The Gift of Time
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Good morning, and welcome to Shelf Life where we are still drafting in the Chivo font six months later. I change my font up periodically because I read somewhere that using a different font helps you draft faster. I’m quite attached to Chivo. I don’t know how I’m going to give it up when the time comes.
Speaking of time. You have probably heard the old saw: Time heals all wounds. Today I am here to propose a corollary: Time improves all inadequacies. Time alone won’t do it, but time spent wisely—that’s the cure for pretty much all things.
I started out a short story writer. I wrote my first short story in middle school. It was about a school shooting. I got in some trouble with the guidance counselor, or what passed for a guidance counselor at my middle school. She may have been a nun. Anyway, that story was not very good. That’s to be expected: I don’t think anybody’s first attempt at anything is very good.
I wrote some more short stories while I was in college, primarily during a creative writing course I took as an elective. These were also not very good, but they were better than the one from middle school. I had more life experience, and I had read more books and short stories, than I had at twelve.
Then, I didn’t write for a long time. I got married and then divorced and moved to the other side of the country for my job. On the left coast, I kept busy playing roller derby until I didn’t anymore, and then I had a bunch of time to fill. I wrote a bunch of short stories. These were still not very good but they were better than the ones from college. I hadn’t been practicing in the interim, but I had been—yeah you guessed it, racking up life experience and reading more books. These short stories were passable. The skeletons of some of them might be worthwhile one day, if I rewrite them.
Right before leaving California, I decided to try my hand at a longer work—a novel. I sat down and in three weeks banged out 60,000 words of probably the world’s worst first draft. Again, this was to be expected—it was my first novel and nobody’s first attempt et cetera see above. I reread what I had written and I had an inkling that it wasn’t a publication-quality story, but I wasn’t sure why it wasn’t or what was wrong with it or how to fix it. I put it away for a few weeks and moved back to Maryland. I reread it again and gave it an edit but fundamentally it wasn’t great.
So I put it away again. I bought a house. During my housewarming party, I met up with some local writer friends and we all agreed we wished we were in a writing group but didn’t know where to find one. We decided on the spot to form a writing group out of those there present and meet at my house on a regular basis. This started out as a typical writing group (it has since become atypical, which I’ll mention later), where members worked on their writing between meetings and then critiqued each others’ work at meetings.
I was extremely depressed at the time and had no creative energy so I trotted out my “trunk stories”—the ones I had written in California. I got helpful critiques on these and polished them up, finishing some that were unfinished and, eventually, starting new stories. The writing group morphed into one where we came together in person to sit quietly and write together—because most of us couldn’t keep the pace of having new work ready to share each month. The accountability of this format caused me to write more new stories. These ones were finally, actually, sort of less bad.
In 2022, I revisited the first draft of my novel, which had been stumping me since I originally drafted it in 2015, and I saw it in a totally new light. This time, I was able to identify the glaring, big-picture flaws and how to fix them. I realized a full rewrite was in order. I started, got one chapter in, and then turned my attention back to other things—work, life, short stories, anything but working on a novel.
It’s not easy for me to write a novel. It’s a long journey to the end and I get bored easily. It was a little bit demotivating to realize that I had to write this whole same novel again. If you can get bored during writing a novel you will definitely get bored writing the same one again.
I had mentioned rewriting my novel to a friend of mine, who told me a story about Kristin Cashore (author of Graceling), and how she was so relieved to turn in a finished draft to her agent only for the agent to turn around and say, essentially, “Great, now that you have the story down start again from scratch and rewrite the whole thing.” That helped motivate me to attempt it again.
Recently, in this year of our Lorde 2024, one year shy of a decade since I originally drafted this novel, I picked up the rewrite and started re-rewriting and found that while the first draft was bad and the rewritten second draft—the part of it I had completed—was passable, the new draft was maybe sorta good. Should I complete it and polish it up, it might even be something publishable.
This is the journey of one manuscript. This story is ten years long. Many people probably don’t need ten years to get to a passable manuscript and many people probably need much more. And that’s fine. But the point of the story, and today’s Shelf Life, is that the secret ingredient in this recipe for a maybe-not-completely-terrible manuscript was time.
I used to work with this woman I liked a great deal, and when a meeting adjourned early she would say, “Let’s give ourselves the gift of time.” This is a lovelier way of saying the generic “Let’s all take this time back” and everyone in the meeting is like “Sweet three whole minutes, I can pee or grab a coffee before my next meeting.” But she was objectively correct that time is a gift.
Here are some lessons I’ve learned from this ten year ordeal of working on the same manuscript.
It’s never too late for someone to start writing. The older you get, the more life experience you get, the more books and stories you read, the better you will be when you come to the writing desk and get down to business. Writing is not like sports, where the older you get the harder it is to start or maintain. It’s quite the opposite.
It’s also never too late to revive an old project that never quite gelled. Old writing projects sitting in digital or analog storage are like a fine wine—only getting better with age. If you come back to old projects with new experience and skills, you may be able to determine that their bones are worth keeping and it’s only the flesh, or even the skin, that need to be tossed on the trash heap. Or you may find that a story will never work but it has characters, settings, or bits of dialogue worth keeping and reusing. Even if a story has been relegated to the trunk, if you leave it there while you evolve it may be worth coming back to.
Don’t be married to the original draft of a story that isn’t working. I have found that when I open a fresh document and start writing the story again, I come up with something better than I would have if I had simply edited the original document. Sometimes the text in the original is better: There’s no rule saying I can’t mix and match the best of both drafts.
Don’t be so attached to a project that you can’t shove it in a drawer for a while—like a decade—until you have the right skills and motivation to make it the best possible version of itself. Had I insisted that I would keep worrying away at this draft continuously over the last ten years, I would not doubt have burnt it on a pyre by now.
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