I did a round of edits on my own, a round of edits with my agents before we sent it out, and then there’s obviously the round of edits with my editor. Each time I was focused on structural things first. I think the structural stuff was almost more straightforward because it would literally be something like, “There’s not a lot of background on this character.” And so then I’d go in and see, “Oh, maybe it’s just this one chapter that needs to be looked at over the course of two months.” And then I would make a to-do list of other things. And then at the end of fixing all these almost different parts of the car, we’d go in and do this total body scan. We’d read through the whole thing and have another little to-do checklist. So, it’s sort of constantly looking at the list, reading a few pages, looking at the list, and trying to do a more comprehensive edit that way.

I actually really love editing poetry. It’s my favorite part. I love how you can change just one word and it suddenly elevates the line or even the whole poem. When I’m writing poetry, I’m looking and reading through and I’m really interrogating each word and trying to figure out: Is this the best word? Is this exactly what I’m trying to say at this moment? And I do a lot of reading aloud because cadence and rhythm are really important to me. I try to feel where the lines are sitting or where the stresses are, where the hits and the rhythm are. I also like to use those read-aloud functions on the computer because I feel like if it can still sound somewhat bearable with this monotone voice reading it, then that’s probably going to be alright—it’s the final test.

It was devastating. That’s really the only word. I was looking for another one. It was devastating on a number of levels, but mostly because I had to confront the fact that I had hurt this person so much that they would say that to me. That was the devastating thing. The rewriting was … once again, I’m not sure if “therapeutic” is the word, but it did feel something like a penance.

D.H. Lawrence wrote several complete versions of Sons And Lovers and The Rainbow and Women in Love . I think that thing of having to begin again maybe enables you to reconceive things, completely reconceive, in a way that’s more difficult now. Now it’s just a kind of constant tampering.