Uncertainty
Listening to NPR the day after Thanksgiving, I heard a story about an archive of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s manuscripts. “They are covered with handwritten corrections!” the archivist enthused, to which the interviewer responded, “The idea that he corrected himself just blows me away.”
Which response rather blew me away. Did he think all those great books just happened without being worked on? What does he think writers do? You write a bit, and it’s not quite right, so you fiddle with it and change a word here and a phrase there and relocate a paragraph or a scene and put it back and fiddle with things some more. Sometimes you cut a bit; sometimes you add a bit. And then you come back next day and do it all again. Oscar Wilde was only partly joking when he claimed to have spent the entire morning inserting a comma, and the entire afternoon taking it out. It’s not as if we’re all taking dictation from some supernatural entity that’s just making use of our typing skills.
Writing is made up of an immense number of critical decisions that are never…quite…decided for sure. Some are huge – which of the three possible romantic partners does the main character choose? Will the protagonist accept the throne or the offered promotion, or go off in search of a more fulfilling personal life? Others appear smaller – should that minor character be Andrew, Andres, or Anthony? Is “barricade” or “barrier” the right word in this sentence? Should the scene with the goldfish happen before the one with the seagull attack, or after?
One has to decide these things, or one cannot make much forward progress. One can only get so far by peppering a manuscript with square brackets and question marks to check or change later: “[UnnamedVillain [loomed/leaned threateningly over Anthony? as the [barricade/barrier/thingie began [continued? Check continuity] to collapse” is more notes than draft.
On the other hand, quite often “Geoffrey loomed threateningly over Andres as the seagulls stormed the barricade behind them” only looks as if it is more certain than the first version. Even before word processors, every writer knew perfectly well that it would only take a few minutes to retype the page and make it “Jennifer snuck up behind Anthony as the walrus knocked over the police cordon in front of them.”
Very, very occasionally, there is an obviously “right” thing to do: using “to whom” instead of “to who,” for instance. Far more often, it is entirely non-obvious whether the villain should be a Geoffrey or a Jennifer, whether the threatened character is better Andres than Anthony or Andrew (or maybe Amy), whether the seagulls or the walrus would come to the rescue first. There is no universally “right” answer most of the time; which version works better is a matter of personal taste and preference, authorial style, and the needs of the story the author is telling. (OK, the one with all the square brackets is pretty obviously not-right for pretty much any story, until somebody makes some of those decisions and removes all the brackets, but either of the other two would be fine in the right sort of story.)
Because there is no universally right answer, the author is left with the nagging feeling that whatever choices he or she made, they may very possibly be wrong…or at least, that there was a better or more effective way of handling the sentence, scene, plot twist, or bit of character development. Some writers react to this uncertainty by constantly changing their work, right up to the minute it gets sent off to an editor (and I am given to understand that there are now self-published e-books that the author continues to update and “improve” for months or years after their official publication).
Other writers react by making a decision early on and treating it as unchangeable. These folks are the bane of critique groups; you point out that seagulls can fly, so they wouldn’t need to storm the barricade, and the writer just stares and says, “This is how it happened. I can’t change it now.” Sometimes, they’re just being stubborn; frequently, though, they’ve convinced themselves that whatever they’ve written “feels right” and they’re genuinely uncomfortable with any change, necessary or not.
All this is complicated by the fact that either kind of writer can be quite correct in their judgments…or totally wrongheaded. Sometimes both in the same book. Plus there’s the process factor: some writers do lots of small rewrites as a normal part of their process; some prefer to mull things over for days or weeks before committing a chapter to pixels or paper, so that it’s close to being right the first time.
The main thing for writers to keep in mind is that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. There also isn’t a perfect solution. No manuscript is ever perfect – not the first draft, and not the final draft. Writers need both flexibility and steadfastness: a willingness to change course when the story demands it and the firmness of purpose to resist the temptation to wander off course when the story doesn’t demand it. And, of course, the intuition and intelligence to tell the difference.
