On the most basic level, bad sentences make bad books. Poet Robert Hass taught me you can rewrite a poem by making every single line better. I revise and revise and revise. Any editor of mine will tell you how crappy my early drafts are. Revisions are about clarifying and evoking feelings in the reader in the same way they were once evoked in me. Or how I see them now.

In Lit, my rough draft of one chapter started thus:

Mother drove me to college in our yellow station wagon, and every night we stayed at a Holiday Inn, where we got drunk on screwdrivers.

This is information. Getting drunk with your mother suggests an emotional problem, but there’s no inherent drama or conflict. Other than the yellow car, there’s no carnality. The screwdrivers suggest trouble but don’t really capture the emotional tenor of the drive. Mostly, there is no scene—just reportage of data. That’s all I started with.

So how did I get from Draft 1’s dried-up little sound bite to something lusher? Memory—a physical memory of that time, a carnal fact. The car hadn’t come with air conditioning, so Mother installed a cheap one, which hung from the dash. It collected distillation, so when she made a sharp right turn, icy water—faintly redolent of chemical coolant—would slosh out onto my bare feet. Getting doused by that splash of freezing condensation was like a physical baptism miraculously dousing me in that single, living instant. It’s as if memory’s eye suddenly flipped open.

Like many such scenes, it comes to me in florid present tense. I look down and see the giant bamboo-bottom flip-flops I’d bought in California, with their black velvet straps, getting drenched with cold water. And I am in that car again. I can see the derby hat Mother wore—a pimp hat, she called it. She’d bought me one, too, in Houston. And she wears a copper bracelet that turns her wrist green because somebody told her it helps with arthritis in her hand. And another sense memory comes: I smell peaches, which we bought by the bushel in Arkansas. Also vodka from the screwdrivers Mother drank all the way down.

[...]

Mother’s yellow station wagon slid like a Monopoly icon along the gray road that cut between fields of Iowa corn, which was chlorophyll green and punctuated in the distance by gargantuan silver silos and gleaming, unrusted tractors glazed cinnamon red. Mother told me how the wealth of these farmers differed from the West Texas dirt farmers of her Dust Bowl youth, who doled out mortgaged seed from croaker sacks.

But because I was seventeen and had bitten my cuticles raw facing the prospect of fitting in at the private college we’d reach that night—which had accepted me through some mixture of pity and oversight—and because I was split-headed with the hangover Mother and I had incurred the night before sucking down screwdrivers in the unaptly named Holiday Inn in Kansas City, I told Mother something like, Enough already about your shitty youth. You’ve told me about eight million times since we pulled out of the garage.

It has a carnal description—the car like a Monopoly icon—from a point of view I could only have in imagination. Other carnal facts: the girl me has both a hangover and bitten cuticles. In addition to data from the earlier draft that this mother-daughter team get drunk together at night, it gives background info that the first paragraph lacks:

–  Mother’s Dust Bowl youth
–  The author’s age
–  Where she’s from
–  That she’s a worrier
–  That the college she’s heading to is one above her station
–  The blight of her shitty high school record

So there exists a boatload of interior information that helps to create emotional conflicts:

–  The mother’s low-rent background adds to the daughter’s angst about going to a fancier college than normal in that family.
–  The daughter telling the mother she’s sick of hearing about said mother’s shitty youth shows the somewhat normal conflict between mother and daughter, though for a daughter to call her mother’s youth “shitty” was way outside the mores of that time. The idiom suggests a lack of boundary between the two that gestures to the book’s central conflict.