Same River, Different Journey

Along with my agent, I’ve now read through The Same River Twice manuscript as a reader.

And if this sounds self-evident, we all read when we read something, right … ?

Well, it isn’t.

I wrote up the experience of sculling the length of the Thames in 2015, immediately after the trip had happened. The writing took about three months, and then I put it away.

Life happening is the main reason I haven’t been back to it since.

But that time has given me the time and emotional / intellectual distance to read it as an editor would, rather than as its author. I know I wrote it, but so much has happened in the intervening time that I am not the person I was then. I’m not in the same place, or space or circumstances. The draft is an accurate record of events, and reading it prompts memories of the trip and what was happening before, around and during it, of course. But then I was living what I was writing. I was right in the middle of the experience. Now, I’m remembering and reliving it from a distance, with fondness and empathy and sense memory, but also objectivity.

As well as reading it in that context, I read it with all of the professional skills academia and working as a reader / editor for University Presses over years and years has developed - or at least what’s left of them post-Covid and amid continuining Long Covid.

So, the first impressions.

I remembered The Same River Twice as primarily being a book about rowing. After all, it was about my friends and I sculling the length of the Thames together in a boat. I think at the time I wrote it up, I wanted to record the experience. I probably had in the back of my mind that I wanted to write a great book about rowing - a book that communicates why the sport grips some of us so hard and what it gives us when it does. And I know I thought like that then because I still think like that now: I still haven’t read one that translates that experience. Steve Redgrave’s story, for example, might be Homeric in its sweep, but his book is a cure for insomnia: a heroic, successfully completed and never to be repeated epic quest made to read like a manual on grouting.

And if that sounds arrogant, well, yes, maybe it was. Maybe it is. Maybe a little. But I think rowing deserves more than a ghostwriter and gold-medal winning platitudes. If the Japanese had invented it the pursuit would have formed the basis for an entire culture and an accompanying literary-philosophical canon. But mainly I wanted to celebrate and commemorate our trip. It might be a small thing compared to five Olympic golds, but it was ours.

At least, that’s how I remembered what I’d written and why I’d written it.

Reading it, though, was a completely different experience.

First, it became very clear that this was not a traditional book about rowing. Those tend to emphasise the testosterone, pain and self-negation at the expense of the nuance but there are as many types of rower and reasons they row as there are ripples on a river. Books about the pursuit of pushing a boat down a river while facing the wrong way also tend to come in tandem with British success at the Olympics. Although there is no glow of a gold medal, what was there about the sport is written from a perspective the bulk of rowers will recognize: that of a non-Olympian in love with the pleasure of making a boat move with his friends. 

Second, and more immediately, it felt like I was reading the work of a stranger - probably for the reasons outlined above. That stranger had taken a simple story about four friends getting together to scull down the Thames together and turned it into a journey through so many other things: the landscapes of his life and personal history, his domestic circumstances; his friendships, rowing, geography, history and cultural memory. He had written digressions, sidebars, overlaps and thoughts – not to show off knowledge didactically but obviously to escape into things known and loved to him at a period when who he was was being challenged and destroyed. The group of people who went on to become his friends arriving at Agecroft and who did the trip with him became in this story an expression of him remembering who he was through the experiences he shared with them.

I’ve talked to a number of authors who have written up adventures, and their advice is to write as close to the experience as possible, because that communicates the immediacy of events and your honest emotional reaction - and then leave well alone. Well, I didn’t do my usual thing of starting to immediately rewrite and rework. I read very carefully, put it down, and thought about what I’d just read.

Having read through what I wrote, I think my job now is to read it through again, very carefully, with all of those hard-won reader / editor skills fully engaged. The manuscript needs to be cut, and my agent is confident that it can be placed - which means that this editing process will be gone through again with another professional editor. As it stands, the manuscript is a kaleidoscopic tapestry of the time and the place and the people and the moments. My job here is like a coach getting their athlete in shape for a race; or a good record producer choosing what to bring up and what to take down in the mix before the album drops; or, to skip past the analogies and get to the reality, like an editor working through a book for a client to help make it as good as it can be. My job here is not to collaborate or rewrite but to edit as sympathetically as I can while leaving the essence of what was there well alone - and leave it at that.

So, that’s what I’m going to do.

©℗ A. I. Jackson

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Origin(al) Stories was first launched to show some of the thoughts, decisions and processes that went into the writing, recording and release of the Northumbria album.

Following the launch of The Landing Stage, which brings together some of the things I do, I’ve continued adding to Origin(al) Stories.

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