I am in the process of reading the draft of my latest novel, which I finished at the end of last year. My plan was to dive in the first week of the new year, but I found I could not. I wasn’t ready. I know that the beginning of reading my new work is always challenging. First, I am often farthest from having written the opening, and so I am not caught in the first-love feeling that can accompany fresh writing. It’s gotten stale or soggy-seeming. Given more time, it will become new again, or rather the distance will allow me to read it not as a part of myself, examining blemishes in a bathroom mirror, but as something apart from me, a familiar friend or a tantalizing acquaintance. So I took more time. An extra week made all the difference.
Now I am making my way through it. I do twenty-five minute timed chunks and find I get through about 6 – 7 pages in that time, making notes and scratching out and editing as I go. The thrill is to see more clearly what it is I’ve created and what it could become. The disheartening part is the distance between what I’ve created and what it could become. On the other hand, I so loved the process of writing these last long sections I wrote, that I look forward to diving back in and following the story more deeply.
I credit the appeal of writing to my daily morning habit—early morning, ideally before anyone else is awake (and I am under strict orders to wake Charlie by 6:10 or he’ll feel the morning was wasted in sleep). I write before I speak, before I read any prose. I try to stay in the dream state, which is remarkably free of the tight hand of the editor, reacting in fear to anything I don’t know (Imagine it! the dream state says.) or haven’t planned out (Invent it! the dream state cries.).
Even when I delayed approaching my revision, I wrote in the mornings. Journal, blog, a little story that came to me. I am holding the space, holding the door open for my creative dreamer to keep walking through. And make no mistake about it, my creative dreamer is not dressed in flowing, colored chiffon with braided hair. She’s got a knot in her back and her deceased father’s pajamas on; her kid is sitting in a corner of the futon humming and drawing an egg-throwing monster with a mechanical pencil. But she’s here, typing, fragments of poems still circling her brain, encouraging her to stay close to image and lyrical truth.
So when I write a note to self in the margins of my draft—Reconceive this section. Too self-aware. She doesn’t know this about herself yet—I am not afraid of the work to come.