Now that I’ve returned home from a glorious week in Taos, New Mexico, where I meet up yearly with friends and fellow authors, work on our fiction—novels and short stories and, occasionally, memoir, eat giant plates of Tex Mex and burgers, steaks and pizza, and stroll around the distinct art, architecture, and landscapes that abound, it’s time to get back to business. And part of that business, for me, is an internal thought I have every time I return home. That thought? Finished a novel? Put it away.
Our Taos group has been going on for eight years after the original Taos Summer Writer’s Conference, sponsored and put on by the University of New Mexico and conceived and founded by Sharon Oard Warner, shut its doors. (We did have a couple years where Covid killed it, but we’ve been back ever since). It’s my super bowl, as I’ve mentioned previously, and the other writers who attend feel the same way. We gather from around the country, have our morning writing workshops where we discuss our work (we usually receive everyone’s work in May and read each entry twice and make our critiques/recommendations), have our happy hours and dinners, catch up, and laugh a whole lot at jokes (this year plenty about snails), the ribbing we take from others, and fall back into the great family we’ve become over so many years. It’s a great time and we always ensure we start planning for next year’s event.
But then, after our hugs and kisses and goodbyes, it’s back to work. We return home with stacks of manuscripts covered in comments, emails with Word docs tracked up in red, and a whole new perspective on what we did well and where our novels and collections could use some improvement. Some of us may feel a little deflated, but we know, in the end, that our writer compadres have provided us with the insight and ingredients to make our works that much better. It’s a good vibe, a great help to the future of our work, and a necessary gathering of like-minded writers with our own quirks and eccentricities (did I mention some of our spouses and guests are well-respected painters, literary agents, airline pilots, translators and ex-roadies, poets and poetry professors, musicians, and more?) Well, they are. And that makes for a hell of a great time. I don’t drink, but the booze also seems to add a little something something.
After putting away the neon Taos, NM mugs and t-shirts, the green chile beef jerky and gifting my daughters the obligatory turquoise arrowhead necklaces and bracelets, I grab the manuscripts and Word docs with all of the helpful comments and recommendations and put them away for later. Yep. You read right. I NEVER look at them until I complete a new novel. I know exactly where the Taos feedback is, I know it’s calling to me, but I push all those things aside, grab a new leather bound notebook, and I get to writing (I used to type my novels but now I go back and forth between writing freehand and typing, as Word has a dictation feature that allows me two just read from my new novel and the speech to text feature works like a charm, albeit with some minor issues). You probably know why I put the feedback away, but I’ll tell you anyway.
Distance. When I first write a novel and workshop it, I’m too close to it. I don’t see the forest for the trees. This year I went with a novel that I wrote in seven weeks (I tend to write first drafts pretty quickly and then work on them for years), and I felt pretty good about it. I had a beginning, middle, and an end. I had damaged characters I liked. I had a plot that worked for me. I had a mystery, which is different for me but that developed organically and that I liked, so I went with it. But like all writers, what I saw in my writing was not what others saw in my writing. My workshop buddies saw a protagonist that was wrapped up in himself. They saw a guy who thought too much and acted too little. They saw minor characters that needed to be made into major characters. In short, they saw the issues I couldn’t see and the problems I would need to address during the revision process. And I understood what they were saying. Even so, I need to put distance between me, the constructive criticism I received, and the novel itself. Some people take a week or two. I take the time it takes me to write the next novel. But I always jump right back in. It’s what works for me.
I’ve been doing this a long time, and I know what works best when it comes time to getting my novel to the next draft. You may know what works best for you as well—whether that’s a week, a month, or five years before you get back to it. There is no set time amount or limit that’s set in stone—it’s whatever you feel is going to get you one step closer to that final product you’ll send out to literary agents, self-publish or vanity publish, indie publish, or whatever. You have to make that call. If you don’t need distance from your work, that’s great. Some of us just feel like it’s best to separate ourselves from our novels until we can see it with fresh eyes. There is no wrong or right here. Do what works for you.
This year we had novels about loss, about drugs, about mental illness, about men of industry and the lives they live from their youth through their old age, a collection of stories about a family of Texans we’ve known from previous novels, a science club that makes a sinister discovery, a father-daughter team on a quixotic quest, and more. All interesting stories that, it would make sense, we’d want to jump right back into now that we’re armed with the feedback we need to improve our works. Maybe some of us will dive right back in, now that we’re amped up with the feedback we were longing for. We got what we needed, right? So, let’s get back to our work.
I don’t believe in rushing it. The publishing industry works at a snail’s pace (see what I did there), and I believe we must not do a disservice to the worlds we’ve created where our characters live, and make mistakes, and overcome challenges, and clash with other characters in those same worlds. Rushing to get our work out there is, in my opinion, a mistake. No one is waiting desperately for us to turn over the newest War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, Lord of the Flies, or Infinite Jest. And barreling through the critiques you’ve received isn’t going to make that process any faster. In fact, you may be doing yourself a disservice trying.
Do what you want! I say. I do. But slow your roll as well. Writing a novel is a marathon, not a sprint. Even the best-known authors out there take years to write their novels. They have beta readers and editors and revise countless times before their agents and editors believe their authors’ books ready for the big leagues and the printing presses. No book will ever be perfect; the idea is to get it as close to that as one possibly can. And the only way to do that is by seeing the work with fresh eyes. So put away your manuscript for as long as you can. Write something new. Go on a trip. Get back to your day job. Whatever you have to do to put some distance between you and the next draft of your magnum opus, do it. You’ve put the time in already. You’ve put your heart into it. Now just give it a little more time so that the love and excitement you had in writing your novel translates into the love and excitement your readers will have to have in order to recommend it to another reader who will, in turn, keep the ball rolling.
Cully Perlman is an author, blogger, and Substantive Editor (SE). He can be reached at Cully@novelmasterclass.com
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