So, as you might have read, my 2nd novel, RADIOLAND has been picked up by a publisher, and I’m very happy and excited about this. A lot of work went into it over a number of years and…
…and it’s a week later, and I’m reading over the manuscript (actually, “reading over” is not quite accurate, I’m squinting at it) and I’m experiencing a darkly familiar feeling as I had with the last book. With THE SOCIETY OF EXPERIENCE I was initially ecstatic to realize that it was going to be published. And then something inside tapped me on the shoulder, and I turned around to hear it say: “You realize you wrote this years ago and that it doesn’t reflect you or your interests as a writer currently?”
And as I’m squinting over the current draft of RADIOLAND and going over the editor’s notes (five pages), I am finding part of myself wishing in the same familiar way that, if time, patience and energy were no object, whether I could just rewrite it from scratch.
Now, of course I’m not going to do that. I need to honour the work that I started. However: why the hell am I thinking this in the first place?
It’s complicated, but I’m going to try and break it down anyways. First, part of it is the sheer amount of work I set up for myself, having written a fairly ambitious piece of fiction that is trying to blend a number of genres and comment on a number of things, all while attempting to maintain a sense of rhythm while keeping the reader interested in the characters and where they are going. With any level of ambition comes the requirement to follow-through with what it is you’ve promised the reader or else you may not deliver the goods and the reader might feel ripped off. We can call this the weight of expectation. Second, and perhaps something only writers or other artists might identify with is that, while it’s healthy to have time away from your work for sake of perspective, there’s a part of me screaming out but I’m not the same person/writer now as I was when I wrote this, and so, as I squint at the manuscript with an eye to revision, I’m needing to find a way to re-approach the work so that I’m respecting what it was I was not only going for as a novel, but what I was going through and ruminating on at the time that I wrote it. I honestly don’t know if other novelists experience this, but I certainly do. Third is easy to explain but hard to do. It’s called: letting go.
In any case, I look at these as growing pains, and I’m privileged to be in a situation where these are my problems.
