by Delia Lloyd
In his famous book about craft, On Writing, Stephen King recommends that authors take a minimum of four to six weeks after finishing a manuscript before beginning to edit it. The idea is to come back to the text fresh: to open it up and read it from start to finish, just like any other reader. This, he argues, is the best way to figure out what works, what needs fixing, and what should be tossed in the bin.
King is right, of course. But what happens when you wait five years?
I recently had occasion to find out. The manuscript in question was a memoir I’d written several years ago which used swimming as a prism to explore adulthood. In it, I examined everything from treading water and lane-changing to sidestroke and the God-like figure of the lifeguard to address topics like goal setting, career change, marriage, and religious belief.
I shopped that manuscript for a couple of years but never managed to sell it. Two agents nearly took me on, but both ultimately passed. They each said the same thing when they turned me down: while they loved the concept and the writing, they didn’t know how to “place the book.” Their encouraging rejections convinced me to stop working on that writing project and start a new one I was much more passionate about.
Once I abandoned the swimming manuscript, I locked it in a proverbial drawer and threw away the key. My desire to revisit it, half a decade later, was entirely practical: I wanted to see if there was any content in there I might need for my new memoir. So I brewed myself a stiff espresso, opened the file, and sat down in my garden one sunny, summer morning to read the opus from start to finish.
Re-reading my failed manuscript was both intensely painful and intensely instructive. Spoiler alert: I did not discover buried treasure. I felt neither elation nor remorse as I thumbed through the pages. Instead, I felt relief: relief that this book had never seen the light of day. Because while my swim book had several redeeming features, it didn’t deserve to be published. It wasn’t good enough.
Here are five things I learned from re-reading the book I never published:
- Don’t confuse good writing with good content. A friend of mine has just written a film script about an under-appreciated sports personality. The screen play is beautifully written; you could die for dialogue like that. But I’m not convinced it’s a story that needs to be told. Do we care about this person? Do we need to care about this person? I made a similar mistake with my swim memoir. For the most part, the writing was strong. I even laughed out loud in certain places when revisiting my prose. But despite the manuscript’s working title, “Life in the Deep End,” the alleged life lessons I drew from the swimming pool remained—dare I say it?—shallow. As a reader, I was left wondering what I was meant to take away from the book.
- A blog is not a book. Which brings me to my second point: a good blog is not necessarily a good book. Sure, many wonderful books began as blogs. And if I’m honest, I think I was hoping to join that roster. My erstwhile blog, RealDelia: Finding Yourself in Adulthood, is all about conceptualizing adulthood as a journey, not a destination, and the stuff you learn along the way. Much of the underlying inspiration from my swimming manuscript came from my blog. There’s a reason, however, that blogs and memoirs remain distinct genres. With a blog, you can’t possibly develop your ideas fully:you don’t have space. You can only hint at the deeper insights that underpin your 800-word posts. A memoir can and should do much more than that. As Melissa Febos puts it in her book on personal narrative, Body Work, “Self-Knowledge, the insights unavailable in the past and acquired in the time since, are what give memoir its depth.” I loved my blog. But I’d like to think that my current manuscript, which is a collection of unflinching and occasionally dark meditations on family, is much more substantive. It’s a book.
- Don’t force a structure. Having read numerous books on the craft of memoir, I’m aware that a good memoir needs a unifying theme, something that binds the disparate events of one’s life together. Memoirist and writing coach Marion Roach Smith encourages aspiring memoirists to work from an “algorithm.” By this criterion, my swimming manuscript delivered. Each chapter began with an observation about one aspect of the swimming pool and used that to evince a particular life lesson. Once I left the introduction, however, the swimming premise disappeared. Whatever I had to say about office life/parenting/friendship/fill in the blank was perfectly interesting and thoughtful. But the overall metaphor of the swimming pool felt really strained. Simply put, I’m not convinced this was really a book about swimming. Nor did it need to be a book about swimming. In my new manuscript, I’ve abandoned the idea of having a rigid structure altogether. I’ve opted instead to write a memoir-in-essay, a form I love to read and which I find infinitely more freeing.
- Know your genre. If you’ve ever thought about writing a book, the very first thing anyone will tell you is to figure out which “shelf” it will sit on in a bookstore. It’s not enough to simply have a topic, or even an angle into a topic. You need to know who’s going to buy this book. Book publishing, like anything else, is a business, and the key to a successful business is knowing your market. Even armed with this stock and sage advice, I nonetheless ignored it with my swimming manuscript. I was stuck on the genre question, but rather than figure it out, I decided at some point to just keep on writing and worry about how I’d market the book later. Bad decision. I ended up writing something that fell between the cracks. It was one-half memoir and one-half self-help, which is probably why both agents who turned me down said they couldn’t “place it.”
- Vet your manuscript before you submit. Another rookie mistake. As someone who’s a huge proponent of writing groups, I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t show the swim manuscript to anyone before I submitted it to agents and publishers. I vetted the book’s proposal with a couple of people, and my husband proofread the first few chapters. But no one read the manuscript from start to finish. It wasn’t that I was too embarrassed to share the rough draft. Rather, I believed that because so much of the raw material for the book came from my blog, the manuscript had already been vetted by the public. WRONG. I’ll never make that mistake again. My current writing group has seen multiple versions of my new writing project. They tell me both what they like and what’s not working in no uncertain terms. Thank Goodness. Their input has been invaluable.
Which brings us back to Stephen King. When I say I felt relief after I re-read the book I never published, that’s not entirely true. Upon completing the final chapter, I immediately fell into a 72-hour death spiral of the sort that will be familiar to all writers great and small: Why am I doing this? Am I any good? Should I throw it all in and develop my erstwhile hobby as a West End singer?
In the end, after licking my wounds for a couple of weeks, I did return to my new memoir, just as King suggests. And I am much the wiser for it.
