Returning to my first love.

I have two written novels and just spanked a new baby novel, my third.

Last weekend, I outlined my first, unpublished, novel that I hadn't opened for more than a year.

As, I scanned through the pages of each chapter, recalling how each moved the plot along, meaning, was it simply a fun chapter for ME, an oasis of colorful rambling, or were the characters and action connected in some meaningful way with the other chapters. It was a short novel to begin with (The first draft was 100,000 words. I kept 10,000 of that first draft and began again, ending it at 50,000 words.) As I sat in my back yard, surrounded by green vegetation, I decided that there were chapters that had to go and that a new beginning needed to be made. Eventually, I got frustrated.

I wanted to leap in and fix the story. But, I had just started my third novel and I wanted to explore the cave of creativity to see how deep it ran, creating something new, after all, is more fun.

I thought about vanity publishing this first novel as a means to avoid a substantial rewrite. Print it, offer it for sale on my web site and call myself an author, with qualifications of course. At the end of my deliberation, I didn't return my first novel to my own slough pile; it sits on the table near my laptop, and like a magnet it gives off an electromagnetic force field, doing its best to attract some opposite force in me, as if it had its own desires to attach to me.

A realization did occur to me. After twelve months of separation from my first novel, I possessed a greater degree of objectivity, more like an editor not the creator of the work with the inherent emotional baggage. I considered tossing my second novel on my slough pile and retrieve it in a year to get the distance I’d need to possess an objective focus. It may not take twelve months, perhaps half that time, or even a quarter. The aging process, it does wonders for many fine things in life that we enjoy.

I believe in the value of an editor, but I worry that even the best editor may not understand my unique voice, assuming I have found it, and that he or she might inadvertently edit me into some disimpassioned scribbler of symbols.

This may be the same with an agent or publisher. We need to understand what we have to say in our stories and why we must say it the way that we do. Otherwise, our voice could become lost, a victim of the delete key.

Opposing views welcome…

Russell Traughber