The Editors Sharp Eye: Nothing Is Wasted

In 1957, Harper Lee brought a manuscript to her editor at J.B. Lippincott. The manuscript was called Go Set a Watchman. An adult woman returns home to Alabama and discovers that her father is not who she thought he was. It was rough. The pacing was slow. The protagonist was difficult. But whenever the prose moved into memory — whenever adult Jean Louise drifted back to her childhood, to those summers, to that father as she remembered him — the language did something different. It opened. It breathed. The images sharpened. The feeling arrived.

Tay Hohoff was a Quaker, a serious reader, and one of the great editors of her generation. She saw it.

She told Lee, in effect: the real story is not in the adult narrative. The real story is in the flashbacks. That child. That father.

Lee went back. She revised for two and a half years. What emerged was To Kill a Mockingbird.

And this is one of the most important editorial stories in American literary history. Not because of the happy ending, though the ending is extraordinary, but because of what it teaches us about the relationship between a first draft and a masterpiece.

In this post, it’s my job to show you that nothing was wasted. Get out your Watchmen and page through for yourself:

The town stayed.

The courthouse.

The balcony.

Calpurnia.

The Cunninghams.

The class tensions.

The particular moral temperature of people trying to be decent inside a system that makes decency very difficult.

Lee didn’t choose to write about childhood. She was writing about adult Jean Louise and conscience formation and the South in the 1950s. The childhood just kept appearing in the margins. Her editor pointed at the margins and said: that.

And all of it was lifted, almost unchanged, from the first draft and carried into the masterpiece. Not recycled as much as transformed. It was taken back and put in real time. As it happened. Three years in a child’s life, vs. one week in a woman’s. Same Maycomb, seen through entirely different eyes and twenty years earlier.

So what changed was the seeing.

Adult Jean Louise saw Maycomb and was outraged by it. Child Scout saw Maycomb and loved it with the clear eyes of someone who doesn’t yet know what she’s supposed to see or what she’s supposed to look past. That double quality, the child’s eyes with the adult’s understanding just barely visible behind the curtain, is what Hohoff recognized in the flashbacks. It was where Lee’s genius shown forth.

Your first draft is not a failure as much as a vault. And somewhere inside the thing that isn’t working yet: That pacing that drags. The protagonist who isn’t quite right. The scenes that feel off. That’s where the real story lives.

Your editor’s job, your teacher’s job, your own job as a careful reader of your own work, is to find where the language comes alive. Where the images sharpen. Where the feeling arrives.

I have been teaching long enough to have said some version of this to almost every writer I’ve worked with. What is the part of this that’s working? Go there. Write more of that. And it is almost always in a place the writer dismissed or undervalued. It’s some digression or a flashback or a memory that they didn’t think belonged in the main story.

Read your draft and ask: where does the language change? Not where is the best scene or the most dramatic moment. Where does the writing itself feel different — looser, more alive, more specific in its images? Where do you stop managing the reader and just see?

That is your vault. That is what Hohoff was pointing at.

And whatever you wrote in the early drafts that you later cut, archived, abandoned— don’t delete it but log it somewhere you can find it. Lee’s editor found the masterpiece in the material Lee had already written. The balcony in To Kill a Mockingbird, that scene of a child watching her father try to do the right thing in a room full of people who have decided against him, existed first as a memory in Go Set a Watchman, written years before Lee knew what it was.

You may have already written the scene your book is built around. You may have cut it. Go look.

Nothing is wasted.

Our live Zoom on is Saturday, July 25th at 11 a.m. Join us here:

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What is the thing you’ve shared in class, or with a group, that you thought was “no good,” that the group adored? Can you remember that moment? Did you listen and go back and develop it!

I’m listening.

Thanks for being with me, Jennifer

PS: To read the original post for the Blackbird Studio Writers, it is Lit Lesson #60. click here.

And to learn more about the Blackbird Studio vision of creating writing that stands the test of time, click here.