Years ago an editor accepted a manuscript for a book I had written, signed a contract, and things were moving forward, (I thought) when the same editor called and said, “I have a problem.”
I asked, “What is it?”
Editor: “I can’t publish this book. It’s no good.”
“None of it?”
Pause.
“You can keep the title.”
A true publishing tale, but my real point here is that it’s one thing to revise a manuscript. It is very much harder to completely rewrite a manuscript. When you have worked through a whole story—set the grooves, so to speak—it’s difficult to cut grooves in a different direction. It is perhaps even harder when an editor (a different true experience) only tells you that your story is basically there, but you have to rethink your whole book. It is at that point your editor (or some outside view) becomes absolutely crucial. It’s not enough to be told, “Rethink,” you need outside thoughts, suggestions, and advice—to pull you around and get you going in a different direction
As for that book about which I was told “I could keep the title,” you may be pleased to know it was eventually published. But—from the time I first began to write it, until it was published, was fourteen years. The title—I did not keep the original title—was Bright Shadow.