As I walked, I thought about my novels and about one in particular, the one I consider an anchor novel. Or, to be more precise, the one I hope may someday become one. I think of an anchor novel as one capable of identifying its author through the work itself, even before the reader feels the need to look for the author’s name. Many great writers have seen several of their novels attain that condition, each one sustaining, on its own, an essential part of their literary identity.
For me, naturally, all my novels are anchors. Each represents a moment in my life as a writer and contains something I consider worthy of enduring. But the place they occupy within me is one thing, and the place they may someday occupy among readers is another. I still have a long way to go.
When I think about The Intriguing Stillness of the Tides, I imagine that someday someone might encounter the novel before encountering me and, after reading it, associate my work with those human questions I have been exploring through fiction as moral philosophy.
These are only aspirations, the kind I sometimes think out loud on the page, rather than actually saying aloud. As I walk my daily miles, I reflect on life and human beings, but also on my work. I return to it mentally, observe it, question it. Sometimes I defend it; at other times, I manage to look at it with a severity I probably did not possess when I wrote it.
Over the past several months, I have returned particularly to The Intriguing Stillness of the Tides. It is a novel in which I have invested a great deal and one I have worked on almost to exhaustion. Over time, however, I have come to understand that spending so long with a work can make certain technical aspects of its narrative invisible, even when they still require attention.
That is why I undertook a process of evaluation. I first turned to what I call early readers, people willing to enter the manuscript attentively and give me their impressions. Of the nearly forty copies I distributed in Spanish and English, I was fortunate to receive around ten readings accompanied by thoughtful comments and, in some cases, extraordinary feedback.
Then came the moment to confront two different questions. How good is the story, and how good is its execution?
The answer to the first began to encourage me. Readers found the story powerful, or at least powerful enough to justify the ambition I had placed in it. The second answer was more uncomfortable. Its execution had problems. A work may contain a valuable story, characters capable of remaining in memory, and profound human circumstances, while at the same time having been brought to the page through techniques that still need to mature.
The early readers offered me a kind of embrace. I could tell myself that the story was there, that it worked, that it had managed to reach other sensibilities. But that embrace came accompanied by something like a slap. The story could be good while its execution remained far from the quality I expected of it.
Both revelations did me good. One allowed me to trust what I had written; the other forced me to ask how much better I could tell it.
I am writing about this process because revising a work is also part of the craft of writing it. For those of us who work independently, that responsibility takes on a particular dimension. Within an established publishing structure, editors, copy editors, proofreaders, and other specialized eyes become involved. When that structure does not permanently surround us, we must find ways of allowing ourselves to see the work from the outside.
This is not about pursuing an impossible perfection. If that were the standard, no writer would ever finish revising. I am interested in something more human. An execution sufficiently refined and true to the work so that the story can find a clearer path toward the reader.
I have begun to call this work curating my work. Caring for it. Preserving what it is while trying to remove whatever may still stand between the story and the person reading it.
That is precisely what I have been doing with The Intriguing Stillness of the Tides. The plot remains, the characters remain, as do its architecture, its events, and its purpose. I do not return to it to turn it into another novel. I return to help it reveal more clearly what it already contains.
One of the first places where I had to intervene was the narrator. I discovered how often I had allowed the narrator to say, quite correctly, something that no longer needed to be said. A character makes a gesture, speaks a few words, or remains silent, and the scene is complete; then the narrator appears and explains what has just happened.
The explanation may be perfectly well written and still be unnecessary.
A question began to accompany me. Does the reader need me to explain this, or can the reader already experience it?
It seems like a technical question, but it is also a question of respect.
A reader comes to a novel carrying memory, experience, imagination, pain, desires, losses, and convictions. A whole life comes along. When a character falls silent before an irreversible circumstance, perhaps there is no need to explain immediately what that silence means. The reader also knows what it means to remain silent.
When the narrator steps back a little, the characters regain territory.
I also learned to distinguish between what returns because it belongs to the novel’s emotional architecture and what returns simply out of habit. A word, a gesture, a construction, a particular way of making characters react can settle comfortably into the writing until it becomes a tic. Writers blink on the page too. Repetition remembers; a tic simply returns.
There was another intervention that proved even more revealing. As Lenore’s illness progresses, she needs a device in order to communicate. While writing the novel, I had allowed that instrument to occupy grammatical positions that actually belonged to her. The device spoke, answered, gave voice.
I eventually understood something very simple. The device is the medium; Lenore remains the consciousness and the voice.
I was struck by how much an apparently grammatical decision can contain. A novel can also establish relationships of dignity through its syntax. Restoring Lenore as the subject does not change the story; it changes the precision with which the story recognizes who continues to inhabit it.
And so, intervention after intervention, I have returned to the same principle. Trust the story and trust the reader.
My novels contain thought because I would not know how to write them otherwise. I am interested in human consciousness confronted by circumstances that force it to reveal itself; I am interested in dignity, suffering, freedom, love, death, and what we do when reality no longer offers us the possibility of changing it. But there, too, I have learned to step back. A novel can think without explaining its thoughts. Perhaps literary thought reaches one of its deepest forms when readers discover it only after they have experienced it.
I do not intend to turn my experience into a method. I share it because there can also be generosity in talking about the craft, even when what we share consists of things we are still learning. Perhaps another writer will someday wonder whether the narrator needs to explain what the character has already lived, whether a repetition carries meaning or simply returns, or whether a reflection truly belongs to the novel or to the writer’s desire to interpret it.
And perhaps this may also interest someone who will never write a novel. Behind a page that appears simple there may be dozens of choices, renunciations, and corrections made precisely so that the reader never has to notice them.
Today I feel that I can place The Intriguing Stillness of the Tides before its readers again with a sense of ease I did not have before. I believe it has reached a literary quality much closer to what I had hoped for it. Some readers will find flaws I still cannot see; others may question a sentence, a technical decision, or a way of telling the story. That is as it should be.
What matters to me is knowing that I have done everything within my reach so that those imperfections do not remain simply because I was able to see them and chose not to look.
The story is still there. Lenore is still there. Harrison is still there. The illness, the love, the dignity, the loss, the silences, and the human questions that once led me to write it are still there. What I have tried to do during these months is clear the path a little more between all of that and whoever decides to enter its pages.
The novel is now returning to circulation with these revisions incorporated. I would like you to read it and, above all, I would like to know what happens when it finally leaves my hands and enters yours. What you find there. What you feel. What unsettles you. What remains after you close the book.
Perhaps that is the one evaluation a novel can never make of itself. It needs the reader.
And when I finish walking these miles, I also think about the other books waiting on my shelves. I will finish Homo Sapiens Empatheticus, continue developing the essay I have been building for years around Fiction as Moral Philosophy, and most likely bring another essay to life, one already quite evolved in my thinking, about the right to live without fear. But there is something that excites me especially. This year, I want to return to Flowers for María Sucel. Twenty years have passed since it was written, twenty years during which I have continued writing, reading, making mistakes, and learning.
Returning to a work written twenty years ago must be a little like returning to a house where one lived a long time ago. I will surely recognize the rooms and remember why I placed each thing where I did. Some will make me feel tenderness; others will make me wonder how I could have left them there for so many years.
But I want it to remain the same house.
I will open the windows, let in a little light, and welcome visitors again.