Thousands of readers, myself included, loved
"Snow Falling on Cedars," by David Guterson. One of its major plot lines -- the suspenseful murder trial of a Japanese-American fisherman accused of killing a Caucasian competitor -- riveted my attention from start to finish. But I wonder how many readers knew that the trial didn't appear in the novel's first draft. I certainly didn't until I heard Guterson talk about it at a writing festival I attended several years ago.
"Memoirs of a Geisha" enjoyed similar success with readers. How many of us knew that the exquisitely crafted novel about the world of Japanese courtesans went through three complete drafts before its creator, Arthur Golden, was satisfied? But that's exactly the case, as Golden told a
CNN interviewer after his book become a best-seller in 1999:
I threw two drafts away. But I wrote a draft based on a lot of book-learning. And I thought I had a pretty good idea of what the world of a geisha was like, and wrote a draft. Then a chance came along to meet a geisha, which, of course, I couldn't turn down. And she was so helpful to me that I realized I'd gotten everything wrong, and I ended up throwing out that entire first draft and doing the whole thing over again.
And now comes word, via "The Weekend Adviser," Sam Schechner's
Wall Street Journal column, that revision played an equally huge role in the completion of the latest novel from Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of
"The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay." As Schechner tells it:
It was the end of 2005, and Michael Chabon was rushing to finish his latest novel. The blurb was in his publisher's sales catalog. The on-sale date was set. Then his editor slammed on the brakes.
Instead, after consultations with his editor, he spent about eight months reworking the entire book -- a murder mystery set in a fictional Yiddish-speaking Jewish homeland in Alaska. He added a flashback structure and pared down the language into a hard-boiled, Yiddish-inflected patois. "I felt like I had to invent a whole new dialect of English to finish it," he says.
This Monday, after five years, four drafts, two trips to Alaska and a title change, "The Yiddish Policemen's Union," will arrive in stores.
"I shudder now when I think that I would have published the old draft," Chabon says.
Everybody rewrites, even if it's just to correct a misspelling, to move some paragraphs around. But in most newsrooms, writers invariably say they do so "as they're writing." Rarely do they dump a draft and start all over again, citing resistance from the clock and editors who often fill in the role of revisers.
What impresses -- and consoles me -- about these over-the-top tales of revision behind successful writing is the commitment of these writers to push themselves and their willingness to jettison reams of copy in search of an acceptable version.
But they have the luxury of time to do that, dissenters could argue. I don't buy that. It's one thing to be given the time, but quite another to throw away years of work to start over. Or even a couple of hours.
It's not time that sets apart the writers many of us admire; it's tenacity, patience, willingness to take risks, and most of all, an understanding that good writing is all about two things: reporting and revision. Much of journalism, be it print, online or broadcast, is largely a first-draft culture. It needn't be that way.
Fortunately for journalists and other professionals, revision doesn't have to mean months of work. Draft fast, print out early, mark up text, input the changes -- it's a process that can be repeated several times in the course of completing a daily story. Until news writers recognize the crucial role of revision, the industry will face resistance from an audience that abandons its products.
Even so, I feel the pain of those who see revision time as a gift they're rarely offered, or a punishment for not making the grade. For much of my life as a writer, revision meant just one thing: I'd failed. Experience and lessons learned from other writers has taught me otherwise, though I still recoil from revision's demands.
In my hard drive is a 90,000 word, very rough first draft of a novel that I've been afraid to look at because I know so much of it belongs in the trash. (You can decide for your self by reading an
excerpt here.) That's why I still benefit from the kind of reinforcement that Chabon's revision tale provides.
According to Schechner, the first draft of Chabon's new novel weighed in at more than 600 pages, narrated in the first person. It didn't work, Chabon said, "in part because the narrator, a homicide detective, was too garrulous. ... I wanted to have more distance from him." So he started over with a different plot and in third person.
If you'd like to be a better rewriter, let me direct you to
"Get me Rewrite: The Craft of Revision," one of my online courses on NewsU. (Enrollment is quick and, as is the case with most NewsU courses, free.)
In addition to practical advice, it features several very cool tools, created by producer Casey Frechette, to help you diagnose and correct problems in your stories. The "sentence tracker," for instance, allows you to plug in your prose and immediately see a bar chart that shows you the length of your sentences and paragraphs. That makes it easier to vary sentence length for pacing and impact.
As for me, I headed to the bookstore today and bought Chabon's newest novel,
"The Yiddish Policemen's Union."
