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"  His dead wife pressed her lips to his forehead, then said, &amp;quot;You can tear a man&amp;#039;s ear right off, rip it like a leaf from a branch.&amp;quot; About his last line: This line comes from very near the end of the novel I&amp;#039;m finishing, and it&amp;#039;s currently, in my humble opinion, the greatest line ever written. This opinion will change soon. It always does. A little background on me, the novel, and the greatest line ever written. The novel is (currently) called The Unaccompanied and it&amp;#039;s forthcoming (eventually) from Random House. I&amp;#039;ve been working on it for a few years; this is the sixth and -- with luck -- final draft. Like most writers, I&amp;#039;m plagued by doubt and bravado, by hope and dread, and rereading drafts of what I&amp;#039;ve written only contributes to this particularly excruciating state of confusion. Dipping back into my incomplete drafts is a form of procrastination, an excuse to tinker with language and avoid the real (and relentlessly difficult) work of imagining the lives of people who don&amp;#039;t exist. So I never do it. I&amp;#039;ve learned to never reread anything I&amp;#039;m writing -- sentences, stories, the aforementioned novel -- before I reach the end of the first draft. No big shock that my first drafts are hole-ridden and unwieldy and generally hideous. I&amp;#039;m not a good writer, not even close, but I&amp;#039;m a merciless rewriter. I believe in neither talent nor inspiration. I believe in work, in hours logged. I derive faith from what Frank Conroy called &amp;quot;ass-in-chair time.&amp;quot; An update on my emotional attachment and perceived literary merit of the last line: It&amp;#039;s obviously not great, but also not without charm.  A little background on the dead wife and the still living husband. In the grand scheme of the book, they&amp;#039;re part of the supporting cast. He&amp;#039;s 78 and suffering from vascular dementia, which is similar to Alzheimer&amp;#039;s; she drowned in the Gulf of Mexico sixteen years ago. I had no intentions of writing a novel in which an elderly man carries on conversations with his deceased wife, but in the process of carving up my lame first draft, I found this line: &amp;quot;He still talked to his wife, and sometimes, thank you very much, she answered.&amp;quot; It was a throwaway line, nothing more than a bridge to usher the prose forward. The line has not survived subsequent drafts, but upon rereading it, I was struck by the sentiment, by the possibility that this character might actually hear the dead woman&amp;#039;s voice, so I followed his lead and it transformed the book. Suddenly, I knew this man. I knew what he wanted and what he&amp;#039;d lost -- the two traits that most vividly define characters (and people) for me -- and I knew that what he&amp;#039;d lost and what he wanted were one in the same: his wife. Nothing could&amp;#039;ve been further from my intentions for the book, and nothing could&amp;#039;ve pleased me more. When a story subverts or jettisons or caroms off of my original idea -- like, say, when a character starts yapping with his dead wife who wasn&amp;#039;t even supposed to be in the book at all -- I&amp;#039;m thrilled. Even when the surprises translate to my rewriting hundreds of pages -- as this one did -- I&amp;#039;m thrilled. And relieved. And filled with such adrenaline and hope that I feel weightless, borne aloft.  Why? Because when a writer writes what he intends to write, it usually sucks. The story is always -- must always be -- smarter than the author. Emotional attachment/perceived literary merit update: The line&amp;#039;s fine, but now I wonder if it would read better as, &amp;quot;\u2026You can tear a man&amp;#039;s ear off, rip it right off like a leaf from a branch.&amp;quot; See, I told you it&amp;#039;s no good for me to reread things. Already I&amp;#039;m futzing with the language when I should be trying to figure out what happens next. I mean, why did I let you talk me into this?  You should know that the dead wife wasn&amp;#039;t a violent woman. She was a violin teacher, a delicate and earthy mother of two who liked swimming naked in the bay. Throughout the course of the book she&amp;#039;s talked with her husband about music and animals and marriage and their kids. She&amp;#039;s the kind of woman who says, &amp;quot;like the dickens.&amp;quot; She&amp;#039;s asked him if he believes in ghosts and he said no, and they laughed like children. He&amp;#039;s always been comforted by her visits, looked forward to them. That she&amp;#039;s now saying something so savage is, for the widower, confounding. That she&amp;#039;s now saying something so savage is, for me, exhilarating.  Here&amp;#039;s the thing. I don&amp;#039;t need the word &amp;quot;dead&amp;quot; at all. If you&amp;#039;ve read the book from the beginning, you already know she&amp;#039;s dead. And from where else, besides a branch, would one tear off a leaf? A stem, I suppose. But do I really gain anything with &amp;quot;from a branch&amp;quot;? Would it be better to tighten the sentence, end on the softer noun, and move more quickly to his reaction? Maybe it should read like this: &amp;quot;His wife pressed her lips to his forehead, then said, &amp;#039;You can tear a man&amp;#039;s ear off, rip it right off like a leaf.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; You really can do that, you know, rip off a person&amp;#039;s ear. Just grab near the top, where the ear meets the skull, then tear straight down, hard as you can. I learned that over a decade ago, in jiu jitsu class, and ever since I&amp;#039;ve been waiting to put it in a story.  And what about this silly &amp;quot;his wife&amp;quot; business? He knows her name&amp;#039;s Beverly, and throughout their relationship he&amp;#039;s always called her Bev, and besides him, she&amp;#039;s the only one in the room which means there&amp;#039;s no chance of the reader getting confused by indefinite pronouns, and plus there&amp;#039;s this cool writerly trick of, once a scene and characters&amp;#039; names are established, reverting to simple pronouns and thereby pulling the reader deeper into the narrative. So, maybe, like this: &amp;quot;She pressed her lips to his forehead, then said, &amp;#039;You can tear a man&amp;#039;s ear off, rip it right off like a leaf.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; I let you talk me into this because I hate writing.  Writing is, I believe, the most difficult thing anyone will ever choose to do. We&amp;#039;ll all go through rough patches in life -- we&amp;#039;ll have money trouble, we&amp;#039;ll get sick, we&amp;#039;ll lose people we love -- but we won&amp;#039;t choose to venture into those dark territories. Writers choose to write. It&amp;#039;s nothing short of masochism. And it&amp;#039;s as unnerving as it is difficult as it is painful. Safer and easier and all the more pleasurable to gab with you than try to figure out what happens after the dead wife says what she says. I hate writing, but I love having written.  I know the line isn&amp;#039;t the greatest line ever, I&amp;#039;ve always known that, but I have to delude myself into believing that the line could eventually be great.  Whether or not the dead wife is actually in his room, actually communicating and conversing with him, doesn&amp;#039;t matter; what matters is that he believes she is. I&amp;#039;m trying to empathize with my characters, trying not to write about them, but to write as them, to experience their worlds through their senses and skins. I try to dream up characters I love and put them in a vice that tightens with every page until either the character or the vice breaks -- so, then, a little sadism in the writer&amp;#039;s mind, too -- and I&amp;#039;m as fascinated and moved and steeled by their grace as I am by their mistakes. And listen, not to sound like a total wussy loser, but when the language clicks, when some unexpected combination of letters and spaces starts to sing or breathe or burn, the rush is downright religious. This is only interesting because I&amp;#039;m pretty agnostic. But when I&amp;#039;m writing well or when I&amp;#039;m reading something gorgeous that another writer&amp;#039;s written I feel connected to humanity -- to all living things, to all things that have or will ever live -- with such unadulterated intensity that I forget myself, forget the illusion of flesh and pain and death and time. The widower in the novel doesn&amp;#039;t believe in ghosts, but apparently, sometimes, I do.  Maybe then, like this: She kissed his forehead, then said, &amp;quot;You can tear a man&amp;#039;s ear off, rip it right off like a leaf.&amp;quot; And then maybe something like this: Her voice confounded him, felled him, made him think of falling leaves. He wanted to run away, wanted to run to wherever she was. He wanted this long waiting to end. He said, &amp;quot;Will it hurt?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Like the dickens,&amp;quot; she said.  Outside, the night wind picked up. Tallow branches scraped against the window, the lurid moonlight cutting through the blinds. He took her hand, brought her knuckles to his cheeks. Her skin smelled of sand. She dragged her fingers over his lips, then he covered his ear with her palm. It was like going deaf, like listening to the ocean. She got a good grip, pinching hard where his ear met his skull. &amp;quot;Are you sure?&amp;quot; she asked. &amp;quot;This way I&amp;#039;ll know if you&amp;#039;re real.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Exactly,&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;This way you&amp;#039;ll know.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Okay,&amp;quot; he said, closing his eyes. &amp;quot;Okay, I&amp;#039;m ready.&amp;quot; About the author: Bret Anthony Johnston is the author of the internationally acclaimed Corpus Christi, named a Best Book of the Year by The Independent of London and The Irish Times. His next book, Naming the World: And Other Exercises for the Creative Writer , will be out in January from Random House. His work appears in magazines such as The Paris Review, Oxford American, and Tin House, and in anthologies such as New Stories from the South: The Year&amp;#039;s Best 2003, 2004, and 2005, Best American Short Stories, and Prize Stories: the O. Henry Awards. Currently, he is the Director of Creative Writing at Harvard University. His Website is BretAnthonyJohnston.com. As told to Anya Yurchyshyn. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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