Upon finishing edits and revisions on the second draft of my novel, I now remember why it’s been a while since I’ve successfully completed the second draft of an original novel.
I love writing. I’ve been doing it since I was a kid, since before I knew how it worked. I also love editing — I do more editing professionally than writing these days, and I’ve stuck with it because there’s just something magical about taking a piece of writing in progress and making it better than it originally was.
Doing it with my own writing, though … it’s hard. Maybe you’ve experienced this, too. It’s easy, at least in comparison, to give feedback on other people’s writing. But your own? And then you have to look at something you’ve written, tear it to pieces, and only glue back together the best parts — leaving the rest to collect dust?
I’m not a great writer, but I’ve been doing it for a long time. I’ve written a handful of novels before this one, even though none of them have ever gotten to the “publishable” stage. That doesn’t mean my first draft was good. It was a good start. But it needed a lot of work. Maybe it still does.
Which leads me to my second-draft slump. My post-revision crisis of faith, if you will. I know the book is better than it was. But is it a novel anyone is going to ever want to publish … or read?
Does it need more work? Or should I give it a chance and query until my hands fall off?
There are a few other complications for me to consider at the moment as well. There’s never a “good” or “right” time to query your novel. But it’s October — I just finished this draft last week. I’m pregnant. My baby is due in March. And in the newborn trenches, I’m not sure I’ll have the stamina to either do more revisions requested by an editor or respond to query responses (if I were to get any).
But if I wait … it’s just one of those things. It might never happen. I’ll blink, and years will have gone by, and my book will just have been sitting there. Forgotten.
I don’t know if it’s ready for querying. But I also can’t, and really don’t want to, spend another six months doing more revisions the book might not even technically need.
There is no self-doubt like that of a writer closer to being able to query a novel than she’s ever been before.
I love and believe in my book. But there is so much more work to do no matter where I choose to go from here. And what if, after all this, nothing ever comes of it? What if I’ve spent all this time and energy on a story that isn’t meant for the wider world?
In the end, I will do the right thing. I’ll sit on this decision a little longer and give myself time to recover from, well … the exhaustion of revising an 80,000-word novel in less than three months.
I just hope it’s all worth it. That’s all we can ever hope for, when we choose to tell stories. That they’ll truly mean something. That they’ll matter.
That we’ll never forget them, no matter what.
