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Salvaging A Novel I Wrote In 1983
My first novel, like most first novels, was transparently autobiographical. It was also, I’m guessing, derivative of writers I admired at the time I wrote it, which was 27 years ago, writers like Hemingway and Faulkner. I am guessing that this is the case because I haven’t reread it since it was rejected, after 11 months at Doubleday, in 1983. The young editor who championed it was sure it would be accepted, and when it wasn’t (in favour of Paul Quarrington’s fine early novel, Home Game) he was almost as crushed as I was.
In any case I haven’t read it since. Nor did I ever submit it again. But a few months ago, I told my girlfriend, Karen, about it, and she asked if she could read it. When she was finished, she said, “This is the most beautiful thing you’ve ever written,” which was a very nice thing to say, but a very depressing thing to hear, because she’s read everything I’ve written since.
I know what she means though. She likes its youthful lyricism, its unjadedness. She likes the fact that it’s a story about a family. She likes the fact that it’s not a murder mystery, that it’s non-genre.
So my next project is before me: to revisit Country Music (alternative title: Up Where We Go) and decide whether I think it’s as good as she does. If I think it’s salvageable (like an old shipwreck still rocking on the ocean floor), I will commit a year to rewriting it. I hope to begin reading it this week. I am looking forward to experiencing again the scenes I worked so hard on a quarter century ago, and I am looking forward to a judicious application of those skills that I have developed in the process of writing six subsequent novels — one of which I never submitted for publication, four of which have been published, and one of which is currently awaiting my editor’s attention — to what may seem to me a callow manuscript.
But part of me hopes that Karen is right. Part of me hopes that it is the most beautiful thing I’ve written.
Next Installment: An Update on Country Music
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J.D. Carpenter's Campbell Young novels have been nominated for the Arthur Ellis Award, appeared on national bestseller lists (The Globe & Mail), and received critical acclaim (The Globe & Mail, The Toronto Star, The Edmonton Journal, Maclean's, Quill & Quire).
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Good luck with the old manuscript, but don’t be too hard on yourself!
I, too, have an autobiographical masterpiece that was praised but never published. (My first agent actually said, “you’re lucky you never got this in print.”) If you are successful with it, perhaps I’ll give mine a go too.