It's Terrific! It's Terrible!

            At the moment I am hip-deep in the final revisions of my third mystery novel, Not Death, But Love. This is the period in producing any book, when it is not a happy time to be an author. From a creative standpoint, the book has been let go, and all that remains is the drudgery of making sure the commas are in place, the quotes are closed, the style is consistent, and the sentences are as tight as they can be.

            Nevertheless, when shying from the task or considering making short shrift of it, I am reminded of the one-star review I read for another self-published author’s work: “Next time, he should consider spending some money on an editor so he doesn’t put out another book so full of typos to an unsuspecting world.”

            I don’t want to get a review like that, and fear can be a powerful motivator.

When Perspective Vanishes

            Something else happens to an author at this stage of the game. By now, I have been living with this book for so long that it is hard to maintain any sort of perspective toward it. Reading the manuscript yet one more time, I find myself overreacting to almost everything in it.

            If I read a paragraph that strikes me as being good, I begin to have fantasies about the ghost of Tolstoy appearing before me and tipping his hat in tribute. If I read a paragraph that strikes me as being not quite right, it can be only a matter of seconds before I’ve gone to the conclusion that the whole book is garbage and the only thing to be done with it is to hit Command-All-Delete and start all over again.

            It is not at all uncommon to encounter two such paragraphs back-to-back within the span of a minute. The mood swings are scary, and I am grateful to have the self-discipline not to act on my worst impulses.

The Power of Stet

            I have, by the way, hired an editor for this book, and she was well worth the money. What I am doing now is reading the manuscript, chapter by chapter, noting her comments and corrections, and doing additional revisions on my own initiative. Even though I’m adding, as well as subtracting, I figure the final manuscript will be a thousand words shorter by the time I’m done.

            In doing this, I am coming face-to-face with my own mental tennis match. Several times now, I’ve marked a change on the manuscript, then when I set down to enter the revisions the next day, I looked at the change and decided to leave it the way it was in the first place. I came of age in the days of manual proofreading, and one of the proof terms of the time was “stet,” which means, “ignore the correction.” I am stetting a lot as I lurch toward the final version of the book.

            Even so, the version that goes live May 27 won’t be the final one. Everything changes, and, for all the attention my editor and I have paid to detail, there will be things to be corrected after publication. I believe in the book, so I will make those changes. I want it to present as well as possible to the readers.

The Writer's Intuition

            I probably could never have been a doctor, and if, somehow, I had made it into that position, I most likely would have done a lousy job of it. Although I have a rational, logical mind, it doesn’t wrap itself around the details of science particularly well, and spending every day with complaining sick people is not my idea of a good time.

            If I’d gone into that line of work, I would have been the doctor who threw it up at the age of 40 and bought a vineyard.

            On the other hand, I most likely would have made a good lawyer had I pursued that career. My logical mind applies itself to legal problems far more readily than it does to medical problems, and the courtroom holds far more instinctive appeal for me than the operating room.

            Actually, knowing how journalism turned out, there’s a part of me that wishes from time to time that I had gone into law.

Oh No, You Can’t

            One of the most pernicious mantras of our time — one that will be spoken at many a commencement ceremony over the next several weeks — is, “You can be anything you want to be.” Horse hockey. Not one person in a hundred will ever acquire the political skills or the desire to get elected dog catcher, never mind President of the United States.

            A more accurate appraisal would be, “If you find a pursuit that your intellect, temperament and talent suit you for; and if you work at that pursuit for a considerable length of time, until you sharpen your skills to the point where they become intuitive, you can, with a bit of luck, be successful in that endeavor.”

            The trick is knowing yourself somewhat realistically. Don’t we all remember kids in high school who thought they were going to be professional ball players when they could barely play catch? Or who wanted to be movie stars when they had no expressive ability whatsoever?

So You Want to Write a Book

            Amazon has now made it possible for anyone who has written a book to put it out in front of the world. This has allowed a few people who have written good books to self-publish them. It has allowed far more people who have written terrible books to embarrass themselves in front of a worldwide audience. I’ve published two mystery novels this way myself and am not entirely sure which class I belong in.

            I do know that writing a mystery isn’t easy. Almost anyone who succeeds at it will have read hundreds of mysteries to absorb how it’s done; will have been developing his or her writing skills over the years; and will have developed the writer’s mentality that sees the world, always, as material to be mined for fiction.

            Without the mentality, and without the intuitive understanding of writing that comes from having done it a lot, almost no one is going to come up with anything passable, no matter how many creative writing classes they take. My old managing editor Ward Bushee used to say, “You can’t teach judgment. A person either has it or they don’t, and the best you can do is help develop it a bit in someone who already has it.”

            The same could be said of writing.