The second book is supposed to be the
tough one. Fraught with pressure and uncertainty, with the glow of first
publication wearing off, it’s a notoriously difficult hurdle ... and
yet it wasn’t that way for me. My second novel (Try Not to Breathe)
was, and still is, one of the pieces of writing I’m proudest of. And it
was, if not easy, less difficult to write than most of my other work.
For me, the third book carried all the
baggage and trouble that the sophomore effort usually does. I despaired
over every editorial letter. Many nights I left the computer thinking,
“I quit; it’s over,” only to try again the next day. For that reason,
for a long time I saw a shadow over that book. Remembering the struggle,
I thought of it as lesser than its siblings.
And then, at some point, I reread Until It Hurts to Stop.
And I loved it. I reconnected with the characters, with the theme that
had driven me to write it in the first place. My behind-the-scenes
anguish was not on the page. The pages reflected only the outcome of the
editorial decisions, not the doubts and debates that happened before
those choices were made.
It reminded me that people don’t see what
you leave on the cutting-room floor. They don’t see the endless drafts,
the revision letters, the raw notes. A scene that took you a month to
write may be gulped down by the reader in a few minutes. Its smoothness
is possible only because of the trouble you took; it’s the product that
counts. The reader doesn’t know that your dog died during the writing of
Chapter Five, or that your kid had the flu and you wrote Chapter Eleven
on no sleep, or that you rewrote Chapter Three seventeen times. The
reader never saw the two characters you deleted and the twenty pages you
lopped off at the end.
The story—thank goodness—has a life apart
from all that, a self-contained existence between its covers. It has
been polished to its best form.
