When is Enough Enough?

I had a curious experience a few months ago with a novel selected for my book club. It was written by a woman I knew, though only slightly, and we had invited the author to attend our discussion. I turned to reading the book with high expectations. Disappointment set in quickly. I found myself quite lost in a maze of characters and history that I seemed to be expected to know but that hadn't yet been presented to me. "What's wrong with me?" I kept asking myself as I slogged through. (If I hadn't been reading for the book club, I would, no doubt, have quit slogging.) "Why can't I follow this?"

By the time I reached the end, most had been sorted out, though a lot of the feeling I would have brought to the story had been lost in the too-long process of sorting. And so I went to the meeting with great curiosity. The novel was beautifully written. What had happened?

And this is what I learned. The writer had spent twelve years writing that one story. Twelve years! She spent the first six perfecting the first draft, which was then turned down by the publisher she wanted, the one who had brought out her previous book. She spent the next six years rethinking, reframing, discarding, smoothing until she finally had a novel her publisher would accept.

Is there anything wrong with this way of working? (This is a woman who holds down a demanding professional position, so she wasn't hammering away at this one text day and night. But still, she was working steadily!)

You will never hear anyone more committed to revision than I am. And my experience is that few writers revise too much. Far more often we writers, especially developing writers, try to smooth problems over on the surface instead of digging back into the heart of the story to solve them where they lie.

But after I heard this woman talk about her process, I understood what had bothered me in my reading from the very early pages. This fine writer had worked her story so long and so intensively and knew it so well that she had quite lost track of what we, her readers, knew and needed to know and what our reactions might be to the unfolding story.

She knew it all so well, in fact, that she was no longer discovering it with us at her side. She had already lived her story, her characters' lives, again and again and again, and finally she no longer knew what we knew and what we didn't and what we needed to carry us to the next page. She had resided in that world of her own making so completely that writing the final story was like digging herself a hole from which she could barely see over the edge.

Do I blame the writer? Of course not. She was doing what we all must do, working hard to create the best story possible out of the material inside her head. And once she found herself in a tangle, there would have been no way out but through.

Then there is the additional fact, not to be denied, that my opinion of the novel she ended up publishing is by no means definitive. Certainly, the editor who accepted the book for publication didn't share it.

But struggling through reading and then listening to the author talk about her process taught me something. There can be such a thing as too much revision. While we are gaining polish we may be losing the emotional integrity of our work.

Our book club read another novel earlier in the year whic was so brilliantly written that nearly every sentence could stand alone as both an example of fine writing and a beacon of wisdom. At first I was entranced. By about halfway through I was numbed. Too much. Too much. Too much. That novel, too, had been written over many years.

My advice? Keep moving forward. Revise. Revise deeply and well. But keep discovering, too. Don't create a world so perfectly known that you can no longer translate it for your readers.

As with so much about the process of writing, this requires a fine balance.

It's easy to say, not always so easy to do. Keep enough space between you and your story so you can judge its impact. And stop when enough is enough.