Back in June, I finished draft 7 of my historical novel, Waist. I did one final read-through, sent it off to a few people to read, and then let it “rest” for two months. I’d been working on it steadily since the previous August (with a short break to give birth to Edwin) and I felt like I needed some time away from it to get a new perspective.

Well, goal attained. I certainly do have a new perspective. What I don’t understand is how my perspective could have changed so much in two months! When I left the last draft, I was really happy with it. I knew it wasn’t finished yet, and I was contemplating one major change, but I felt good about the work I’d done and proud of the writing.

Now I think it’s terrible! I find something I want to change on every page. The writing makes me cringe in places. Sometimes I think the action slows because I was so determined to be historically accurate, and sometimes I think it needs more details to root it in the place and time. The characters are messing with me, too. When I last read it in June, I felt good about who the characters were and the extent to which I’d developed them. Now it feels like they’re screaming at me, “Fix me! Fix me!”

How could so much have changed in two months?

It can’t be that I’ve gotten much more experienced as a writer, because I only wrote one short story in that time, and I didn’t even finish it (Midnight Snack, part 1, etc.). I did write a lot of blog posts, and I worked on a contest essay, but those were all nonfiction pieces. Could focusing my writing elsewhere really have prompted such a shift in my novel writing?

I also read a lot over the summer, but it wasn’t historical fiction, and it wasn’t much more than I typically read, so even though I strongly believe that extensive reading feeds writers, I don’t think that’s the answer.

I guess it doesn’t matter so much why my perspective changed; what matters is that I have a lot of work ahead of me. I keep trying to tell myself that this is a good thing. After all, the whole point of letting it “rest” between drafts is to get some distance so you’re able to see more flaws, and then you can go back to work to make the book even better. I just didn’t expect this much work.

(Also, if all I needed to do to improve my novel was to not look at it for two months, then why did I pay a small fortune for a professional novel writer to read/critique my book last spring? I could have done it myself for more time, but no money!)

So draft 8, here I come. (And draft 9… and draft 10… sigh…)