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A Curious Contradiction

Avi writer

There is a curi­ous con­tra­dic­tion that comes from writ­ing for so many years: The more books I begin, the worse they seem at the start. I kid you not, there is almost a feel­ing of agony when I review the first drafts of a new novel:

This is awful. You’ve lost it. You need to start some­thing else. No one will take this. No one will read this. What made you think this would work?

These are real thoughts — I’ve had them all — as I plunge into the long process of cre­at­ing a new book. The irony is that these thoughts are not just accu­rate, they come about because I know good writ­ing when I read it. Ear­ly drafts are always bad writ­ing. They are painful to read.

As I have writ­ten in these posts many times, the process of good writ­ing is such that the time of cre­ation is long, the effort is ardu­ous, and the process is one of end­less­ly nit­pick­ing and revis­ing. It can even be boring.

The key point is that it takes a lot of time to write some­thing good. It must evolve. That evo­lu­tion is also a les­son that I have to teach myself over and over again. The work is bad before it can become good.

Accept it and push on.

The nicest moment comes when, after a great deal of work, I sud­den­ly — and it is often sud­den — gain a sense that things are falling into shape. That the work is becom­ing good.

All of this is because one of the most dif­fi­cult aspects of writ­ing is the author’s abil­i­ty to objec­tive­ly see and be crit­i­cal of one’s own work. It’s why folks like me so much appre­ci­ate a good edi­tor. In truth, there are many edi­tors in my life. You can begin with my wife who is as sharp as she is out­spo­ken. She does not stint, either with the pos­i­tive or with the negative. 

[The worst kind of response — true sto­ry — comes from the per­son who reads fifty pages over an hour and then puts the work down.

Me: Well, what do you think?

Read­er: There is a dan­gling par­tici­ple in the first paragraph.]

But I have a cou­ple of trust­ed friends — who are will­ing to read what I have writ­ten and who will tell me what they think. Invaluable.

And final­ly — most impor­tant­ly — my pro­fes­sion­al edi­tor. Your rela­tion­ship with that per­son, a mat­ter of deep trust, is key to what you will even­tu­al­ly produce.

All of this goes far to explain why I can say that I have absolute­ly no objec­tion to self-pub­lished work. Equal­ly, I object strong­ly against self-edit­ed work.

It is a myth that the author cre­ates a book on his or her own.

All of these thoughts come about because I have start­ed a new book. And it’s bad.

That gives me hope.

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