By Suzanne Roberts
One of the questions I often get about writing is this: How do I know when a piece is finished? The first answer I give is that it’s done when it says what it needed to say, which is usually something different or deeper than what I had set out to do from the beginning, so there are both surprise and recognition. I’m the sort of writer who often has no idea where I’m going until I get there. Writing is an act of discovery, and I only figure out what I’m trying to say by saying it.
Another answer I give is that I know I’m done when I’m putting commas in and taking them back out; fiddling with the minutiae is a sign that it’s time to let it go.
Both these answers are true, but they are also not true. The truth is that nothing is ever finished. This isn’t the answer most writers want to hear, but I’m offering it here as good news. If we accept that we will never be done with a piece of writing, we can stop worrying so much about it.
We change and grow as writers, so when we return to our work, we can always improve it. When I give a reading, there are often words or phrases I read differently from the printed page, which is why I wince when someone in the audience opens my book “to read along.” Many writers I know do this, editing their already-published words when they read. And if we’re lucky, we might be given the opportunity to make those changes in subsequent press runs. I was able to do just this with my first memoir Almost Somewhere.
Two summers ago, I set out again to hike California’s John Muir Trail, the trip I wrote about in my 2012 memoir. I brought my Kindle along, so every night in the tent, I consulted my own book to compare the trail I was hiking to the one in my memory; I was interested in the ways backpacking had evolved but also how I had changed. Drought and wildfire, along with more signage and safer bridges, had transformed the landscape but more than that, my understanding of myself and my place in the world have changed.
Reading my earlier work, I found so many cringey phrases, and I also saw just how naive I had been about so many things. As a young woman, I had read mostly male nature writers and never quite saw the landscape they offered me in their books—one of rugged individualism and of conquest, so in Almost Somewhere, I had been seeking a uniquely feminine view of nature, one based on connection and community. What I hadn’t thought about, though, was that early American nature writers were not just coming from a masculine place, but a stance of colonization. I had been taught that our national park system was a wholly positive American endeavor, and it wasn’t until years later that I learned the creation of the park system was predicated on a dark past—one of displacement, murder, and erasure of Native Americans. Both my experience and the memoir I wrote represent an imagination limited by a lack of knowledge.
This is not to say that my first memoir—a record of who I was at that moment in time—isn’t of value. Yet when I revisited the book, I realized I wanted to write an afterword, noting the ways my perception, consciousness, and capacity for empathy have changed. When my husband and I took a rest day at the Vermillion Valley Resort, a popular stopover for both JMT and PCT thru hikers, I paid the expensive internet fee and wrote to my editor, pitching the idea of a new edition of Almost Somewhere . He wrote back immediately, saying he loved the idea.
When I returned home, I went through my memoir again, making small changes. I had to stop myself from making more significant revisions, because I knew I had to honor my earlier effort and the writer who made the best book she could at the time. Our work is a snapshot of our earlier selves, and if we aren’t sometimes embarrassed when we look back, that probably means we haven’t learned a damn thing.
Many people don’t get to go back and revise earlier publications, though I’m certainly not the first to do it. Walt Whitman famously revised his first edition of Leaves of Grass over the last four decades of his life. What started as 12 poems became a 400-poem “deathbed version” tome. The French painter Pierre Bonnard often retouched paintings he had made many years earlier and was even rumored to have persuaded a friend to distract the guards while he touched up a painting hanging in a museum.
Going back in and making changes and additions later enables us to see where we’ve been and maybe even where we’re going. It also makes clear that we’re never really done with a piece of writing or work of art—that is, not until we’re dead, and if we can keep this in mind as we go, maybe we’ll be able to more easily let things go.
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Suzanne Roberts is the author of three award-winning memoirs: Animal Bodies , Bad Tourist, and Almost Somewhere, as well as four collections of poetry. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, CNN, National Geographic Traveler, Brevity , and elsewhere. She teaches for the low residency MFA program in Creative Writing at UNR-Tahoe, and is currently at work on a craft book, based on her Substack newsletter 52 Writing Prompts .
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