From Dust and Light: On the Art of Fact and Fiction, which will be published next month by W. W. Norton and Company.

Waste seemed like all I knew when I was a child. My parents didn’t get along, and we moved often, even when they were married, then more and more once they had divorced. Briefly, when I was in eighth grade, my brother, my sister, and I lived with our mother on one part of Cape Cod. After a year, we were sent to live with our father and new stepmother on another part of the Cape. Suddenly, as I started high school, I had different parents, a different house, a different school, different friends, a different life. My stepmother and I instantly, instinctively, despised each other, which made things hard for everyone.

I had three close friends in those years, sequentially, not simultaneously, all from families dissimilar to my own. I threw myself at each, wanting to be them as much as I wanted to be with them, trying their lives on for size, vaguely aware that they weren’t much like me but thinking that perhaps, if I mimicked the ways they lived, I might transmute myself into something like them.

I changed everything possible about myself, adopting new haircuts, clothing styles, musical tastes, attitudes, as if, by decorating my outer life, I could hide what I couldn’t change: my greedy, obsessive immersion in a stew of dense and complicated books that I borrowed, bought in thrift shops, sometimes even stole. My parents distrusted books and the people who read them and were baffled when they occasionally caught me reading; my friends were baffled as well.

With the first of those high school friends, I lived a life of skipped classes and secret parties, of sneaking out of bedroom windows (we were thirteen, then fourteen), hopping into cars with older boys, some of them men, men in their twenties: What were they thinking? What was I thinking? Cigarettes, stolen liquor, bouquets of different drugs, and banquets of lies. With the second friend, I lay for days on a long empty beach, bathed in baby oil, smoking opium and listening to a radio barely audible above the waves. We drowsed and dreamed and sometimes sang (I can’t sing, but that didn’t matter). At night we slipped away from her parents’ house (more conniving, more lies) and went to parties in the dunes, mostly with people around our age. With the third friend (who’d once been close to the second, and with whom I first shared some of the secret books), I played cribbage and listened to classical music and talked about Nietzsche and Dostoevsky and how, when, and if our real lives would ever begin.

Those experiments seemed to last forever: Would I be this kind of person, or that? Live this way, or that?

Each friendship felt at the time like the one true one, the entry into the life I was meant to live. Each time, I failed to understand the lives of my friends and their families. Nor did I grasp my effect (pernicious, for the most part) on them. Mostly what I did, other than hurting people, was to get good at failing.

I kept on failing for years, as I tried to figure out who I was and what I might be good at and might want to do. I failed to graduate high school, almost failed out of college my first year, and failed twice, in two different fields, to finish graduate school. I failed at my first marriage and failed numerous friends. For a decade after graduating, I failed to find any satisfying occupation. I worked as a receptionist, then as a billing clerk, and then as a customer-service representative in a cardboard-box factory. I was a greenhouse technician and a helper at a biological-supply company; a trainer at a test-preparation service; and for three days (the blood made me faint) an assistant to a dental surgeon. Later, I was a clerk and then a research assistant in a college’s development office; a secretary to a biophysicist and an assistant to a group of endocrinologists at a medical school; a tax-form typist for an accounting firm; and finally a freelance proofreader, a copy editor, and then an editor for a medical publisher.

Even once I started writing, I kept failing. I wrote bad prose poems, laughable villanelles, ridiculous sestinas. I began a play featuring Franciscan monks arguing about a schism in their order, and something like a story about the Inquisition. I wrote multiple drafts of two terrible novels.

Again and again, I set off energetically toward something I thought I could see, only to crash back down empty-handed.

A kinder word for this process, by which I’ve made both my work and my life, is “revision.” Disaster, mess, slightly less mess; small improvement, two steps back, a swerve, and another small improvement.

Revision is so central to my life and my writing that, when I was teaching writing to undergraduates, I twice offered a course about it. If I’d found it helpful to look at the drafts and notebooks of writers I’d learned from and loved, wouldn’t younger writers also benefit? I imagined having my students read the early version of The Great Gatsby, called Trimalchio, which its editor described as like “listening to a well-known musical composition, but played in a different key and with an alternate bridge passage.” Or sharing my excitement over the news that Tolstoy had started Anna Karenina impulsively, deep in the process of gathering material and taking notes toward what was meant to be a novel set in the time of Peter the Great. In Creating Anna Karenina: Tolstoy and the Birth of Literature’s Most Enigmatic Heroine, Bob Blaisdell details the enormous reconceptions, radical restructurings, and massive revisions of his characters’ very natures.

To a friend, Tolstoy wrote that he had “finished in draft form . . . a very lively, impassioned and well-finished novel,” which he was “very pleased with” and which would “be ready in 2 weeks’ time.” Four years later, after having started with a character sometimes called Tatiana or Nana—graceless and vulgar in his early drafts, almost ugly, and married to a saintly husband—he finished the novel we know. Richard Pevear, in the introduction to his 2000 translation alongside Larissa Volokhonsky of Anna Karenina, also reminds us:

The whole other side of the novel, the story of Levin and Kitty, was absent from the early variants; there were no Shcherbatskys, the Oblonsky family barely appeared, and Levin, called Ordyntsev and then Lenin, was a minor character. In the early versions, Tolstoy clearly sympathized with the saintly husband and despised the adulterous wife. As he worked on the novel, however, he gradually enlarged the figure of Anna morally and diminished the figure of the husband; the sinner grew in beauty and spontaneity, while the saint turned more and more hypocritical.

How relieving I found those examples! And what sense of permission I thought they granted. I brought some of them to my students, along with drafts of James Joyce’s story “The Sisters,” as it had been published in the Irish Homestead in 1904, before it was revised and became part of Dubliners in 1914. I had them look at drafts of Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,” along with the poet Ellen Bryant Voigt’s beautiful essay, from The Flexible Lyric, about the poem’s composition and revision.

I pondered throwing even more at them. Perhaps the massive restructuring Fitzgerald performed, after the novel was published, on Tender Is the Night, which can be traced in the literary scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli’s book on its composition? The new edition of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, which includes the forty-seven different endings he tried before settling on the one we know. And, and—ack, poor students!

Not surprisingly, the course was itself a kind of failure; I’d misread both the students’ interest in revision and where they were in their own writing lives. But along the way, I learned things I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t wholeheartedly thrown myself at the task, each time excited by visions that would later prove fruitless. Writing works the same way for me—and in fact nothing has been more important in my life than the willingness to believe that each new effort won’t be a failure and to commit myself entirely—even though the evidence is that I will fail again.

Tolstoy called the blinkered energy that sends us down paths that often lead nowhere but that, occasionally, result in useful discoveries the “energy of delusion.” The Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky, who used that phrase as the title for his own study of Tolstoy, Pushkin, Dostoevsky, and others, wrote:

The energy of delusion—the energy of searching freely—never left Tolstoy.

In his conception of War and Peace he begins writing about Kutuzov.

He comes up with a flawed sketch of the character, even though it contains the real facts and the real traits.

But the energy of delusion, the energy of trials, experiments, the energy of investigation compels him to describe again—a different, a real person. This takes him years.

How useful that energy is. How essential, how unpredictable. I never know where it will take me.

Just now it has, for example, led me to write a little about myself—despite saying frequently that I don’t, and won’t. I might delete these sentences. I might revise them yet again. I might finally admit to myself that the words with which we attempt to render the truths of our lives can be endlessly revised, but not the life itself.

It’s winter now, some months after the phoebes outside have built their nest, raised a family, and moved on. Bitter cold, snow on the ground, blue jays crowding the feeders clownishly while the little birds—chickadees and nuthatches and tufted titmice, downy woodpeckers and yellow-bellied sapsuckers—wait anxiously for the bullies to leave so they can begin their own meal. You might think you know something about me now from the highly redacted scraps of personal anecdote I started with—but really, I could have written anything, shaped those glimpses however I wanted, and you wouldn’t know.

You know far more about me from how I’ve been writing here about the nature of revision. That’s the truth of character that can’t be concealed. You know what books I’ve loved and why I love them. You know I like birds, you know I watch them, you know I live in a place sufficiently rural to have trees and phoebes. You know many of my days resemble one another, and that I have a house, and that I must not be commuting daily to a job—which in turn suggests I have some other way to make an income. You know I have enough free time to look outside and note down what I see, and that I value both actions.

And beyond those relatively simple facts, you have a sense of my sensibility: my emotional makeup, my responses to the world, my obdurate insistence on revising and revising again. What I notice, what I pay attention to. That—not only that, but essentially that, in addition to fact, sometimes even instead of fact—is at the heart of fiction.