Writing the Novel_ From Plot to Print - Lawrence Block [77]
It’s possible you’ll produce a first draft which looks to be submittable without a major rewrite. You may find, however, that the manuscript needs to be retyped before you send it off.
If so, I have a suggestion. Unless you absolutely can’t stand the idea, do the final typescript yourself.
You can probably guess the reason from my discussion of the revision of Burglars Can’t Be Choosers. No matter how much editing you do in pen or pencil, no matter how thoroughly you rework your material before having it typed, you’ll find more little changes to make when you actually hammer away at the keys yourself.
A friend of mind used to do this. Then she started to get higher advances and her books began earning more subsidiary income, and she decided she could afford the luxury of hiring somebody to type her final drafts for her. She works very hard over them, making innumerable pencil corrections before bundling them off to the typist, but her style’s not as polished in her latest books because she’s not doing her own typing. She’s omitting what was always a set stage in her personal process of revision, and while her books are still well written, I think they used to be smoother.
Earlier, in the chapter on snags and dead ends, I advised against setting a book aside when you run into trouble with it. Although it may seem like a good idea, it rarely lets you develop a fresh slant on your novel. The books I abandon in midstream invariably float off out of my life and are never seen again.
When you finish a first draft, however, I think you should give yourself breathing space before plunging into a rewrite. There’s a reason for this beyond the very real fact that you’re likely to be tired and deserving of a break.
The writer who has just completed a book cannot usually be sufficiently objective about it to appraise it properly with an eye toward revision. In my own case, it’s hard enough to be objective about my work ten years after it’s been published, let alone when the pages are still warm and the ink still wet. At that stage I’m not only too close to the book, I’m still inside it. A break of a couple of weeks lets me unwind, and when I sit down and read the thing from start to finish I just might have a certain amount of perspective on it.
During this cooling-off period, you might want to have someone else read the book—but only if you’ve got someone around whose judgment you trust. If a negative reaction might paralyze you, don’t take any chances. Wait until you’ve done your rewriting before you show the book to anybody.
Now’s the time to have the book read by a knowledgeable acquaintance if you’re concerned about your lack of expertise in a certain area. Suppose the book has a background in coin collecting, for instance. You’ve done a ton of research on the subject but you’re no numismatist and you can’t be certain you’ve got the lingo right. Maybe you’ve committed the sort of glaring error that’ll get you snotty letters from your readers.
Show the book to someone with the right background, explaining your uncertainty to him and asking him to read it with that consideration in mind. Make it clear to him that you want him to spot errors, that you’re not showing him the book in the hope that he’ll praise it. (It’s necessary to state this out front, because most people assume that most authors want not criticism but praise. And most of the time, incidentally, they’re absolutely right.) When he tells you what’s wrong and how to fix it, you can incorporate the information you get from him in your rewrite. If he tells you everything’s fine and your book is numismatically accurate, you can stop worrying about that aspect of it while you rewrite.
And, if he offers a lot of nonnumismatic criticisms of your story and characters and writing style, you can thank him politely and pay him no more attention in this respect than you see fit. Remember, you showed him the book because of his knowledge about rare coins, not because you figured him as the most perceptive editor since Maxwell Perkins.
Which leads us,