Refuse To Be Done

At a BoucherCon panel I heard Juliet Grames of Soho Press recommend Refuse To Be Done by Matt Bell. It's a book about editing your novel -- or "putting every word on trial for its life," as Bell quotes Francine Prose. Bell's book is laden with techniques and I've gone back to it often in my line edit of B.K.P.I.

One thing Matt wrote that especially stuck with me is about why we revise a novel:

"The activities in this chapter will give you a way to stay in the work long enough to manifest yourself upon the page not once or twice but dozens or hundreds of times, until you end up not with a book written by the you who existed on any particular day but, rather, one collaborated upon by the many selves who existed over the likely hundreds of days you were writing. These daily manifestations -- the many versions of the writer that have come together to collaborate upon the work -- are what, I believe, makes our favorite books seem written by superhumans ... These 'genius' books really are better than what any one of us could write on any individual day, but that's not how they were written. As we fill our hours and days with the work of rewriting, our fictions will not be written by any one self but by the spectrum of selves we're always becoming, even as the novel is becoming alongside us."

Now I have to go become some more.

You should read Matt’s book. Available from Bookshop.org, and that other place.