I know, the expression is “practice makes perfect,” but there is no perfect when it comes to writing. There is only, “As close to perfect as I can make it.”
I was talking to my writing buddy Sophfronia Scott this morning about how proud I am of my new novel, THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO DANNY. So proud that I actually videotaped myself opening a box of Advanced Reader Copies that came in the mail, even though I felt a little silly, clichéd, and vain doing so. (Cut me some slack; I was raised Catholic.)
She and I talked about how our pride in our work comes from (a) writing what we feel compelled to write (not what we think we should write in order to get published); (b) feeling that we’re getting better with each book; and (c) the years of drafting and revision that went into the final product.
I know of several writers who have written books “for the market,” and I’ve attended readings featuring those books. It’s not pretty. The authors read from their books the way a wedding band plays “Shout” or “The Chicken Dance”–a stark difference from when they play their own songs, or when they cover a song they love.
In other words, those authors don’t seem very proud of what they’ve written. And if they’re not, why the hell should I pay good money to buy the book?
In contrast, I know of many writers like Sophfronia who have labored for years on a book to get it right, and then persist in their efforts to get it published. When they read from their books, they glow. Those are books I want to read.
So that’s what I’m going for–writing books I can be proud of, books that I would want to read, even they aren’t isn’t simple enough or “light” enough to be a “page turner” or a “summer read” that will become best-sellers. (I’m not trashing best-sellers, by the way. Most of them are fantastic. Nor am I trashing genre fiction, which I also love. And some high-falutin’ literary novels are way too complex or obtuse for my taste. It’s just that I like to write books about complicated characters in situations where there’s no clear right or wrong way to go about things, and that usually means there’s a lot of revision involved, and a lot of “complexities” for readers, who don’t always appreciate not having any clear resolutions at the end.)
“If there’s a book that you want to read,” Toni Morrison (one of my literary heroes) said, “but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”
Two of my all-time favorite novels, Morrison’s Beloved and Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love, have earned reviews averaging 
3.7 and 3.9 stars (out of 5), respectively, on Goodreads, largely because readers find them “too complicated.” My goodness. These are two of the best books I’ve ever read. Not just good but great. But it’s okay; some people don’t want to work too hard when they read. I can totally get that. But shouldn’t we reward, not criticize, books that evade a simplistic understanding of their plots and characters instead of trashing them because we didn’t “get it”? Some of the readers who give books like those just one or two stars seem angry that the author didn’t make things easy for them–as if they were personally offended.
I’ve been working on THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO DANNY for about ten years. The first draft was 165,000 words long–an American epic, as I imagined it. (Ha! said my inner critic. Nice try, Hicks.) It’s been trimmed down to about 100,000 words, which means I excised a book-length amount of words and scenes in order to tighten up my story. It went from a collection of newspaper headlines, storylines, blog posts, texts, and narratives to one linear story about one young man that takes place in fifteen years. It’s still fairly complex, so I guess it will earn mixed reviews, some of them from angry readers. But that’s really okay. I’d rather be criticized for my best work than be praised for something into which I didn’t put much effort.
Meanwhile, I’m hard at work on my next novel, which is, in its current state, a little too simple for my taste. :-)
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