Why Did I Shoot Jon?

An Exercise in Vandalism and Revision...

Before we begin:

My next LIVE CHAT will be this SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 23rd at 5pm ET / 2pm PT.

Pay to subscribe and I’ll send you a message to get us started :)

Hi.

In my last Substack post, I shared a short story I wrote in response to a writing prompt I’d recently offered my paid subscribers. Almost nobody seemed to care. That’s fine.

I’m only mentioning this because in my introduction to the story, I wrote:

I made myself write this story from start to finish with no pauses, which is what I think you should do when you’re practicing writing.

The best way to practice revising and editing is to interview someone, transcribe it, take out your questions and distill what the person said into a monologue. Then edit it so that it makes for a compelling story told from the first-person point of view.

So last week I interviewed my guy, Luke Goebel, about moving to Portland, Oregon after growing up in small-town Ohio. I recorded the interview and transcribed it. Then I removed my voice from the transcript. I edited Luke’s voice into what felt like the ultimate distillation of what he’d had to say.

Next, I saw ways that fictionalizing the narrative might strengthen the piece in a certain direction. (This is the authorial decision-making part of the exercise. More about that in a future post, but basically the authorial decision is when you locate—within yourself—what is powerful and interesting about a story to you, and you lean into it.)

What’s exciting to me about this exercise is that you can be ruthless. Of course Luke’s story is his story. By fictionalizing it, I felt like I was vandalizing it. And I think that’s exactly what revision and editing should feel like at first. Vandalism. (In a way, however, I feel that I am protecting Luke’s truth—the real, lived story—by fictionalizing and mutating it, adjusting it, etc.)

I knew I was finished with the edit when it seemed that Luke had dissolved into a new character, some other guy.

I decided to call the story…

Why Did I Shoot Jon?

(Luke said he would participate in the LIVE CHAT this Sunday if you have any “questions.”)

In 1992, we moved out of state, to Brickhaven. My parents bought a house in the lamest part of town, the west hills. We were up in these forested hills and there was nothing there but trees and houses, boring houses. It was boring, I hated it, and I didn't have any friends. I was twelve.