I'm Alan Alder, and this is clear and vivid conversations about connecting and communicating.

I say in the introduction, I left a plenty, a gracious plenty of mistakes behind so you can play along at home,

get at your own pin and see, can you make a sentence better by just trimming it?

You know, I have been thinking for years that I was fiddling too much with my sentences, that I was being too precious.

But then when I went back to read Belcanto, I thought, no, that's what you've got to do.

You've got to keep fiddling with things until you get it right.

That's novelist Anne Patchett.

She recently did something very unusual.

25 years after publishing her highly acclaimed best-selling book, Belconto. She published an annotated version in which

she goes through it line by line with handwritten notes in the margins, commenting on how she had

written it, both what she loved and what she hated.

In our conversation, she also talked about how she arrives at her characters

and the brave decision she made to end the book in a way that she knew might distress her readers.

This is an amazing thing you've done, this annotated edition of Belconto, because it represents such an interesting point of view of the author.

What made you do it? How did you come to the idea of doing this?

My old self going back to meet my youthful self. It's very Dickensian. So I was asked by a little bookstore outside of Boston

to annotate a copy of one of my books. They asked 20 different authors as a fundraiser because

they had been really hard hit for COVID. And I did Tom Lake. I did my last book. And I did it really early. Then when it was time to send it in, I went back, I looked at it, and I thought, I want this. You know, I want to make a copy of it because this seems like valuable information. So I copied the copy by hand. And in doing that, I thought, this shows a lot about

how to write a novel. So then I took the idea to my editor. I said, what if I did this in my own

handwriting? And I did Belcanto, because I would want to do a book that

was farther away. Anyway, that's how the idea came about. And you took the book and you literally

wrote in pen and ink in the margin of the book, all of the things that you liked about the writing

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