That Horrible Moment When You Have to Decide Which Version of a Book to Write

Hello again,

putting the whole of A Complete Guide to Point of View out here kind of did for me. (The heatwave hasn’t helped, either.)

The Guide is a more finished piece of writing than these entries usually are. And I moved on from it to a novella I’ve been writing.

More about that soon.

But in the past couple of days, I have gone back to the project this year is meant to be about - On Drafting.

Here’s from January 1’s entry:

..the idea is that I’m going to be trying out some of the things that I think would be useful — right from the start — for a writer who was mainly wanting to concentrate on what they do every day when they sit down and they open up their laptop or they get a sheet of A4 or they carry on from where they were before.

And some of the things that I’ve learned and some of the things that I’ve taught are very much based on that.

Most of the stuff that I end up saying to students is really, really detailed advice about how to address the page, how to think about what you’re doing before you do it, and I guess, most of all, how to rewrite.

So the first thing I’m going to do is ask you directly what would be useful for you?

What I’ve found, looking back over the year, is that I’ve written something that’s mostly unpublishable — in its current form.

Unpublishable because I’ve laid it out here in on Substack a very open, accessible, gap-between-sentences way. And something in me tells me that isn’t going to work as a book.

It’s too aerated, bubbly, pop. There are lots of day-to-day references, as you’d expect in a diary. A whole entry can be an aside (one of the reasons I love the form).

The POV is an address to You, which can start to be wearying/hectoring.

So I’m now faced with two apparent versions of the possible book I might write. (He hedges.)

Call them A and B:

A is a light rewrite of these diary pages, trying to keep the offhand tone but cutting out anything too chatty or of-that-day-only.

B is what I’m calling the classical version — by which I mean, my attempt to distil everything I have to say on writing into absolutely the best sentences I can make.

Which do you think I should write?

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My doubts about A are that it is lazy and won’t go deep enough.

My doubts about B is that I’ll crush the whole thing to death with a weight of false authority, and that I’d be trying to write someone else’s book.

I’m sharing this because I think it’s the kind of either/or fork in the road that most writers reach, at the end of a first draft.

I could make it this book (that I privately need to write) or I could make it this other book (that I hope people out there will want to read).

On rare occasions, with some books, these two things never separate — private utterance and public statement are the same.

My usual advice to other writers is, Try writing both books, and see which of them you spend the most time on. Which draws you away from the other? Which is charismatic and which a chore?

That’s most likely what I’ll do. But I’m also interested to hear which book you think I should write.