Editing My Novel Today

Here's Hobbes on the piano. When he learns to open the kitchen cupboard doors, I'm sure tuna cans will be spread out on the counter with teeth marks in them. That's the kind of cat he is. His name fits him too well.

Last night I watched a riveting PBS program entitled Alaska: Silence and Solitude It was comprised of footage filmed by Dick Porenneke who lived alone in the Alaskan wilderness for 35 years. He filmed himself building a log cabin and kept a journal about his life. His resourcefulness was astounding. I would like very much to watch the film again. I think the book about him may be a "must read."

Today worked on editing my novel. Angus went through it and gave me suggestions. Now I'm reading through it and incorporating those changes I agree with.

When you write a book, you become enmeshed with it. For one thing, I'm sure I read meaning and content into my writing that is not really there, but is only in my mind.

In other words, I may mean certain things with a sentence or paragraph, or even a word, and believe I've said it, that I've painted the picture or feeling and the reader is with me, but that's not necessarily true.

Give it to someone else and that person may not receive that feeling or sense of experience you thought you made so clear.

In any event, there is one chapter in particular that Angus does not like and would prefer I simply cut out. Before I do, I will need at least one more reader to give me the same opinion. I know when I read the original version of this chapter to my critique group, they liked it.

Angus is not a novel reader and my target audience is women, so I think it's a matter of appeal. The chapter doesn't appeal to him.

But time will tell. If one person hates a chapter and nine people love it, well you keep the chapter. If five people have no objections to it but five people clearly don't like it, well, that means it isn't a matter of taste, but substance. It's a bad chapter that doesn't work. At best it's tolerable. No writer aims for tolerable. You aim to make people feel a kinship with you, to feel what you have felt, to understand what you or your character has been through. You aim for connection, not boredom or annoyance.

It's unlikely I will get nine more volunteers to read and comment on what works for them and what doesn't. But the more, the better.

I really want to go to bed. Tomorrow is another day. You can tell from my tone that the editing did not go well. I finally got through that chapter, but it was very difficult because I really was wedded to the words, even though I thought I was not. The chapter may be better now, but I'm not sure.

That's the frustrating thing about editing your own work. If you are a tolerable writer, perhaps even a good writer, there is no real right or wrong, only something different. You aim to make it great, but a merely good writer cannot edit to greatness. Only an impartial eye can do that. My job is to stick with my authentic voice, see if I can find a great editor and then surrender the work. But to surrender it to someone who is no better than I who will only change it, not transform it to something better? Why write at all?

Truly, I will never be able to tell if what I write is good. Only the reader can make that determination for herself, and everyone has different tastes and needs in stories.

Let's see what Rumi has to say:

This moment this love comes to rest in me,
many beings in one being.

In one wheat-grain
a thousand sheaf stacks.

Inside the needle's eye,
A turning night of stars.

Ah, yes, that's what a novel should be.