On Putting Down The Pen

Guest blogger, Carolyn Parkhurst

My latest novel, The Nobodies Album, is about a writer who’s decided to go back and rewrite the endings of all her published books, and at every reading I’ve done since it was published, I’ve been asked whether I’ve ever been tempted to do the same thing. My answer–and I try to keep the panic out of my voice–is always something along the lines of “For the love of God, NO.” It’s not that I think my books are flawless; far from it. But I find that I need an endpoint, even if it’s one that’s chosen arbitrarily.

For years, I’ve been telling people that I finished writing my first novel, The Dogs of Babel, the day before my first child was born. This is true, in its way; I’d completed a draft of the novel about six weeks earlier, and I’d been working through a list of changes I wanted to make to the manuscript. On the afternoon of January 10th, 2002, I crossed the last item off the list, and in the early morning hours of January 11th, I went into labor. Book finished, baby born. Great story.

But can I honestly say that that’s the day the novel was “finished”? Nothing I wrote that day was set in stone; I went over the manuscript again several months later before sending it out to potential agents, and once I’d sold the book to a publisher, I had several rounds of back-and-forth revision with my editor. The January 10th version of the book isn’t substantially different from the version that was published a year and a half later, but it’s not exactly the same, either. I made additions, subtractions, substitutions; I wrote new passages and changed details of plot and character. I changed semicolons to periods and periods to semicolons, and finally, on a date arbitrarily chosen by the publisher, I made my last pass over the pages and washed my hands of it. And the first time I looked at it and knew that it was, beyond a shadow of a doubt, finished was the day I first saw it on a bookstore shelf.

“How do I know when it’s done?” is a question that writers at all levels of experience ask, and unfortunately, there’s no definitive answer. The fact that writing is so terribly idiosyncratic, that every writer makes her own rules, is both frustrating and exhilarating. There’s no way to do it wrong, but there’s also no way to tell if you’re doing it right. It helps to know other writers with whom you can discuss questions of art and craft, but their methods will almost certainly be different from yours. I imagine that if you survey a group of, say, brain surgeons, you’ll find a range of techniques and personal styles. But you’re not going to find anyone who starts with an incision in the foot. Writers, on the other hand, may start anywhere we see an inch of skin. (It’s probably good that the people we work with can’t actually bleed.) You want to keep going until the work is as good as you can possibly make it, but there are dangers in over-revising. I know from experience that it’s possible to rewrite a piece so many times that eventually you revise all the life out of it. The more you work over a piece of fiction, the harder it is to keep your eye on the slippery thing you set out to capture in the first place.

If I were writing any of my three novels now, would I end up with exactly the same book? Probably not. Writing is about making choices, and we–as writers, as human beings–are inconsistent. A different day, a different set of circumstances and external stimuli, we might make a different decision. When I hold one of my novels in my hands–the published book, the concrete object–I’m aware that what I’m holding is the result of years of careful, thoughtful work. But it’s also a snapshot of the way my mind was working on the particular day I had to turn in my last changes and send it off for the next stage of production.

In the end, it always comes down to a gut feeling and a leap of faith. And at some point, no matter what, you just have to decide to stop.

Carolyn Parkhurst is the author of the New York Times-bestselling novels The Dogs of Babel and Lost and Found; her latest novel, The Nobodies Album, was published in June. She’s also written a children’s book, Cooking with Henry and Elliebelly, due out later this month. She lives in Washington, DC with her husband and their two children.

Find Carolyn at www.carolynparkhurst.com. The fictional author who’s the protagonist of The Nobodies Album also has her own website: www.octaviafrost.com.
Photo by Marion Ettlinger.

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