Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Jennifer Dupree writes about What Do You Want From Me? from Apprentice House.
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I Don’t Want to Talk About How Many Revisions This Novel Has Seen
At least the title of my second novel, What Do You Want from Me? hasn’t changed since I started working on it more than eight years ago. Pretty much everything else has, though.
I don’t outline my novels because I need to be surprised by my writing, which unfortunately often translates into the surprise of a not-satisfying kind. I started with a premise, which is not a bad place to start. Way back in the beginning — version 1/draft 1 — I knew the emotional center of this book was about an adult child caring for a parent with some kind of dementia. There were echoes of that story in my own life, but I told myself I could stay very far away from anything resembling the truth. That’s part of the beauty of fiction, after all. And so.
Version 1, Draft 1: A man with Huntington’s disease kills his son and then gets away with it. This premise led very quickly to a full stop — the son was already dead and I’d already decided the father got away with it, so it was hard to see where the tension was coming from. I was also nowhere near that emotional center of a child caring for a parent, which was what interested me to begin with.
Version 1, Draft 2: This time, the father kills someone else and the son helps him get away with it. That was better because at least I had an inciting incident and two characters trying to achieve an end result. And a son who cared, although I didn’t quite understand why he cared. I wrote an entire draft of the novel before admitting to myself that I didn’t know why the son would help the father get away with murder. There were a lot of plausible reasons that might have worked — guilt about how he’d treated his father in the past, fear of his father’s volatility if he turned him in, disbelief in his father’s guilt — and I explored each of them on the page. But none of them resonated in a way that made me want to keep writing.
So far, I was doing a very good job of avoiding the thing I really wanted — and needed — to write about.
After draft two there was tinkering — expanding scenes, deleting scenes, excavating character motivation, questioning intention and believability. But none of that got me closer to that pinging sensation that writers know means they’ve reached the emotional center of the story. To do that, I had to get closer to the things I didn’t want to write about.
Version 2, Draft 1: An adult man gets diagnosed with Huntington’s and realizes it’s probably what his father has. He talks his father into buying an old house and they fix it up together. I liked this version, but there just wasn’t enough tension or conflict or complication to hold my interest, never mind a reader’s interest. But it was closer to this idea of showing up for an ailing parent.
What I really wanted to write about was the toll it takes on a person to be the caregiver of a parent with dementia. My grandmother lived with us for seven years of my childhood. She went into a nursing home when I was ten, but my mother continued to visit her nearly every day, feeding her dinner, washing her face and hands, combing her hair. I wanted to understand what my mother experienced because I’d mostly thought only about my experience of living with my grandmother. But I still wasn’t ready to go at it directly.
Version 3, Draft 1: I began again, this time with a middle-aged woman, a teenage daughter, a mother with dementia. This time, I allowed myself to creep ever closer to my childhood, not so much in the plot of the novel, but in the essence of what the characters felt about each other, their circumstances, and themselves. My writing felt so much less forced, so much more organic. I started to hear the truth pinging in the distance. But here’s where I got really afraid. This version of the novel felt emotionally truer than what I was comfortable with, which is of course what good fiction should do, but I wasn’t sure I could handle it.
Version 3, Drafts 2-10: I tiptoed around emotions I was afraid of. I didn’t want to talk about the middle-aged woman’s frustration with her teenage daughter, her desire for her to be perfect and quiet and easy because she already had too much to deal with. I backed off when I hit on the truth of the teenage daughter’s loneliness and subsequent vulnerability. I wrote and then deleted and then wrote again scenes in which the husband wants the wife’s attention and she just can’t give it to him, when the mother misses important milestones for her daughter, when the mother wants and needs her own mother to be there for her and then experiences the grief at the loss of her mother, even though she’s still technically alive.
I try not to regret any of those early drafts. I try to forgive myself for wanting my fiction to be…fictious. Yes, of course we can and do create people and plots out of whole cloth, but the thing we’re trying to figure out and then say in our stories and novels — that has to come from some emotional truth. What I was trying to do when I started this novel was stay miles away from that pinging center because I knew it would be painful. And it was. But I also gained an understanding of what life might have been like for my parents. The real gift of revision is re-vision, to see again or anew. Not just the words on the page, but, for me, to see again the emotional riddle I wanted to solve. To have to look at the problem again and from a new angle and again and again until I had it — the pinging truth.
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Jen Dupree is an assistant editor for The Masters Review, a librarian, and a former bookstore owner. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from USM’s Stonecoast program. Her work has appeared in December, Solstice, The Masters Review, On the Rusk and other notable places. She is the winner of the Writer’s Digest Fiction Contest for 2017, and a two-time winner of a Maine Literary Award (2022, 2006). Her novel, The Miraculous Flight of Owen Leach was published in April of 2022 by Apprentice House Press. Her second novel, What Do You Want from Me? is due out in April 2025.