Revisions

I’m going through revisions for my World War I book, reading through all the things that don’t make sense or maybe I changed halfway through the book and forgot to double check, plus the typos and stupid mistakes that persist in a 90,000 word manuscript no matter how many times I read through it. It can be a pretty demoralizing process, but one in which I have been delightfully surprised at my own conscientiousness. I’m also in the middle of a new manuscript, one that is all jumbled and broken and I keep pausing and wondering if maybe I should just start over and, well, it’s at least nice to know that past Serenity actually checked to see if they carried revolvers or pistols in the British Expeditionary Forces.

It’s a little window into the slow and halting process that I went through, a little over a year now, trying to make sure I got it right. There are so many things I would change, so many little and big tweaks that I could switch, but I don’t know if it would help or hurt the story, so I don’t. I once read that Dostoevsky rewrote Crime and Punishment three times, in first person, third person, and third person privileged. At the time, I thought, “That’s wild!” and now I wonder if maybe that’s just what it took.

There’s this American thing about work ethic, nose to the grindstone, hustle culture and all that. I hate it so much, not least because I have been in both creative and non-creative professions and I’ve found that all work and no play doesn’t make Jack a dull boy, it makes him make increasingly poor decisions due to exhaustion. When it comes to writing, there is a limit to what any person can achieve, unless they’re Stephen King on a coke-fueled binge in the early 1980s, of course.

Even some of the most prolific authors I know talk about spending 8 hours writing, but include sitting and staring out of a window or going for a walk to be part of that writing time. It’s hard, this job that doesn’t feel like a real job. And having a significant portion of that “job” be sitting and imagining, well, I might as well pack it in. There’s no grindstone here.

So there’s relief in the revisions. Look! All of those days spent thinking and typing, it’s here! That two hour rabbit hole where I looked at pictures of mess kits to figure out if they would use a bowl or a cup for soup? It mattered! And maybe, when I switch back to my current mess of a manuscript, I can remind myself that I won’t remember how messy it was, just how much fun I had writing it.