Reading straight through your work

It’s one thing to reach the final sen­tence of a first draft. It’s quite anoth­er to be able to sit down and read your work through—without stop­ping. The work of cre­at­ing a first draft is very hard, often grind­ing. Con­stant rethink­ing. Con­stant rewrit­ing. Changes can be big, even as there are count­less small ones.

But the deci­sive moment, I think, is your abil­i­ty to sit down and read your work right through. I has­ten to add that even if you can do it—without rush­ing back, hor­ri­fied, to your keyboard—your work is not done. But at least you have a con­sis­tent flow, a sense of a whole, and view, if you will, of the entire land­scape. After all, a nov­el is more than the sum of its parts. If you think of the nov­el as a jig­saw puz­zle, where­as there can be many beau­ti­ful pieces (or moments), it is the image as a whole that brings you to anoth­er place, a sum­ma­tion, or rev­e­la­tion, if you will, of some­thing big. That is the great achieve­ment of a good nov­el, and its great­est challenge.