It was back in May of 2019 when I made the decision to start rewriting a novel I’d last written in the late 1980s/early to mid 1990s. It had a single title (it was the first of a series of three novels) and was nearly 600 pages long (that is way too many pages). My plan was to edit it down to an actual publishable length.
I randomly split the stack of manuscript pages, read a few, and immediately decided that was a bad idea. The writing was nothing like the style or voice my writing had evolved into by the time my other novels were published in the 2000s. My distaste for what I read wasn’t only because of a difference between the style compared to the style of the published books. I just didn’t like what I read.
But those characters had been resurfacing in my consciousness for a while. I can see proof in a lot of my posts in the months prior to that decision to rewrite–the way the most random topics would lead me back to remembering those people and their stories. As I finally said here in 2019, I wanted to know how the decades of changes in me would impact how I would change them. In order not to be influenced by the past version, I packed the manuscript away unread and began my novel in an entirely different way. I never looked back.
As I’ve admitted repeatedly, I didn’t edit that old book down to publishable size. I stopped imposing rules on it. Rules are for publishing houses and their marketing and publicity. I’m not seeking that. I’m writing… because I have to. Even if it’s for the two readers I have. [I’ve tried other readers. That hasn’t worked out well for me so far. I have to rise above the insecurity and doubt other people’s reactions or even indifference cause me so that I can keep writing. This isn’t easy. Writers crave readers.]
Once again, the book was getting TOO LONG. I split the new manuscript into three books. I’m now on the seventh. In each new novel, refreshers are needed relating to plot and characters, but I try to do those in a variety of ways that aren’t tedious for a reader.
Recently, I reached a point when I questioned why the plot unfolded as it did for these people in the old version. I know what motivates them now, but things are a lot different. So what motivated them back then?
A few days ago, I pulled this out again.
I read it first page to last. It was startling how different things are between that old version and the one I’m writing now. I can barely recognize these people. In the decades in which I first conceived them, I was either a teenager smitten by music and musicians, or I watched a lot of daytime TV, plus prime time TV offered dramas like “Dallas,” “Dynasty,” and “Falcon Crest.” Many bestselling novels of those decades were from Jacqueline Susann, Sidney Sheldon, Judith Krantz, Jackie Collins, Harold Robbins, and Danielle Steel, among others. That genre was referred to as glitz, and I suppose because I was writing about people with money, ambition, and fame, I thought I had to write something similar to that style.
I think that old novel fails not because I was writing outside my life experience, but because I was writing outside what I regard as my authentic storytelling voice. So what the heck ever, whether I have two readers or twenty or none, I hope I’m doing all the things listed on the above quote from Mary Lou Cook. I love these people and their flaws, mistakes, virtues, depth, humor. I break a few rules with them. I’m fine with that.
I write for my characters. I write for me. (We are not the same.)