The Writing Breather

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?