No, this isn’t a post about red herrings, the sort of devious wrong turns with which mystery writers like to ensnare their readers. Rather, it’s in response to a comment on the Murderati blog from my friend Pari Noskin Taichert, about throwing away a whole bunch of great prose because she realized her book started in the wrong place.
I’ve read a great many stories, especially in the critique groups I’ve belonged to, where it was clear that the writer had taken a great idea, run it off into the ditch, and left it there because she was afraid to backtrack and start over. There the stories that you read, finish, and then wonder “why didn’t the writer use Jane as the narrator instead of Igor?” or “why did the romance with Aaron spring up out of nowhere in the middle of the story?” or “why did Artie, who didn’t show up until page 273 of the book, turn out to be the killer, when George clearly had a more logical motive?”
I think that in many cases, the answer is that the author invested too much writing into the story before realizing that George would have made a better killer, that Jane really did have a more compelling voice, or that Aaron should have appeared sooner in the narrative. This is a problem especially common among writers who don’t outline — and I should qualify my biases by saying I ususally don’t outline, either, though I try to have a pretty solid idea of the major flow of my plot before I begin writing — but it’s not exclusively the fate of the non-outliners. Sometimes it’s easier to see these false starts in an outline, but sometimes characters have a way of surprising you and doing things you wouldn’t have expected, back before you understood them so well.
But outline or don’t, the trouble comes when you realize you’ve made a mistake. To be fair, in some cases, authors don’t realize they’ve gone down a blind alley, and there’s not a lot that can be done about that. Hopefully, those folks have good critiquing partners and editors and the like, people who might tumble to things they’ve overlooked. But that’s another topic for another day. Today’s question is, what do you do when you realize you’ve gotten sucked into the wormhole, and getting out means blowing up a day’s (or month’s) worth of work?
This is where a certain attitude of detachment works in your favor. Remind yourself that your words aren’t your children. Remind yourself that electrons and ink molecules don’t have feelings, and your paper won’t feel wounded if you throw it in the recycle bin. Your thumb drive won’t ever go on Oprah to talk about how traumatized it felt when you re-formatted it. Erasers won’t leap screaming from your hands, shouting, “No! Don’t make us!”
You are a writer. The words have come before, and they’ll come again. And part of this job (hey, you did choose this crazy profession, right?) is throwing away the words that aren’t working, starting over when you have to, and clawing your way out of the blind alleys. Sure, it’s hard to see three days work tossed in the trash. But if your job is to produce the very best story you can, sometimes that goes with the territory.
“But, I wasted all that time!” I hear you cry. No, you didn’t. Going down a wrong turn might have been, in fact, the necessary step to discovering the truth about how your story needed to unfold. A map doesn’t help you figure out how to reach your destination until you know where you are on it. Sometimes you can’t see the right road until you look at things from the vantage point of the wrong one. When Thomas Edison was asked if he felt all the experiments which led up to his invention of the incandescent light were wasted, he reportedly answered, “Not at all. Now, I definitely know more than a thousand ways how NOT to make a light bulb.”
So don’t mourn the time spent in those wrong turns. Dust yourself off and, armed with the knowledge that you now know another way not to make a light bulb, go forward and reshape your story. Use the new-found direction you’ve won, and take your writing in the direction it needs to go.
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