"after klee" by devi laskar

I’m in a race against time to finish reconnecting the aorta and sew up the chest.

That’s probably a dramatic metaphor for revising a novel, but can’t you sort of imagine it? I’m operating on a living creature that is awake except when pain causes it to sink from consciousness. I’ve painstakingly fixed the heart, spurts of blood up my front. What if this creature won’t come to life after all I’ve done?

And considering this surgery has gone on for a few years now, getting the heart to beat may take a miracle. Good thing it’s just a metaphor.

Revision feels this precarious and pointless at times. It’s the kind of work I want to put off or rush through, but it’s better to do it gradually. Because although it’s important work that must be done in a timely fashion, the terms are negotiable. The hard part has been that I’ve been negotiating with myself. I’m incredibly flexible, yet incredibly unreasonable.

The first draft took a few years to write, my approach so gradual, even halting, I wasn’t sure I would be able to finish it. The second draft took more than a year because I felt overwhelmed and procrastinated a lot. My gradual process became more deliberate, giving me time to develop the story, and that wasn’t a bad thing.

Here i am, wrist-deep in the third draft which will have taken a month and a half if I complete it by my deadline today. It’s my own, personally determined deadline, and that makes things difficult. If I don’t finish it on time, no one will mind. But two days from now I leave for a short business trip, and I know if I don’t finish it before I leave, I’ll lose momentum. This time I can’t be flexible, and that’s quite reasonable.

Working faster has made aspects of the process and product clearer to me. The flaws in my writing spurt from the body of the work, at once surprising and fascinating. I can fix some problems; I can clamp others and work on them later.

If a word, detail, or scene is superfluous, I cut it. That’s been so much fun. I thought I would feel attached to every word, but when I feel something needs to go, the feeling has usually been pretty strong. Some passages have seemed underdeveloped, so I rework them. Whether they stay or go depends on how well they serve the story. So far, most of those have made the cut and get to live. For now.

But that’s just my opinion, and I’m only the writer. What my novel needs to be is still not completely clear. My vision is crucial, but it’s not all there is to this process. This book will be read–a revelation that came to me about six months ago. I will need response from trusted readers. I’m trying not to think of what they might think. They’ll have their chances, but for now, I’m still trusting my judgment. I’ve stopped doing this work as if I’m operating on myself. Each draft helps me detach a bit more to do the work as it needs to be done rather than how it will cause the least pain.

 James Black is a founding member of Book Writing World. He earned a masters degree in comparative literature at the University of Missouri at Columbia. His work has been published in the anthology The New Queer Aesthetic on Television and in the journal Anon. He’s writing his first novel about the family of a closeted, gay soldier stationed in Iraq. Check out his blog, Quota, at http://j3quota.wordpress.com/. He contributes to the BWW weekly!