On Ghosts, Revenants, and Revision
By Lawrence C. Connolly
Copyright © 2014 by Lawrence C. Connolly
Lately, I’ve been contemplating ghosts.
I don’t mean the revenants of dead people, but rather the specters
of books that were never born. Titles such as Harlan Ellison’s Blood’s a Rover, a yet-to-be published
book that I saw advertised for release from Ace in the early 1980s, or the Orchises
Press edition of J. D. Salinger’s Hapworth
16, 1924, which received considerable advance notice in 1996 before the
author pulled the rights.
Sometimes these ghosts achieve a semblance of existence, usually
after the authors are no longer around to stand in their way. Such releases are
almost always incomplete and appended with editorial notes to outline what
might have been (or worse, finished and revised by literary continuators who
claim to know the authors’ true intensions).
In the early 1970s, the always eccentric Truman Capote
referred to his long delayed Answered
Prayers as a “posthumous novel” because “either I’m going to kill it, or
it’s going to kill me.” The unfinished book was eventually released in 1986 –
two years after Capote’s death.
Other well-known books that were abandoned either by death
or disenchantment include J. R. R. Tolkein’s The Notion Club Papers, Edgar Allan Poe’s The Journal of Julius Rodman, and Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger. It remains to be seen if Stephen King’s The Plant, started in 1982 and currently
unfinished, will become one of these.
The abundance of such ghosts isn’t surprising, given the
nature of the creation process and the fine madness shared by many writers. For
us, it’s not just about getting the words right. As Patrick Rothfuss writes on
his blog:
Words are just the tip
of the iceberg. [It’s also about] the order of scenes, characterization,
tension and subplot. I obsess about these things. I don’t want them good. I
want them perfect.
Rothfuss cites these as just some of the reasons why his
second novel, The Wise Man’s Fear,
came out years after its anticipated release date.
In all, I think that Ted Thompson, author of The Land of Steady Habits, best identifies
the reasons for such delays (and the ghosts that can result from them) in a
recent article in Salon.
I think deep down we
know when we’re done. There is something driving your writing, something that
you might not understand, that has to be expressed for the project to be
realized. If it hasn’t yet been found, or hasn’t yet been made clear, you’ll
feel it and you’ll know you’re not there.
Those inner feelings are more important today than ever. In
an age driven by publication deadlines and the option of rushing a work into
print via a proliferation of self-publishing platforms, it seems literary
ghosts are the least of our concerns.
[I]t takes [time] to
write a high quality book. I’m not talking about a book that everyone has to love.
I’m talking about a book that has the basics: a solid story, well-developed
characters, conflict that engages the reader, a satisfying resolution,
well-crafted sentences and paragraphs, literate use of words, and a lack of
typos and other egregious, noticeable errors [. . .] .
With the proliferation
of self-pub, online retailers are flooded with books that contain almost none
of those basics. Books that scream “vanity” and “I just wanted to get rich
quick.” Books that say, “I was too impatient, or too arrogant, or too ignorant,
to either learn the [. . .] most basic writing techniques, or to get an
editor’s eyes on this before it went public.
Elsewhere in the blog, Rachel references a famous Paul Masson
ad from the 1980s, in which Orson Welles proclaims that the winemaker will
“Sell no wine before its time.”
Writers should be guided by the same dictum. They need to be
honest with themselves and trust the inner voice that says This isn’t what you mean or This
isn’t working or You can do better.
I’m not saying that deadlines aren’t important, simply that they sometimes can
and perhaps should be adjusted when the book demands it.
I spent a lot of time this summer thinking about such
things.
Earlier this year, my novel Vortex: Book Three of the Veins Cycle was scheduled for a summer
release. Ads appeared, review copies went out, and I began what was to be a
string of summer appearances in support of the book. But even as the machinery
geared up for the release, something was nagging me, a sense that the full
potential of the story was yet unrealized. I suppose it would have been easier
in the short term to let the book come out. Instead, I requested a delay.
Since it was the third and final act in the cycle, I knew
from the outset that Vortex was going
to be a challenging book. It was the place where all the narrative arcs and
mysteries needed to come together, where the true nature of the cycle would be
revealed and the series drawn to a close. The first version of the book did
these things. That wasn’t the questions. At issue was how it did them. I didn’t
want the book to feel rushed, to give the impression that characters were
simply hitting their marks. Their actions needed to be fully motivated, with
the revelations growing out of their decisions. To make that happen, I needed
to live with them a little longer, spend a little more time exploring the
potential of their lives and the reckoning of their choices.
The additional revisions took three months. The work was
intense, and I admit that I worried early on that I might be conjuring a ghost.
Nevertheless, within weeks, the book began to truly come alive.
I turned the manuscripts in last month. No regrets this
time. The extra time was worth it, and I can now rest knowing that I have given
it the fully realized life it deserves.
It comes out in November.
