I Sent in a Bad Draft
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I did it!!!!!
Dear Readers,
First up, I really liked this piece from my friend Christie about Stop Making Sense, a film I have seen more times than I can count, including all the screenings mentioned in this piece:
This week I turned in a very bad first draft of my next book to my editor. PLEASE CLAP.
I can hear you already. Amy, I’m sure it’s not that bad. Amy, I bet your editor will love it. Amy, you are too hard on yourself. Friends, sure, maybe I am hard on myself sometimes, but also I let myself buy a cabinetful of fancy candles before putting a moratorium on fancy candle purchasing so some might say I am actually not hard enough upon myself.
No, this book is a mess. Pieces of it are, simply, missing. Arcs start and then don’t finish while others appear out of mid-air and then resolve. Others neither start nor finish but do pop up for a brief moment. There’s no epilogue because if I don’t know what the fuck themes I’m fully pulling off here what on earth can I tell you about LATER OK so I just typed “TK” and left it at that.
Some books write easy and some books write hard. Some books are tough to start and then flow. I have sort of a few scenarios books tend to take at this point, and early on with this one I knew it wasn’t one of the easier ones. That is OK, I told myself over and over, because At Her Service and On Her Terms felt this way too, and they ultimately ended up books I love and am extremely proud of. (For Her Consideration mostly wrote like a dream but also it was lockdown and I had very little going on other than existential dread. In Her Spotlight took forever to get going because of the massive amount of research needed, but once it was going going, it flew.)
This one felt more like At Her Service and even more like On Her Terms. This is a comfort because I adore that book and so I can trust the painful slow-going process. But I remember specifically one aspect that nearly ripped me apart during drafting (and which I spoke to my pal Lance Rubin about awhile ago): I was getting ready to turn in an incomplete draft with a whole chapter missing and arcs I didn’t feel like fully paid off yet. I was eager to get notes from someone else and get it off of my desk for awhile. I was looking forward to starting the next step, and grateful for publishing professionals who’d meet me where I was.
And then FOR SOME NO-GOOD REASON I went on Threads (note that I have not gone on Threads now for months and I am mentally and emotionally healthier for it) and saw a conversation where people were saying things like WOWWWW I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU WOULD HAVE SO LITTLE RESPECT FOR YOUR EDITOR —AND YOURSELF— TO SEND IN A ROUGH DRAFT
OK so everything I’d thought up until then vanished and I burst into tears and I cried for like an hour at my little table where I do most of my writing. I just sat there and wept.
