The Real Work of Writing Occurs on Revision

In the opening pages of my debut novel, The Lost Book of Lancelot, our narrator (you guessed it, it’s Lancelot) recounts his earliest memory. As a boy he lived on a mysterious, mist-clung island. He was raised by Viviana, the Lady of the Lake, and he longs to know her magic. When Viviana holds her closed fist in front of him, her hand begins to glow.

(7 Self-Editing Processes for Writers.)

Magic? No, it’s just a firefly. What looks like magic, she explains is just the world revealing itself.

Lancelot, enthralled, snatched the firefly. But in his boyish eagerness, he accidentally destroys it.

         I open my hand. The firefly lies mashed in the folds of my palm.

This is where the opening scene originally ended. That early iteration achieved a few things. It grounded the reader in a sense of place. It dramatized the dynamic between Lancelot and his surrogate mother, and it suggested that in this narrative world, nature and magic were inextricably linked.

Okay, cool. But do we really get a sense of Lancelot here? Not really. Throughout the book we see him yearning, longing, craving knowledge, dreaming of more. We know from these opening pages that he’s curious. But what’s missing are the emotional stakes of his longing, the engine of his character that will propel the entire narrative. In source texts, Lancelot is volatile, prone to wild fits of madness. His self-doubt, his guilt, and his longing, are absolutely going to destabilize the hell out of him.

On revision, I added this to the end of the firefly scene:

I open my hand. The firefly lies mashed in the folds of my palm.

The damage is horrifying. A living thing, now in bits. I realize, almost instantly, that what I’ve done is irrecoverable. Even Viviana’s magic can’t bring the firefly back to life. A desperate wrongness rises from my stomach.

Frantic, I smear the remains of the firefly on a tree trunk, but the tension inside me is too much to bear. I curl my hands into a fist and punch the bark, over and over. I need to feel the pain to account for the fact that I’ve killed the firefly.

Startled, Viviana pulls me back. She’s looking at my pulpy knuckles with a knowing fear. I start to sob.

“Deep breaths,” she says, and pulls me close.

It will take weeks for the cuts to heal. I still have the scars.

*****

A little better, right? Now we can see how Lancelot synthesizes this moment, and how he’ll likely approach others like it. We see how Viviana reacts, with familiarity perhaps, but also with foreboding concern. It’s not a huge edit, but it helps the scene do a little more heavy-lifting.

The truth is, I never could’ve seen this narrative opportunity on the first draft, or even the second, third, or fourth. In the beginning I was just playing around in the sandbox that is Arthurian legend. If you go back to the 13^th century, to an Old French version of the stories known as the Vulgate Cycle, you’ll find a queer-coded love story between Lancelot and a fellow knight named Galehaut. That thread captivated my imagination and inspired me to start writing. But those early sessions were clouded in a haze of self-doubt.

Even with source material, I was struggling to piece together a fresh and compelling plot, straining to understand these characters and their medieval milieu. The requisite research felt daunting. My perspective seemed off somehow.  The voice in my head kept telling me, you can’t do this. And the pages I was generating only seemed to validate my inner critic. This wasn’t an Arthurian Song of Achilles. It was the deluded attempt of a writer way over his skis. I nearly gave up.

In my day job I’m a book editor at a publishing company. Every day I get to help talented authors tell their stories and find their readers. I love my job. Beyond the business of acquiring and publishing, I get to roll up my sleeves and engage with the manuscript itself. I usually do two rounds of edits, one big-picture, and one line edit. In both phases, my goal is to amplify the author’s vision for the book, a north star we locate together before the process begins.

For my own novel, I had my north star, and that was the problem. All I could think about was how bad my pages were compared to the books I’d sought for inspiration.

That week, I was emailing with one of my authors. “How’s the draft coming?” I’d asked her.

“I’m trying to be kind to myself,” she wrote back. “And I’m letting myself having fun.”

Her words crested over me, washing away layers of sedimented thinking. Was I being kind to myself? No. Was I finding the fun? Not really. I realized I was approaching the project all wrong. I had somehow forgotten that there would be revising and shaping, that I’d be applying my own editorial toolkit to these pages once I got to the end. This rough draft? It could be terrible, and it wouldn’t matter because no one would ever need to see it. I’d somehow forgotten that the real work of writing often occurs on revision.

And the fun part? That was easier. The next morning at the coffee shop, blinking cursor before me, I made myself a promise. I would write this book for me alone. The end goal wasn’t publishing. It was to embrace a new creative challenge, to prove to myself I could write this thing. The Arthurian sandbox was fun as hell, a perfect escape hatch from reality, a portal, for a couple hours here and there, to a world of my own making. That was the whole point.

This new mindset was a total game changer. Liberated from expectations, I came to see my terrible first draft not as a sign of my own daily failings, but as a growing ball of clay that I could shape into a form of my choosing using an editor’s toolkit.

The best part? That toolkit is accessible to everyone. Once I finished that first draft, I did a big picture round. How can I sharpen the plot? How can I enhance the emotional stakes? These two side characters serve the same narrative purpose, let’s combine them. Some scenes I took down to the studs, others I jettisoned entirely. The initial draft was in the third person, and one day I experimented with first. It clicked, and I rewrote the whole thing. Then I did a line edit to make the sentences sing.

Now, as I work through new ideas, I’m trying to remember to be kind to myself. The first draft can be bad and that’s okay. It’s part of the fun.

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