Does anyone else take a breather after a writing endeavor? It’s not like shelving the manuscript or e-mailing it to your friends. It’s not a vacation. In fact, it’s something you can’t do if you leave the book entirely.
When I finished my manuscript last week, my lists were entirely crossed off. I couldn’t think of anything else to change. So I saved it, then tabbed out. I didn’t close. I left the file open for another two days.
About three hours into the breather I was cooking lunch when I got a sudden twinge about my soothsayer. I wondered if her scene wasn’t raw exposition. I also wondered if I’d spelled her name consistently after changes in the last draft. So I covered the pot and pulled it up. It turned out her name was misspelled half the time, despite my having gone over the entire book paragraph-by-paragraph. Her pages were also painfully dry. I copied, pasted, rearranged, re-worded, and even played some parts out loud in fastening some more naturalistic dialogue until it had punch.
That’s the function of a breather. It’s the equivalent of a smoke break during political negotiations or a four-hour class. I don’t smoke, but I would go outside to mull things in a different environment. The dryness and spelling issues of the soothsayer didn’t occur to me in straight editing. I was preoccupied with too many other things. Only later, cleaning the bathroom or mowing the lawn, would I think to check. It’s a healthy balance against the blindnesses that arise in deep editing.
Over the next two days, miscellaneous weaknesses and inconsistencies kept popping into my head. Sometimes I was nervous over nothing; no, I’d already shortened this passage, or that one had never been as silly as I worried in the first place. But more often, there were actual problems only my relaxed and reflecting mind would recognize. As I made the eighth alteration (unifying the gender of a certain giant spider across multiple chapters), I wondered: do other people do this?
I always do this. I step away, but never really leave it. It gives your mind room to breathe. I didn't really know if that made sense to other people, but obviously, you get it. :)
ReplyDeleteI'm glad it's all coming together for you.
I do that too. It gives your mind a chance to bubble questions/concerns up to the surface.
ReplyDeleteFind/replace on Word is a wonderful thing for spelling names consistently!
Even when editing non-fiction for other people, I do this. After a few readings, you feel like you know exactly what's going on, which puts me in a dangerous rut.
ReplyDeletePlus, it's the only way I get food.
Yep. Time and distance lets you see things with fresh eyes. I'm reading a memoir by Neil Simon at the moment. He said that putting a draft in the drawer for a weekend is like magic. On re-reading it, all the good stuff is still good, but the bad stuff now stands out, as though it were written by someone else. Makes it easier to know what to fix, shore up or cut entirely.
ReplyDeleteMy breathers tend to be a little different. I try not to think of the story at night, when I sleep, and put it aside during the day while I work. I try to leave it for the 2 hours I can manage a day. But it never works out like that. I'll wake up in the middle of the night realizing some problem, or come up with solutions while I'm busy at the job ;) Never the right time at all.
ReplyDeleteYep. I take a break and play bejeweled, it lets my mind relax and it comes up with all sorts of interesting things. A shower is good for this too.
ReplyDeleteAgain, congrats on finishing the book.
Stacey
This is also a vital part of programming. Every programmer has at least a half-dozen stories about being tormented by a bug during a 12-hour bleary-eyed slugfest, only to finally have the solution occur to them when they turn away in disgust to take a nap or go for a walk. I think "breathers" help in multiple ways--they rejuvenate you by functioning as small breaks from the conscious expending of energy, and also let your subconscious try novel approaches to the problem while your conscious mind's focus is elsewhere.
ReplyDeleteYep, breathers are good. Sometimes my berak lasts a few days, sometimes a couple of years. Congrats on getting through the first round of edits -- that is a huge feat. peace...
ReplyDeleteI do this all the time, sometimes I won't go back for a year, just to make sure I get the story out of my head so that when I go back I can take a fresh look.
ReplyDeleteI do it, but not as a deliberate action. For me, it's more inaction — or more accurately, I'm called away from the keyboard by my dayjob, or life in general. It might be days or even weeks before I come back to the story & see what's festering in there.
ReplyDeleteMine usually hit me when I'm driving to or from work. I keep a notebook & pen handy and jot down just enough to make sense and not let me crash.
ReplyDeleteYep. All about the breathers. Typically, I call them "crashes" because by that point I'm sort of exhausted to the point of blithering and bad hygiene. At the *end* end, I also tend to struggle with some serious down feelings, sort of like saying goodbye, or just realizing something that was omni-present just wasn't there anymore.
ReplyDeleteBut I think breathers are important throughout the writing process, and that it's good to put things down, walk away, get into another headspace, etc. Can shift your perspectives considerably.
Love reading this post and the responses. I suppose my stepping away would be between drafts, but I have to disentangle myself completely. I can feel my subconscience working on things that bother me, but I refuse to work on it until I can utterly devote myself to six weeks of focused attention to the completion of the full draft (or project) because I've found that this is how my mind and body works. Breathers are just a slow slow torture for me. Good stuff here, John. You've got spiders in your book? I really want to read it.
ReplyDeleteYep I've done this while editing and also even when writing just a flash - I leave it up and walk away and do something else, all the time my mind is still working on it.
ReplyDeleteIt's like when I use to exhibit my watercolours, I'd paint a picture, but I would leave it sitting up for days, somewhere I could see it as I walked past, if I didn't hate it at the end of the time, it was good to go, but sometimes it allowed one to see glaring mistakes.....
I think what you are describing is not really a breather at all because you haven't stopped working on it. It's a chance for different parts of your brain to work away in the background on the book.
ReplyDeleteI also agree that coming back to it after a break makes it fresh again for your conscious mind.
Exciting that you're getting close to finishing it.
Sometimes my breather lasts a couple DAYS or longer. When I finished a first draft of a 100,000 manuscript, I let it sit for a good two months before I went back to it.
ReplyDeleteFresh mind, fresh ideas.