Welcome to the “Deleted Scenes,” where we interview contributors to gain insight into their editorial and revision processes. In this piece, Michelle Donahue, author of “Moon Jump,” shared her experience revising the story.
Q: Share as much or as little from a deleted scene (line, paragraph, section, or frame) that you originally had in the story. How did it change from this version to the final version?
I don’t often write fiction that is directly inspired by my life—I’ll place small details or inconsequential observations into my work, but I’m rarely interested in doing more than that. “Moon Jump” is an exception; I began writing it not long after my grandmother died, as a way of commemorating her and of saying a proper goodbye, something I couldn’t do in real life.
One of the struggles I had when writing and revising “Moon Jump” was knowing when it best served the story to rely on “the facts,” to craft scenes close to the way I remember things happening. Often real life doesn’t make good fiction, and though I was inventing large portions of this story (for example, I can’t, sadly, actually moon jump), in my early drafts I often defaulted to real-life moments and details.
For example, in my first draft of the scene where Mo and her mother visit Ya-Ya in a nursing home for the holidays, I wrote it much as I remembered:
“The last time I saw Ya-Ya before her strokes was for Christmas. My mother and I brought cookies and hot chocolate and we gathered around her bed. I pretended not to notice how frail Ya-Ya was. I knew she had stopped walking, knew dementia had settled into her like a dream, but seeing her motionless in the bed was still shocking.
We ate cookies, we laughed a little. I wrapped my arms around her hollow frame, her bones that of a bird. I liked thinking of her that way—just ready to take flight. Birds bones are hollow but incredibly strong.
My mother had left to talk to a nurse, so it was just Ya-Ya and me alone. Ya-Ya bent forward toward me and whispered something I couldn’t hear.
“What?” I asked and she repeated her word louder. I wish she had said something like, Do you still moon jump? Or, Let’s look out my window at the birds. I’ve named them all. But instead she said, “All I want to do is die.”
For decades my grandmother had dealt with chronic pain, and by the time she was bed bound in a nursing home, she was ready to die. On our visits she’d make this very clear, saying statements much like Ya-Ya did in the above draft. It was heartbreaking to hear, of course, both because I was sad to think of her dying, but also, I was sad because she couldn’t die like she wanted to.
Although I was very interested in exploring the strange, horrible layers of emotions of loving a person who wants to die, for “Moon Jump” I realized this harrowing statement didn’t work. Ya-Ya isn’t my grandmother, though she is inspired by her. Ya-Ya didn’t suffer from chronic pain; I’d deliberately imagined a version of my grandmother who could be free of that burden, and Ya-Ya brims with a vitality and love for the world that I rarely saw in my own grandmother. So in the final draft, I re-envisioned this moment the way I wish it had happened:
“What?” I asked and she repeated her words again, but she was still indecipherable. I imagine she said something like, Do you still moon jump? Or, Let’s look out my window at the birds. I’ve named them all. It was exactly noon. I thought of her kitchen wall clock, full of bird voices. I wished I could give Ya-Ya all their sounds.
Like in the story, my grandmother did have a kitchen wall clock where a different bird’s song rang out every hour. In “Moon Jump” this moment is sad, yes, but in the revised version the focus shifts away from death toward Mo wishing the most beautiful gift she can imagine for Ya-Ya, so there’s some light there too.
That’s what I ultimately wanted to achieve in this story, to portray the slow death of a loved one in a way that was both realistic but also felt cathartic, hopeful, possibly even lovely. The first draft did none of that, because it was pulled from a darker reality. With “Moon Jump” I wanted to re-make the world, if only a little, to give my grandmother the sendoff she deserved.
Q: What is your revision process like? How do you evaluate a scene and decide to add, include, remove, or change an element?
My revision process varies a lot piece by piece. Generally my first drafts, or what I think of as zero drafts because they’re so partially formed, are all about exploration. I write short, wispy scenes and experiment a lot with voice and structure. With short stories, I usually do this for a few fun pages, until I get more of a sense of what I want from a piece, and then I’ll start over to hopefully produce a relatively clean full first draft. If I feel happy with the overall structure of the draft, I’ll walk away from the story for a few days, to return with fresher eyes. Then I try to read it more like an editor, looking for sections where pacing falters, lines that feel unnecessary, or moments that need more clarity or tighter writing. What’s involved with this sort of evaluation varies so widely depending on the piece, with my decisions being driven by both gut-instinct and reason-based craft decisions.
Sometimes, like with “Moon Jump” it takes me awhile to find my way into that first full draft, because in the more experimental, playful “zero draft” stage, I can’t seem to shake an idea that’s ultimately wrong for the piece. For “Moon Jump” I was convinced the story needed to be told unchronologically. First I started with what Joan Silber calls switchback time, toggling back and forth between Mo as an adult and Mo as a child. I thought juxtaposing Ya-Ya in her prime with her decline would be more powerful. I’m definitely a maximalist as a writer and like to play with form and structure a lot, so I rarely start drafts in a truly conventional place. But I couldn’t get switchback time to work. As you can see from the partial draft, the opening was all wrong—the voice overwrought, the story trying to tap into unearned tension. I knew that, but I can be quite stubborn and was convinced the story should start with Mo driving to see Ya-Ya on her deathbed.
So then I tried to tell the story through collage—moving from short scene to short scene more by association than any real logic, trying to create an imagistic painting of sorts of Ya-Ya and her life. But that didn’t work either, as the story isn’t only about Ya-Ya, but is so much about Mo’s relationship to her.
I (finally!) realized I wasn’t gaining anything from using unconventional time, and the shorter scenes detracted from the joy and leisure of seeing Ya-Ya, with all her vibrancy, in her prime, which you do witness when the story is chronological. As I reordered my scenes, expanding some and combining others, the narrative easily clicked into place. All revision, I think, mirrors this sort of journey in some way—you think you know what best serves the story, and it’s only through tinkering, trying and failing to make that work, that you realize there’s another and better option to pursue.