form. Waterbed will remain. Right there, where I’ve put it. So I care about that word. In the movies, it’s a completely unreal feeling. How can you care about this word or that one when you know it’s not going to be there further down the line. A lot of other people are going to come along and rewrite it. Waterbed will be gone. You can’t care about it in those circumstances. This is why I’m writing novels and not films.’
Feeling. It was all about the feeling. Everyone thought that feeling was the thing that was left out in a Lee Child novel. Whereas the truth was that it was all feeling, all the way through, every last word. And it had to feel right.
‘That is why I can’t change anything. The book is like a diary of how I felt at the time. I can’t change that.’
‘I lost count of the cigarettes. Do you think I should be adding up the butts? Making a tally? People probably want to know what the optimal number of cigarettes is, how many per thousand words.’
‘Too many cigarettes. End of a paragraph, end of a sentence: another cigarette. Normally I’d have had more coffee too.’ He turned and looked right at me. ‘I am writing on the verge of a stroke. I’m teetering on the edge.’
‘Hey, you haven’t finished the book yet. You’ve barely started. We need to know who the hell Keever is.’
It was the first time the thought had occurred to me. Is that why he had let me in on the whole thing – to bear witness, just in case this was the last time? Before it was too late. Despite a solid collection of bad habits, he looked healthy enough. For now. I needed a full medical report. A brain scan maybe. Lungs too.
Lee was like an ageing boxer. Muhammad Ali or Joe Frazier coming back for one more big fight. Another twelve rounds in the ring. Another payday. But conscious all the while this could be his last shot at the title. Right up against the odds. And I was his only spectator.
Which reminded me, just a little, of Reacher: this is what he does, he bears witness. Without Reacher it’s just another tree falling in the forest, silently.
The old split between ‘office’ (downstairs) and ‘home’ (upstairs), in the Flatiron district, had gone. Now it was all one. Which was probably why we were quarantined off, in the dedicated office, at the back of the apartment. Lee reckoned the trouble with working from home was that you are never done, you are always on. And so it proved. He got back to me later that night with some small but significant revisions to what he had already done in the afternoon. A few points had been nagging him.
This is the email he sent me:
Went through what I wrote again and made minor changes that I think snap the voice into better focus – following James Wood’s Flaubert theory [in How Fiction Works], the ‘semi-close 3rd-person’ voice there should subtly modify to better characterize the actors. Now I think I have it down, so at the page break we’re really going to feel the country villains stepping off stage, and Reacher stepping on.
There was one thing about what he had written that, to my way of thinking, was definitely wrong. But I didn’t like to mention it to him. I thought it would be stepping over the line. Like making some kind of sarcastic remark to Reacher.
8 FUCK YOU, LEE CHILD!
Following day. Back in the office. The first few sentences remained the same. Keever was still Keever. ‘I think Keever will always be Keever,’ Lee said (he admitted later that maybe there was an echo of Cheever in the name, i.e. John Cheever the writer).
But then came the comma. So he did revise after all! He felt the need for a comma. It would make it more ‘rueful and contemplative’, he said. And they would use the air for a guy like Keever had, overnight, become And they would use the air, for a guy like Keever.
The comma picked out and emphasized the importance of Keever, but it also served to draw attention to the thought process of the parties unknown – or rather known but unnamed – who were preparing to bury him. ‘The punctuation not only makes it stronger – it reflects their being mentally slow. You can hear them saying that.’
And then there is a whole word changed in the next sentence. ‘It seemed to me spotter sounded too trivial.’ Now that sentence reads: They would use search planes, and helicopters, and maybe even drones.
In the second paragraph, the only man-made structure their side of the horizon was a problem for Lee. Whose horizon? he wanted to know. It was too definite. And possibly ‘confusing’. ‘Here they are in the middle of nowhere. They don’t even know where the horizon is.’ In the revised draft this reads: the only man-made structure their side of any horizon …
‘It emphasizes their position in the middle of nothingness. They no longer have a clear horizon – it’s limitless.’ It was subtle, but Lee was weaving between the phenomenological point of view of the characters and the omniscient observation of an anonymous narrator. ‘Horizon’ was more him; it was (implicitly) more Reacher.
Lee loves repetition. But he is also sensitive to overdoing it. One of his immediate revisions was to take out one repetition too many. I had become quite attached to the safe enough phrase. Ironic (with Reacher in town, who is safe?) and incantatory (like they have to keep saying it to themselves). But where previously he had So, safe enough. No prying eyes, now he has only, Therefore, no prying eyes. The second paragraph first sentence contains safe enough already. The third paragraph, as we know, is nothing but ‘safe enough’. The point was made. No need to overdo. Their assumption of some kind of step-by-step irrefutable logic in what they are doing is anything but well founded, especially when Reacher is about to step off the train.
And when it came to the description of the hog pen, Lee wondered if he had been over-embellishing. Enjoying it too much. Rubbing it in. The dirt was always freshly chewed up comes out, in the slightly more compressed version, The dirt was always chewed up.
‘We don’t need freshly. Adverb. One word too many. Better styling. Economy.’
I wasn’t interrogating him: he was volunteering these thoughts. I wasn’t doing any analysing. He was analysing himself. Being really rather professorial. Maybe he could get a job as writer-in-residence, at Columbia for example. For the moment, I was his only student. This wasn’t an inquisition. Lee had made a big pot of coffee and we were knocking it back, mulling things over. Seminar-style.
There was something he hadn’t changed but still wasn’t sure about. ‘I’m still not sure about shit and piss,’ he says. ‘I want something different, but it has to be honest. Would they use “waste”? I don’t know. “Ordure”, for example, is clearly a non-starter.’
I had thrown in ‘ordure’ just for the hell of it and got it thrown right back in my face.
He turned to me and said, with feeling, almost like a reprimand: ‘But it has to be honest.’ Lee likes to stress certain words, mentally italicizing.
Only one thing went wrong, and it happened halfway through the job.
Halfway? On second thoughts, Lee reckoned this was ‘too retrospective’. He wanted something more immediate. Now there is no halfway etc. It’s right then: it happened right then.
I was thinking, there is still a problem with the timing though. If the train comes through only five hours late, that places it at midnight, when they are only just starting work. Shouldn’t
