to you is very often the detail that matters least to your reader.
At the end of the hour I broke my own promise to give her the last word, because she had just said something that was the entire point of what we are trying to accomplish with The Story Room. She was talking about editing. About going back and back to a sixteen-hundred-word piece, more than she has edited anything in six years, checking that she had closed her loops.
And there is the point. Closing the loops during editing is the point. Resolving the questions is not. Her essay opens with her hand braced under her chin like a gun and closes with the pulse still going under the same thumb. That loop is shut. But the question, whether the voice in her head is an enemy or the only thing that ever kept her safe, is left standing open in front of you, and she doesn’t answer it.
So here is the thing I actually want to know. Please join us in the comment section to discuss.
What are you afraid to write about because you haven’t yet answered the question?
Susan Kacvinsky is at the Author’s Table tomorrow on Substack Live, Thursday, 5pm UK and noon Eastern, with the fiction prize winner. She asked Di the sharpest question of the hour from the chat, so it seems only fair she takes the chair herself.
The Heroine’s Salon is this Sunday, 16 August. A room where we argue about the ideas underneath the writing, and you leave having changed your mind about something. Paid subscribers attend free, anyone who submitted to the magazine attends free, tickets are also available. Please join us!
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