Warrior Poet

And you thought it was all over, along with Christmas, New Year’s, and Festivus’ dreaded “Airing of Grievances.”

As the four-part “From The First Draft To The Last” series was winding to a close, reader Turenn, whose request kicked it all off in the first place, came back with a follow-up:

“Is there another danger, though, you can revise too much?”

Funny you should ask. I was already thinking of touching on this very thing.

There’s a great quote by Tom Waits floating around somewhere, whose exact wording eludes me, but the gist of it is this: If you overwork music, if you sterilize and pasteurize it too much, then it loses all its nutrients. And if you compare Waits’ recordings, especially his borderline-primitive stuff from the last dozen years, to the average bright, shiny, auto-tuned, squashed-dynamics shard of pop confection, you’ll understand exactly what he means. One sounds alive and breathing; the other sounds like the sonic equivalent of glare off a windshield.

Now, with the written word, I don’t think of overworking overkill as exhibiting quite the same symptomology. Highly polished work has a tendency to scoot out of its own way and not draw attention to the amount of labor that went into it. But Waits’ point is well taken.

Because, with the revision process, you can definitely hit a point of diminishing returns.

• You’re overdoing it if it grossly interferes with what Seth Godin calls shipping: finishing something up and getting it out the door.
• You’re overdoing it if you’re repeatedly second-guessing yourself over every minuscule detail.
• You’re overdoing it if you find yourself obsessing over what readers might find wrong with your work, instead of what they may find right with it.
• You’re overdoing it if you take a work that in your gut feels more or less balanced, then keep slathering on more words or frantically hacking them away without any clear reason why, other than  that you feel “It needs something, something…”

You get the idea.

Breaking those cycles … knowing when to say when … getting a feel, like a master chef, for the moment the dish has reached its peak … these are mostly matters of instinct and experience.

It takes trust in the process. It takes self-confidence. Sometimes it may even take courage, the courage to tell yourself, “It may not be perfect, but it’s the best I can make it right now.”

This will come. Whether you have sound instincts from the outset, or these sensibilities get honed through practice, it will come.

[Photo by D Sharon Pruitt]

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As we finally bring this behemoth in for a landing, I’m reminded of the old saying: “Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it.” What started as a request for a single post turned into … well, you can see how things mushroomed. Thanks again to Turenn for suggesting the topic. Be it hereby known, I’m always open for requests.

In Parts 1 through 3, we began with the misshapen unloveliness of a first draft and put it through an extreme makeover, doing everything within one person’s power to bring it closer to its potential.

Now, finally, comes the time to start letting go…

As in Part 3, there’s some overlap with prior material I’ve written, that can amplify the topic, so look for the Detour link to shoot off on an extended tangent.

The Editorial Process: Angels To Some, Demons To Others

If you’re writing solely for yourself, you can afford to be easily satisfied. If you’re writing for publication, then an editor may be involved. Some editors simply acquire. Others are more hands-on, and give suggestions for revisions. Likewise agents, some of whom initiate an editorial phase of their own. Publication or representation may be contingent on your cooperation.

Personally, I love the give-and-take of the editorial process. If I’ve just finished a piece, I’m too close to it to be objective. A fresh pair of eyes can spot weaknesses I might not see until after a month or more of distance. I find it enormously rewarding to work with a trusted editor to take a work that may be 95% there and bring it the last 5% of the way.

Still squeamish about letting others tamper with your words? Get over it already. To quote agent Donald Maass, he of Part 3’s subsection on micro-tension, from this Q&A:

“Outside readers are needed, critique partners or groups who are at your level or beyond. Professional athletes have coaches. Actors have directors. Rock groups have (for recording) producers and (for performances) musical directors. Why do writers think they can, or even should, go it alone? I don’t get that.”

A few tips on getting the most out of the editorial process:

• Be nice. Be prompt. In other words, be professional.
• Don’t act like a diva. Your every word may not be a precious gem and the editor may actually have a point.
• You don’t necessarily have to roll over on every single issue.
• If you disagree on a requested revision, diplomatically give your reasons why. You may persuade the editor to see it your way.
• Never forget that editors are human. They can get distracted and miss things. If an editor asks for something that’s already there, point out where it is. Just don’t get cocky or contemptuous about it. Be nice.
• If you absolutely can’t live with something an editor demands, cordially withdraw.
• Say thank you, and mean it.
• If you have a conflict with an editor, don’t complain about it on message boards, blogs, etc. Even if it doesn’t get back to the editor in question, it still makes you look like a whiner. EXCEPTION: If an editor and/or publisher has gone to the Dark Side of unscrupulous and unethical conduct. This is fairly rare, but often doesn’t come to light until people start comparing notes.

Some of this seems screamingly obvious. Yet there’s probably not an editor alive who can’t tell stories about the arrogant douchebags who’ve come across their desk. Don’t be the focal point of another such story. Your first encounter can lay the groundwork for a future relationship, or destroy all chances. Ultimately, it’s your work that clinches the deal, but if it comes down to a writer who’s professional to deal with and another who’s a proven pain-in-the-ass, guess who’s likely to get the nod.

Final Draft? There Ain’t No Such Thing!

As my artist friend James Powell is fond of quoting, “Art is never finished. It is merely abandoned.”

Comes the day, then, that I’m forced to abandon a work and let it continue on its way. This becomes, by default, the final draft. This is an arbitrary distinction. The truth is, I can hardly scan through anything of mine without wanting to tweak one more thing, one more thing.

But first publications don’t usually comprise only publications. Novels may come out in new editions. Short stories, novelettes, and novellas get reprinted, some of them several times: in year’s-best round-ups, in later anthologies and magazines. Most eventually get corralled into a collection — my fourth was published last spring, and I’m starting to plan the fifth. Nearly all my books, novels and collections alike, are making the migration into e-book formats.

I seem genetically incapable of letting something go back to print without taking another pass through it to see if anything needs touching up. It’s micro stuff at this point: Word X seems punchier than Word Y; this line of dialogue could ring better; this cultural reference could be updated; and the piece usually sheds a few more unnecessary words. This keeps the work alive and breathing for me, rather than feeling like I’ve only dug it out of a trunk full of mothballs in the attic.

This runs counter to the way some writers approach their work. Once a piece is published, they never touch it again. I have no quarrel with that. It’s just not my way.

Detour: “The Same River Twice.”

Exit Page Right

There are a lot of things that I hope this four-part epic post will be: Helpful. Food for thought. An expanded way of approaching your work. Inspirational. A source for an extra tool or three.

One thing I don’t intend it to be is a checklist.

Format dictates presenting these actions in a logical sequence. In practice, I’m never this logical or sequential. After the first draft, anything can happen in almost any order. Things that may look like distinct stages here more often than not get done simultaneously, in varied combinations, as I go through the novel or story time and again, one pass after another after another.

It isn’t distinct stages so much as a process of continual refinement. To return to the sculpture metaphor of Part 2, it’s chipping away everything that doesn’t look like the horse … and growing new marble where needed.

It’s just my own workflow, no more and no less, and there may be holes in my game. And for closing words, it’s hard to beat these, from Bruce Lee:

“Absorb what is useful, discard what is not, add what is uniquely your own.”

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Our journey until now…

In Part 1, we started big and clumsy, with birthing a misshapen blob of story and getting its core parts in order. Part 2 covered the administrative tasks of internal logic, and the art of language and rhythm.

Now we get into the skills that you can spend a lifetime refining.

More than any other aspects of reshaping a manuscript, these processes rely on sensibilities that develop through experience. They’re about feel and instinct and balance. A sixth sense about the right time and place for something. An inherent grasp of what’s too much and what isn’t enough.

In a couple places, I’ve addressed the topics in earlier posts elsewhere. If you’re interested in burrowing deeper into these subtopics, I’ve linked to PDFs of these essays that will open in new windows. Just look for the Detour links.

The Tangled Web: Better Simplicity Through Complexity

Arguably, this is the trickiest aspect of revising, because it doesn’t involve dealing with what’s there, but instead recognizing what isn’t there and needs to be. I think of it as growing connective tissue throughout the work — a longer work like a novel, especially — providing better meshing between elements that don’t quite hang together yet.

This may include:

Things that seem shallow and need to be deepened. Imagine a novel that heavily relies on an passionate, tempestuous relationship between two characters … but it’s all just smoke and fire, never getting down into the embers that fuel the relationship. If you’re only skating the surface of something that’s supposed to resonate, go deeper. Explore and reveal the why behind the intensity, rather than expecting the reader to take your word for it.

Elements that lack clarity and need further definition. If you’re too close to your work to be objective, this is where a trusted early reader can help. If someone comes back with a report that begins, “But I don’t get why they…”, then that part probably needs another look.

Strengthening story arcs. When a lot is going on, with a disparate cast of characters off doing different things, these subplots often benefit from having their own clear beginnings, middles, and ends. It can help to mentally isolate them and think of them as standalone stories broken up and layered throughout the larger whole.

Foreshadowing and surprise. The farther we get in a work, especially a long one, the greater the likelihood is that we come up with twists and turns that seem to emerge out of nowhere. Sometimes these work as-is. Often, though, they’re outcomes that should be prepared for earlier. If not, it becomes blatant that you’re just making it up as you go along.

Detour: “The Three-Step Process To Surprising Your Readers”

Micro-tension. This is a concept I’ve recently encountered, and it really is a revelation. It’s something that agent Donald Maass discusses at length in books and blog posts. “Tension on every page,” is his mantra, with the end goal being a storyline that pulls you in early and keeps pulling you along.

Think of this as a small, underlying conflict between a character and another character, or himself, or her circumstances or surroundings. Or it may be a prevailing mood, an undercurrent of disharmony. Micro-tension doesn’t remotely imply that you’re writing a thriller. It can be subtle, applying just as well to a romance as an episode of 24.

Enough of my butchery. Seek knowledge at the source. If you don’t pick up Maass’s The Fire In Fiction, at least Google “Maass micro-tension.”

Reinforcing the theme. Sometimes it’s only when we’ve gotten to the end of the first draft that we realize what we’ve really been writing about. A crime novel turns out to be about fractured relationships between fathers and sons; a multigenerational family saga reflects changes in the national character. Armed with this understanding, you’re now in a position to go back through the manuscript and bring out the full potential of the scenes and passages that reflect this unifier.

Cutting: Who Will Survive, And What Will Be Left Of Them?

If you’ve used the gut-dump approach (see part 1) for your first draft, I guarantee you that you don’t need everything you’ve ended up with. And probably with most any other approach as well. The main reason I overstock is to give myself a surplus of raw material to work with. It’s the same principle as censor-free brainstorming: generating 10 ideas to keep the best 3.

Ideally, then, subsequent drafts are going to tighten up and get shorter. While that’s an oversimplification — we’ve seen above that there may be places that need to be further beefed up — it’s likely there will be even more places that can benefit from nipping, tucking, cutting, and compression.

In his most excellent On Writing, Stephen King shares a formula that an editor sent back to him with an early rejection:

Second draft = First draft — 10%

Einstein couldn’t have made that more elegant. And then there’s William Faulkner’s admonition:

“Kill your darlings.”

Not surprisingly, people have floated different interpretations of this. I’ve always taken it to refer to the stuff that’s there for no greater purpose than to tell people, “Hey, look how good I’m writing!”

Detour: “The Delete Key: The Published Writer’s Best Friend”

Just Over The Horizon…

Yup, things have gone fractal again. Two parts became three, and now three have become four.

But there it shall end. With a look at the editorial process and why, for me at least, “final draft” is only a temporary state, Part 4 will definitely bring this series home and put it to bed.

Stay tuned.

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