When we are close to a manuscript, either drafting or revising extensively, it is nigh on impossible to know certain things about it. For example, it is hard to know how good it is. At moments it can seem fantastic. For me, this is especially true after someone else has said something kind about it. At other times, it can seem terrible. For me, this is true when the sentences become too familiar; their rhythms feel predictable to me, and their flaws insurmountable.
If you are drafting, I have one piece of advice for you, and it is the advice I’d give any swimmer in the middle of the ocean questioning the advisability of this journey: keep going. The doubts that arise in drafting are inevitable and damning. That cruel voice that tells you you do not know what you are doing and what you are doing sucks? That’s just part of the deal. You sign on to be a writer. You get your cubicle, your seat, your laptop, pens, notebook and that messed up voice.
You hole up in your cubicle (café, idling car, desk in the corner of your bedroom), sit on your seat, take up your laptop or notebook, and IGNORE THE VOICE. That’s your job. Keep going. Make it your mantra. Set your goals and hurtle toward them. Write badly. Write for quantity. Just write.
If you are editing, on the other hand, you have to finesse that terrible voice. The mature and loving version of that voice is your editor.
That this voice has a place in the process does not mean it is ever correct during the drafting. During the drafting, that harsh voice is just panicking. It wants to slow down and think everything through, reject what you are doing and find a better option. There is always a better option.
During drafting, that voice must be firmly rejected, like the fourth child in the Seder who does not count himself among the Jews when he inquires what these traditions do for you.
During editing, that voice becomes the wise child who wants to learn everything about his own traditions. You must teach him.
In order to get that voice from ignorant child to wise child, you must give the manuscript some space, which in the linear world of writing means, some time. Time will give you distance. Now that voice—in its mature and loving form—has the chance to better the draft. If you had not completed the draft, terrible as it seemed, you would have nothing, now, to edit.
You take space, time, and then you return, trying to see your work as a reader rather than as a writer. This works for a while and then it begins to fail. More time must be taken or in other ways distance must be achieved. Other readers give us distance. So do lists and plans.
Yesterday, I made an inventory of everything I’ve done so far in this latest revision of my novel and of what I have left to do.
The first part—what’s already been accomplished—is especially important, because it is so easy to forget. A book is too large to hold entirely in the mind until it is finished. Hence, tracking the work provides you a thread to follow out of the labyrinth.
Lists of scenes, of the cause-and-effect relationship between the events, of settings, character arcs, whatever you need to “see” clearly from beginning to end will revive the editor. Reading the work aloud or planning to hand it over to a trusted reader can also revive the editor—one begins to imagine the book as it will appear to other eyes, and this freshens it up for these tired eyes.
Finally, if you are having these problems it’s because you are really doing it. You are writing. You are struggling, sure, and doubting. That voice is tormenting you. You are in your seat. You are soaring.
Elizabeth Stark is the author of the novel Shy Girl (FSG, Seal Press) and co-director and co-writer of several short films, including FtF: Female to Femme and Little Mutinies (both distributed by Frameline). She earned an M.F.A. from Columbia University in Creative Writing. Currently the lead mentor and teacher at the Book Writing World, she’s taught writing and literature at UCSC, Pratt Institute, the Peralta Colleges, Hobart & William Smith Colleges and St. Mary’s College. She’s at work on a novel about Kafka.