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A clean page draft—why?

I am about to start writing a clean page draft. It is exactly as it sounds; you write new words on blank pages without looking back. You kill your darlings and everything else too. All you’ve written is a darling—it all goes. You buy a plastic box and put everything up to this point except research into that box and you snap the lid and take it to the basement. It can sit there as evidence that you know this book and these characters but what you had to say about them up until now wasn’t the final word. You are pulling out the Levenger pad and the Kakuno pen filled with a sepia ink cartridge and beginning again, with Beginner’s Mind.

Why am I doing this? I have written lots of pages, showed some to friends and my agent, gotten a thumbs up, so it would seem sensible to continue to until The End with additions and refinements, tweaks and teasings out and connections. So in what sense does it seem sensible to set it all aside?

It’s important to figure this out. Analyze this. Discern whether or not this is legitimate or if it has the shape of a temptation. What’s the true motive? I have a friend who used to accuse me of avoidance when I decided to start a book over. It made me angry because I didn’t know what I could possibly be avoiding. I was trying so hard. Was I avoiding the possibility of success? Was I avoiding failure? Fear? Joy? What? I didn’t know. Was she right? Looking back, I think we were both right. I was trying to figure out some things, and she was urging me that I should just keep going, get to the end before I gave up on an attempt. I didn’t yet have a method for how to write a book, so I couldn’t say what stage I was in, either to myself or to her.

What have I learned since then?

The importance of understanding what a draft is. So far I have written a draft, with several sub drafts, lots of drafts of the first 50 pages, several drafts of some scenes, one of others, up to the end. That is not a book. I haven’t yet written a book. Setting aside what I have written is not starting the book over, really. It is writing a fresh draft based on all I know. I see more people ruin their relationship with their writing by not understanding what draft they are in—very much like what happens in relationships. The biggest mistake is thinking a work is done when it is really a draft. Sending work out prematurely usually results in disappointment. If work is getting rejected, it’s really important to understand why. I think, if a person can write, and setting aside the difficulties of getting through all the gatekeepers, rejection happens because they have been overly intent on getting the work out into the world before it was ready. It’s an easy mistake to make. Computers make work look finished and polished when it isn’t. If that is happening to you, get honest about your draft, and ask a few other people to be really honest with you. What’s wrong? Why isn’t it connecting? What quality is it lacking? I’m not saying it’s easy to get published, but it is easy to give editors reasons not to publish you. The draft issue is the source of all those good personal rejections. We have to send out final drafts that are undeniable and closed systems that other people can’t try their way into.

The importance of understanding what the book can be. This has been really crucial for me, as it is for most people. We all have categories in our minds about books, both about quality and about genre, and it’s hard to quiet that noise when we are writing. There are the books we wish we had written and there are the books we are capable of writing. These are not the same. We are never going to be any person other than ourselves. We do best to write for our eyes and sensibility only and to be as clear and communicative as we can for the sake of those reading our work, and we need to do both these things at the same time. This is not as tricky as it sounds. Pretend you are on trial for your life and you have one opportunity to make your case clearly, succinctly, persuasively, entertainingly, and beautifully. This is one hundred per cent about you, and one hundred per cent about how you make your case. The books we love have made their authors’ cases well enough that we both have a sense of the mind organizing the words and how that mind connects us with common ground among humans. What case do you really want to make, and how? Think long and hard about this. Knowing the answer will save you going down a lot of dead ends.

The importance of understanding the work. This is so important and also so difficult. Writers work really hard. That means not only putting in the hours and getting words on the page. It means constantly making adjustments around the work in the rest of life that will support the work. It means not giving into the impulses to settle—and the way of settling is very tempting. The reality check is to read about how hard writers work and grasp that reality. Steven King 364 days a year, all day. George Saunders, dozens of drafts per story. Louse Erdrich, 24/7, always making notes. I would say this is directly connected to understanding what a book can be and how to get there. Writing is not for those who brighten at the sound of the word “weekend,” unless that is when they have time to write. This is not to say that everyone has to work at this pace—most of us can’t for reasons of needing to make money or care for others or the choice to enjoy other aspects of life. The point is to understand that a lot of people who have long successful careers never settle, write many drafts, and work all the time. They are comparable to first rank athletes who train all the time. If that is not how your life is shaped you can’t be upset with yourself if you don’t get those results. We can make choices about how hard we want to work, for sure; that’s our side of it. We can accept that we don’t have the time or space to work all the time and figure out a more attenuated schedule. Either full or part time, what is it really going to take to write a good book? Part time takes longer; that’s reality.

There was a theory put forward by the the psychoanalyst D. T. Winnicott about what makes for “the good enough mother.” This mother attends to enough of her children’s needs for them to develop both confidence that they will be heard and resilience when they don’t get the attention they want. I don’t think there is an equivalent for writing for a simple reason. The book is another entity, for sure, but no matter how alive and responsive it feels, it doesn’t actually have a mind of its own. Everything on the page, we put on the page. The page can’t generate itself. (Okay, AI can, but that’s another story.) So we are 100% responsible.

Which brings me to the clean page draft. I am feeling love and understanding for this book and wanting it to be as good as it can be. And after much discernment I have concluded the way forward is to being again, in a new tone. Do I want to do all this work? No, and yes.