CHAPTER ONE — MIMI You might think I came to Africa as a humanitarian, dispensing medicine to babies so malnourished their delicate rib cages threatened to snap, rib after rib, in a glissando of tiny broken bones. You wouldn’t…
My freshman music theory professor once said that all music aims to emulate the human voice. While his statement was received with muffled scoffs from the instrumentalists in the room, those words have stuck with me. Isn’t that what we ultimately set out to do as writers: to take hold of the human voice? My characters’ voices have most often manifested themselves through the asking of questions.
Water Baby had, for several years, been a story narrated by Lila and Pascha. During one revision, I decided Mimi’s character—a mere mentor figure to Pascha that felt flat—either needed to step up or step out of the story. She was “too good.” In a freewriting session I asked her, “What are you hiding?” Immediately, she began to speak. Mimi’s opening chapter of Water Baby has hardly changed since then. That question has subsequently informed much of my revision process, along with the question, “What brought you here?” Rarely is the answer altruistic.
Not long ago, I rewrote Pascha’s opening chapter, and asked the same of Simon: “What brought you here?” Pascha and Simon’s parting had always been part of the story’s arc, but I struggled for a long time to figure out why Simon went to Zambia without Pascha. I wrote through a number of possibilities, but none rang true. Like Mimi, I realized Simon was too good. Around that time, I began reading accounts of surgeons who had a patient die on the table, how it haunted and even paralyzed many of them to the point of never returning to the operating room, yet several refused to talk about it or seek counseling after the event. Who do you confide in when you are complicit in the death of someone who had placed their life in your hands? That crisis of confidence and debilitating guilt captured my attention, and it became clear this was what had happened with Simon. When writing this chapter, I tried to not oversteer a voice that spilled out messy, confused, and conflicted, with lots of lists and incongruency, which strangely felt far more grounded than previously written chapters.
In music, the performer cannot emulate the human voice without fully engaging the ear, and I’ve found the same to be true with writing. What I’ve learned from these revisions, and throughout the writing of Water Baby, is to listen with curiosity and without expectations, holding the characters loosely to allow their authentic voices to emerge.
AMY WIDMOYER HANSON has been awarded The Iowa Review Award in Fiction and the New Letters Prize for Fiction. She holds a degree in piano performance and has taught both privately and in the public schools. When she isn’t writing, she volunteers with a refugee resettlement agency in Minneapolis, where she lives with her husband and three children. Find her on Instagram @amywhanson.
