A Writer Can Change Her Mind, Can't She?
Of course, she can. Especially if she’s not
getting any traction with the novel she’s been trying to sell. After several
years and rejections too numerous to count, plus a tour through an expensive
book doctor, who thought the story was a good one, it occurred to me that my
novel about a typist in a small town in the Midwest who is jealous of the newcomer,
a more cosmopolitan young woman whom she feels duty-bound to welcome, was, to
put it mildly, boring.
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I liked it; the book doctor liked it. But
the people who count—agents and publishers—didn’t seem to find it interesting
enough to bother with. I could keep trying—I am a firm believer in
persistence—but there came a point when it was obvious I was beating my head
against the wall. I had two choices: Give up, or try something different. By
then, I had invested so much time and effort in crafting the novel, I was loath
to abandon it. I liked the characters too much to let them go. I liked the
basic concept—that people are a product of their upbringing and often have to
change if they are to grow. I wanted to describe what it was like to sit at a
manual typewriter all day long, typing deadly insurance policy forms that were
so expensive, no erasures were permitted. But I knew the story needed a healthy
dose of action, suspense, whatever. So I changed it.
Throwing out the boring stuff and keeping
the interesting stuff wasn’t easy. It boiled down to asking myself the same
question about each element of the story: keep or change?
Get
me Rewrite!
Plot: In the original story, the two women become good friends, although
the main character, Judah, suffers when her old high school flame returns to
town and immediately hooks up with the young woman, Nancy. Then valuable things
start to disappear, and the people in the office accuse the stranger in their
midst. Judah doesn’t want to believe this until she discovers all the stolen
items hidden beneath Nancy’s bed. Yawning yet? Apparently the agents and
publishers were. So the revised version became a story about a naïve young
Midwesterner who gets blackmailed into spying on her boss.
Setting: There is a Cold War element here that simply wouldn’t be credible
in a small Illinois town, and that’s why I moved the setting to Washington,
D.C.
Characters: Having invested a great deal of effort developing my characters and
their personalities, I kept them all, including their names and their
relationships (more or less), but I changed their roles to match the new story.
Judah still has an overly strict religious upbringing that makes her never
question strange happenings in the office. But now she also has a secret past
as a child thief. Nancy remains the world traveler with a back story pretty
much the same as in the original novel and an affection for Jack, whom Judah
had dated only a couple of times. Ralph, the shoe salesman who lives across
from Judah, remains the same, except that I kill him off midway through the
rewritten novel. Tom Lawrence, the boss, also remains the same love interest,
although in the rewritten version, Judah is forced to betray him. Jack, who was
the real thief in the original plot now is the real villain in the new version.
Time: Both the old and new versions occur in 1966, at a time of
transition from the old manual typewriters to electric and then correcting
electric typewriters. Both versions also occur in April, although the rewritten
story takes readers up to Christmas of 1966 when Judah winds up killing the man
running the spy operation.
It took several months, possibly more than
a year, to blend the old and new versions of The Typist into a story that caught a publisher’s interest. It’s
not so much that a writer can change her mind; it’s that sometimes she should change it.
Caroline Taylor is the author of three mysteries, “What Are Friends For,” “Jewelry from a Grave” and “Loose Ends”; the award-winning nonfiction book, “Publishing the Nonprofit Annual Report: Tips, Traps, and Tricks of the Trade.” She is releasing a thriller, “The Typist,” in June 2018. A lifelong writer and editor, Caroline has received numerous awards for editorial and design excellence for publications she produced for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the NIH Foundation, World Wildlife Fund, Greenpeace, BoardSource, and the Aeras Global TB Vaccine Foundation. She is a member of the North Carolina Writers' Network, Sisters in Crime, and Mystery Writers of America.
