The Transformation of Things (33 page)

They call us back, and as I walk down the long, checkered hallway to the room, I feel this horrible all-consuming fear, this nausea. I know what they’re going to say isn’t going to be good. Isn’t going to be anything I am prepared to hear.

“Hello, Angel.” The doctor waves in her face. She doesn’t react. I stare at him and smile. He’s attractive, young, with thick blond hair and a pear-shaped face.

He averts his eyes. His mouth moves for a while, with no sound. I watch his lips. They’re nice, supplelips, like lips you would want to kiss. And then I hear him say, “Asperger’s syndrome.”

The words echo and echo and echo, as if they’re daring me to make sense of them.

The storyline continued from here, with Jen researching As-perger’s syndrome a bit and finally even confronting Bethany about it, offering to help if she needed it.

So why did I cut these scenes? For starters, my agent pointed out to me that these Bethany dreams and her storyline really weren’t necessary. And as soon as she said it, I realized she was right. This happens to me a lot in revision: Someone else will read the book and will say something to me so painfully obvious that I want to kick myself for not realizing it on my own. Yes, Bethany’s storyline was only slowing the book down.

Bethany and Lisa were overlapping way too much in my earlier draft of the book. Lisa already asks Jen if she’s going to leave Will, and she updates Jen about tennis, so it didn’t progress the book forward in any way to have Bethany do it, too. Once I cut Bethany’s storyline/dreams, I had more room to expand Lisa’s, and I thought Lisa had much more potential as a character. She’s nicer, more sympathetic, and though she makes some bad choices, I could see Jen getting past this and being her friend. On the other hand, even though these dreams changed Jen’s perception of Bethany, Bethany herself didn’t change, and in this version of the book when Jen tried to reach out to her, Bethany ended up telling Jen, in no uncertain terms, that she didn’t want
her
help.

Which brings me to another reason that I cut this: Unlike the rest of the dreams in the book, these dreams didn’t do anything to help support Jen’s personal transformation. I liked that they showed a part of Bethany’s story, but, then again, this wasn’t Bethany’s story. It was Jen’s.

Was it hard for me to cut these scenes even though I knew it was the right thing to do? Was it hard to let this storyline go? I’ll
admit that it was, a little bit, anyway. A part of me wanted readers to know Bethany the way I did, but the other part of me, the part that realizes that the best of my writing comes out in revision, knew I needed to let it go. And sometimes that’s really what revision is all about for me, just letting go of the individual bits and pieces of the book and cutting and rewriting and expanding the parts of the book that truly make it a story.

Copyright

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF THINGS. Copyright © 2010 by Jillian Cantor.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2010 ISBN: 978-0-062-02026-0

FIRST AVON PAPERBACK EDITION PUBLISHED 2010.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
    Cantor, Jillian.
      The transformation of things / Jillian Cantor.
        p. cm.
      ISBN 978-0-06-196220-2 (pbk.)
      1. Self-realization—Fiction. 2. Family—Fiction. 3. Domestic fiction.
      I. Title.
    PS3603.A587T73 2010
    813′.6—dc22 2010015002

10 11 12 13 14 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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