As any good Jewish person or FOJP (friend of Jewish Person) will tell you, the title above is the first of the four questions asked at Passover.  It was four questions that recently–and thankfully–changed the way I’ve been approaching my work in progress.

I’ve been working on this thing for a long time–almost two years.  Throughout, people have had problems with the narration.  I don’t want to go into it too explicitly, but basically, I was keeping the narrator’s identity a secret with a big reveal about it at the end.  Those who have read chapters have expressed confusion or even frustration about this, but I had always thought, “I can muscle through this.  I can see their objections, and I can work past them.”  This all changed last week when a friend read through the entire draft–one of about two people in the world to have done this, I think–and approached the problem in the manner of Passover: asking questions.

They were pretty simple questions, but they got to the heart of the matter: how would I sum up this story in one sentence?  Why was I keeping the narrator’s identity a secret?  What would I lose by changing that up?  In answering these questions, I realized that the whole secret narrator thing was, heartbreakingly, more of a device I was hanging on to than something that really served the story.  In fact, what I thought might be most important in the story had nothing to do with a mystery and was not at all about hidden identity.

I stress again that none of this should have been a huge revelation.  Just like Chazz Palminteri at the end of The Usual Suspects, I started hearing voices and seeing images of people saying the same–voices whose words I could remember with shocking clarity for conversations that happened quite a while ago.  Grad School Advisor Margaret: “I’m not saying it’s not working.  I’m saying it’s not working yet.”  Agent Elizabeth: “I’m not saying to give up on it.  But I am sounding an early warning.”  Critique group member Jen, over her frothy chai (okay, I’m making that part up; I don’t remember her beverage of choice): “I’m still not buying it.”  So–to throw in another question–why was my recent reader able to break through when these great responders–and they really are some of my favorites–couldn’t?

(By the way, I don’t mean to be cagey about the identity of the recent reader.  She’s one of the most amazing writers I’m privileged to know, and I’ve been in agony awaiting her first book, which comes out in the fall.  I just think she’d be a bit abashed at my naming her publicly, so I’ll call her Dane, a joke that I think she’ll enjoy.)

So anyway, why the great breakthrough with Dane?  Part of it, I think, is time; I sent her the second draft, so I’ve had time to live with this story for a while and murder many darlings already.  But more than that, I think there’s a power to asking questions rather than making statements.  Goodness knows I can be a statement-y person–so eager to convince the writer that my idea is the right one, I might just rush in and declare my insight.  However, this might not always be the right choice.  Dane didn’t assume she knew what was best for my novel, and I shouldn’t do that for other peoples’.

I hope to learn by example to open peoples’ work up to them.  In the meantime, I remain grateful for the four questions and also look forward to my mom’s customary Passover dessert come April.  But that, dear readers, is another story for another time.

As you probably don’t remember, I posted last summer about revisiting Vermont College of Fine Arts, the finest grad school in all the land, for an alumni mini-residency.  This January finds me back there again as a graduate assistant–aka, grad ass.  (Don’t you love a place that officially refers to its volunteers and employees with profanity?  I’m not always a fan of the profane, but something about grad assishness really does it for me.)

At some point, I’ll take a picture of the view from my window and talk in general terms about everything I’m learning (general terms because it’s all peoples’ intellectual property), but here’s what I will say about being back at a place you haven’t visited for a year and a half–ie, the dorms: what’s hitting me most is the recovered memories of sound.

People say smell is the most evocative sense, but at least this time around, I’m getting yanked through the rabbit hole from hearing room doors slam shut.  No one’s doing any bitter slamming–au contraire, people are just brimming with joy to be here–but these doors are for some reason just very loud and thunky and like nothing else I’ve ever heard.  A low, rumbly pitch.  And, doing double duty in the sound category are the clinking keys.  Is it something in the metal?  The one-two combination of round and square?  The particular molecularity of the plastic keyring?  Whatever it is, the key rings sound distinctive, too.  I hadn’t remembered either of these sounds, particularly, but I now realize that if you played me a tape of them, I would bolt upright and go, “Dewey Dorms!  Vermont College!”

And, you know, being a writer, it’s impossible to let any of this go by unmetaphorized, so I will note that I think there’s something symbolic in all this: keys to let you back in to a place you left, doors to rooms whose shape you knew but which are filled with new people and things.  I partly won my gal on our first date with my description of the recursive–progressing onward while looking back–and I think there’s something recursive about entering a room.  It will always be the same and different from the room you just left, because even if nothing else is moved in your absence, you are moved; you are different.

Of course, if the main sense-memory of this journey were, say, stewed beef tips, I would probably make something of that, too.  But I don’t want to think about stewed tips, so I’m going to end on this happy Stephen Sondheim song, “Opening Doors.”  (It’s about a composer, lyricist and novelist developing their careers.  Omg, resonance everywhere!)

And the lyrics, too.