"The Rapist Says He’s Sorry” changed my writing, and then it changed my life. It changed my writing because before writing it I was a first-draft writer. A year before, I wrote “The Abortionist” in a week, and what I turned in was exactly what GQ ran. It didn’t have to be edited, I didn’t have to change anything, and that was my standard for success. “The Rapist” was very different. My first draft was awful, and I knew it was awful as I was writing it. It circled around its point without ever stating it, and so — without the tension of trying to say the unsayable — it was lifeless. I wasn’t being hard on myself; my editor, David Granger, thought so too. So I wrote a second draft. I wrote it very quickly, over a weekend, and I wrote it as a way of _finding_ the point, which meant that I wrote it with energy but without discipline. It was better than the first; it had life. But it was well over 20,000 words, and was unpublishable. So I wrote the third draft, with the objective of reining the second draft in. It took a five-day work week, and I handed it in on a Friday. It wasn’t great, and I knew it wasn’t great, but I thought that I’d done enough to get Granger a publishable piece. He called me on Saturday morning, and told me that the piece I handed in he couldn’t hand in to his boss (yes, Granger had a boss back then) Art Cooper on Monday. In the guise of revising it, I’d taken the life out of it. But I’d written something like 40,000 words already, and so the following conversation ensued: Me: “What are you doing this weekend? You’re probably spending it with your family, right?” Granger: “Yes, that’s right.” Me: “And you’ll probably play a little golf on Sunday morning.” Granger: “I don’t know. Maybe a little tennis.” Me: “And you’re asking me to spend my whole weekend writing a whole new fucking draft of a story I’ve already written three times.” Granger: “That’s right. And you need to get me something by Monday morning. I need something to show Art.” Fuuuuuuuccck. But I went back at it, and since I didn’t know how to fix what I’d already tried to fix, I tried the oldest trick in the book: the “this is a story of” paragraph. And damn, it worked. The story came alive as I wrote it; I was able to say what I thought I couldn’t. This was also where Granger and I got the idea — well, came to the conviction, really — that if a story is about a murder, you have to show the murder, and if a story is about a rape you have to show the rape. In this case, we showed the rape three times: first, from a responsible “journalistic” point of view — the voiceover point of view —; the second from Mitch Gaff’s; and the third, from the point of view of the victims. I had not done that in any of the previous drafts; it was a structure I arrived at the fourth time around. I always hear about the John McPhee way of writing, from index cards, or the writing workshop way of writing, from an outline. I do neither. My index cards are what I remember; my outlines are the ruins of what came before. For better and more likely for worse, I don’t know how to proceed any other way. I still try to write perfect first drafts; but in general “perfection” usually means drafts rendered lifeless by the presumption of perfection, and the constrictions of structure. So I wind up writing fast, in fear and desperation and mounting self-loathing, until the death of the story allows it to live in a form different than the form I imagined and tried to impose. This happened most recently in the story I wrote on the 11 men killed on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig; but it happened first in “The Rapist Says He’s Sorry."