But that hardly matters. What’s relevant, I think, is that Susann knew her audience. The public evidently likes the idea of reading books over which writers have labored endlessly. Perhaps readers find it galling to shell out upwards of $8.95 for a book that flowed from its author’s typewriter like water from a cleft rock. The stuff’s supposed to read as though it came naturally and effortlessly, but one wants to be assured that a soul-satisfying amount of hard work went into it.
That’s nice to know when Dick Cavett holds your book up and asks you how you did it, but in the meantime you’re naturally more concerned with producing the best possible novel than with figuring out how best to push it on the tube. Is revision necessary? And what’s the proper approach to it?
For me, the best approach involves a sort of doublethink. If I take it for granted while writing a book that I’m going to have to sit down and do it over, I’m encouraging myself to be sloppy. I don’t have to find the right word or phrase. I don’t have to think a scene through and decide which way I want to tackle it. I can just slap any old thing on the page, telling myself that the important thing is to get words on paper, that I can always clean up my act in the rewrite.
Now this may be precisely what you require in order to conquer your inhibitions at the typewriter. Earlier I mentioned a couple of writers who produce lengthy first drafts, throwing in everything that occurs to them, then pruning ruthlessly in their second drafts.
I find, though, that unless I regard what I’m writing as final copy, I don’t take it seriously enough to give it my best shot. For this reason I proofread as I go along, do my first drafts on damnably expensive high-rag-content white bond, and get each page right before I go on to the next one. I don’t necessarily rewrite as I go along, but neither do I leave anything standing if it bothers me. Sometimes I’ll have twenty or thirty crumpled pages in or around my wastebasket by the time I’ve produced my daily five pages of finished copy. Other times I won’t have to throw out a single page, but even then I’ll be doing what you might call rewriting-in-advance in that I’ll try sentences and paragraphs a few different ways in my mind before committing them to the page.
In the chapter on starting your novel, I mentioned that I frequently rewrite the opening chapters of a book. Aside from that, I usually push on all the way through to the end without any substantial rewriting other than the polish-as-you-go business just described. Now and then, however, upon proofreading yesterday’s work prior to beginning today’s production, I’ll find something bothersome in the last couple of pages. This may happen because the unconscious mind, laboring during the night with what’s to be written next, will have come up with something that calls for changes in the section immediately preceding it. It may happen, too, because I was tired when I reached the end of yesterday’s work, and the results of fatigue are evident in the light of dawn. When this occurs, I’ll naturally redo the offending pages; this serves the dual purpose of getting me into the swing of my narrative even as I’m improving yesterday’s work.
Some writers elaborate on this method, rewriting their whole manuscript as they go along. They begin each day by rewriting in toto the first draft they produced the day before, then go on to churn out fresh first-draft copy which they will in turn revise the following morning, and so on a day at a time until the book is finished. There’s a lot to be said for this method. If your first drafts are stylistically choppy enough to require revision as a matter of course, and if the idea of being faced with a top-to-bottom rewrite all in one chunk is unattractive, this sort of pay-as-you-go revision policy has much to recommend it. Among other things, you don’t encourage yourself to be slipshod in your first draft, since your day of reckoning isn’t that far in the future.
This won’t work, incidentally, if you produce the sort of first drafts that require substantial structural revision, with lots of cutting and splicing.
A couple of pages back I described my present approach to writing and rewriting as a sort of doublethink. By this I mean that, although I work with the intention of producing final copy the first time around, I keep myself open to the possibility that a full second draft will be required. If I determine that this is the case, the fact that my first draft is neatly typed on crisp white bond paper doesn’t alter the fact that I have to redo it from top to bottom.
When I wrote Burglars Can’t Be Choosers, I stopped one chapter from the end and rewrote the whole thing. I suppose I could have written the final chapter of the first draft before starting the rewrite, but I didn’t see the point; I knew that my final chapter would be affected by the revisions I’d make in earlier chapters, so that I’d only wind up redoing it entirely later on.
Burglars Can’t Be Choosers got a complete rewrite for a couple of reasons. One stemmed from the fact that I didn’t know the identity of the murderer until I was almost three-quarters of the way through the book. The solution I hit on necessitated a certain amount of changes along the way. I wanted to push on to the end — or almost to the end, as it turned out — before making them, but they did have to be made in order for the book to hold up.
In addition, I was dissatisfied with the pace of the novel. While most of the scenes worked well enough, I felt there was too much wasted time in the story line. A rereading convinced me that I could eliminate a day from the plot, tightening things up a good deal in the process.
I could have tried making these changes by cutting and pasting, redoing selected pages here and there. I considered this but couldn’t avoid the conclusion that the book would profit considerably from a complete rewrite. While it seemed to me that some portions of the book didn’t require any changes beyond an occasional sentence here and there, I decided to retype everything.
By doing this, I made an incalculable number of changes. It’s virtually impossible for me to retype a page of my own work without changing something. Sometimes it was clear to me that these changes constituted a substantial improvement, although this improvement might not have been apparent to most of the book’s audience. In other cases it’s moot whether the changes I made were for better or worse; I occasionally had the feeling I was changing phrasing solely as a respite from the boredom of pure copy typing.
I would never have rewritten Burglars Can’t Be Choosers for stylistic reasons alone. The book was written smoothly enough the first time around, and if I hadn’t had to make structural changes I would have submitted my first draft as it stood. In retrospect, I’m glad I was forced to rewrite it; it’s a better book for the extra work it received.
It’s possible you’ll produce a first draft which looks to be submittable without a major rewrite. You may find, however, that the manuscript needs to be retyped before you send it off.
If so, I have a suggestion. Unless you absolutely can’t stand the idea, do the final typescript yourself.
You can probably guess the reason from my discussion of the revision of Burglars Can’t Be Choosers. No matter how much editing you do in pen or pencil, no matter how thoroughly you rework your material before having it typed, you’ll find more little changes to make when you actually hammer away at the keys yourself.
A friend of mind used to do this. Then she started to get higher advances and her books began earning more subsidiary income, and she decided she could afford the luxury of hiring somebody to type her final drafts for her. She works very hard over them, making innumerable pencil corrections before bundling them off to the typist, but her style’s not as polished in her latest books because she’s not doing her own typing. She’s omitting what was always a set stage in her personal process of revision, and while her books are still well written, I think they used to be smoother.