Hi again. Hope all’s well.
The past few months have been good. I didn’t blog because I had a tedious goal: line-by-line edit of the novel. I switched scenes, revised the ending. This draft was about giving the book a world. In that process, The Thing shed an additional 13% of its body weight. Think about how many sit-ups it would take for you to shed 13% of your total weight. That’s what it felt like.
Then I sent the Thing to several friends. Nine months of un-slept-in mornings were on the line. Got some helpful feedback. For those of you who have drafts of novels and are editing them, I have found two anecdotes comforting:
1) David Foster Wallace said in one interview that he was, categorically, “a five-draft man.” For me, a new draft is changing something fundamental about the plot and characters plus the line-edit that results from the shock-waves of inconsistencies that subsequently resonate throughout the book. A draft is a dismantling.
As someone who has been working on a novel for a long time, you start to wonder if you are actually making the book better or if you are just trying to write a new novel with each draft. That is a frightening thought. I found that weird dee-eff-doublette comforting because it limits the number of times you can go through the process. If you don’t cut corners on editing, five full drafts is a good place to know that the book is as good as it can be.
The quote also made it easier to cope with my friends’ constructive criticism. I was a lot more amenable to changes when I knew that I have two more drafts of doubt and demolition to face.
In addition, it makes me feel less capricious. I take my editing more seriously when I know when there’s only so many times I allow myself to dismantle it.
Ask me again when I get to the fifth draft and let’s see if it’s still comforting.
2) In an interview on The Corrections, someone asked Jonathan Franzen how many pages he had to cut in order to arrive at the final draft.
Hundreds?
Franzen looks at the floor.
“Thousands.”
You want to give the book the editing that it deserves. You’re not lazy and you’re not delusional. You know that the real writing is editing and that’s what all the great authors do. You remember the sign above your English teacher’s clock that read “There is no such thing as a final draft” and you remember your college professor’s advice to “give this book everything you have. Do not save any material for some other project.” Those kind of quotes can and will drive you insane because there’s just enough truth to them.
Apparently Michelangelo’s approach to sculpting was that he was chipping away to see what God left in the marble for him. It’s a shame you can’t treat a novel like that because you can constantly shift the Thing’s core, never allowing anything else to settle and crystallize around it. Words ain’t rocks.
If you’re going through that, I feel for you. I hope those two anecdotes help you, too.