Part IV: RewritesI've never really done rewrites. Oh, that's not to say that I never revised my text, I labor under some egotistical belief that sentences and paragraphs spring from my fingertips as some Platonic ideal of the subject at hand ... I've just always been very meticulous about my writing, editing and making changes during the process so that my first drafts came out more or less the way I wanted the final draft to look. As you might have guessed from Part III in this series, there was no time to be that precise while writing The Crab. I had to get the words out as quickly as possible and worry about fixing them later.
Rob King, my editor, assured me that this was the best way to go through the process. "If you try to make it perfect the first time around," he said, "then you'll never finish your first draft." Well, that might in fact have been the case since I had such a challenging time finishing the first draft even using his process. But be that as it may, when it came time to start the second draft I was in completely untested waters.
Also at Rob's advice, the minute I sent off the first draft I began to pretend it didn't exist. "Leave it alone for a few months," he told me. "Come back to it with a fresh perspective." That sounds good ... but the fact was that 10 weeks away from The Crab was not enough to give me much of a change in perspective. And when I got the envelope from Rob I was still chest deep in the belief that the book pretty much stank. Still, it obviously wasn't so bad that the book department felt the need to take it away from me and hand it to a more seasoned author for "development" (something that happens occasionally when new authors prove more ambitious than skillful) ... so they still had faith that I could do the job.
In fact, Rob made me feel much better when he wrote, "This is a very good first draft." He then made sure I was ready to get down to work by adding, "But even the best first draft is a LOUSY final novel."
I pulled out the manuscript, sat down in my most comfortable (and confidence bolstering) chair, and began reading both my own text and the hand-written notes that took up a good percentage of the margins. Rob's suggestions (he didn't demand ANY rewrites ... but boy did he make a basketful of really GREAT suggestions) were pretty insightful ... clearly I'd done a good enough job so that he could tell what I wanted each section to achieve, and he had lots of useful tips on how to make my points even better (or when they were points better not made at all).
As I said, I don't have very much experience with rewriting - so it is hard to make general statements about the process based on this one instance - but I will say this: If your editor asks you to make a change, unless you have a REALLY good reason to ignore him or her (something better than nearly any permutation of "but I LIKE it that way") ... MAKE THE CHANGE!
Oddly enough, that last piece of advice goes against what Rob told me. He'd said, "Don't make any changes that don't feel right, no matter what I said in my notes. In the end this has to feel like YOUR book ... not just something you wrote under someone else's guidance." The thing is, I considered Rob as my first (and most educated) reader ... and most things that bothered him would, I believed, bother OTHER readers as well. And as much as the process of writing the book was for ME ... the final product is for the READER. It did me no good, I reasoned, to have a passage or even a whole chapter that worked perfectly for me but left the reader baffled.
There were plenty of places in the first draft where Rob suggested I change things that I'd put in the manuscript on purpose ... he just didn't get what I was trying to bring out (or worse, he got it but thought that it was trite or contrived). In nearly every case, after thinking about it for a little while, I realized that if I couldn't get the reader to agree with my vision then keeping those passages would just add a dissonance that would only hurt the book as a whole.
Of course, I didn't make ALL the changes he asked for (I AM egotistical enough to think that SOME of my prose is deathless right out of the gate). And we had some interesting debates about the differences between Rokugani culture and that of real world feudal Japan. (I am much better versed in the real world samurai than the game setting ones.) After several long emails and phone calls, I was eventually able to convince Mr. King that although the wakizashi (the samurai's short sword) was most famous for being the instrument used in seppuku (ritual suicide), historically it was also used quite often a light melee weapon.
Most contentious, though, were some comments sent in by the L5R continuity folks.
Now, as you might recall from earlier installments, I have an appreciation for the job of continuity control that most authors don't (having had for over a year to fill that role for several of TSR/WotC's game worlds) ... but I was aghast at the level of changes that were asked for in the second draft. There were very substantive issues that had never been raised in the either of the two outlines I'd written OR as the various bits of the story were submitted during my milestone turnovers. In fact, there was more than one place where the team requested throwing out 2-3 chapters of material and rewriting it from scratch. PLUS they handed over new source material that had never been offered in the first place ... short stories that it would have been easy enough to incorporate if I'd known ahead of time, but which now would require a complete reworking of the story to account for.
I reiterate: Continuity control is a terribly difficult, thankless job ... and the L5R folks have more conflicting sources than most shared worlds. I think that they do a wonderful job making sense out of a world that was conceived in several distinct throes of unchecked creativity. But what they were asking for at this point was beyond the realms of reason ... and I told Rob so. (I'm sure he passed that information on to them in a more polite fashion ... and I've just undone all his diplomatic work ... sorry, Rob.)
In the end, Rob and I came up with some modifications that did not compromise the dramatic structure of The Crab, and paid homage to the intent (if not the actual printed words) of the original source material. Continuity buffs who notice irregularities in The Crab can blame me for putting my authorial foot down and saying, "No! If you wanted it that way, you should have asked for it that way! THIS is how it's going to be!"
The actual WRITING part of rewriting took place over the course of the 6 weeks between Thanksgiving 2000 and New Year's Day 2001. It was a lot more involved emotionally than I'd thought it would be. In fact, I had all the emotional ups and downs as I did during the first draft ... but in about half the time. And when I was done I once again felt like I was handing over a big steaming pile of poo.
But intellectually I now knew that the book was not only better than it had been before this draft ... it was, in fact, a pretty good first novel. And as the new millennium dawned, the whole thing was in the hands of my most capable editor ... and the professionals in the Wizards of the Coast Book Department.
The only thing left for me to do was wait 6 months.
Next: All the OTHER things I still had to do in the next 6 months.
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