You’re Right Until You’re Not: On Being Able to Change Your Writing Process Mid-Project

My first exposure to other professional writers came at one of the early ThrillerFest conventions. I was able to talk with other authors beyond just the pleasantries and my gushing over their novels. One of the questions that came up often was the number of drafts each writer went through until submitting their manuscripts. It was a question that was utterly alien to me.

(5 Reasons Why Writers Need Privacy.)

Of course I would read back through what I’d just written and tweak a word or two or move an occasional sentence but for the most part what came out as I lay the words down line after line was pretty much what I submitted. I would work with editors, for sure, but even then structure, pacing, and character were pretty much the same once the book was published. I could feel for those agonizing and endlessly rewriting until they drove themselves crazy but somehow I’d been spared.

I recall a story an editor once told me about a manuscript he’d bought. It was a World War Two thriller that was missing an edge and he knew just how to fix it. He sent the author a simple note. Make your hero a heroine and we have a winner. I can imagine how gobsmacked he must have been at that moment. To his credit, he complied and got a chance to read the book prior to publication and the change in gender made the story crackle.

Seven books into my career I got a call and the opportunity to cowrite thrillers with the legendary Clive Cussler, an offer I agreed to even before he completed making it. It was with these books that I felt a little of what others had to go through. Clive was a sharp editor and knew what he wanted. And I have to say for the most part his suggestions strengthened the books we wrote together, tightened them, and made them more focused. I never felt these were a new draft per se, but a more polished version of the first.

We wrote seven books in the Oregon Files together but by the end I was burned out with the series and frankly I was disagreeing more and more with editorial changes. I wanted to return to my own character, Philip Mercer, and so I left the Cussler fold to write The Lightening Stones.

Clive reached out some time later, just before I started writing another about my globe-trotting geologist, and asked if I would be interested in doing a novel about super sleuth Isaac Bell. I wasn’t interested until an idea hit me: Ret-con Bell into Clive’s big breakout book, Raise The Titanic! Clive loved it. I also wanted to flip the tried and true Cussler formula on its head by starting the book with a scene in the present and then let the story unfold in the past. Clive really liked the concept. The Titanic Secret was the result, and it easily hit bestseller lists around the world.

For our next collaboration, I wanted to push the envelope a little more and have a scene in which Bell is at a dinner with half a dozen other people. Unbeknownst to him each person is, in some, way the book’s villain. It was a little more Agatha Christie than Arthur Conan Doyle but again Clive was game.

Not long before I completed the book, Clive passed suddenly and his son, Dirk, took the helm of the Cussler ship. I’d known and liked Dirk for many years but we had never worked together. Crack out of the box he told me that he didn’t like the book at all. It lacked the Cussler formula and the idea of multiple villains versus one super-villain wasn’t compelling. It needed major rewrites. It needed a second draft.

Needless to say, I took this critique with grace and good humor. Or I cursed him and his entire bloodline in perpetuity. I forget which one. After days of the kind of deep breathing exercises that would make a doula proud, I got past my own ego and came to a fundamental truth. There was plenty about the book Dirk liked, who wouldn’t love seeing Isaac Bell stop saboteurs from destroying the Panama Canal before it opens? If I wanted to salvage the manuscript, I would have to accept that there is more than one way to tell a story. I would finally have to do a second draft I had so deftly avoided for all those years. That thought daunted me. In truth, it scared me to death.

Many of the authors I know are a superstitious lot when it comes to their craft for the simple reason we really don’t understand how we are able to write book after book. It is a complete mystery to us where our ideas come from, how we juggle plot lines and characters and understand the rules of grammar don’t apply to dialogue but do to exposition. We keep to whatever routine works for us out of fear that even a minor deviation will take down the whole house of cards and leave us slack-jawed in front of our computers with nothing to say.

This wasn’t a deviation Dirk was asking of me, but a fundamental change in direction. Frankly, I was paralyzed for a couple of weeks. My mind was a complete blank. I knew deep down that there was only one way to tell this story. My original concept was the only way the book worked. Full stop.

But then I looked at the problem differently. I had to look at doing a second draft as a literary mountain others had climbed, often repeatedly, and one that I could conquer too. Hell, if those authors could do multiple drafts who’s to say I couldn't too. Once I saw a rewrite as a challenge rather than a rebuke, I approached the manuscript with a new attitude.

Gone was a cast of characters with their own petty reasons for wanting work on the canal halted. I need just one villain. Who is he? What does he gain? He’ll need a henchman because all good villains do. What’s his story? It all started coming together. The subplot about a lost treasure? No longer necessary. Snip. Some of the action set pieces no longer worked in this new draft. It’s okay. Save them for a future book.

In the end, the edits took a couple of months and once I got going I grew to accept that sometimes my superstitious routines were preventing me from being a more open and flexible writer. Ego tells me my first draft was the superior one, but I have no quantifiable reason to actually believe that. The second draft of The Saboteurs was the one that hit store shelves and it was another bestseller and a fan favorite to many. Who am I to say that all those readers didn’t get the best Isaac Bell adventure I could write?

Since then, I haven’t had to go through any such laborious rewrite, mostly because Dirk and I work closely together on the outlines and there can’t be such a vast difference in opinion about the book’s direction. But I now know that there are many ways a hero can journey from the beginning of the book to the end and that none of the steps are as cast in stone as I first thought.

Bookshop | Amazon

(WD uses affiliate links)