The other
day I was having coffee with a photographer friend. We meet from time to time
to discuss our respective crafts, and this particular day, we were talking
about mine. And he asked a very good and very interesting question.
He prefaced
it by saying that it seemed to him that there are often a number of different
ways of saying something clearly and effectively. So how much, he continued,
does it matter, whether a writer gets a sentence or a paragraph perfect? If it
was all right on the first draft, how important is it to keep re-doing it; and,
in the course of re-doing it, isn’t it possible that something that was good in
the first draft gets lost in the course of constant revisions?
My answer
was yes.
Genre Fiction vs. “Literature”
Then again,
I write genre fiction — mystery novels, to be precise. That no doubt affects my
opinion on the issue. I know I’m producing disposable items, not heirlooms. My
books should be done well enough to keep readers entertained during a long
plane flight, but I’m under no illusions that anyone will be reading them a
hundred years from now.
In that
case, the standard isn’t getting it perfect (which a writer almost never does,
anyway), but rather getting it pretty good within a reasonable amount of time.
Once the first draft is written, it goes through three revisions, the last of
which involves reviewing and addressing my editor’s changes. After that, it’s caveat emptor for prospective readers.
I do a
great deal of planning and outlining before I begin writing, and with years of
journalism experience at my tail, I fancy myself pretty good at writing
competent prose on the first go-around. Because of that, and because of the
standards of the genre, my first drafts are generally 90 percent of the way to
what I want, and revisions are mostly housekeeping affairs, rather than major
conceptual rewrites.
Buy a Book at the Airport
Now
obviously, if something just isn’t right, the author should keep working on
that something until it gets to at least some semblance of rightness. You don’t
want to put your book out there with something in it that you know is wrong. I
mean, we have to have some standards.
Nevertheless,
I keep reading posts in author groups and other such places in which people are
agonizing over how to get something perfect. A lot of times, it’s the title
and/or first sentence of their book. Other times, it’s just the question of
revisions in general. The problem with that is that when you look at anything —
a manuscript, a house, a marriage — too long and too hard, all you see are the
problems, and the good qualities fade into the background. It’s a path to
madness, and writers are singularly prone to traveling it.
If anyone
really believes their book has to be revised to the point of perfection, my
advice would be to go into any airport bookstore, purchase any bestselling
novel, and read it. None of them are perfect, and some aren’t even very well
written, but they had something — a story, an idea, a strong central character
— that made people like them. And that was enough.
As one of
my editors at the newspaper used to say, “Just tell the damn story and give me
clean copy.”
