Critically reading…myself

 

I’m in the process of digitally republishing five novels I wrote nearly fifty years ago.

It’s a legacy project. A “bucket wish” for authors.

I want my out-of-print family sagas—some of which were never published in the U.S.—to finally be

available in my own country, and hopefully long after I write no more.

But it had been decades since I read my own books, written in 1979-1994. Were they worth republishing?

So it was that last year I began my legacy project by critically reading my own stuff. They were all long

books—in those days, long books like mine were often plus 200,000 words—whereas now publishers

want 80,000 novels.  I’ve heard that authors are now told 100,000-word or more novels should be cut in

half and sold as two books.

Hmmmm.  But I put away greedy thoughts of republishing not five long but ten short books

It took me six months of solid work to read my own five books.

And I’m happy to report that I loved them.  What a relief! Sometimes, after a satisfying day

of reading my own long-ago words and concepts and dialogue, I’d go to the bathroom mirror, look at my

wrinkles and jowls, and ask myself if I could still write like I once did—so full of passion and insight

and energy.  I would then tell myself, as we seniors often do, that what I’d lost in energy I’d more than

replaced with wisdom.  Sometimes I believed my own reassurances to myself.

Then, back to reading myself, sometimes I would remember exact words from every passage. 

I could recall sitting at my lightweight little typewriter on my tiny Cairo balcony, choosing each word in

every sentence.  Or when I was writing about a lovesick encounter in a Greek waterfront café, I could almost

taste the calamari once again.  It was all so clear, so entirely still in my heart and mind!

But there were other times when I totally forgot the intricacies of plots I myself had created. Scenes that

felt fresh and new to myself simply, I think, because I no longer could remember what had happened.  I vacillated

whether this was good or bad, and in the end just abandoned myself to my own fictional world.

But twice I got so wrapped up in my own stories that I wanted to change them; in both cases, I wanted

to “save” a dying character.

In one instance, I didn’t remember a particular plot twist, but I did sense, just as a reader would, that a child

was about to die in a painful way. Reading this nearly fifty years later, I said out loud,  “No!  Don’t do that!”

And I was thinking:  She’s going to kill him off.  No!  Don’t do it! I was actually thinking of myself, the author,

as the other, as “she.”

A slightly different but related issue developed during a scene of carnage in Lebanon, as I the

latter day reader could see that one of the main characters was about to die.  As it happened,

I really loved her.  (Yes, for me anyway, sometimes I had real emotions attached to my own characters.)

Reading this decades after I myself wrote it, I considered that maybe I could rewrite the scene and

have her spared.  With excitement, I realized how I could do that without changing much.

This was a very satisfying idea.  But when I discussed this with a friend, a retired English professor,

he was aghast.  He said he remembered there was some hullabaloo years ago about rewriting Lear.   I don’t

remember the particulars, but it may have been the ending; the changed plot would have lightened it up

and changed the import of everything.  My friend said that as the author of my book I could do whatever

I wanted to revise it, but that this would be looked upon critically with scorn and disdain.  So, with reluctance,

I let her die even in the digital version.

Thus it is, as I share my early work with all of you, that presenting these digital versions is, for me,

a salubrious time.  They are all good books, and this project is the capstone of my life. Know that as I pass

them from me to you, there is a smile on my face.  

Wrinkles and jowls but smiles, too! 

Kronos is available on Amazon KDP here

Image by Nanci Arvizu using Adobe Firefly