As hard as this is to believe, a quarter of a century has now come and gone since I finally finished the first draft of You Cannot Kill a Swan: The Love Story of Lyuba and Ivan. It was in the later afternoon of 26 August 2001, and I was working on the upstairs shared 1996 Mac and using ClarisWorks. The first draft was written on four different Macs and four different word processing programs (though one of those programs, Word 98, was only used for the first chapter of Part II). Adding in all the editing and rewriting I did a decade later, it was completed on six computers and six programs.
I properly began it on 31 January 1993, just one month after my thirteenth birthday, and loosely drew from an unfinished picture book and ideas from 1990–92. Since my father bought the 128K Mac in 1984, I was able to start and write the entire book on a computer. Though I wrote the first drafts of most of my Atlantic City books by hand, Swan was different and special.
How did I manage to write that book so well, and ultimately tie all the storylines and characters together, at the ages of only 13–21? It truly was hashgacha pratit (Divine Providence). I spent almost the entire span of my teen years working on it, and the first few years of my twenties. It genuinely never bothered me that I had no real social life, since I was so focused on my writing, reading, and schoolwork. Mine was an interior life of the mind, and it paid off big-time when it came to putting my writing above everything else.
On 26 August 2001, I finished Chapter 41 of Swan, later entitled “Who Will Stand, Who Will Fall?” after a line in the chorus of the George Harrison song “The Lord Loves the One (That Loves the Lord),” which depicts the day-long court battle over Tatyana’s paternal rights in March 1924. Then I wrote the brief Epilogue, which returns to Russia and the respective fates of Lyolya and Serafima Lebedeva. The only dialogue in the Epilogue is by Serafima, who speaks the book’s title in the second half of the one line.
Soon after closing out of the final document of this massive doorstopper, I saw on aohell that the singer Aaliyah had just died in a plane crash. I don’t follow contemporary pop culture, since I’ve always gravitated towards the music and films of prior decades, but I’ll always remember that event and its date because it’s linked so closely to the end of my first draft.
Though I junked or radically rewrote 99% of the original 1993 material, there were so many places in my juvenile initial vision that perfectly led into a more mature direction and an actual plot with a real focus. The material from the second major phase, my junior year of high school, didn’t need quite so many severe edits and excisions, but it did require more than light, surface tweaking.
The material from the third and final major phase of the first draft, late ’98 through to the end, needed the least amount of editing. The vast majority of these chapters are largely unchanged but for adding and expanding certain scenes. It truly was one of those times where a book was writing me instead of the other way around.
I wish I’d removed the scenes of Aleksey buying wedding rings on his and Eliisabet’s first anniversary and Lena and Antonina going into the hall with the fidgety kids during the Bible readings at Lyuba and Ivan’s wedding and chatting about their First Wave feminist beliefs. They add absolutely nothing important to the overall story but for the former revealing Mr. Golitsyn was born a prince.
I also regret ending the scene of Katrin asking Anastasiya to design her wedding dress and giving brutally honest negative opinions of Christianity without any concluding line or passage thematically leading into the next scene of Ivan, Aleksey, and Nikolas at the iron factory. But the book is what it is, for better or worse, and that’s just how it ultimately solidified.
Every book unfolds exactly how it’s destined to, and could only come together in that way at that time in the writer’s life, even if we often look back and wish we would’ve done some things differently. I view it as a precious time capsule of my development as a writer from the ages of 13–21.
My entire life long, this will stand as one of the books I’m proudest of having written, one of the books closest to my heart. We grew up together, and it wonderfully demonstrates my writing style during many distinct phases. How many other writers can say that about a book they began writing in junior high?
Welcome to My Magick Theatre 