An Invisible Palimpsest
I’m in the middle of first pass pages for my forthcoming novel, A Sleight of Shadows. This means that I’m reading for typos and making small adjustments to the text – changing a word here, a punctuation mark there. Small things, that probably would have been fine if I had left them stand, that probably no one but me would notice, but I do notice, and it is my book, and so they are being changed.
Making those near-invisible changes has made me think of unread versions of books. I do developmental editing for other writers, and especially when working with early-career clients, I remind them that no one will see the bad drafts. In other words, the vast majority of people only read the version of the book that winds up on the shelf. Beta readers, agents, editors, they’ll see earlier, rougher drafts, reviewers might see one slightly different than the finished product, but for most people, the only version of the book that exists is the final one.
This can be a useful way of thinking about the drafting process, the fact that no one will see your messiest drafts. It can be freeing, to think that way, to remember that your missteps are private. I also remember thinking for quite some time (well into adulthood), that writers didn’t need to revise – that novels were written in order from “It was a dark and stormy night” to “they all lived happily ever after” without any major changes needed, and that if you did need those changes, you weren’t a writer. For a long time, I thought I wasn’t a writer because I could never write a perfect first version. Brains can be weird, sometimes.
And we do, sometimes, get those behind the scenes glimpses of works in progress. On my desk right now is the facsimile edition of The Waste Land – a book that contains a draft and typescript of Eliot’s famous poem, with Eliot’s edits, as well as those of Vivien Eliot and Ezra Pound. Pound pulls no punches – one of my favorite comments is “verse not interesting enough as verse to warrant so much of it.” I love it not because I love seeing Eliot dragged, but because I love the reminder that we all have our imperfections, that we all need edits and multiple drafts sometimes. A thing that Eliot seems to know, too, in that he has sought the edits, and in that he takes them seriously, and has a much better poem in the end because of it.
Do I need to see the drafts and the editorial notes to truly appreciate “The Waste Land”? No, I don’t. I fell in love with the poem long before I first looked at the facsimile edition. Do I think of the poem any differently, having seen some of the process of writing it? Again, no, not really. Not as art, and that’s what matters, in the end. Seeing the drafts and notes is a reminder of the work that goes into the art, but nothing more than that, for me. We’re not graded on effort, and we’re not read in the erasures. What I want, in the end, is to read the version that the author wants read, with all of the small changes no one but them would notice.
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