What If I Don't Finish It?

I've been circling unfinished books for a while now.

I mentioned Kafka in an earlier Margin, but there's one part of his story that has been bothering me ever since. Kafka told Max Brod to destroy his unpublished work after he died. Brod had already told him he wouldn't. And Kafka left it with him anyway.

I keep coming back to that. Maybe Kafka deliberately left his work with the one person he knew would disobey him. Maybe part of him wanted it destroyed and another part desperately didn't. Maybe leaving it with Brod was a way of making the decision without having to make it himself.

We'll never know. Which is sort of the problem.

But the writer I keep coming back to is Emily Dickinson.

She's been one of my favorite writers for as long as I can remember, and the more I learn about what happened to her work, the more complicated the idea of leaving something behind becomes.

Dickinson wasn't entirely unpublished during her lifetime. A handful of her poems appeared in print, usually anonymously, sometimes without her permission, and sometimes altered.

Editors regularized her punctuation. Changed words. Adjusted rhymes. Added titles. Made her strange little poems behave more like nineteenth-century poems were supposed to behave.

Even the dashes. The Dickinson dashes.

And I keep wondering what that felt like. To finally see your words in print and recognize them, but also recognize all the places where somebody else had decided they knew better than you how your words should look.

Did that have anything to do with why she published so little? I don't know. Nobody does. But I can't stop wondering.

When Dickinson died, she had instructed her sister Lavinia to destroy her correspondence. Lavinia did. And while going through what Emily left behind, she found something Emily apparently hadn't told her what to do with.

The poems. Nearly 1,800 of them.

Lavinia chose not to destroy them. Thank God.

But that choice created another one. And another. And another.

Because preserving a writer's papers isn't the same thing as knowing what the writer wanted you to do with them.

Dickinson's poems weren't sitting there as 1,800 pristine little final drafts ready for the printer. There were revisions. Cross-outs. Alternate words. Words written in margins. Little marks connecting one possibility to another. Sometimes Dickinson seems to have been considering more than one word without ever telling us which one won.

And she wasn't there anymore to ask.

So other people chose.

Her early editors chose words. They chose punctuation. They chose titles. They chose how the poems should look on a printed page. They made Dickinson more publishable. And in doing so, they made her a little less Dickinson.

It took decades for later scholars to go back to the surviving manuscripts and begin undoing those choices. Today we can get much closer to what Dickinson actually put on the page. We can even look at many of the manuscripts ourselves. Her handwriting. Her revisions. Her alternate words. Her marginalia. Her dashes.

But even now, closer isn't always the same thing as final.

Because what do you restore when she left two possibilities? Which one is the original? If she crossed out a sentence, are we allowed to read it? If she wrote another word in the margin but never replaced the first one, which word belongs in the poem? What if she simply hadn't decided yet?

And what happens when the person who was supposed to decide can't?

That's where the idea I've had rattling around in my head finally clicked.

I want to write an unfinished novel.

Not a novel about an unfinished novel. An actual unfinished book.

I want you to be reading along and eventually realize there isn't another chapter. The author never wrote it because she disappeared or died before she could.

Which immediately creates a problem with my brilliant idea.

People are going to be pissed.

If I spend an entire book making you care about a story and then deliberately don't give you the ending, that's not experimental fiction. That's how my book ends up airborne across somebody's bedroom.

So I did what anyone planning to write an unfinished novel would naturally do.

I turned it into a trilogy.

Because apparently the solution to not finishing one book is writing three of them.

I don't know exactly what all three books are yet. I don't know whether my author disappears or dies. I don't know how much she leaves behind or what anyone eventually does with it.

But I know the first book.

Book One is hers.

You get what the author left behind. The manuscript exactly where she stopped. Cross-outs. Alternate words. Notes to herself. Marginalia. Contradictions. Things she probably meant to delete. Things she hadn't decided yet.

And then there's what comes after.

What happens after an author disappears or dies and leaves an unfinished novel behind? Who owns it? Who decides which version counts? Do you clean it up? Do you publish it exactly as she left it? Do you finish it? What if she told you not to? What if she never told you anything? What if this was the book she couldn't wait for the world to read?

At what point does preserving someone's work become violating it? At what point does preservation become exploitation? When does honoring a dead writer become exploiting the dead? And at what point does respecting someone's wishes mean allowing their work to disappear?

That's the part I can't stop thinking about.

Because there are two different kinds of terror in writing.

There is the terror of letting someone read what you've written.

And there is the terror that no one ever will.

So.

Apparently I'm writing a trilogy.

I have absolutely no idea what it's called.