No Perspective

Remember a couple weeks ago when I gave myself a deadline for the revised, not-embarrassed-to-let-someone-else-read-it version of my novel? The deadline is July 1st. It’s the day I’m handing the novel off to my friend Lisa, who will be my first reader.  Not just the first reader of this novel, but the first reader of any of my fiction ever (aside from the excerpt I posted here), and I have been writing fiction since I was 16.  All this time people have said things to me about how they’re sure it’s good, but the truth is that no one knows, least of all me.

I do not think it’s impossible for a writer to have perspective on her own work, but any perspective I did have on my novel has recently slipped away.  What I mean is that I have no critical distance from my work and I can no longer tell what’s good and what’s not or what works and what doesn’t.  This happens to me all the time with papers for school, usually because I work so close to the deadline.  After writing for 8 hours, I can’t tell anymore if my arguments is genius or incredibly obvious, so I write until I’m out of time or energy and then I turn it in and hope for the best.  That doesn’t really work for a novel.  I mean, at some point I will have to say it’s good enough, but there’s so much more time for feedback and revision.

And, the truth is that though I could go on and on about its merits, I hate revising and I’m no good at it.  Normally I revise only for typos and small clarity issues.  Even with my Master’s thesis, my revisions were mostly adding whole new sections, not tearing apart the ones that were already written.  But, again, that doesn’t work for a novel.  I like a lot of what I have and I will never be one of those writers who rewrites everything, but there are parts of my novel that don’t work and they need to be changed.

I don’t know what it is about revising.  I know that most writers find such relief in having something down on the page.  The blank page makes them anxious, but once they have something down, then they can get to work polishing it.  I’m not like that.  I stare at my already written words and have no idea what to do, even though I know they need to be changed.  I guess it goes back to me being a big picture person.  In a novel, especially with dialogue, there are so many pieces that have to fit together and once you go messing them up, there’s so much work involved in making them flow again.  I hate it.

Once I can get enough perspecitve to see what’s not working and I gear myself up for digging into my already written words, the issue is that the problems in my novel remain problems because I don’t know how to solve them.  That’s something that’s really surprised me about writing a novel: I spend so much of my time feeling like Angela Lansbury in Murder She Wrote.  The biggest problems in my novel come in the last half where most of the major drama is over and it’s much more about recovery.  It’s easy in dramatic scenes to explain why people feel the way they do and why they react the way they do, but the far more subtle mood shifts and motivations that happen in day-to-day life are so much more difficult to write.

What I’m trying to say is that the writing is not going well.  And yet the deadline just gets closer!  I have very little time left and so much to revise.  I’ve always had a healthy respect for deadlines.  In fact, I’ve never missed one, never asked for an extension, and never taken an incomplete.  And, even though it would be really easy to do that now, because there are no real consequences for missing my self-inforced deadline, I don’t want to .  I know that some people would advise taking some time off, but that has never worked for me.  I never figure things out unless I’m in the thick of them and I never get anything written unless I sit in front of my computer and force myself to focus.

I look forward to a day very soon when I don’t have to rely on my own limited perspective–when I can hear what other people think of my work.  But, I realize now that even though I do fear harsh critique, what I’m looking for is not praise.  What I want most is for people to talk about my characters as if they are real and as if their lives are real too.  I want to engage in debate about whether one would really make the decisions she did or whether the other would really be so willing to put up with her.  I think that’s when I’ll finally get some of the clarity I crave.

It’s strange to think that I finally have some time to write, which is what I’ve wanted all year.  But, now that I’ve overcome that obstacle, I’ve run smack into several others.  It’s never as simple as just sitting down and writing, and yet there is no other way.  I can’t set aside the ego and anxiety and story problems, so I’ll drag them all along with me to the finish line.