old flames and banked fires

Julie Elizabeth Leto (and yes, you’re going to see me quoting her a lot, because she’s brilliant) wrote an excellent essay several years ago entitled “To the Manuscripts I’ve Loved Before.” It’s an excellent piece that every beginning and developing writer should read. It’s directed to those of us who are revising and revising and revising the same proposal and never getting anywhere. She writes:

I’m here to tell you that revising and revising is, in most cases, a lesson in futility. You need to start new stories, explore new situations, study and learn and apply… [Diana snips]

And that’s another thing. You don’t develop voice through revising. Voice is developed through the telling of the story itself. So in order to find your voice, you need to tell lots of stories…you need to write more books!

I’m not putting down revising. It’s an essential process that sometimes separates the published from the unpublished. But you also shouldn’t keep working on the same story forever. After a while, it’s time to let go. Maybe you’ll someday be able to go back to that story and with your new, developed skills, you’ll be able to fix the problem. But that’s for later. I’m talking about now.

Now, you may have, through your study of the writing craft, have evolved beyond those characters and that story situation. You need to test those skills on something new.

Good advice, and I’ve been using it ever since I first read the essay in 2001. It allowed me to put away the books that weren’t working and concentrate on the ones that were. The advice that let me put my most beloved novel in a drawer and say, “The time will come, dear one. It’s just not today.” If I was still fighting to wrest manuscripts I’d written three years ago into a shape that would make editors and agents sit up and take notice, would I have had any time to write (Secret) Society Girl? Hell no!

It helps that I don’t think of my books as “my babies.” They are my creations, sure, and as such, I am very protective of them, but I think of them more like lovers. I am protective (very alpha female, I), and nurturing, and loyal, and when the love affair is over, well, I won’t be waiting on the train platform.

I know one writer who is still madly in love with her first manuscript. She keeps rewriting it over and over again in a variety of different forms. Now it’s a category romance, now it’s a single title, now it’s a chick lit (“Look, I changed the pronouncs, that makes it a chick lit, right?” [grrrrrrrr]). I know another writer who has been working on the same story for so long that imprints have formed, requested the book, and fallen into obscurity before she’s decided that it’s perfect enough to send in. A third writer I know is banging her head against a titanium wall, convinced in her soul that the only way to break into the writing world is through category romance, and she’ll mangle her natural voice until she can write a saleable one. These people all need to read Julie’s article and move the hell on. In some caes, that means starting something new, in some cases, that means letting something go, and in some cases, that means pulling her fucking head out of the sand and getting a clue — ahem, sorry. 😉

As for me, I’m looking at the article with a new eye. I’ve now sold two books in a genre very different than anything I’ve written before. These manuscripts I’ve loved before — do they have any place in my career now? When I’ve met all my deadlines and I have a chance to market another of my books, will I have changed so much as a writer that I won’t recognize them anymore, I won’t know them in the way that allows me to delve deep into their souls and rearrange things to make them better?

(I already experienced this once with Meltdown. By the time I returned to it to revise, the two novels nan a novella I’d written in the interim turned a short revision process into a months-long overhaul. It was the second book I’d ever written. It should have been chucked in the closet, and to send it to the editor who asked, I had to rewrite it from top to bottom.)

Will I go back and look at the manuscripts I haven’t relegated to the back corner of my closet, and think, “These are the novels of a different girl, in a different career. Nice books, but not for me.” Will they be my old flames? Good books, award-winning books, books I remember with fondness and nostalgia (“this is the one that taught me pacing!” “Oh, I remember how much I enjoyed writing humor when I started this one!” “Wow, this one had such great sex!”) but nothing I could ever settle down with.

Or will they survive in my heart as little “what ifs” — the type that may lead me to mid-life indiscretions a few months or years down the road. I see my book across a crowded industry update, see just where it might fit in a publisher’s schedule, and regardless of my branding, I leap into a fling with my once-beloved project. (Can you tell I’m a sucker for reunion romances?) I will justify it by point to Suz Brockmann’s Letters to Kelly or somesuch.

Ah, what the hell. Diversity is good, right? 😉