Fragile--Handle With Care

October 27, 2008

My friend Erica Orloff recently offered to read chapters of a kids' novel I'm working on. Today I e-mailed her back to thank her but to tell her that, with the exception of my kids, I don't let anybody read my works in progress. They're too fragile.

Or maybe I am. Either way, it doesn't take much to totally derail the book. Someone can say, "I don't like it," and that's it, the project might be done. Too much tinkering in the early stages of a novel screw me up. Once it gains momentum, it can be more impervious to criticism. Maybe it's like a snowball that picks up more and more snow as it moves downhill. Early on it doesn't take much to squish it. Once it's big, it still might get stuck, but it takes a lot more to stop it.

I realize this suggests that I have so little faith in my own work that a little criticism can make me stop working on it. The answer to that is both yes and no.

These days, I'm pretty concerned about wasting my time. The idea would have to be totally awesome for me to work on it for months if I didn't think it might not be publishable. It would really have to be something I felt strongly about, not just a Good Idea or a Shiny New Idea, but one of Mark's Totally Awesome Ideas, and those can be a little rare. My Good Ideas are certainly publishable, although convincing publishers of that can be tricky in a competitive marketplace.

Two examples, though. One is an adventure novel that I'd been working on about a couple bioprospectors. These were a couple adventurer-biologists who traveled the world looking for plants or whatever that might become new medicines. One of them was an anthropologist whose expertise was in native medicines and the other was a pharmacologist. The book started with them rappelling down cliffs in Chile to gather vulture guano when their third partner tries to kill them. Eventually the book takes them to a new project, following the footsteps of an expedition into the Congo in the 1800s after one of my heroes recovers missing journals from the expedition's sole survivor that talks about the unusual rituals one of the tribes they encounter has using the venom from a lizard.

I'd written maybe a 100 pages or so of this when I sent it off to my agent. Her sole response was: "I hate it."

That was pretty much a stake through the heart for that manuscript, although I still think it's a great idea.

Another one was a biotech thriller about scientists who thought they had a treatment for Alzheimer's and were testing it illegally in nursing homes on dementia patients, with bizarre and violent results. I sent 70 pages or so to my agent who said, "Your thriller doesn't thrill."

I no longer send my agent unfinished manuscripts.

Stephen Parrish notes on today's blog that if he talks about works in progress he tends not to actually write them. This is fairly common, actually; Lawrence Block wrote a column about it once, suggesting that the energy that should have gone into writing tended to go into talking about writing instead. I'm of that tribe as well, I think, and I'm even hesitant to mention in general what projects I'm working on here on my blog, although I seem to have gotten over that (mostly). Still, I'm actively working on one project and less so on another and I haven't really mentioned them here, although I mentioned them on Erica's blog.

It's not quite up to the level of feeling like I'm jinxing projects to talk about them, but I sometimes think you should be careful about letting your babies out into the wind and weather before they're strong enough to stand on their own.

How about you?

Cheers,

Mark Terry