I spent several months in the weeds of a revision of my latest novel, Above and Beyond. It felt like I was circling Detroit Metro Airport, low on fuel, after a particularly harrowing trans-Atlantic flight punctuated by vertiginous microbursts over Lake Erie (if that sounds like an oddly specific simile, ask me about it sometime when we’re within arm’s reach of a bar–I’ve felt safer jumping out of a plane than I felt on that flight). This morning, during another session of a wonderful Zoom writing group I joined earlier in the year when the revisions had stalled, I printed out the full second draft. This is what I consider a readable draft, and whenever she’s done with her teaching responsibilities for the semester, my fantastic beta-reader Christina will read it through and share her thoughts. Is it a story? Does it work? How do you feel afterward?
It’s not as though I can’t answer these questions for myself. In fact, I’m getting better and better at being my own editor with each project, as one would hope. But pretty much every writer will tell you some version of how crucial it is to get out of your own head at some point. I’m not yet ready to let this story go and declare it finished, but I do want to know what someone else thinks of it. In some very real sense, I want every manuscript I give her to be better than the one before it, even though I know it’s not perfect or polished, and I am all ears when it comes to suggestions from a smart and earnest reader.
And just in case you’re wondering, the problem is not usually that I really like what I have written and maybe need to be brought down a peg or two hundred. Rather, I usually need to be convinced that it does not suck, because that is what it so often looks like from the weeds. Christina already knows the general shape of the story, so she’ll be able to look past the big picture and react to the execution, too.
Assuming that my my view of the weeds is not representative of the overall effect of the novel, query letters will go out within the month, giving me plenty of time to tinker with the issues Christina and I identify.