Breathing Room
July 11th, 2007 by Marsha Moyer
Since posting here a few weeks ago about the challenges of revising my fourth manuscript, I’ve gotten a deadline extension and a new sense of perspective. While some writers work best with clocks ticking and whips cracking, I’m not one of them. I need room to stretch out, to let the characters run wild, to let the story unfold in ways that my brain simply isn’t capable of producing on short notice.
Now that I’ve got a little bit of breathing room, I’m fascinated by the way my imagination has risen to the occasion. I can sit down at the keyboard and allow my mind to go quiet, reaching into that deep place I was afraid I’d lost access to. Sometimes the result is as simple as expanding a two-word description into a sentence or a paragraph, permitting myself to see and feel the landscape through my characters’ eyes. Sometimes it’s the ability to see the story from a whole new point of view—another narrator’s, or a different place in time.
Time is still a dear commodity; I wish I had months instead of weeks to tweak and polish. But I’m just glad to get up in the mornings and feel my imagination stretching, taking a couple of warm-ups laps, then setting off at a sure, easy lope along the path. I’ll be relieved to get to the end of this long run, but for the time being, I’m enjoying feeling grounded again, the terrain under my feet, and the sense that, even though I have a pretty good idea where I’m going, the way can be full of unexpected pleasures.
Congrats on both the extended deadline and the new perspective! I’m glad things are starting to loosen up for you, Marsha.
So glad the extended deadline works for you! From personal experience I know many writers are procrastinators and, if it wasn’t for deadlines, nothing would ever get written!
This is one of my fears, that once I finally do get published, my deadlines won’t allow me the time I need to write well. I guess time shall tell.
I need to clarify (it’s past midnight and I’m posting this, so brain isn’t fully functional). When I say “write well”, I mean that at this point in my life, there’s a point where I like to really take the time to go through my manuscript, line by line. I wonder if I will have that kind of time when I have looming deadlines that I can’t break.
Melissa, you can avoid this to some degree by not signing contracts for books that aren’t written yet. Twice now I’ve breezed through publication with the first book in a two-book deal only to run into revision problems with the second (the one that was unwritten at the time the contract was signed). It could still happen that a publisher might acquire your completed manuscript and then give you a very tight turnaround to get the edits done, but that hasn’t happened to me.