I like to comment...on losing a manuscript

I know, I promised to talk to you about essays, and yes, that’s coming.

But something happened that’s on my mind and that I think talking about it might be useful to others, and is definitely worth untangling for my own sanity. You see, I’d been to Davis, West Virginia, one of my favorite spots to go and write, and I’d made great progress on a novel project I’m working on. At least, I thought I’d made good progress.

It was not quite winter and not yet spring in Davis. Transition time. After writing for hours I sat by the Blackwater River, feeling satisfied about my work.

Then I came home.

The external hard drive that I’d been using failed and also the novel’s file had been corrupted. I lost all of the work.

I could get into all the tech details (and how I’m remedying the situation), but that’s not at all the point. I was able to recover a draft from about five days prior to my trip that had only the text. By this I mean the entire novel (minus the new work) was a single block of text that spanned page after page in an indifferent flow of characters. No formatting. Just black marks on the white screen.

This was now the best draft I had.

And after taking time to be pissed, to grieve, to feel foolish, to throw up, and to finally resign myself to this is my draft, I just stopped thinking about what had been and faced what was my new choice: start in from the beginning or set it aside.

I haven’t written fiction in over a decade and I wondered, as I chose “start in from the beginning,” if somehow fiction had cursed me and I should stick to nonfiction and poetry. But this damn project had my attention and I suppose at the end of the day I was not going to let it go.

Always praised first and foremost for being a hard worker, I’m the kind of person who has the discipline to write every day, or pretty close to it. So getting back to the novel should have proved easy, and in some ways it was just another day at the keyboard (or with the pen, which is how I do my early drafts). All I wanted to do is get back into the work and let it wash over me. And that happened.

But then so did the email and texts and other distractions. As I focused more, I also marveled at how many distractions I let into my day. I’m not saying these are bad things—the value judgement of each really doesn’t matter. Some felt worthy and others didn’t. What I began to see was how much I let my time be fragmented.

Let me say that again: I let my time be fragmented.

Now, there are people who I consult with and who pay for that work and I have to make time for it. And there are a lot—and I mean an awful lot—of folks who want my time but that the returns are minimal and often unpaid. And interestingly, when I started to look at the whole of my work week, the paid work was the work I felt the best about, and a lot of the other felt loaded with expectations, but wasn’t fulfilling me. It was me wanting to be liked and accepted or to feel important.

I found that I had been justifying to myself giving my time and talents elsewhere to the deteriment of my own work, and if I was going to do that, I should’ve had just stayed (miserable) in academia.

There are things I want to do simply because I want to do them. My whole life doesn’t come down to a paycheck. But there are many things I felt obligated to do, even though I could not articulate why I felt that way. And there are a few obligations that are also things I want to do. And then there is my writing, which came last even though in importance to me it was number one. Things had gotten lopsided because I let it get that way.

And then I lost the novel.

When I got back to it, I worked through hours and pages and saw the novel becoming a novel again. Of course, I noticed something else. My revisions got a hell of a lot better.

Somehow, seeing this work as thick blocks of text, I could approach revision both with remove and with a sense of urgency. And I know it would be easy to cite the cliched advice of “killing your darlings” but this was something entirely different. I had to face my novel as merely a giant chunk of text until I did something with it, and to do the most with it I needed to chisel to the good stuff.

The prose got leaner, repetitions got hacked away, and characters sharpened into better view. I didn’t think I was the kind of writer who was precious about what I wrote—heck, in graduate school a friend kidded me about being a “nuclear reviser”—but I saw in the text mass how precious I’d been in no uncertain terms. I’d done some work, but nowhere near what I needed to make the novel work. Exposition got in the way of action, dialogue got lost among detailed description, time got muddy, characters flat and lost in a sea of words.

Maybe it was easier to delete when I thought so much had already been deleted.

When I got to the place where I’d left off in the novel while working in Davis, the work was ten pages less than that earlier effort. That stood out to me. I’d stopped at page 200, which is now page 190.

But besides the page count, I found that the characters were more realized, and the action carried them in a more direct way. My word choices sharpened. You know, all that stuff we talk about when we talk about revision. How much of what we say we should be doing in revision was I actually doing?

How did I kid myself about this work?

This is not a “blessing in disguise” story. This is a story about a terrible moment in my writing life that forced me to get real. My work is never as good as I think it is. It can always be improved. My guess is that this is true of most writers, if they’re willing to be honest with themselves.

And also, I had to confront my problem of not prioritizing my own work. Its a holdover from a culture that valorizes overwork, that sends messages to people like me that I was not enough and I would never be enough, and from a desire to be seen as worthy of success. I had so many weird and bad messages floating around my brain that it took one seriously bad scenario to snap my focus back.

As I moved ahead of where I had been in my revisions, the work is still hard. I am nowhere near done. But at the end of each day I feel this calmness, a kind of quiet joy. I love this work. It’s frustrating and sometimes cruel, but I love it and can’t help that I love it. It will never be perfect, but it can be better.

Maybe some of that the love for writing, and especially revision, got lost as I fragmented my time to please other people with things that weren’t my top priorities. Prioritizing isn’t the same as being selfish. It’s being real with yourself about what is important to you.

Hard lesson? Yes. I hope it never happens again.

Somewhere this past week, working through all of this, I also felt satisfied. Not with the work per se, but the idea of this work as the iterative acts of reflection and revision. In the moments I’m truly in my novel doing the tough sentence-by-sentence revision, I don’t think about the future results—things like publishing or being known or any of that kind of stuff. I just write and rewrite, and it is more than enough.

News and Notes:

• Hope to see some of you at AWP next week. I’ll be around Thursday and Friday at the WVU Press Booth, 1047.

• Hope to see some of you at the Barrelhouse Conversations & Connections event on April 12th at American University. If you have not yet purchased a ticket, they’re almost sold out! I’ll be there talking about book proposals.

• I’ll also be returning to one of my FAVORITE West Virginia Bookstores, Booktenders in Barboursville. I’ll be reading with David Prather and Marc Harshman to celebrate National Poetry Month on April 19, from 1-4 PM. Come out and enjoy.