I’m back to revising my novel, the one I’ve been working on for over a decade. I want to wrap this baby up and send it out (again) — an impulse driven by my impatience, that nagging feeling this thing is taking way too long. It can be hard to know when it’s time to submit and when we’re just tired of revising. People say it’s ready when you have no idea how to make it better.
A couple months ago I realized I had four completely different directions I could go to improve it. So me being me, I started four docs and simultaneously rewrote the novel four different ways. (!!!) It was pure madness, but eventually it became clear which version was best and I dropped the others. A handful of smart writers read the new draft and we met over Zoom. They each had wildly different responses to the multiple POVs and the contrasting opinions made my head spin. The next morning I received a sanity-saving text from one who’d been thinking about our discussion and said I shouldn’t listen to their feedback since their responses were so varied. (Thanks, Shayne!)
Except, of course, they were right that something wasn’t working. It reminded me of what Rebecca Makkai once said: typically when readers tell us how to fix our work, they’re wrong, but they’re right that something is falling short. So it’s our job to sift through their feedback and figure out how to address that particular issue.
I’d forgotten that somewhere along the way. In my determined quest to publish my novel, I reached a point where I was taking feedback without examining it closely. My attitude was basically, you think that’ll make it better, okay! Here you go! But the latest round of feedback made me realize the endless revising had drained the novel’s spark.
Too much feedback can kill our work. It can suck the fun out of it, make us feel lost, and our work can lose its glimmer if we scrub too hard.
So I’m trying to reverse scrub— rewriting, yes, but in a way that’s fun. And that’s giving back the energy it lost from too much editing.
Finding my way back to the fire of the novel is enough assurance I’m on the right path, but I recently had a tarot reading that felt affirming. While it could’ve been about my personal life, I decided it was about my writing because I’ve read you create the meaning in tarot. You look at the images and put together a story. And since stories are meant to be shared, I’m sharing mine with you:
You’ve experienced a setback and it really knocked you down. You poured your heart into something and had high hopes for it working out a certain way and it didn’t, which shook you. But you need to take a leap and put yourself out there again. Things will work out differently this time.
I don’t need to be told to take a leap. I’m the person who needs to be pulled from the edge of the cliff because I tend to be foolishly reckless optimistically bold, ever ready to take risks. So what I need to be told instead is to slow down. I need to be reminded the work takes the time it takes. We can’t rush it. Sometimes our work needs a good scrubbing, and then maybe it needs to get a little messy again. The wild adventure of writing a book isn’t linear, and it requires patience. We can’t be in a rush to leap, and we might have to sit in the discomfort of how dang LONG it’s taking. But when it is time to finally take that leap? we’ll be ready.
Reading recommendations:
Online:
Daniel Garcia has a beautiful new essay in The Masters Review. I’m always so inspired by Daniel’s creative use of form and this essay is no exception.
Chrissy Martin has two razor sharp poems in Defunct.
Books:
Company by Shannon Sanders is every bit as brilliant and masterful as I knew it would be. This is one to preorder, people! Also, Shannon’s story “Rioja” was recently featured on Ursa Short Fiction, a podcast hosted by Deesha Philyaw and Dawnie Walton that I’m obsessed with. (Psst- the episode with Dantiel W. Moniz is life-giving.)
Speaking of preordering, my dear friend Amelia Brunskill’s new novel Wolfpack is out June 15th! A suspenseful novel about a cult written in verse? Sign me up!
Other things:
Speaking of signing up, for those who write creative nonfiction, Davon Loeb, author of The In-Betweens, is leading a workshop this summer through Manhattanville! (Also, he’s got a breathtaking new essay in the latest issue of Gulf Coast, also very worth checking out.)
Finally, since I mentioned tarot, if you’re looking to get a reading, I’d like to suggest booking with Ines Bellina, author of The Cranky Guide to Writing newsletter, as she’s trying to raise money to go to Tin House’s Summer Workshop. She’s excellent. You can book a reading here.
This post’s title came from this song:
I hope you can give your work the time it needs, even if it’s going much slower than you’d like!