I’m sitting across from Richard Nash, a ‘rogue editor’ who has shown more excitement about the future of publishing than all the other editors at the conference combined. He is earnest, and leans across our table at the Carousel Bar to tell me the words I didn’t know I needed to hear:
“You have to respect the writer that was, that finished the book.”
We have been talking about revision, a jagged rocky terrain I’m lost in, and he’s just handed me the map.
I started my novel when I was twenty-one, while I did my ‘victory lap’ fifth year at Truman. It began as something completely different – not only in genre but in the kind of writing – and has matured with me. At least I like to think so. It’s been the journey of my writer-self, spanning the length of my time at LSU and reaching beyond.
And I cannot stop revising it.
Two years ago I referred to the draft I was working on as the final draft. Today I make jokes that I’m working on my fifth final draft, but it doesn’t feel right. The book is ready to be done, I’m just not certain I’m ready to let go.
The anxiety of revision has never been like this, for me. I am afraid of taking out the crackle, the immediacy of my work. I worry that while I smooth down the rough edges, I’m also polishing away everything that’s alive about my stories. Revising short stories is terrifying, revising my novel is a different animal entirely.
I realize it now: I stopped respecting the writer who finished the book. I second guessed her choices, I distrusted her motives. I saw in her all of the weaknesses I imagined I’d grown out of – and resented the reminder. But all of that is irrelevant. I’m trying to fix something that cannot be fixed.
With a short story, there’s a good chance that the person revising it is the same person who wrote it. Unless you stashed your story away in a drawer for a year or three, the only biggest difference is that maybe you’ll get a haircut between drafts. When you write a novel, no matter what, by the time you finish you will be a different person than the one who started. A year – or three – will have passed, and a year of living makes a huge difference. Even if you somehow went a year without having any new experiences, heartbreaks or television shows, the experience of writing your novel will change you. The same thing happens during revision. The process just takes too long.
“You will be a different writer by the time it’s published,” Richard Nash says to me, and I feel some tight place in my chest relaxing. I can’t revise away the fact that a different person wrote this story, and I shouldn’t try to. She wrote a novel, and I think it’s a good one. It’s time to respect that.