9/24/23
When is It Done?
This is number twenty-nine in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community so I can afford to keep writing.
WHEN MY SECOND MARRIAGE went down in flames, so did my finances. That was back in 1986. My business was bankrupt, I was bankrupt, and she took all the artwork. I was recruited to bring my clientele with me and join another firm.
We were on the bleeding edge of publishing technology and I was the bleeding expert in the field. We went straight to work doing advertising and corporate communications for a number of Minneapolis area businesses.
I learned two valuable lessons from my four-year association with that company. The first, and possibly most important, was to never work for a crook. That was almost as bad as the second marriage that brought me to the company. An employer who withholds taxes from employee paychecks is supposed to pay that money to the Federal Government. When one discovers the taxes withheld were not paid, there is hell to pay—in the form of the IRS.
Ah well. We live and we learn.
The second most important lesson I learned from this venture was that there comes a time when a project must be considered finished.
The end.
I was working on a four-page corporate newsletter for one of our clients and was determined that it would be perfect when I released it. I adjusted the type, worked on the image positioning, and cross-checked the spelling with a dictionary in my hand. (This was long before ‘spellcheck’.)
My boss leaned over my shoulder to look at the computer screen and asked how long I’d been working on that project.
“A day and a half is all,” I said. Subtext: twelve hours on a four-page newsletter=three hours per page.
“It takes two people to paint a masterpiece,” my boss said. “One to put paint on the canvas, and the other to hang the artist. This project is finished. Now.”
Well, he didn’t hang me, but he did stop the constant cross-checking and trying out different layouts. In my mind, the project wasn’t perfect, but the client was absolutely thrilled with it. They gave us rave reviews and the business took off based on that project.
It was a lot simpler to call it quits on a corporate newsletter than it was on a book. My first serious attempt at writing a novel was Behind the Ivory Veil (available on Bookapy), the prequel to “The Props Master” series. I remember how incredibly proud I was when I typed “The End” on page 120 of my great American novel. I packaged it up and took it to a friend who was an experienced novelist.
He read it.
While I waited. It took about half an hour, at which time he said, “Wow! That’s really freeze-dried. If you added some hot water to it, it would be a whole book.”
I went home having my first real dialog with a character. And I started rewriting.
When I shelved the project some thirty-five years ago, it was in the fifteenth draft. It wasn’t until I returned to writing and started publishing my novels that I decided to dust off the draft and ‘finish’ it. Seventeen complete rewrites before I was ready to turn it over to my editors.
And it still wasn’t perfect.
I could probably have worked on that book for another five years and it still wouldn’t be perfect. But it was finished.
One of the problems authors face constantly is knowing when a book, a story, or a series is done. Some authors simply get worn down by their work in progress and quit. Others write the same story over and over. And a few just never get to the place where the story is finished.
That is one of the great parts of writing during NaNoWriMo. When I participated the first time in 2004, my only goal was to finish a book of 50,000 words in thirty days. And I did it. I also accepted the challenge by Google Blogger to write the book online. I blogged that first story, posting the material live each day. It was crazy, but it worked. I finished my story in thirty days. It was done.
You can still read Willow Mills on my Nathan Everett website, though it has never been published as a book.
I did my undergraduate and graduate work in technical theatre. I was a designer and technical director, and in 1976-78, I designed and built twenty-four shows in twenty-four months before I got hit with my first life burnout. I decided to go into something low-stress—like publishing.
The more I learned about the publishing industry, though, the more I discovered similarities between it and theatre. In theatre, a season is announced with dates and show times. Some amount of marketing is done before the show is ever cast or a set is designed. Then people are brought in to design, direct, act, and manage the production. Tickets are sold. And if you are lucky, an audience shows up.
The one constant thing about theatre is that on Friday night at 8:00, the curtain goes up. It goes up whether the lines are all memorized, whether the costumes are finished, whether the paint is dry, and whether there is an audience. The curtain goes up.
Eventually, I learned to equate my crooked boss’s line about hanging the artist with the curtain going up. You have to have a point at which the project is finished. That is as true of a book as it is of a play or a newsletter.
Of course, that doesn’t mean you should rush to the finish just to have the project done. Even after that first draft is finished, there are necessary rewrites and edits. But it helps not to become obsessed with making the project “perfect” when what you really want is the project released. My editors and I take great care in putting out quality work, but we aren’t pedantic about it. As Pixel has told me, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.”
When I worked in computer software at an industry behemoth, I learned the rating system for ‘bugs.’ Severity 1 was a bug that stopped shipment. It was a crashing bug that made the software unusable. If it only crashed five percent of the time, it might be a Sev 2. And of course, there were bugs that were simply irritants and they were called Sev 3. Within each of the severity levels, there were priority levels 1, 2, and 3. They ranked the order in which bugs of that severity would be fixed.
In the same way, there are editing errors that stop shipment. By the time a book has made it through my editors, though, I consider remaining bugs to be Sev 3/Pri 3. They won’t cause me to stop shipment.
The project is done.
I know authors who carefully plan out what they are going to write with what amounts to a chapter-by-chapter outline of the entire story. Some of my stories have been planned with that amount of detail. On the other hand, there are authors who simply fly by the seat of their pants and don’t know what the next word will be until they have written the current word. Next week I’ll talk about “Planner vs. Pantser.”
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
