I noted yesterday that in wrapping up the latest draft, one aspect that helps near the end—when your brain is so fixated on fixes, critique, smoothing—is to make a love list for the book. Sometimes, this looks like highlighting lines and moments you love in one color. Then, you look at your draft and realize it’s nearly all highlighted. It’s a good feeling! And perhaps a necessary one.
I talk a lot about the generosity baked into being a reader i.e. a lot of your experience is dictated by whether you’re looking for reasons to say yes or say no to a given book. When you’re looking for flaws, you will find them. (This is also why the right beta readers matter, because some will look for something wrong in every sentence, which isn’t as helpful as you expect.)
What I find is that by the end of a revision, I’m nearly entirely primed towards what’s still lingering as a problem, so I need to snap back into the love part. More so what all have I fixed? rather than what is still wrong with it? (Yes, I’m a perfectionist.) It’s also why many authors refuse to ever read their finished work once it’s bound and on shelves because they worry they’ll nitpick.
An example of a recent worry:
Tatum (narrator) has more scenes—because of order—in which she’s waking up/falling asleep, whereas in previous drafts, I was much better about varying scene beginnings and endings. Some of this is plot-based in that there’s always been a day-camp and a night-camp (part of the lore/feel) but I worry it feels stagnant.
But that’s not necessarily something I needed to perfect before passing off to my editor because we might change that anyway.
I also just found an old draft—as in, the first draft—of my book that I started in 2017 in my calligraphy box. There’s something gratifying about also remembering when I came up with certain exact lines that have remained in the book for 10+ years. Not because I’m being precious about it, but because they’re that good.
So, some love list.