Hot love on a platter

Around The Bend - The Asteroids Galaxy Tour

I coined a new term during a chat with another writer friend the other night (Hi Megan!): Eating your earlobes.

Obviously, this requires a little explanation. In Stephen King's collection Skeleton Crew is a story called "Survivor Type," which even King himself says he took too far. In it, a surgeon smuggling heroin on a cruise ship survives a shipwreck and is marooned on a tiny island with only his surgical tools and a quantity of heroin. As he tries to survive, he breaks an ankle and is forced to amputate his foot. Starving, he winds up eating the amputated foot. Then as time passes with no rescue, he continues to remove parts of his own body and eat them. Yeah, I know, gross, right? Well, it is Stephen King. The last things he takes before finally cutting off one of his hands (which means he will no longer be able to perform the self-surgery) are his earlobes.

How does that apply to writing? you may ask. It applies not so much to the writing part of writing, but the editing part.

I was asked today why I wait a few months in between completing a first draft of a project and starting the editing/rewriting on a second draft. The reason is pretty straightforward - there must be some creative and emotional distance between drafts, time that is required to let the story "breathe" on its own, without being fiddled with. When I return to it a few months later, after I've begun another project, I can approach it from that fresh, untainted perspective and it's easier to amputate the bad parts. Fortunately, I don't have to ingest large quantities of heroin first (although I do ingest large quantities of caffeine). Then, when I finish a draft, I set it aside again (usually placing it in the capable hands of my trusty editor Allie.

Time and time again, I've seen other writer friends of mine keep going over the same piece of work, over and over and over, making change after change after change without ever stopping to step back and see if maybe they have it right. The problem with doing this is twofold:

1. You're never satisfied that the work is finished.
"Just one more read-through," you tell yourself, and then there's another and another. Eventually years may pass because you're still not convinced that the work is ready. It's a defense mechanism; if you don't call the work finished, you never have to face the admittedly emotionally-challenging process of querying (which leads inevitably to numerous rejections). It shows fear of progress and an inability to step beyond your comfortable tidal pool into the greater ocean of publishing (isn't that a great metaphor? *pats self on back*). I worked for a few years on a tabletop role-playing game system where the main author suffered from this particular malady. To my knowledge, some fifteen years later he still has not published his game.

2. You can do more damage than good.
You might have some real gems in your work; sentences that ebb and flow with lyrical precision that could strike a chord into even the tinniest of ears. But you're so busy cutting and rewriting that you never take the time to walk away and come back later to find them. At some point, this process reaches a critical mass where the whole thing finally blows up and instead of walking away, you throw it away. Congratulations, you've just eaten your earlobes.

So my advice to you is when you finish a draft, do what you need to do to stay away from it. Start a new project. If you're the sort of person who can't stop tinkering, email your file to a friend or family member you can trust (who has a place to back it up online) and delete it from your hard drive. Scary? Absolutely. But I promise it'll keep you from working on it! If you're a little more disciplined, like me, schedule it into your project list. For example, here's my plan for the next few projects:

1. Complete Blackout by the end of August (totally possible - I have less than four chapters to write).
2. Work on 4th draft (after editing by Allie) of The Archmage in September.
3. Begin work on 3nd draft of Pariah's Moon in October. I won't finish it before November, so this will be a post-NaNoWriMo project that will probably lead into January.
4. November: I'll be doing my 6th go-round with NaNo, in a genre I'm calling Urban Fantasy Hockey. The working title is Blood on the Ice. My agent, bless her heart, is stoked to get this one when it's done.
5. First quarter of 2010 - this is where things get murky. I'll have two projects ready for edit/rewrite (Blackout and Enter The Jackrabbit), and will probably be ready to start something brand new, which might be any of a number of projects I'm not prepared to discuss this far in advance.

So you can see, Blackout isn't getting its first real editing treatment for a good four to five months after I complete it. That delay is crucial when it comes to successful editing/rewriting. Otherwise I'm just eating my earlobes, and after that all I can do is cut off my own hands.