Three years of work erased in a single day. Told by Hisham Matar (EP 30).
After the first draft of his first novel — the one that began on a tissue box — Hisham Matar moved to Paris for six months and rewrote the book from start to finish. He had been working on the novel for about three years in total. He finished the second draft in Paris and sat down to read it.
Hisham had trained as a stonemason before he became a writer, and the image he reached for in the episode was from that life. A stonemason tests a block by striking it with a tuning fork and listening. A sound block gives a clean note. A block with a hidden fracture gives a dulled, wrong note — a stone that will split the wrong way later.
The second draft sounded cracked. Not in one passage, but in the whole. He could not name the fracture precisely. He only heard that the note was wrong.
He destroyed the draft the same day. Three years of work. He did not keep a copy for reference and did not archive the pages. He went back to a blank document.
Starting from scratch, he moved the centre of the book. The new draft put the mother-son relationship at the core — a structural decision that the earlier version had not made. The rebuilt novel became In the Country of Men, which was published to international recognition and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2006.
The story is a specific kind of literary decision: one that looks from the outside like catastrophe and from the inside like clarity. Hisham told it in the episode as a practical description of how craftsmanship carries over from one discipline to another. A stonemason does not persuade himself a cracked stone will hold. A writer, he argued, should not either.
See: Hisham Matar, The Tissue Box Novel