The Sixth Rewrite

You think your months and years writing the book have created a masterpiece. They haven’t. They’ve created a monster.

You don’t know it at first. You think your book is a handsome, muscular charming gent who will woo the ladies and make the publishers vie for it. You think that the work you’ve put into the book ensures that all who read it will love it. Heck, even your critical friends who read it love it.

Then you send it to agents.

“I can’t get into the characters,” they say. One is especially cruel: “I don’t see the commercial potential here.”

So you go back. You rewrite it. You work with an editor. Now, you think. Now, it’s done. So you send it out again.

“I want the characters to be deeper,” one agent–who almost took the book–says. More taciturn rejections from other agents who don’t even comment.

So you go back. You add some character things. You work on patching things together. But you get the feeling that your lovely work of art is looking more like a junked Edsel.

You don’t understand. You’ve read a lot of mystery books. Most of them break the so-called rules set down by the seminars you’ve attended. These books start with someone moving into a new house, which does not figure into the mystery. (I read two different books by well-known authors which started this way.) Or they start with someone waking up in the morning, which is supposed to be the death knell for a new book. Or they start with a domestic scene at the breakfast table in which the characters talk about how much they love one another. Yuch.

Your book starts with the narrator worrying about being killed by nuclear bombs. You think this is a boffo beginning. But the rejections keep coming in.

AAAAAAARRRRRGGGGHHHHH.

But the real rule is this: Established writers can break the rules. A new writer has to grab the agent by their hair and drag them back to their cave. The agent has to read as if compelled by a fire at their back. The agent has to fall in love in the first five pages.

Why? Because there are 20,000 other people querying the agent. They’re not going to take the time to read your little meditation on death by nuclear bombs.

Then you read a book, Just Write by James Scott Bell. Suddenly, the answer stares you in the face.

If you’re going to write a mystery, a thriller, anything which will engage the reader, the stakes have to be high, he says. Death. Death is always a high stake which will keep the reader reading.

And you realize that, for all the moping about nuclear bombs, the real stakes in the book is that your main character’s client is facing a death sentence. You’ve skimmed over this in the book because you were more interested in the puzzle of the mystery. But now you realize that this has to be front and center.

So you go back for the Sixth Rewrite. Knowing there will be a seventh, an eighth, a ninth.

Someday you will finish the book and it will make the publishers compete for you affections.

Someday.

But in the meantime, rewrite, young man. Rewrite.