First drafts and other unmentionable things   

February 5, 2008 | Comments

I’m trying to clean off my desk today, and it’s a humbling experience! I found a short story I wrote a few months ago and read it over. It made me cringe! The worst part of it was, I knew I had sent that piece out into the world and asked an editor to buy the story. At the time, I thought it was pretty good, too.

Amazingly, my editor over at Wild Rose Press saw past the rough spots to the story hiding within. The horrible two-page draft I found this morning eventually became The Perfect Candidate. The morals of this story are:

• First off, never send out a first draft! It’s really embarrassing a few months later.
• Second, accept the fact that no matter how brilliant your writing is, there’s always room for improvement. Sometimes editors are wrong, but more often than not their suggestions really do improve a story. This is especially true when an editor’s comments get a little too close to your writerly pride!

Ok, back to work for me - I need to find my desk sometime before 4 o’clock this afternoon, when I hand off the kids to their unsuspecting father and lock myself away to pound out a chapter or two.