The Hardest Two Words: Not Yet

I’m on what is likely, no joke, my thirtieth draft of my novel. If I knew the actual number, maybe I’d also know how to tell you just what qualifies as a draft—is it a new start, regardless of the portions revised? Is it only when you get through the full monty?—but I make it my business to not know such things. It would only get depressing, then funny, and then right back to depressing again. Besides, I’m not out of the ordinary. If you don’t hang out with writers, this might come as a surprise, but taking five years to work on a first novel is pretty typical. And I’m not necessarily telling you that NaNoWriMo has it all wrong; I’ve found is that the first draft is actually pretty quick. It’s what comes along later that has a way of settling into your life like bedbugs. THIS time, you tell yourself and your loved ones, this time I’m really about to get rid of them! But I know that it’s not nearly as simple as that, and what’s worse, if your loved ones are at all smart, so do they. They know it’s not quite safe to come sit on your couch again. 

I hit a particularly rough bump in the road this fall. I thought I had it nailed, really thought it was Finished-finished. I sent in my draft on November 2^nd, the Day of the Dead, which seemed apropos for a story centering on a guy’s relationships with a bunch of ghosts. And then, since life for the most part was right where I left it when I’d entered the final push, I got on with things, trying my best not to acknowledge that I was waiting to hear back from my agent that, yes, this was it.

Only the longer I had to wait, the more uncertain I became. I couldn’t have put my finger on what was making me unsettled, but there it was. I confided my feelings to my husband; he pointed out that I usually felt this way after I’d sent in material, and it had never gone horribly before. I confessed to a writer friend, and she reassured me that it’d been great when she’d read it, something like, oh, five drafts back.  And I’d gotten an agent in the first place, hadn’t I? So I did my best to stop worrying. And then I got word: Not. There. Yet.

I’d say I took it gracefully, especially if I were writing the movie of my life and casting a more glamorous blond, but that would be short of the truth. In reality, it was one of the hardest experiences of my professional life so far, even going way back to that time in high school I worked under the table at a Korean tutoring center and the fifth grade boys spent their afternoons coming up with new ways to flaunt my authority. But I did manage to have a halfway-coherent conversation with my agent before unceremoniously heading back to bed to cry with the covers over my head. (Maybe I exaggerate a little bit. Maybe the crying happened in the bath.)

But I rallied. I always do; we always do, novelists and writers, at least those of us with any chance of ever seeing success. Sometimes I think that the entire system these days is set up to weed out the brilliant yet weak, like a far more boring and bureaucratic Hunger Games set up in some New York publisher’s office, where our only weapons are paperclips and hand sanitizer and a well-formatted query. I called in every writer I could think of who might not only be willing to listen to my tale of woe, but might also have some sort of secret knowledge about how to get past it. I came up with a new plan, recruited new readers, and assured my agent that this was, as I almost always firmly believe it is, a temporary set back. 

The horrible part? I honestly don’t know whether that’s actually true. I’m not sure I’m capable of knowing. When I was writing the most recent draft, the one where I thought I had it, I found hole after hole in the plot, detail after detail I could massage to make better, clearer, more vivid. I found connections between characters that must have been staring me in the face for months that made the relationships so much more vital. It was absolutely thrilling. I was high on my own genius. So what was I missing during that period? Was I deluded the entire time? Was I simply not capable of evaluating my own work? 

I have no doubt that I really did see these things, just as I have no doubt that I did make my novel better. But as I let it sit over the holidays, as you do, as I gathered ideas about how to outline, how to reapproach difficult sections, how to convince new readers to take it on, I began to sense the existence of other problems. Bigger problems. Like, seriously: how can something be dramatically missing if you only find out about it two pages before? Problems that made me question my very soul as a writer: how had I missed these things for so damn long?

And yet, here I go again. And I am once again riding high on the thrill, and the relief, of identifying problem areas, of fixing and tightening and generally improving my manuscript. I have to believe in what I’m doing, in this feeling, or I simply can’t move forward. I have to believe in what I’m doing even though I know, through experience, that I will likely have felt this aHA! feeling at least twenty times during the entire revision process, from second to thirty-first draft. And most of the time, there will be a big blind spot, and a big smarmy monster sitting in that blindspot, just out of my field of vision.

 I just kind of have to exist in this state. Keats was onto it; it’s all about holding two opposing ideas simultaneously true. Without fully buying in to the revision process and my ultimate success, I can’t continue. And without the simultaneous knowledge that I’ll likely walk this road again (and again and again), I won’t be able to survive the devastation of being told, yet again, Not Yet.