I have a jaw of a brain. When a project interests me, I clamp down. My bite holds and holds. This makes revision complicated. I have to gentle myself away from myself.
My dog loves to steal—paper napkins that stick to his gums, pencils robed in crunchy wood, wrinkly wrappers with a lick of caramel left inside. My brain collects like this too. The scent of boiling milk when spices are stirred in. Mango stuck in my teeth from biting the peel in a kitchen around the corner from my childhood kitchen. A grave rubbing in London, how pressing hard can rip the waxy paper, wreck what you’re making. Again! my aunt shouts, waving me back to the diving board. I shiver, lips blue, wanting it to be over.
My dog wants the wrapper, the wrapper, the wrapper. Until his nose says cheese! Or apple niblet! and he frees himself, lunging for the more delicious.
What is the treat I can give my brain when it can’t let go?
Another sentence?
Another story?
Sometimes I paste a chunk of prose into a new document. I title the file rearranged or better or after or revised. I change the font. I adjust the spacing to single, let my words cozy up against each other. This lets me tug on thoughts, to unmake and remake the bed of my story.
I can be bold with these changes because I still have the old bone-draft, kept dry and safe in my hard drive. If the new version doesn’t taste as good as mango bitten in Priya’s kitchen, her mother glamorous even in a robe and slippers, her father already gone on a bicycle, and if the new thinking wanders or relies too much on the bright taste of remembered fruit, I can put everything back just the way it was.
My jaw brain likes that. The possibility of retreat. Or—I can follow the new trail, see where it leads, burrow deeper. I can drop the mango. Quiet my aunt’s voice. Erase the grave rubbing, although I can still feel the waxy crayon in my fingers and hear the hushed slit of the paper giving way where I tried too hard.
Recently I worked with a developmental editor who uses printed copies. I reviewed her notes, then returned my pages to their box. To work with them would mean wrinkling, bending, folding, marking, breaking. I didn’t dare disrupt her wisdom in the margins. Maybe I just needed to give up. Start something new.
But then weeks later, I reached for the manuscript. I wanted to paint outside the lines of a plain notecard and needed something underneath to catch the excess. Why not take a pristine page and mess it up? I touched my wet brush to brown and gold and red-violet. I tapped a muddy-looking rectangle: Ah, turquoise. I sogged my notecard with color then pulled it away to dry. What remained: an empty rectangle, framed by color. I couldn’t hear my aunt yelling when I broke the surface. My manuscript curled with moisture; my words danced. Water returned my work to me, softened the smart comments to what they always were: professional and lovely and worth the cost.
By using my story as scrap, I pushed past its preciousness, unclenched my jaw brain.
I want to pick up wood shavings left over from the carving of a carousel horse’s mane. To touch what’s been chiseled away. To honor the absence. The relief of it. I want to scrape the mango pit with my braces-straightened teeth, gnaw on the bitter. Priya never had braces; you know this about friends from middle school, what they wanted. I have a book in progress like I have a memory of Priya’s father unlatching his bike helmet, handing me a flimsy plastic bag with a paper bag inside, hot bagels, a nesting doll with warm-bread scent as the prize. It’s not about breakfast, that scene. It’s about grief. I cannot return to that kitchen, but when I write, I am there still, with my friend and her father and the mango and the bagels.
I keep painting my draft pages, saturating them with my too-muchness, and only then does the weave of words loosen. I can excise swaths of old thinking. I brushstroke new sentences into being. On my laptop, I pull chapters around in circles, carousel them. I make enough of a mess to crack the form. It’s a seed, it always has been. The mango becomes new again, going from ripe to green. In the green there is possibility. I just have to be patient. If I cut too soon, it won’t get sweet.
