Editor's Desk: The Importance of Time Away
Let your draft cool
I have this draft that I really really love. It’s something I’ve worked on for years. I’ve brought it to my writing group a handful of times and I got to the point where they said I should send it out. And I did. I submitted to contests and standard submissions. One of my colleagues told me she never submits to contests unless she is certain she will win. Well, I felt that way. Because when I would read and reread my work, I couldn’t see anything I would change.
It’s gotten a lot of rejections over the years. So much so that when I recently got a rejection for it, I realized that I didn’t have the steam to send it out again.
While all of this is going on, I review submissions for a literary magazine. I read through many that aren’t done yet. More revisions are needed. Perhaps the narrator isn’t leading with authority over the story. Or the writer doesn’t have a grasp on the story yet. I’m sending out rejections while I am also receiving my own rejections.
It’s something that’s hard to teach, but important to learn—the art of putting a piece aside and returning to it later with a clearer mind and less of a high-stakes mentality towards getting it published. Once I take that part away, I find I can read my work the way any reader would. The time away allows me the closest I’ll ever feel to that sense of how the work comes across to someone who has never seen it before.
When I do give a piece that space, it’s usually a few months. Perhaps more. With a novel in the works, it hasn’t been hard to put a short piece on hiatus. But recently, I returned to this piece, rejected many times over, and I saw the darlings that had to be removed. The core of it became more clear. It began to connect better. Have it fixed it? I plan to take a few more days and then come back to it and see how I feel.
While I know many of us want to get our work out into the world as soon as possible, I think the hurry can cause us to overlook the potential of where we can take our drafts. These are tough questions we all have to face. Why am I doing this? Do I really feel this is ready to send out or is it more that the feeling of putting it out there makes me feel I’m actually doing something? Will waiting another week be a problem? Maybe two? Can I invest in other creative projects that fulfill me in the meantime?
We teach a great deal about writing, but not about patience. When attending panels about getting a book published, I’ve learned that even with an agent and an editor, it’s going to take around two more years before your book is out in the world. And that’s what I’ve realized: it’s not about the end goal. The writing in itself has to sustain you.