Revision scratches at scenes can reveal fundamental truths about the story

Evidence

My folder of drafts of this passage now runs to forty pages, excessive and obsessive perhaps, but it is after all the beginning of the book and must be right. I have noticed over the years that my digging at, fiddling with, scratching away at a scene will often turn up something much more fundamental than a new image or a livelier verb. In this case, I gradually realized that the reason the scene must be in somebody else’s voice is that the heroine does not remember it. Traumatized by her flight, she cannot recall witnessing her father’s death until she is nearly fifty years old. When I realized that, I understood much better what story I was telling and how the plot could be shaped and resolved. — Janet Burroway; Elizabeth Stuckey-French; Ned Stuckey-French, Writing Fiction, Tenth Edition, 698

Categorization

• XREF: Pays off the “bearing wall” remark of Dillard (p.648)—obsessive fiddling, not polish, is where the sacrifice and discovery happen.
• FICTION: The trajectory—an obsessive 40-page revision surface-plowing into the heroine’s repressed trauma—could seed a craft essay or example of trauma-driven narrative structure.