Molly Gutman offers a behind-the-scenes look at her writing process for her short story “Belly and the Hatchet,” published in Issue 70.1.
I’m a little infamous, among my writing friends, for my intense revisions. Like, way too much revision. Revision overboard. Dozens of drafts, several start-overs from scratch, on and on. So it’s fairly on-brand for me to admit that “Belly and the Hatchet” went through about fifteen drafts before I arrived at the version that appears in this issue of Shenandoah.
It started, six years ago, as an exercise in an undergrad workshop run by the writer Becky Hagenston: from a headline about two tigers (pet tigers!) loose in the Altai Mountains, I tried writing a story about international conspiracies and farmers caught in the crossfire. There was an eight-page version. A thirty-page version. A sixteen-page version. But the story was hopelessly unfocused and, importantly, not my story anyway. I’ve never lived in the Altai mountains and have no sense of what life is like there. I have, however, lived in the Ouachita Mountains (glorified hills, but gorgeous glorified hills!) in Arkansas. I do know what life is like there. So, years after those early drafts, I pulled the story out again and rewrote it from scratch, applying parts of the plot to characters I recognized in a place I considered home.
The only problem, then, was that story was—how to say it delicately—so boring. It always had been, I think. It was sad and long and grisly, and by the first two pages, the major problems of the story had already come to pass: the main character had already miscarried, and she’d already found her favorite goat dead in the shed behind their house.
Stories, I think, have a real challenge ahead of them when traumas happen (in scene) in their openings and then have to drive the rest of the story . These stories can feel like they’re always spiraling back toward that trauma , like the tether to that trauma keeps these stories from moving forward linearly. Stories like this can feel off kilter—mine certainly did . It was headed in the wrong direction. This was years before I read (and re-read, and re-read) Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative (Catapult 2019), though the book would have been a godsend back then.
Anyway. We’re in 2016. I flip the spiral inside out and try the story that way. The timeline, now, flows backward. And click! The story falls right into place, after fourteen other drafts. Somehow, this backward version feels so much more emotionally real to me than any of the story’s forward-chronological versions.
And that, I think, is because sometimes trauma feels shaken loose of linear time. Think of how often we use the word spiral when we’re talking about grief or trauma or healing. There’s also that metaphor about grief as a box with a ball inside; the ball, so large at first that it takes up almost the whole box, can’t help but strike the walls of the box and drag us back into pain and memory—but over time, the ball shrinks, and it hits those nerves less and less often. Sometimes we face stuff that knocks us loose of any sense of forward movement, and narrative absolutely has the ability to reflect that, in its choices about structure and chronology. Mabel’s concurrent grief over her miscarriage and the loss of her darling goat become, in a backward timeline, an inevitable, dreaded destination: inevitable because by the time we get there, the traumatic events have already happened in a real-enough way that they’ve influenced the whole story before them, and dreaded because we know what’s coming and don’t want to get there, for our sake or for Mabel’s.
But the backward direction of the story has some hope built into it, too: by the time we arrive at the trauma in the center of the spiral, the rest of the story is already behind us. Mabel and her husband have taken a couple of steps out and away from that painful center: we know, because we’ve seen the story’s future, and we have a sense of its trajectory. This, then, is why I cherish revision so much in my own writing practice; it’s what enables me to find the heart of the story, its anchors and the positions from which it should be told, which make up so much of our experiences about what a story is in the first place.