Earlier, in the chapter on snags and dead ends, I advised against setting a book aside when you run into trouble with it. Although it may seem like a good idea, it rarely lets you develop a fresh slant on your novel. The books I abandon in midstream invariably float off out of my life and are never seen again.
When you finish a first draft, however, I think you should give yourself breathing space before plunging into a rewrite. There’s a reason for this beyond the very real fact that you’re likely to be tired and deserving of a break.
The writer who has just completed a book cannot usually be sufficiently objective about it to appraise it properly with an eye toward revision. In my own case, it’s hard enough to be objective about my work ten years after it’s been published, let alone when the pages are still warm and the ink still wet. At that stage I’m not only too close to the book, I’m still inside it. A break of a couple of weeks lets me unwind, and when I sit down and read the thing from start to finish I just might have a certain amount of perspective on it.
During this cooling-off period, you might want to have someone else read the book — but only if you’ve got someone around whose judgment you trust. If a negative reaction might paralyze you, don’t take any chances. Wait until you’ve done your rewriting before you show the book to anybody.
Now’s the time to have the book read by a knowledgeable acquaintance if you’re concerned about your lack of expertise in a certain area. Suppose the book has a background in coin collecting, for instance. You’ve done a ton of research on the subject but you’re no numismatist and you can’t be certain you’ve got the lingo right. Maybe you’ve committed the sort of glaring error that’ll get you snotty letters from your readers.
Show the book to someone with the right background, explaining your uncertainty to him and asking him to read it with that consideration in mind. Make it clear to him that you want him to spot errors, that you’re not showing him the book in the hope that he’ll praise it. (It’s necessary to state this out front, because most people assume that most authors want not criticism but praise. And most of the time, incidentally, they’re absolutely right.) When he tells you what’s wrong and how to fix it, you can incorporate the information you get from him in your rewrite. If he tells you everything’s fine and your book is numismatically accurate, you can stop worrying about that aspect of it while you rewrite.
And, if he offers a lot of nonnumismatic criticisms of your story and characters and writing style, you can thank him politely and pay him no more attention in this respect than you see fit. Remember, you showed him the book because of his knowledge about rare coins, not because you figured him as the most perceptive editor since Maxwell Perkins.
Which leads us, neatly enough, into another area of the question of rewriting. So far we’ve dealt with the matter of the revision work that you do or don’t perform before submitting the manuscript. Of another sort altogether are those changes you make at the suggestion of an agent or publisher.
Most new writers will change almost anything to get a book published, and that’s probably as it should be. Just as the first law of nature is quite properly self-preservation, so is the first commandment of the first novelist to get published if it is at all possible. If you can accomplish this simply by revising your manuscript as an editor suggests, you would probably be foolish to do otherwise.
Hopeful writers have a fairly common fantasy in this area. It usually involves a hard-boiled editor trying to seduce them into making crass commercial changes to the book’s artistic detriment. The author either makes the changes only to discover the hollowness of great financial success at the cost of his soul, or he stands up for what he believes, tells the editor to go climb a tree, and (a) finds a more understanding publisher through whose efforts his book brings him wealth and glory beyond his wildest imaginings or (b) drinks himself to death in righteous indignation.
It all makes alluring fantasy, but it’s not too well grounded in reality. An agent or editor suggests changes because he thinks the changes will improve the book, not because he’s anxious to louse it up. His point of view may be in part the result of his commercial orientation, and if that’s not somewhat true he’s probably limited in his effectiveness in the business. But I’ve never known an editor to ask for a change that he didn’t believe would result in a stronger book.
Beliefs, however, are not facts. Agents and editors are wrong often enough. And in the world of fiction, rightness and wrongness are often subjective matters.
To get to the point, what do you do when an editor wants changes with which you disagree? Do you bite the bullet and make the changes? Do you stand up for what you believe in? Come to think of it, how do you know what you believe in?
How much significance can you attach to your own feelings? After all, you only wrote the thing.
It’s a tricky question, and you can spend years in this business and still have occasional trouble answering it. One thing that’s certain is that the decision is yours to make. It’s your book, it’s going to have your name on it, and only you can decide how strongly you feel about what’s between the covers. If you refuse to make certain changes, you may be saying “no” to publication, and another opportunity for publication may not ever come along. You can’t assume no one else will ever take the book, but you may have to acknowledge the possibility, especially with a first novel.
Generally speaking, writers gain confidence with increased experience. I made some changes at an editor’s suggestion in my own first book, the lesbian novel I discussed earlier. One of those changes was a bad idea and I disliked making it, but it didn’t really occur to me to demur. I was twenty years old, delirious at the thought of having a book published, and awestruck at the two-thousand-dollar advance they were handing me. I know now that I could have talked my way clear of the one change I really hated making, but I didn’t even try.
That was minor. A friend of mine cut a long novel drastically some years ago at the suggestion of a respected editor. He felt at the time that the book would be weaker, both commercially and artistically, as a result of the cuts; however, he also felt the editor’s opinion was worth more than his. Perhaps it might have been in most cases but in this one it manifestly was not. He now regrets making those cuts. With the experience he now has under his belt, and with the track record he has since amassed as a successful commercial novelist, he would be far more likely to resist making similar changes.
Experience, the very factor that supplies confidence and self-assurance, can also deepen one’s humility and enable one to recognize and admit flaws in one’s work. In my own case, I know I’ve become more open to suggestions regarding revision than I was a number of years ago, although I’m apt to be unyielding when I’m convinced my position is right.
I’m sure I was inclined to take a stand against revision on some prior occasions because of simple laziness. I didn’t want to do the work, so my mind obligingly supplied reasons why the indicated changes were not a good idea. I still have a tendency to think this way, but I’m more inclined to see it now for what it is, and thus have trouble mistaking it for artistic integrity.