The Value of Time Away
How many times have you written—or rewritten—your fiction material? I estimate that, in the course of “writing” my YA manuscript, Sudden Sisters, I’ve actually written the equivalent of five books. That’s because, in the 17 drafts, much of which was new writing integrated with and among existing writing to create a “better” version, many thousands of words’ worth of writing has occurred.
This is not a bad thing—in fact, it’s just the opposite. When we look back four or eight drafts ago, the story in some ways might look much as it now does in our current draft. But our rewriting has deepened, clarified, and furthered the stakes, tension, backstories, and character interiority we “knew” in some ways from early on, yet hadn’t quite gotten onto the pages for readers to infer and interpret
We hear it all the time—Writing is Rewriting. Yet, what is Rewriting, really?
One experience I had with my pages shoved an answer to that question right in my face.
I had written a 38,000 word version of my story, and polished it with the help of some beta readers and an independent editor. The manuscript gained literarly representation, and was submitted to several editors at publishing houses. One editor even wrote back with what my agent called “the most generous rejection letter” he’d ever seen. It was indeed very generous, and I learned a lot about how my project has fared when that editor submitted it to her acquisitions group at a major YA imprint.
Based on her letter, I also did some meaningful rewrites. Of course, her “notes,” as with so many reader notes we all recieve, led to logic fixes, character profile adjustments, tone and attitude shifts—even a genre-lean, to help the story reach and hopefully satisfy more readers.
When my agent down-shifted his practice, and later passed away, I was simultaneously pulled into a position of greater responsibility at my teaching institution, so some years went by before I worked further on that project.
And that’s the thing: over ten years later, I re-opened my last-saved version and started reading. A waterfall might as well spontaneously have erupted over my head, flooding it full of new images, emotions, motivations, past traumas for my characters, and how all those could connect. It was like a whole new beginning—page by page, lacing in so much information I hadn’t thought of before.
That’s because the material had been largely resolved in terms of plot. Sure, the characters were all there, too; they were not '“undeveloped.” They were, for the situation the plot and their backstories conspired to put them in, basically sound. Maybe even compelling.
But the invitations for MORE, and DEEPER content just leaped off the page in this new read. A little here, a nice three-quarter page there, some more two pages later, and before I knew it (after 19 months) I’d worked through the whole project, adding meat made of motivation, detail, history, onto the sturdy “bones” I’d built long before.
One lesson I took from this was that meaningful TIME AWAY allows a kind of objectivity that might actually be needed to see where opprotunities lie for true deepening.
No, I do not recomend waiting ten years at a time on any project for any assumed good it might do. But a solid month or two could open a lot of pathways in a later re-read, and raise new awareness of where and how the pages are ripe for more, more, and more depth, emotion, stakes, pacing, reversals, etc.
On a line level, we’re “rewriting” almost every time our eyes hit a page—there’s always a word or line to “fix” as we go. And those, sometimes thousands of fixes, ultimately end up bringing the work truly to life.
I just can’t say enough about time away as a means of noticing cracks that only a more objective eye can illuminate. And filling those cracks with gold could push the material where it really needs to go.