As I’ve mentioned before, perfection can’t be achieved, so I don’t wait for it before sending out a manuscript. I try to write the best book I can at the time, get it edited, and make a few final changes before moving from the production to the submission stage. But once I start submitting, my practice had been to keep my hands off the text and concentrate my writing skills on the next book. If a publisher or agent accepts the manuscript and wants changes, I’ll do that, but the initial writing process is done. At that point, second-guessing myself takes up valuable time without making the manuscript noticeably better.
But there are rare occasions when I have
revised a manuscript after sending it out. The most recent came a few days ago.
My latest story takes place during the Pullman Strike of 1894, and one of my
protagonists and his friends watch the Labor Day parade in Chicago. As I was
looking for a good photo to go with my Labor Day post for next week, I came
across a historical article stating that it was raining in Chicago that year.
My description hadn’t mentioned the weather so it wasn’t wrong, but it was
incomplete. Since I like to be as historically accurate as is possible without losing
my reader, I revised that chapter to include rain. A few small changes were all
I needed.
My changes to Desert Jewels were more
extensive. My first middle-grade historical novel was about a Japanese-American
girl interred during World War II. Wonder of wonders, I got one of those rare
rejection letters that was actually personalized. Although the publisher
passed, the letter stated, “we felt that the delivery of historical information
was a little too didactic, and that the story itself was a little too spare.”
The letter confirmed my own unease about the story, and I ended up making
significant changes. That was the first of only two times I broke my rule and
revised a story after submitting it.
I needed some photos for the top of this
post, so I decided to use photo-editing to show the difference between good and
(maybe) better, although that characterization depends on the observer. If you
look closely at the first phot, you will see some natural imperfections—a metal
appendage on each side of the tower and a few thin branches (primarily in the
upper right-hand corner) that appear to be scratches but aren’t. I could leave
it natural or I could clone those “imperfections” out, as I did in the second
photo. I’ll let you decide which is better.
The point is that some changes improve the
manuscript or the photo but others don’t. The writer or photographer has to
make that call. But even when changes are made, the result will never be
perfect.
So don’t overdo it.
__________
I took the photo of Sabylund Lutheran Church
during a trip to Wisconsin in 2010.
1 comment:
This is so true. I am somewhat of a perfectionist (can you be somewhat perfect?) and will go over and over a text until I think, at the time, that it is perfect. I few months or years later, I'll return to that text and find all kinds of places where I could have written better or, even worse, had obvious mistakes in spelling, grammar, etc. We all have to learn, it seems, to let things go at a certain point.
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