FOR ASK BK DAY:
Has Muse Margaret or one of your proofers ever made a suggestion that caused you to alter one of your manuscripts in any significant way?
The proofers are not really reading in that way - they are doing grammar, punctuation, and looking for typos or obvious or not-obvious errors.
Muse Margaret is a whole other story. She "gets" what I do and is impeccable in her ability to see things that are not what they should be. It doesn't happen often, but when she has a problem, I listen. Sometimes it's as simple as her reading the pages I've given her and having her say "I'd like to know what that person was wearing, or how did she smell" or that kind of detail, and I always do it, because she's always right. In the new book, which she loved, there was one section where she got antsy because I was repeating a lot of information in dialogue, because I thought it was important. I ended up changing that to just a couple of lines from the third-person narrator rather than dialogue.
There are times when I've disagreed, but when I've gone back and really analyzed what she was saying, she was right and I made changes. The two biggest things ever were in the title story of How To Write A Dirty Book and Other Stories, and in the final chapter of Rewind.
In the former, the story was originally written in the first person, the leading character was an out-of-work actor and she loved the idea of the story and all the dialogue, but HATED that he was an actor and hated the first person - she felt it was smarmy. I disagreed, of course, but then reread it and saw exactly what she meant. So, the first thing I did was change the character's occupation to the much better (and why I hadn't thought of it in the first place is anyone's guess, because it was the ONLY profession he should have had) having him be an out of work screenwriter, which made much more sense to the story. I then made him a nebbish who hadn't had much luck with girls and that change actually gave the story some depth and a point it didn't originally have. I then put it in the third person and voila - it worked so much better. All of those changes, surprisingly, too me about twenty minutes.
With Rewind, she never had one problem until the final chapter - she basically thought I'd ruined the book and she wanted me to simply cut the chapter. I thought it was great, but we agreed to both reread it and talk again the next day. In the meantime, I had dinner with my friend Nick Redman, and I asked him about it. I gave away the ending to get his opinion, and I told him what the chapter was about and what the point was and he loved what I told him. So, I wrote down all the reasons he loved it, and I talked to Margaret the next day and read them to her. And she said the most amazing thing. She said, "Yes, he's totally right - what you told him is perfect - but that's not what you wrote." I went back and read it and bingo, she was totally right. In just a few paragraphs I'd mucked it up because I was facile. It took me all of four minutes to rewrite those few paragraphs and then she was thrilled with it.
She's never been wrong yet and while it's sometimes hard to pinpoint what her problem may be, we always figure it out and I always change it.
