People say that writing is solitary. For the most part I agree, but I have had a bit of a change of heart lately. For years I wrote alone, only having one or two people read my stuff when I thought it was finished. I learned a lot, but it seemed like I did a lot of rewriting. Over the last few years, I have been very lucky and have expanded my group of readers to include about five regulars, plus my agent, and it has made a tremendous difference. Still, for the most part, I worked like I always had. I wrote and then I gave them the manuscript and they gave me notes and I went back and revised.

Recently my editor gave me a round of edits that included cutting 63 pages of a 313 page manuscript. This was an enormous challenge that I wasn’t too sure how to approach because I’d cut 65 pages from the previous draft and I was wondering exactly where I was going to find 63 pages more to cut when I hadn’t even been able to reach that first goal of cutting 75 pages. However, my editor asked a lot of good questions which sent me off in a new direction for the beginning and gave me ideas. The problem was, “Did they work?” For the first time I was faced with a deadline that would not allow me to write to my heart’s content and then give the pages to my readers. I knew it would take me nearly the whole month just to fix everything and so if I waited to get their opinion then and I’d goofed up somehow, I was going to be in big trouble.

So what I did was I started giving my husband (who is an excellent writer and critiquer) one chapter at a time. Sometimes I’d just give him a scene. Sometimes a paragraph. He was much more ruthless than he’d ever been before, and I think this was because he was dealing with much smaller portions. If you give someone a six course meal and ask them to give you a detailed report afterwards, it’s going to be much less specific than if after the appetizer you ask for a review, and again after the soup, etc. And that’s what happened here. He just refused to let me go on until what I had made sense and was done as well as I could do it. It was frustrating at times, especially when I reworked a paragraph three or four times before he would say, “Ahhh…yes.”

So the revisions are off and while I wait for the next round, I am working up a proposal for my next YA. I have an idea that I think will work and I ran the hook by my agent. He seemed to agree that it could be interesting. The thing is, he wants me to write 30 pages and a synopsis. He wants to see that before I jump into a whole novel. I have one thing to say to that. Nooooooooo!

Okay, not true anymore. He was right and I can do this. And so I have been working on this for a couple of weeks. Today, I felt I was ready to start working on the thirty pages, but something was holding me back…was the bit at the climax that I had in mind to stupid? Too unbelievable? Too contrived? I took a deep breath, sat my husband down on the couch, and pitched him my new book, complete with backstory, character descriptions, and as many plot points as I could get in. He found holes, but overall he loved it. And the bit that worried me at the end, he thought was the best part of the story. Whew…

So the point of all this rambling is that I think that keeping things in, not letting any of my trusted critique group hear what I have in mind just doesn’t work for me anymore and this discussion and brainstorming is going to work better for me. I think (hope) there will be less revision involved. I’ve already seen how points that I might have struggled to make work for days were noted, discussed, and resolved all in a matter of minutes by talking about this to my husband.

Now I know that not all of you have someone as handy as he is (he doesn’t have a regular job because he’s an artist, so basically, if I can pry the guitar or camera out of his hand, he’s ready to read), but if you have struggled along valiantly, all alone, you might give this approach a thought. Maybe there is someone that you trust that might not even be a writer, but loves to talk stories over coffee. Or someone you can call.

I read a long time ago in a screenwriting book that, “Writers cannot write in a vacuum.” and for years I told myself that they meant screenwriters, but I’m starting to think that it’s true of all kinds of writers to some extent. And yes, I know that the clipart is not the kind of vacuum they mean…I was just checking to see if you were still paying attention!