Kill Your Babies

I’m rewriting my first novel. Do you see the humor? For a while in my preteens, George Gobel was my favorite TV comedian. George used to introduce people to his “first wife.” He said, “It kept her on her toes.” That’s how I feel about my “first novel.” Who knows if there will be a second? I’m still surprised that there’s a first. My writing demon keeps poking me, “Come on, Ken, you’re retired, why do you need to keep dealing with rejection?”

My writing guru, Stephen King got me through the first draft: Two thousand words a day, and you’ll finish even a long novel, first draft, in three months. Then it’s on to the rewrite. But first the draft goes in the drawer for at least three months. The big challenge then, King warned, is “killing our babies.” It’s a horrifying image. I thought understood, but I didn’t.

I waited the mandatory three months and then got to work, cutting extra words, getting rid of adverbs, tightening things up. It was the kind of rewriting I’d done on articles for professional journals, on grant proposals and charter applications. There was craft there that I took pride in, but with the novel, I didn’t enjoy the rewrite and, when the novel failed to find an agent, I didn’t know if I’d ever look at it again. Or write another novel. My demon had a point.

Much to my surprise, I’m rewriting again. Much to my surprise, I’m finding it’s more than cutting extra words. I’m killing my babies. I was a storyteller long before I began this late-in-life plunge into fiction writing, and I’d found ways to incorporate some of my favorite stories in the novel. These stories are my real babies. It hurts to realize that they don’t do anything to advance the novel. Even more to my surprise, killing my babies was much more exciting than word-pruning. It was fun. It felt good.

I gave the revised novel to Dee to read and was looking forward to her feedback. Until I got it. She was about a third of the way in. There were things she liked and a big problem. Dee found a great big baby that I hadn’t killed. I loved that baby, but I did a better job of controlling my defensiveness than is usual for me.  “It’s my life. What else can I write?” I had to sit with Dee’s feedback and sleep on it and sit with it again. Dee was right. Not only didn’t it belong, it distorted the entire novel.

I’m excited. I’m ready to kill that baby. I’m looking forward to the next rewrite, and I’m trying to hold myself back. I should wait at least until Dee has finished her read. Who knows what babies she’s yet to find.  Should I wait even longer, put the draft in the drawer for a while? Three months? This morning, I couldn’t wait.  I couldn’t help myself. Unburdened by the story that didn’t belong, I began a new chapter, not a rewrite, a compromise with the King injunction: I wrote fresh, without looking at what had already been written. And then, I went back to waiting.

This morning, on my cushion, there was a new surprise, an inkling that, having somehow befriended my rewriting demon, down the road, there may be a dive into a second novel.