Editorial Scissors and Train Car Hand Straps

Writing the manuscript for my Katyn book took me sixteen years to finish.  Years of writer’s block consumed most of those years.  The actual time it took to write the manuscript was probably 2.5 years.  Completing the first draft, I have over six-hundred and thirty pages. 

My first and longest serving book editor who lives in Texas—calling him (or my other editor) a “beta reader” doesn’t do justice to his wisdom—cautioned me, “You can’t write about everything.  You need to leave some things out.”  I chuckled.  “You sound like me when I tell my students when they have too much in their drafts.  Now I know how they feel,” I confessed. 

One part of me knows he’s right, and I need to be mindful of my reader; after all, I no longer am my only audience reading my words.  I am not writing for myself anymore.  On the other hand, the scholar in me says, “You must be thorough.  You’re teaching them, through your book, about a foreign event—the Katyn Massacres.  How else are you going to persuade them to care about it.”  What to do?

“It makes sense to you.  You’ve lived it.  The book narrates your journey learning and writing about it.  Moreover, the book is about you—it’s a memoir describing how writing about Katyn changed you.  Your mind makes sense of it.  Your unconscious will fill in the gaps that you don’t write in words.  But for the reader…” my editor cautioned me, “stream of consciousness won’t work.” 

I sighed because what he said was right; however, the literature professor in me resisted, “I was going after Faulkner and Joyce.”  He countered, “Did it work for them?”  I signed again, admitting “Few readers understood their books and their streams of consciousness when they first published their books, and quickly, especially for Faulkner, the books went out of print.”  Revise: that’s what I needed to do.

My second book editor—she was my Senior-Year High School English teacher—enlightened me, “Think of your writing as the handgrip in a subway car.  Your reader is going for a ride, and sometimes the trip is bumpy, but your reader will have the handgrip to hold on.  So, no matter how fast the train goes, the rider won’t fall over.  Do that for your reader.”  Over thirty years and she’s still schooling me.      

How many of the six-hundred or so pages will survive the cut, I don’t know.  After printing the document, I see that I need to omit some parts.  And when I mailed the manuscript to my editor in Texas, I remembered an important lesson I teach in my classrooms: revision means “to see again.”  And even writing teachers need to be taught by their readers about revision, too.