The Art of Holding on to Your Stories

A view from Chisiya Hill; photo by Ken Wilson. The home surrounded by the brush fence belongs to my sister-in-law, my Maiguru. The road passing by connects many places, but its span here, from that little hill to Mototi Primary school several kilometers down is our piece of road. We walked on it on our way to school; it knows us, and we know it.

The advice we often get is that writers should learn to let go of their work, to reach a point when we consider the draft done, when any additional changes we make would affect the art. This is good advice, but I am just not able to follow it. As long as I still have my draft, even after working on it for ten years, I will always find words to replace, sentences to tinker with, ideas to add. It is an opportunity to determine the work's future through further editing and revision, to make it say what it wants to say in the best way possible, and often, even after numerous revisions, the work may still not feel as good as I want it to be. At that point, yes, I may let go, abandoning the work and allowing it to be published. But such a work leaves me hurting; I just know that if I had had another chance, I would have made some crucial changes to it.

I blame it on the medium;  I blame it on language. I have concluded that language is not always  adequate to express our art, but one can still sculpt it in such a way that it gets close, gets close to helping the work say what it wants to say, that's what keeps me struggling with words, with sentence structure, with paragraphs, and with whole chunks of text. I love deleting, yet I also love adding new words, phrases, sentences. Sometimes I see a section that looks well-written, and as I read and re-read it, I begin to see  it falling apart. Perhaps that's what William Faulkner meant when he said, "Kill all your darlings." When things fall apart like this, I begin to  wonder what would have happened to the first, second or third rush of satisfaction I had in the work.  Perhaps the problem is that the satisfaction is a rush, or that good writing comes the hard way, that it is patient, takes its time, but whatever the case might be, I enjoy working on the work until...I realize that it still needs a lot more work.

This, the never-ending work on stories becomes an art in itself, and the hope is to get to the core of something I am trying to express, or to discover what it is that the story is trying to tell, to admit that the process it not just about me, but  that it is about something larger than me, that it is about Motoi, the village I grew up in, and about Harare, the other place I called home, or about Sacramento, where I live now, yet even this doesn't begin to scratch the surface, because the work is also about places I haven't inhabited, it's about places times I haven't even begun to dream about--the work is about all of humanity. That, ladies and gentlemen, the fact of the work making the writer inhabit all these spaces, is the ultimate joy, the factor that keeps me glued to the work with the hope that perhaps a speck of me may scratch its mark into all this beauty and mystery.