Last week, my Literary Madrina said: “There’s writing and there’s story.
“Music industry doesn’t reward good singers. It rewards good performers.
“Writing industry doesn’t reward good writers. It rewards good story.”
And then she confirmed I have great IDEAS for stories:
- A Latina protagonist working in tech? Ooh! Haven’t seen that yet.
- A YA novel about Model Ricans in Orlando? Totally original, this is the diaspora we haven’t heard from yet!
- A female rum runner in 1920s Puerto Rico? Ay ya yay. Can’t wait to read your re-write of that, pero…
Having a good idea…is a different thing from successfully executing the idea on the page.
– Literary Madrina
Uh-oh. Sounds like my latest manuscript is still a reflection of the messy Story of My Life. Literally. I’ve been trying to execute one of my many good ideas on the page since 2003. Yep. We’re just shy of twenty years. And, the number twenty, my friends — must be the magic number because then she said…
Based on the draft I read, to be on the safe side, you won’t be writing two more drafts, it will be more like twenty drafts.
– Literary Madrina
Oh snap. Twenty more drafts? OK. Try not to fall into THE GET OUT abyss. Don’t Sink into the flooooooooor. Oof. I’m at the bottom. I’m pretending not to be at the bottom, but I am definitely down here, smiling through my eyeballs. Literary Madrina knows me. She knows this is where I am because she started out our conversation reminding me that I visited her, face-to-face, in Brooklyn, circa 2014 after I went “splat” in Brazil. Yes. I’m no stranger to the dark hole that got personified in Jordan Peele’s movie THE GET OUT, and I always wanted to show my version of it in Hollywood, but….but…
To help me re-emerge from the darkness, Literary Madrina shared an article by Benjamin Percy called “Revision as Renovation” where renovating a fixer upper is more than, or equal to, the process of rewriting a manuscript. In the end, his realtor hardly recognized the house just as the author hardly recognized his novel…and this is AFTER a publisher said “yes” to the manuscript.
“It took me a year to rewrite The Wilding, to move from first to third person, to free up those characters and braid together their stories.“
– Benjamin Percy, Revision as Renovation
Sigh. I will stop right now and eat this big, heaping slice of humble pie.
Time to read. So far, MEXICAN GOTHIC has pulled me in and I am making notes, asking myself the big picture questions: “Why do these characters capture me? Why does the style of writing make me want to turn the page?”