Lost at Sea

by Diana Jenkins

Sometimes I wonder if I am wilfully deaf – maybe the fat lady’s been singing for years now and I just refuse to hear her throaty warble. How else to explain my unwillingness and even fundamental inability to let go of a manuscript that shows every sign of terminal illness?

I came so close a few months ago, I really did. I said goodbye. Made final arrangements for burial. Told family, close friends and a couple of professional acquaintances that the end had come at last – peacefully, if long overdue. There was sadness, regret, but I also felt an enormous sense of relief and release.

The end came – at least I thought it had come – when I heard back from the senior editor who’d requested my full manuscript. Cast your minds back, if you can bear it, to the February feature, and you may recall she had first asked for a sample following my pitch at an ASA speed dating event. So. Then came the request for the full manuscript and off it went, carrying my incurably unrealistic hopes and dreams along with it.

I must be bluntly honest with you now about the state of this piece of work. One of the reasons it’s so crippled with disease is that it has seen more changes in leadership over the past few years than the Australian Labor Party. It’s not an idle comparison. In trying to get it right, in trying to respond robustly to criticism, I’ve come to resemble nothing so much as a somewhat pathetic politician obsessed with the latest polling, changing my story as endless rounds of feedback indicate problems with this, then that, then this, then that, then this, then...that. In trying to attend to these identified faults within the manuscript, I’ve created new ones and worse – I’ve lost sight of some of the fundamental elements that made me want to write the story in the first place.

I’m pretty clear that in my own case, the manuscript has suffered – and I have suffered too – from the absence of a single, crucial figure. I really crave and have long believed I desperately need one person – this is an editor for some writers, an agent for others, a mentor or supervisor or tutor for still more – to be with me or at least available to me the whole way through. A consistent critic: that’s what I need. It’s what I’ve always needed. I know having the immense good fortune to find a supervisor who became the champion of my thesis – the wonderful Associate Professor Elizabeth McMahon – is the ONLY reason I got my doctorate in the end. All my years of brain-bending hard work would never have been enough without Liz, because I didn’t really know what I needed to do to make it function effectively as a pass-worthy doctoral thesis – and she did. She was absolutely instrumental in getting my thesis to a place where it competently jumped through the required hoops. And when it comes to my fiction writing, I’d do anything to have a Liz-shaped editor in my corner now.

Instead, I’ve had feedback on samples and occasionally the full MS from manuscript assessors; from several trusted friends; from various members of Varuna’s own creative team; from my Varuna-formed writing group; from an established and award-winning novelist; from a senior editor at a publishing house; from one agent; then another; then back to the original agent, who passed again; from a publisher to, finally, this second senior editor at a different publishing house.

They’ve mostly been enormously constructive and generous in their feedback – incredibly helpful, and I’m forever grateful for the time and effort they’ve given me when responding to my work. But they have each had different issues (except for one, which I’ll get to), so my diligent efforts to address the manuscript’s flaws have created a whole other unintended but extremely grave consequence, which is that it’s lost something of its original authenticity. Typing those words puts a lump in my throat, because I know it’s true, and I know it’s a precious thing I’ve lost. And I don’t know if I can ever get it back.

Some of those aforementioned readers didn’t feel close to the narrator, so I tried to get her to talk more about her feelings. Now there’s too much figurative language, according to the most recent reader, and I can see she’s right. I went too far trying to force my character to emotionally confide. So what do I do? Go back to an earlier version and try to recover some of its less overblown elements? But what about the substantial plot changes? Do I wind those back too? In fact, the manuscript today is virtually unrecognisable from the first draft – except for one thing, that is, one piece of damning feedback that I can’t seem to shake no matter how many versions I do, and it was this same criticism, levelled by the senior editor who most recently read it, that made me think that the manuscript just had to be allowed to die.

I have tried to fix this foundation issue through countless redrafts. I’ve rewritten the entire manuscript. I’ve created an entirely different story with brand new characters in brand new settings to try to address this one criticism that has dogged me from the very first feedback I ever received right through to this latest round. I can’t quite believe my failure to fix it – it makes me feel so fucking stupid and hopeless. Dense. It makes me feel like the biggest thickhead that ever lived. How? How is it possible that I still haven’t corrected this problem?

As I wrote to one of my former readers, the novelist, when I read those now so familiar words in the rejection email from the senior editor, I could feel all the life and energy draining out of me. The realisation that I had once again failed to fix this fundamental flaw was one of the most deflating of my life.

The basic charge is that my manuscript is ‘episodic,’ a word that has cropped up in just about every bit of feedback I have ever had. Episodic: there’s no functional narrative arc, in other words – not even now, when I have strived to create an entirely new narrative to fix this very problem. But it seems even my fix also comes off as episodic. I’ve just created a new episodic manuscript rather than fixing the episodic nature of the original manuscript. Brilliant.

The episodic structure has many consequences for the reader, I’ve learned over the years. One is that it’s not sufficiently engaging over a novel-length read. That’s issue enough. That’s really a killer, and is chief among the reasons for my trying to correct the problem. But another intriguing consequence is that it makes readers think my story is non-fiction. Certainly in its earlier iterations, this question of its status as fiction or non-fiction seemed to preoccupy most of the people who read it (and as you can see from the list above, there were a few).

In writing the many versions of this manuscript, I have drawn on some of my own experiences, but finally to a very limited degree. As the manuscript developed, autobiographical elements became progressively scarcer until now they barely make it onto the page at all except for some broad circumstances and settings that are drawn from personal experience. Characters, conversations, action – all of these I have invented. And yet the episodic structure – which seems to be my natural writing style, since I can’t get away from it even when I think I am vigorously applying myself to the task – creates an atmosphere of recollection and reality that undermines the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief.

You might think having someone say that, ‘It feels real, like some of these things happened to the author,’ is a good thing, a compliment, a way of saying my writing is convincing, but you’d be dead wrong. It quite obviously destabilises and discomfits the reader. It is fatally distracting, because this question of whether it’s real or not irrevocably compromises the pact between author and reader. They can’t lose themselves in my story because, despite my best efforts, I haven’t created a fictional world that’s sufficiently fortified against the intrusions of this one.

I don’t know how to explain this effect of my writing, nor do I know how to make it go away. I can’t tell you why a scene I wrote convinces readers that something happened to me – me, the real me, the author of the story – rather than to my character, when it’s something that did not happen to me, when it’s something I simply made up to fix – you guessed it – a problem one of my first readers had with the main character’s motivations. But it’s one of the many ‘episodes’ in the manuscript that contribute to overall reader unease and dissatisfaction.

So. Back to being dead. Just so dead. Dead, dead, dead. When I got the senior editor’s feedback, and saw that damning word, ‘episodic,’ all I could hear – at long last – was the fat lady belting out a good one. Boy, that chick can sing. And she is loud. She even stuck around for an encore, just to make sure I got the lyrics right.

I read the editor’s email a few more times and thought, I have absolutely nothing left to give this manuscript. The thought of heading back in there for another attempt at a redraft – because she kindly said she would be prepared to look at a reworked version – was so miserable I couldn’t stand to entertain the idea for even a moment. I decided to get to my feet, applaud the fat lady and beg her for another tune instead. I was listening properly now. She had my undivided attention at last.

And at the end of this extended farewell concert, it felt good to say goodbye.

But this manuscript is like a bad marriage, or maybe more like John Farnham, because no matter how many times I think I’ve said a final farewell, there it is again.

Here’s what happened next. First, the dust settled on my initial wave of disappointment. I had to face a few hard facts about the most recent version, the most significant being that I had totally rushed the rewrite that saw it go from – wait for it – an adult novel to a young adult one. This seismic change was so poorly executed because I was in such a major bloody hurry to be done with it. It was a cosmetic patch-up, a swap-n-go at best.

I’d had the startling revelation that this was, in fact, a young adult story, after picking it up for the first time in three years (new motherhood and a rather demanding child having halted all progress in the meantime). When I finally got up the courage to squint at it, lip curling obscenely, so screamingly obvious did it seem that these characters were still kids that I was sort of embarrassed by my failure to recognise it until then. How the fuck did I miss that?! Well, my only defence is that I didn’t set out to write a young adult novel, I set out to write an adult one. And perhaps earlier versions were more suited to an adult audience; all I know for sure is that somewhere along the line, all this rewriting changed everything, even the audience I was writing for.

So after all these years and all these botched attempts to cure what ails it, I now have the undernourished bones of a young adult novel: this much I know. It’s not the story I started with, it’s not the one I thought I was writing, but it is – unequivocally – the one that has emerged from the wreckage of all these failed attempts. It still requires hospitalisation and extensive rehabilitation before it’s going to be able to walk unassisted, but at least I’m clear on that one detail. It might still prove beyond my meagre ability to get this young adult story over the line, but that’s the job that’s available. And that means I pretty much have to start all over again.

It’s unlikely I would have signed up to even attempt that job were it not for one small twist of fate: I heard back from the agent from the speed pitching event. I’d given up on that ever happening because it just seemed as though too much time had gone by and I just assumed the formal rejection had somehow gone astray. But just a week – exactly one week – after I’d declared to myself and others that the manuscript was finally dead and buried, lo and behold, the agent requested the full manuscript, apologising for not having been in touch sooner. My sample had somehow become separated from my contact details. Life, huh?

I still haven’t sent her the manuscript, though she requested it a full 3 months ago now. I haven’t sent it because I haven’t yet attempted to fix it, and I don’t want to blow the opportunity of having her read it by sending her the same version the senior editor saw. I know it’s incomplete, so there is no point sending it in its current form. I tried a rush job and ended up sending out a half-baked story that wasn’t ready to go. No doubt I will keep on making countless mistakes, but I have always tried to avoid making the same one twice.

I’m no longer in a frenzied hurry to get a novel published – I let go of that idea a long time ago. It’s really not that. I rushed it out to the senior editor because I am still looking for that Liz figure, someone who’ll say to me, “Listen, this still needs shitloads of work, sweet-cheeks, but it’s got potential and I’m going to help you” – that’s what I’m still hurrying to find, that constant critic, that stable editor or agent or whoever it is who will be my sounding board. I’m still just as hungry for this person in my writing life. I really want and need their input and guidance. I can’t afford to retain someone, so I keep trying to find this person through the conventional channels. It’s tough going, because there are countless others like me, and we’re all competing for the loyal attentions of someone whose time is already in absurdly short supply.

I read an article years ago about American author Don DeLillo’s career trajectory (I wrote my doctoral thesis on his work). His publisher talked about a hot-house culture that protected authors like DeLillo back in the 70s, so that these writers had time and space to perfect their craft even as their books did not sell. They were incubated in a supportive publishing environment while the publisher copped repeated commercial failures – in DeLillo’s case there were quite a few – believing that, eventually, the investment would pay off, as it certainly did in his case. I’ve never been more wistful in my life than reading that account of a nurturing place for the developing writer. I am pretty sure that model no longer exists, but the thought of it took my breath away.

I’ve heard so many published authors say they seriously doubt their first novel of however long ago would find a publisher today, and I think it’s the rare author indeed who’s carefully incubated through several unprofitable novels until bursting forth with something that makes the publisher a few bucks back after years of money down the gurgler. Who can afford the resources? Who can absorb that kind of risk? No one, which is why the cost is being put back on the author right there in the development phase, with substantial fees running into thousands of dollars being charged for the kind of consistency of feedback I am looking for. After I got the agent’s request, I was actually ready to go into debt to do one of these courses – it was over $4,000 – but the course was cancelled. In some ways it was a blessing, because I hadn’t spent $4,000 I can ill afford, but I was still devastated and have been adrift ever since.

I guess I’m telling you all this because I’m hoping it’ll make anyone who’s in a similar predicament feel a bit better. I can’t be the only one who finds trying to navigate this world without putting down some pretty serious cash nigh on impossible. And maybe I have to be prepared to invest in my writing with more than just time spent and income potential sacrificed. Maybe that’s just the way it has to be if I can’t let go.

And yes, maybe I should let go. Maybe I should email the agent and say, ‘I know this manuscript needs more work than I’m capable of giving it by myself and I respectfully and gratefully withdraw it from consideration.’

It’s tempting.

But so is trying to have a real go at starting over and writing it as a young adult story, because now I know in my heart that’s what it is.

What would you do?