The Art of Re-Creation

Six years ago I wrote a novel in a month.

I wrote every morning at the kitchen table, the November sky pelting gloom against the window. I wrote during my breaks at work and sometimes when I should have been working. I didn’t think, much, or lay out a plot, or do any research. I just wrote and ate Mandarin oranges and slept.

I tricked myself into doing it by telling myself I could fix it later.

You’ve heard this one. Just get it out. Let it all out. You can fix it later. This is good enough for now. Just create! Just be! Don’t edit!

And it is important trickery, don’t get me wrong. There are people – I was those people – who never start, or never finish, or who edit as they go so that at the end of the day they have wordcount: 0. Overcoming the internal critic is important. Getting the words out of your head is important.

Recently I decided or realized that I have a fear of The Second Draft, where many people seem to fear more The Beginning of the Creative Process. I am guessing there are also those people who do three or twelve or eighteen drafts and never get to the query letter. Maybe I will be that person someday! Who knows! Stay tuned!

We all have our speed bumps.

I committed with a friend to revise something big during the month of May. She has a novel and I needed one. Suddenly, from one of the boxes in my bedroom closet, my novel reappeared after years in hiding, and I knew it would be just the right size and scope for me to cut my Second Draft Teeth on.

I have never revised a novel. For good reason, as it turns out. Here are my preliminary thoughts, after roughly 30 pages of editing.

(Clarabell the chicken & sock image courtesy of Madelinetosh, who hand-dyes and makes amazing things from fibre.)

Revising a novel is like taking a perfectly good sock that has one little tug in it, attempting to tighten the tug and having the whole fucking sock fall apart. You barely know how to knit and you don’t appear to have the right size needles and where is the pattern for the sock anyway, everyone knows socks are the hardest things to knit. Why couldn’t it just be a scarf? Maybe you should just make it into a scarf. But attempts to make it into a scarf fail utterly and there is still the shape of a sock there, like a ghost-sock, so why not just try to…maybe…urge it back into sock shape…start at the heel … oh dammit. You have no idea how to knit socks. Seriously.

Now you have this pile of yarn all over your desk and a couple of needles and the need, the sleep-altering, bottom-burning DESIRE to see that yarn once again take the shape of a useful, attractive sock, so you start. Slowly. To put it back together. Jesus. It’s tedious. It takes all the fun out of everything. < -- That sentence formerly ended with an exclamation mark and I changed it to a period, because novel editing takes the fun out of everything. Yes, out of every fifteen minutes of head-scratching fury there is usually one minute of AHA! but that is rocky math, friends. That is the kind of math that makes you want to cut up all your socks with kitchen shears and go barefoot forever just because it's easier than putting this sock back together. You go out and see other socks in stores. Who made those socks? MACHINES? Hand-knit by who? God? You get some books about knitting. You read some blogs about knitting. You stare at people's feet. You do one line at a time. OK just one more line. And you're working and working and you see nothing for your efforts, just notes, just more notes about more work you will have to do and you just want to start something new, feel that rush of creative excitement like a cool wind over your skin. You remember you have a blog. You remember you can start and finish stories or just start them or just write bad poems or whatever; something, anything to take you away for ten minutes from this pile of tangled yarn. After a while, you've done 30 of 100 pages and your neck won't turn left or right but you are pretty sure you can see where you're going with this thing, this massive, unevenly striped tube-that-might-be-a-sock-someday that you so recently and so naively thought was pretty coherent. And you realize that if you ever write another first draft of a novel, telling yourself, "it's OK, you can fix it in the second draft" is not going to work. Hopefully the thrill of completion will be enough and, like labour pain and the first months of my children's lives, I will blur this experience into a cotton candy swirl and think of it fondly enough that I want to do it again. Or I could take up knitting.