Lindz asked Madeline Miller:

I absolutely LOVE "The Song of Achilles". It instantly became my favorite book! I was wondering about something. In an interview about the book, you said that you spent 5 years creating the first draft, then you scrapped it and started again. Why did you scrap the first draft? And did you completely delete it, or is there still a copy of it lurking somewhere? Thank you so much for writing such a beautiful book!

Madeline Miller Hello Lindsey, and thank you so much for the very lovely note! It's true that I completely scrapped five years of work, and a finished draft, of The Song of Achilles. I still have the file somewhere, about three computers back at this point, but I'm not sure that I could fish it out without serious technological assistance. So it's sort of like it's deleted. I'm actually okay with that, because the draft was completely wrong. I had found Patroclus' story, but I was still shaping his way of speaking, and I was relying too much on the diction of epic literature. I see Patroclus as a character who is dragged into the world of epic because he loves Achilles, not because it is his natural place. I wanted him to be shaped instead by the world of ancient lyric poetry, the poetry of love, friendship, internal emotion, daily life. So that was the next five years!

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