You can ignore everything else in this lecture except number eight. It is the only absolutely twenty-four-karat-gold-plated piece of advice I have to give you. I’ve never taken it myself, though one day I hope to. The advice is as follows.
When you finish your novel, if money is not a desperate priority, if you do not need to sell it at once or be published that very second—put it in a drawer. For as long as you can manage. A year or more is ideal—but even three months will do. Step away from the vehicle. The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat backstage with a line of novelists at some festival, all of us with red pens in hand, frantically editing our published novels into fit form so that we might go onstage and read from them. It’s an unfortunate thing, but it turns out that the perfect state of mind to edit your own novel is two years after it’s published, ten minutes before you go onstage at a literary festival. At that moment every redundant phrase, each show-off, pointless metaphor, all the pieces of deadwood, stupidity, vanity and tedium are distressingly obvious to you. Two years earlier, when the proofs came, you looked at the same page and couldn’t see a comma out of place. And by the way, that’s true of the professional editors, too; after they’ve read a manuscript multiple times, they stop being able to see it. You need a certain head on your shoulders to edit a novel, and it’s not the head of a writer in the thick of it, nor the head of a professional editor who’s read it in twelve different versions. It’s the head of a smart stranger who picks it off a bookshelf and begins to read. You need to get the head of that smart stranger somehow. You need to forget you ever wrote that book.
Transcribed by me from the article “That Crafty Feeling,” on pages 107–108 of my hardcover copy of Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays, © 2009, The Penguin Press.
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On reading this, I was reminded of Charles Lindbergh’s two books on his flight from New York to Paris in 1927.
The first, “We”, was published in 1928, and was largely the work of an itinerant 26-year-old pilot who’d just become world-famous. There’s a shyness there, and in the awkwardness of language a deep affection, almost a love for the aeroplane that carried him – hence the title, “We”.
Two decades later, Lindbergh revisited the experience, and “The Spirit of St. Louis” was published in 1953. It’s a much more polished work, and much more revealing of the inner man, and yet…something is missing.
The love.
I’m glad we have both versions, and I thin of this when going back and editing a work that’s been in the drawer for awhile.
This is a great example! Thank you!
Very wise advice. I finished my first draft in August. I was desperate to kee going – to start from the beginning and edit. But thankfully my writer friends forbid it. So I allowed it to collect dust, wrote 30K of another book and have just picked it back up this week, and boy was it an eye opener! I will forever more have at least a 3 month break from any draft before I edit. VERY wise advice.
It’s very hard to wait, though. 🙂