Norman Green

REVISIONS AND SECOND THOUGHTS

You thought you were done? Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha…

My agent read the latest draft of my current writing project, which is a YA novel I’m calling ‘Benbow Street Shakedown.’ I am pretty happy with it as it is, or I wouldn’t have sent it to him. ‘I like it,’ he says. ‘Great characters. But…’

We have run into this snag before.

One of the things I like to do as a writer is to develop parallel story lines. Two people in a similar situation, one goes left and the other goes right, follow them both and see what happens. Or another way is to watch two characters who are looking at the same event, one seeing black and the other white. Which one is right? Is there a right at all? Is there such a thing as the relativity of truth? Don’t our perceptions create our reality? I don’t know why but there is almost always an element of this kind of thing in anything I write. I think it’s just the way I’m wired.

My agent hates it. ‘Get rid of this other story line,’ he says. ‘I like character A, but I’m not interested in character B.’

When I was first starting out I think I suffered from a slave mentality, I was so happy to have someone reading my stuff that I would have changed all my characters to aliens, given them green skin and set the whole story on the planet Zircon (which is, I think, somewhere between Brooklyn Heights and Greenwich Village), if that’s what he wanted.

Nowadays I’m not so sure.

I think part of the problem is that I’m becoming surer of my voice. I think I am getting a better handle on what I want to say and how I want to say it. Another part of the problem is that writing is an art and not a science, and therefore it is much more difficult to quantify what works and what doesn’t. Every statement that either I or my agent makes in this conversation has to contain the qualifier ‘in my opinion’ or something similar. Be a lot easier if you could just haul out your tape measure and determine once and for all which of you is right.

I think publishing will eventually reach a point where none of this matters, where version A and version B, and a dozen others besides, will coexist , where novels will become truly interactive and the readers (users?) will determine for themselves which story lines they will follow. This is the sort of thing going on with what we used to call video games. They’re not quite there yet, but they’re on the road and getting closer all the time.  Maybe that will be the change that finally makes the novel as we have known it obsolete.

However.

None of this helps me in my current predicament. I haven’t looked at the manuscript in question since I sent it to my agent, I wanted to stay away long enough to have some perspective (there’s that word again) when I went back to work on it. And I must admit it’s hard for me to see the forest for the trees after I’ve spent six months or a year writing something.

Another complication is objective. An agent, I am told, is primarily concerned with answering the question ‘Can I sell this?’ A writer is usually wondering ‘Does this kick ass?’ Or at least this one is.

Anyway, I have to go back to work on ‘Benbow Street Shakedown.’ My job is to find a way to give my agent enough of what he wants without sacrificing too much of what I want. Not so easy.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

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