Writing is Revising

 

About 30 years ago in 1992, I started writing a young adult book called The Mosquito Test. The title idea came from a road trip up north with a high school distance runner. Mike would run in the State Class A High School Championships. On I-95N, I pulled into the breakdown lane for a call of nature. I ran into the woods on this warm Saturday morning in early June. The moist, wooded area was somewhere between Newport and Bangor.  Man, it was buggy. Trying to care of business and not get eaten alive proved challenging and got me thinking about a challenge Maine kids might conceive of for friends to join their club. That's when the club's Mosquito Test came to my mind. 

At the same time, I had 3 English students living with Cystic Fibrosis and another, a former ski racer, battling cancer. I couldn't help thinking of a kid born with what at the time was a terminal disease befriending another kid who just started confronting cancer. And what if they became friends and partners in tennis?  

Somewhere in my files there's a one-page letter from my friend Monica Wood who read a 215-page draft of The Mosquito Test. She commented on the believable characters, the intriguing plot, and the battle the two main characters faced with cancer and cystic fibrosis. Then she wrote something to the effect of, "Try writing the book in first person using Scott as the narrator." 

Rewrite the 215 pages? 

I did. 

The teenaged narrator's voice drew in YA readers and created a more believable story.  Once I got over my hangover, I loved writing from Scott's perspective. 

I'm teaching Writing Practicum this semester for UMaine. This morning as I read the second draft of a  grad student's manuscript, I discovered she took my advice (or my hints) and revised her piece. She went from a third person limited point of view to first person POV. The opening chapter of her YA novel is much more lively and believable with a teenager telling the story.]

Few pieces are written in a single draft. Most of us try this-n-that until we discover what works. It is and will always be true:  Writing is revision.