The Walk-Away
In negotiations, one of the most difficult things to do is the walk-away. When you tell the seller their price is too high, and you turn to go. Even if you REALLY want what they’re selling, you need to be prepared to turn your back on it and walk off, or you run the risk of being taken advantage of.
So they say, anyway. I grew up in suburban New York. We didn’t practice a lot of haggling at the Galleria Mall or the Gristedes where I worked. In corporatized, homogenized America, haggling is obsolete.
But the walk-away has another use, and that’s in writing. It’s when you write something, put it away for six months, and then read it again with a critical eye. It is an amazing shift of perspective, because you are never in the same mental/emotional place you were when you wrote it, and flaws that didn’t even occur to you at the time leap off the page at you after the time off.
This has always been the case with my writing. I spew out a story, thinking it’s great, put it away for a while, and then come back and make massive changes. I frequently lament the loss of some plot thread or another, but the end result is always MUCH better than the first draft was. As my college writing professor, Raymond Federman, used to say, “Writing is not writing. Writing is REWRITING.”
There is a long section (6 chapters) of book 2 that I wrote last summer. It is a more-or-less complete story arc, telling the life-story of the book’s protagonist up to the point in time where book 1 left off, so that I can then begin to synch up the characters with the readers understanding everyone’s perspective.
When I wrote it, I was elated, thinking it was some of the best stuff I had ever written. But when I gave it to my agent, editor, and test readers, their response was more or less “Meh, it’s okay.”
Huh.
So I took all their comments and put them aside, along with the chapters themselves, and moved on to write other sections until I had covered all independent parts of the book. The remaining chapters will bring all the myriad characters and their solo adventures together, so I need to finalize those solo parts.
Re-reading those earlier sections has really opened my eyes to a lot of things. I saw what worked, what didn’t, what created good tension, and what diffused it unnecessarily. I edited every chapter right after writing it, but this was different. It’s like how reading a trade paperback (TPB) collection of a comic book is different from (and far better than) reading the monthlies. You get to see how the story as a whole works, as opposed to individual chapter arcs, the subtle details of which are lost by the time the next issue comes out. When I was a kid, I had the time to read every issue six times so I was always up to speed, but time is more precious as an adult.
After I had covered the pages in red ink and notes to improve the section, I finally went back and looked at the comments from my test readers. I think it’s really important to form your own opinions before looking at the thoughts of others, but as always, those opinions are invaluable to me. Some were in line with my own assessments, and others weren’t; some I agreed with, some I didn’t.
I am gearing up to start rewriting the section now. It’s going to be a LOT of work, unraveling some plot threads and weaving in others, but I know the end-result will be FAR better than what I have now.
I’ll never understand how authors like Piers Anthony, who write like a book every 4 months, do it. Do they rewrite at all? Judging by the state of Xanth when I stopped reading (around book 16 or something ridiculous like that), probably not.
But everyone’s writing process is different, I guess.
i have a trunk full of stuff marinating. or fermenting.
that might explain that odor….