Hello from wintry New England, where we returned Sunday evening after a joyful weekend in NYC. Because my rather obsessive five-year-old has gotten into audiobooks, we listened to The Hobbit practically the whole ride home. How dramatic it was to hear about little Mr. Baggins and the dwarves traveling Northward through Mirkwood to brave the lair of Smaug as we too drove northward, from the colorful leaves and blue skies of the temperate city and through brief thunderstorms and rainbows to the icy roads and snowy winds of Western Mass, where the gray trees are waggling naked in the bitter wind outside my window as I write this, with a cup of tea and the space heater going by my side.

Which . . . very hobbit-like.

AI: mostly evil, but useful for generating images of hobbit houses.

No shade, but I never got into Tolkien as a kid. He is obviously not great re: female characters (just one problematic thing for which he has been critiqued in recent years), and as an excessively girly little girl I only read books about female characters unless someone forced me to do otherwise. As you can probably tell, however, as an adult I’ve been enjoying it, consuming it as I am for the first time with my kids and via the energetic narration of Andy Serkis, a.k.a. Gollum himself. It’s also fun to finally understand a bunch of cultural references, not least the reference by our neighbor-friend down the road, who has more than once referred to us a hobbit family, because we are all pretty small, and three of four of us have unusually big feet.

That it’s too advanced for the three-year-old doesn’t seem to matter. She gets some general gestalt of the story and enjoys the sounds of the various words and phrases. Over dinner last night, as we all collectively tried and failed to remember the names of the dwarves (Dwalin, Balin, Kili, Fili, Dori, Nori, Ori, Oin, Gloin, Bifur, Bofur, Bombur, and Thorin, so fun), she proposed a few creative nonsense names of her own. The narrative is also, admittedly, pretty advanced for the five-year-old, who will occasionally admit he has no idea what’s going on, and/or ask to pause the audiobook so I can give him a brief synopsis. More often than not, though, he gets bored midway through my explication and asks that I start the story up again. It’s very curious to me that he wants to keep listening despite not entirely understanding it.

Curious to try to parse how much plot he actually comprehends. Plot seems to be the hardest to grasp; he has apparently absorbed a lot of character, setting, scene. He is capable for instance of describing every detail of a dramatic set-up, but his understanding is pretty limited re:, like, the characters’ motivations, and what’s happening in the story more globally — and, crucially, why. This is, of course, in part, a developmental limitation of his specific, five-year-old brain, but it’s a shortcoming he shares, unfortunately, with many a college-aged student I’ve known, and many grown-ups, too — especially when we are distracted (which! in the distraction economy!? when are we not!?).

What I’m saying is, we all need practice consuming and considering long stories, if we really want to understand them — not to mention how they are put together, and why.

Thanks for reading Postcards from Mountain House. If you have a friend who might like it, please

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It’s been months since I last posted here, which is mostly because I’ve been working rather obsessively (a genetic trait, perhaps?) on retyping my third book. This retyping process made up the bulk of my most recent round of revision, the one which brought the book to what I am thinking of, at this point at least, as some kind of early finish line. It was a dumb and straightforward as it sounds: after doing a few early edits I knew needed to happen, I opened the most recent draft, created a new document, and, split-screen, began typing the book again from the beginning, fixing problems little and big as I went.

It was a time-consuming, painstaking, and often rather boring editorial pass, but, if you’re a novelist, I can’t recommend it enough. For one thing, as authors of long projects, I do feel we really owe it to our readers to reread our whole manuscript, start to finish, and fix it up nice before we send it out, whether to editor, agent, or friend. But if you, like I, find it difficult to read anything without skimming a bit, here and there, now and then (in this economy!?), you probably find it even harder to read your own words without skimming. After all, you know them so well. Retyping forces me, anyway, to slow the fuck down and really consider every dangling modifier, every lopsided sentence, every sloppily constructed paragraph, every stupid line of dialogue, every cliché, and methodically replace each unfortunate incidence with something fresher and truer.

sticker art by Meghan Hopkins Sokorai

It is not just the minutiae, however. I’ve also found that retyping the book in this way, from front to back, with as fiercely critical an eye as I can muster — and, crucially, over a relatively short period of time — allows me to identify overarching plot issues that I may have missed when I was drafting, then revising. After all, writing a 300-or 400-page book takes literal years of one’s life, and life does not pause to accommodate the process. The component parts will always have been assembled piecemeal, in bits and bobs and through comings and goings and cuttings and pastings and puttings-aside, with less attention to their place in the whole than to their individual excellence. Due to this problem of chapters having necessarily to be hewn separately before assembly, it’s common to find, post-assembly, that key elements of the overarching narrative have been omitted due to lack of foresight, or accidentally dropped, or glossed over, or forced to fit together when, actually, they don’t really. 

The process of retyping feels slow amidst the trees, but looks quick from above the forest. Rereading my book as I retyped it, word by word, over the course of a compressed couple of months, allowed me, I found, to more easily keep the whole thing in my mind at once, and therefore identify what was missing and what was redundant or extraneous, what belonged and what didn’t.

It’s similar, in fact, to listening to a long audiobook, in that both processes force the reader (and/or writer) to consume the narrative both at a slower rate and via different sensory input than she otherwise might (aural, tactile). The effect of this, I feel, I suspect, is not only a kind of forced, sustained attention, but also an improvement in memory and, therefore, narrative comprehension. If you have a child you are probably familiar with a certain conversation in the learning world about multisensory learning. Turns out it has been proven to improve memory even in house flies.

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Anyway. Now that I’ve completed the long process of retyping the book and sent it to my agent, I’m having trouble knowing what to do with myself. I feel like I’m in a kind of anxious, unsettled creative purgatory, too distracted to read, too anxious and invested in the current novel to start working on something new. It takes, I am ashamed to report, a non-negligible amount of self-control to refrain from writing my agent daily with hideously needy requests for an update: Have you read it yet? Do you hate it? Are you obsessed with it? It’s been 1 day, 2 days, 3 . . . You don’t have other clients, right? You don’t have a family, a life? Can we sell it, though, do you think? For a zillion? Half a zillion? A quarter zillion, maybe? Do you think it has a shot at winning a prize or two? Should I throw it away and start a new life? Should I just die?

What do you do when your personal energy is so annoying you can’t even stand yourself? You write something on Substack? You clean your house? You listen to audiobooks? You Hobbit.

There is honestly so much that is so deeply pleasing about Bilbo Baggins as a protagonist. Let’s start with his name. It’s delicious to utter. Then there is the fact that he is such a very unwilling hero. As a Taurus, I can sympathize utterly with his wanting always to be back in his cozy hobbit-hole, eating many delicious meals and dozing by the fire. And yet he is chosen, despite himself, due only to his own begrudging goodwill and hospitality, to go off on this very uncomfortable adventure, into the darkness. He is frightened and complains frequently but it must be done, and, turns out, it must be done by him, and by doing it, he finds he can. There’s this one moment that really got me, when he’s almost made it to the dragon’s lair. In the tunnel in the mountain, our unwilling Mr. Baggins hesitates:

It was at this point that Bilbo stopped. Going on from there was the bravest thing he ever did. The tremendous things that happened afterward were as nothing compared to it. He fought the real battle in the tunnel alone, before he ever saw the vast danger that lay in wait.

Our five-year-old is a pretty sensitive kid. Most movies, even kids’ movies, stress him out too much for him to really enjoy them. He frequently asks for reassurance that no one will get hurt or die. Listening to The Hobbit with this kid, however, I’ve noticed that, although he is thrilled by the book’s many scenes of imminent peril, they do not seem to upset him. When I have paused the audio, at key moments, to check in with him about how he is feeling, whether Bilbo is facing bloodthirsty goblins or sadistic giant spiders, the kid seems completely into it, a bit worried maybe but game to keep going. Part of this is growing up, of course. He has literally grown an inch a month since summertime, and one can only imagine how busy his little brain has been, constructing new neural pathways. But part of it, I suspect, has to do with the nature of story, in and of itself.

We tell — we crave — stories about what scare us. Hauntings, killings, stolen children, murdered wives, serial killers: to experiment with these subjects on the page, as writer or as reader, is to process our fear slowly, with nuance and distance, and from varied angles. I think I am drawn, as a writer, to stories about losing the people we love, because that is what scares me most. I can only imagine that the endless proliferation of true-crime podcasts and TV has to do with our reckoning, as a culture, with some of the same — and with the political and personal distrust that has been fomenting in our ever fractured communities, and with a fascination with our own darkest selves, and on and on.

A book-length narrative, however, consumed slowly, forces our confrontation with all those frightening things into a kind of contained intimacy. We trust the author, particularly when we are familiar with the tropes of his craft. We believe that he will be honest with us, and (probably) not murder his protagonist, our avatar. We are invited to understand what frightens us through the lens of a fictional character’s perception. We are in control, too; we can close the book at any time and abandon it. So the unsafe becomes safe.