Throw it all out!

I'm back to work finishing Super Power of the Day: The Hero Chronicle Continues after a lovely vacation to Ireland, Scotland, and England. These first pictures are indelibly tied to craft for me.

One of my mentors, author Sandra Scofield, once told an entire class of aspiring authors who were finishing their (our) first novels, "Throw it all out! Start from scratch!"

I sat up. What? You can't possibly mean me? My work is wonderful! I may need a tweak here or there, but it's working. Who would toss out all their hours of attentively worked prose in one fell swoop?

Sandra would.

Oh.

Still. I scoffed.

John Lennon did.

Huh?

Loads of canonized writers did, habitually.

Wow.

And Sandra was right.

One of the most fun parts of this particular trip to the British Isles was visiting...

The Dublin Writers Museum

The Writers' Museum (Edinburgh, Scotland)

and

The British Library, with their exhibit...

Wastelands to Wonderlands

Each venue displayed original manuscripts and first edition copies of seminal English literary texts, edit marks often included. Joyce, Shaw, Yeats, Swift, Stevenson, Burns, Austen, Dickens, the Brontes, Hardy, Wordsworth, Wilde, Blake, Eliot, Coleridge, Keats, Forster, Kipling, Conan Doyle, Milne, Auden, Orwell, Conrad, Woolf, Tolkein, du Maurier, Lewis Carroll, Ishiguro, Kureishi, Ted Hughes, Plath, John Lennon, Gaiman, and J. K. Rowling.

Pardon my name dropping. I spent a lot of time gasping in awe. Literally, I would walk up to a displayed text and let out a gasp of recognition and astonishment.

While some authors did indeed tweak a word or two here or there, quite a few squiggled lines through and crossed out entire pages of text, sometimes leaving a mere sentence for the final draft. Sentences I know by heart, having read and studied them with admiration and, quite often, love.

While I refuse to toss out an entire draft of a piece and start over with a blank doc, when I have a paragraph or section that just refuses to come together, the solution is usually to throw it all out. To start from scratch.

Case in point, my revising this morning. I'm about a third of the way through the 7th or 8th edit of volume 2, an edit I originally thought would be a final proofing as the design work has been done. But fresh eyes are picky eyes, and fresh ears hear glitches well. I thought I was done "writing," yet this is typical:

The last paragraph of page 54 wasn't working. I tossed it. I started over. It's working now.

I've learned my lesson.