Writing the Novel

by Lawrence Block; Block

  I could go on. But this chapter, like Abraham Lincoln’s legs, is plenty long enough as it is.

  And that’s the long and short of it.

  Chapter 13

  Rewriting

  I rewrite constantly. For every page that gets printed there must be five that go into the wastebasket. One of the hardest aspects of writing is accepting this squandering of labor, but it is essential. I doubt if there is one page in a thousand, throughout the whole of literature, that wouldn’t have been improved by the author’s redoing it.

  —Russell H. Greenan

  Professional writers vary considerably in their approach to rewriting. Some would endorse the observation quoted above while others would dismiss it as nonsense. Some regard rewriting as the genuinely enjoyable side of their occupation, the stage in which one sees the book taking its final form. Others hate rewriting but do it anyway. Some do one complete draft after another until the book satisfies them. Others polish each page before moving on to the next one. Some write five or more drafts of a book before they feel they’ve got it right. Others submit their first drafts.

  I don’t believe there’s any right or wrong way to approach rewriting, not with so many pros having so much success with so many widely divergent methods. As with so many aspects of writing, each writer must determine what works best in his own particular case—what method produces the best work and makes him most comfortable.

  I myself have always been the sort of writer who loathes revision. Looking back over the years, I can see a couple of factors which tend to explain this attitude. I was always more concerned with the accomplishment than the act; I was interested less in writing, you might say, than in having written. Once I finished writing a short story or a novel I wanted to consider myself done with it for all time. Indeed, the minute I typed “The End” I wanted to be able to take a deep breath, walk around the corner, and see my work in print at the newsstand. The last thing I desired at such a moment was to sit down, take an even deeper breath, and commence feeding the whole thing through the typewriter a second time.

  Because I was a naturally smooth stylist, as I mentioned a couple of chapters back, I could get away with submitting first drafts. They didn’t look rough. And, because I had a sort of fictive tunnel vision, I was unlikely to see more than one way that a book could be written.

  When I was writing the soft-core sex novels, economic considerations largely ruled out rewriting. Who could afford it? Who had time for it? When you’re turning out somewhere between twelve and twenty books a year, you may cheerfully agree with Greenan’s point and still never rewrite a line. So what if every last one of your pages could be improved by making another trip through your typewriter? There’s no time to polish each page to perfection, and no incentive, either. The readers won’t notice the difference. The publisher probably won’t notice either, and wouldn’t care if he did.

  There’s even an argument against revision, and it may have applied to those early sex novels. Jack Kerouac advanced it when he spoke of his writing as “spontaneous bop prosody,” equating his manner of composition to a jazz musician’s creative improvisation. More cynically, the lead character in Barry N. Malzberg’s Herovit’s World, a hack science-fiction writer enormously contemptuous of his own work, argues that rewriting would rob his crap of the only thing it has going for it, its freshness. Once you start rewriting, Herovit holds, you’re not able to stop. With each draft the fundamental banality and worthlessness of the material becomes more evident even as its vitality and spontaneity are drained from it. All you wind up doing is what William Goldman, discussing the agony of rewriting an inadequate play prior to its opening, called “washing garbage.”

  I never washed my garbage in those days. Thinking back, I’m astonished at the sangfroid with which I presumed to forego revision altogether. I scarcely ever retyped a page.

  There was one time I well remember when, checking the pages at the end of the day’s work, I discovered that I’d written pages 31 through 45 but had somehow jumped in my page numbering from 38 to 40. Rather than renumber the pages, I simply sat down and wrote page 39 to fit. Since page 38 ended in the middle of a sentence, a sentence which then resumed on page 40, it took a little fancy footwork to slide page 39 in there, but the brash self-assurance of youth was evidently up to that sort of challenge.

  Jacqueline Susann used to tell talk show audiences how she rewrote every book four or five times, using yellow paper for one draft, green for a second, pink for a third, blue for a fourth, and finally producing finished copy on white bond. I don’t seem to recall the point of this rainbow approach to revision, nor am I sure I believe Susann actually did this; anyone as accomplished as she at self-promotion might well have been capable of embroidery.

  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 w
hich 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.

  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 eithe
r 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.