In the summer of 2023, I rode in a van that lurched up a windy mountain pass in California’s High Sierra. With me were six other writers, all of us gazing silently out the windows at the epic vistas as we climbed to our destination at 6,200 feet. We were headed to the Community of Writers Summer Writing Workshops for a week of panels, craft discussions, workshops, readings, and camaraderie.
I was hoping to use the time away to tinker with the memoir I had recently completed, maybe feel struck by inspiration for my next project. Though I’d submitted three chapters of the memoir to be workshopped, there was no way I was going to rewrite any of them wholesale, no matter how interesting or necessary the suggestions. The manuscript had already been scrutinized and scrambled up in various summer-conference classrooms for five years running. It had undergone rounds of edits with early readers and my patient agent, who planned to go out on submission with it after the holidays. I was satisfied with the individual chapters of my memoir, as well as their arrangement within the book, but I was loath to admit there was still something a little off. It didn’t sing the way I wanted it to. I imagined the sustained chord heard in fantasy movies when all the pieces come together: a spell broken, a door unlocked. But I was also keenly aware of my propensity to edit ad infinitum. It was time to call it.
During a craft panel under a canopy in the dry heat, all of us fanning ourselves with our folders, wearing wet paper towels like kerchiefs around our necks, someone—either a panelist or an audience member—mentioned that we should think of a pendulum when revising our manuscripts. One of the panelists gave a brief explanation of the concept for those who were unfamiliar: The first chapter of a manuscript should echo or resonate with the last chapter, the second with the penultimate, and so on and so forth until you are right smack in the middle of the book. If there are an odd number of chapters, that solitary center could potentially serve as a radial point, containing either a nexus of themes, a collision of characters, or a weighty neutrality. This seemed to me a fascinating idea, although one more akin to a game than to a practical editing method. I jotted a quick note on the back of a handout: pendulum?
Ten years earlier I’d had a different kind of experience in adjusting balance. I had moved back to Portland, Oregon, after gallivanting around numerous cities trying to find a forever home. My then partner and I had been living in San Francisco but were getting tired of the costs, the crowded commute to work on public transportation, and the general hustle. By comparison, Portland felt easy and small-town. Cheap, too. My partner was an avid cyclist and was excited to get back into it in a city known for its bike paths and DIY culture. Rather than buying a beater car, she suggested building me a custom bicycle, a self-taught skill she had honed over the years.
I remember vividly both of us kneeling on our apartment’s hardwood floor, my salvaged bike wheel in a truing stand. She spun the wheel gently, observing when it would wobble to one side. When it did she would adjust the tension of the spoke from its opposite end. Checking and rechecking this balance was a slow process, but eventually my wheel spun smoothly and evenly. It was ready to be remounted on the frame and taken out for a ride.
As I sat under the canopy that afternoon on the mountain, I recalled this memory. To my mind, tuning a chapter vis-à-vis its diametrical opposite was less the swing of a pendulum than the truing of a wheel.
When I returned home after the conference, I went to a copy shop to print out all three hundred-odd pages of my manuscript, single-sided. Then I rearranged them so the final chapter followed the first, the thirtieth the second, and continued in this manner until I was left with a single, lonely chapter tacked onto the end, which I thought of as the book’s tender middle, containing, ideally, every theme, the key to the entire story, maybe.
It went against my artistic approach to have even indulged this idea: I naturally pushed back against formulas and ready-made, time-tested structures into which we were taught to plug our created worlds or real-life narratives. The hero’s journey could bite me. But something about this endeavor felt less rigid, more open to interpretation, like divining some truth from a daily horoscope or a tarot card spread. It would, I hoped, reveal things I would have otherwise never seen—and be a much more generative and exploratory process than making sure I was hitting commercially ordained plot points.
We are attuned to symmetry in such a way we don’t even notice it as we go about our day-to-day. Our faces. Our bodies. Our brains. Leaves and flowers. Squirrels and butterflies. Snowflakes and raindrops. Stars. Splashes of water on a surface. Even viruses and fungi. Symmetry is found not only in the physicality of a thing, but in its patterns of growth, such as in mitosis and in its genetic coding. It is shaped by the laws of physics, the principles of math. Symmetry is necessary for structural integrity and stability that, in turn, lends to an animal’s ease of movement, a leaf’s ability to photosynthesize, Earth’s ongoing rotation. Life itself.
I should not have been surprised then when I read my manuscript anew, yoked chapters back-to-back, and discovered the symmetry that already existed. The realization felt magical, like I was tapped into some larger life force, as if I had no choice but to create it. It was predetermined. Programmed into every living and nonliving thing.
Or perhaps it was just a case of confirmation bias. I was seeing only the symmetries because I was looking for them—forcing weak links between disparate things and deciding they were meaningful. Either way, the process encouraged revision, was a literal re-vision in and of itself.
Like with my ex-girlfriend and her truing stand, I slowly went through each page with its corresponding chapter in mind, finding echoed moments I could push just a touch further, flesh out a bit more fully, by reminding the reader of a tone or an image, by recalling a theme or a feeling. The process took a few months of checking and rechecking, the subtle shifts rippling out and requiring new tunings. The connections I found and developed were never overt and in some instances were separated by hundreds of pages. It’s possible their effect will be detected only on a subconscious level. But by the end my manuscript felt stronger for it, as if its fabric were more evenly woven.
I was so surprised by, almost obsessed with, this method that I became evangelical about it. I shared the technique with writer friends, even scoured my own bookshelves for confirmation of it. For example: I grabbed the first book my eyes landed on—Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir In the Dream House (Graywolf Press, 2019). I went to the third chapter, “Dream House as Perpetual Motion Machine,” and the third from the end, “Dream House as L’esprit de L’escalier.” At a glance, I could see the symmetry in their form alone. Both were a page and a half in length with blocky, full paragraphs scarce on dialogue. After rereading them side by side, I located several more instances of symmetry. In both chapters the narrator is out of her element and eased by some sort of “magical” intervention. In the former, she sits on the grass in the far outfield, not participating in her PE class’s baseball game. She rubs a dandelion on her chin, and the stain, she believes, will predict her love life, a harbored crush, perhaps. In the latter, she is in Santa Clara, Cuba, an unfamiliar yet familial city whose strangeness leaves her feeling stressed and sick. After she vomits in the street, a local woman casts a spell on her to make her better. Considering these instances in retrospect, the narrator knows that nothing supernatural has ever occurred, that these were merely displays of want, perhaps even of devotion.
Machado’s mirroring chapters center around societally othered characters who are unapologetic in their authenticity, self-possession, and self-preservation. In the earlier chapter there is Ms. Lily, the allegedly lesbian PE teacher who teaches body isolations to a classroom of snickering third graders; in the later scene we have Granddaddy, the narrator’s grandfather as a “little brown kid” who had once told a wealthy white man to “go fuck yourself.” The narrator’s recollections of these people exhibit her own want. Her aspirational strength in the face of abuse.
In November, two months before my agent and I had planned to go out with the memoir on submission, I taught a seven-week course on revision in a church basement. I had about a half dozen students, all of whom brought either a chapter from a longer work-in-progress, a short story, or personal essay. Aware that all of nature is an endless nesting of microcosms, that the atomic resembles the cosmic, I decided to try something new in my class. I had my students pair each paragraph with the one situationally opposite, then analyze them in relation to each other. On a handout I offered these suggestions: Do they resonate the same way? Is their timbre similar? Is there a repeated image? A connecting theme? An echoing or mirroring? A metaphor at play? Consider the center paragraph (or paragraphs); what is it doing (or what are they doing)? Observe any growth or change in the main character between the two paragraphs.
Afterward everyone shared their findings. They gasped at coincidences, laughed at double meanings, scribbled arrows and margin notes about grand revision plans. I was giddy at not only how eerily the paragraphs aligned, but also how useful and generative the process was, if even to simply reveal the author’s deeper intent and emotional wisdom—what Vivian Gornick called the story—or confirm the direction the author was already taking; they say that synchronicities are a sign that one is on the right path. After seven consecutive Wednesday evenings, rain slamming against the hopper windows, a drum-circle class going on above, everyone left with a newfound trust in their own writing.
In the new year, my manuscript had become a flower, a star, a cell. A living thing that was stable, meaningful, and natural. No longer a slightly lopsided ride, it sailed smoothly, taking the reader from a rotting squat to a nature trail, from a dramatic fight between a mother and daughter to their serene walk among oak trees and dove song, arm in arm. The small, and occasionally not-so-small, changes I had made since the craft talk in the Sierras made my manuscript more balanced and whole. Truer. It sang to me now, like a whirring wheel.
Karleigh Frisbie Brogan is the recipient of a 2024 Oregon Literary Fellowship. Her work has been published in the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, HuffPost, Literary Hub, Entropy, Nailed, and elsewhere. She is the author of Holding: A Memoir About Mothers, Drugs, and Other Comforts (Steerforth, 2025).
Thumbnail credit: Hannah Hayes