By Tosca Lee
Sometimes people ask me what my favorite part of writing is.
It’s not first drafts. Pull my fingernails out with pliers, why don’t you.
Rewriting and editing is much more fun. That’s where I roll my sleeves up and really get to work. Because now I’ve got that messy lump of clay on the wheel, something to work with.
But the best part is having written. People denigrate writers like this—that there are those who love to write and those who love having written. But having written means I can get out and be with readers, which is by far the best part of being a writer. After all, it was a love for stories that made most writers want to write in the first place.
I’m also a big believer that something mystical happens between my pen (okay, my fingernails and the keyboard) and the printed words, and between the printed words and the reader’s heart. Something that I wasn’t a part of, that isn’t technically even my business.
I first started pondering this during a signing for my second book, Havah: The Story of Eve. A lady was standing in line to get her book signed and when she got to me she started crying. She said some words about the book that didn’t seem tear-worthy but clearly there was something uniquely personal going on that the book had touched.
As a person of faith, I believe that God does big things in the creative process and talks to others through our endeavors. And I accept that I might not be part of that conversation even if my work sparked it. I’ve even had readers go on at length about how they appreciated my insight into some issue or another and how I expressed this or that… when I honestly was not thinking about any of those things as I wrote the book. This is fascinating to me!
There are a few questions authors get asked over and over. One of them is “Can you tell us about your writing journey?” Another is “Where do you get your ideas?” But every time a new book comes out, there’s the inevitable “What do you hope readers will take from this book?”
I used to try to answer this question. I have reasons for writing the things I do: ideas I want to share, thoughts I want to pose like questions, conventions I want to challenge. But several years ago I quit giving the answer. Because regardless of my motivation for writing a particular story, what a reader takes from it depends entirely on what she brought to it.
As someone who teaches fiction writing a lot, I talk about ways to stay (mostly) sane while writing, trying to get published, and entering the industry. One of the big ones is knowing where our control over the story ends and where it takes on a life of its own—kind of like grown kids, going off into the world to do things we might never have guessed of them.
And that’s the part where we finally get to sit back and see just where that story goes.
Reader, what books have had the strongest impact on you?
Tosca Lee is a New York Times bestselling author of twelve novels including The Long March Home (May 2023, coauthored by Marcus Brotherton), The Line Between, The Progeny, Iscariot, and The Legend of Sheba. Her work has been translated into seventeen languages and optioned for TV and film. She is the recipient of two International Book Awards, Killer Nashville’s Silver Falchion, ECPA Fiction Book of the Year, and the Nebraska Book Award. Her work has finaled for the High Plains Book Award, the Library of Virginia Reader’s Choice Award, the Christy Award, and a second ECPA Book of the Year, among others. Lee earned her bachelor’s degree in English from Smith College. A former first runner-up to Mrs. United States, she lives in Nebraska with her husband and two of four children still at home.
As an author, I completely agree that the editing process is the most rewarding! As for books that have influenced my writing, I think back to the books I read a long time ago by the former CIA operative, Charles McCarry, such as SHELLEY’S HEART. I read it twice to learn some of the basics of crafting a good political thriller. I also loved many of Nelson DeMille’s books starting eons ago with CHARM SCHOOL — a real “classic” when it comes to weaving history into smart novels. Thanks, Tosca, for a thought-provoking post!
As an author, I completely agree that the editing process is the most rewarding! As for books that have influenced my writing, I think back to the books I read a long time ago by the former CIA operative, Charles McCarry, such as SHELLEY’S HEART. I read it twice to learn some of the basics of crafting a good political thriller. I also loved many of Nelson DeMille’s books starting eons ago with CHARM SCHOOL — a real “classic” when it comes to weaving history into smart novel.
This is so true, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard it put this way before. I know I was affected by Laurie King’s second Mary Russell book, because it made me face what was missing in my life. I was determined to see the Acropolis because of a line in a Helen MacInnes book. Readers can always see something in your books that you didn’t purposely put there.
But I’m the opposite—I hate rewriting! My goal is to write it perfectly the first time and never have to touch it again. I seem to get farther from that goal every time. Wasn’t it Dorothy Parker who said ‘I don’t enjoy writing. I enjoy having written.’
Totally me!
I love the rewriting. I think it’s the perfectionist in me. And because if that, I must force myself to stop or I would always be rewriting and never finishing. Rule of thumb, it’s done when all your doing is changing ing words to ed words or vice versa.