Breaking News! Local trans woman caught cheating… on the six-week rule

So, today I was jazzed up about finally being six weeks past writing the rough draft of Project Ouzel. But here’s the thing… if I have to sit down and think of the cold, sober truth of it, I’m actually, truthfully not. Factually speaking, six weeks have passed since I wrote the rough draft. But six weeks since I wrote it is not the same as six weeks since I last touched it. Deep down, I know that.

When the clock passed midnight last night, I was so excited at the prospect of finally editing my novel that I was planning on getting four hours of editing work done today. While I have seen people post the October 3rd gif because it’s Mean Girls Day, this day also has this special meaning for me. But, here’s the thing. It’s based on a lie. Because I’m a lying liar who lies. Because I did not truly put aside the novel and let it rest. Not even a little bit. Not even remotely. There is no way I can honestly say that I followed this rule.

What is the six week rule anyway?

In his book on writing, very appropriately titled On Writing, Stephen King writes about a great many things. In my post about writing at Arctic Star, I talked about how he wrote some of his work while working at a laundry in Maine. One of the other things in his book is this six week rule. Basically, the idea is that you should let the book sit for six weeks after you write it. Don’t touch it, stop living in the world of it. Let it settle the fuck down and just be.

I could directly quote King on his explanation of the rule. I’m certainly going to in a bit. I think this explanation of the why is the better place to start. Now, he doesn’t necessarily say this is the reason why, but I can read between the lines. I can see how the rule can help me see the forest for the trees. Even if I haven’t lived it in practice yet.

When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest. Not every book has to be loaded with symbolism, irony, or musical language (they call it prose for a reason, y’know), but it seems to me that every book—at least every one worth reading—is about something. Your job during or just after the first draft is to decide what something or somethings yours is about. Your job in the second draft—one of them, anyway—is to make that something even more clear. This may necessitate some big changes and revisions. The benefits to you and your reader will be clearer focus and a more unified story. It hardly ever fails.

And that’s the thing that I missed by breaking the rule. I am still in the minutiae of Project Ouzel. I’m thinking about specific scenes, specific character foibles. I’m contemplating how flat some of the characters are. What I can do to make them more well-rounded. Especially since I have had an idea to spin off a novella series around the supporting cast. An idea that evolved into the series of full-length novels¹ , but I still like the idea in my heart. But here’s the rule, explained:

How long you let your book rest […] is entirely up to you, but I think it should be a minimum of six weeks. During this time your manuscript will be safely shut away in a desk drawer, aging and (one hopes) mellowing. Your thoughts will turn to it frequently, and you’ll likely be tempted a dozen times or more to take it out, if only to re-read some passage that seems particularly fine in your memory, […]

Resist temptation. If you don’t, you’ll very likely decide you didn’t do as well on that passage as you thought and you’d better retool it on the spot. This is bad.

And that’s the whole god damn point of the six week rule. There it is, in a nutshell. But this next part is what worries me.

Caging the fucking ego

Aleister Crowley himself allegedly² once wrote “A single ego is an absurdly narrow vantage point from which to view the world”… and I cannot agree more. And the last part of the rule I want to cite talks about the problem of letting yourself run away with the ego to ruinous places.

The only thing worse would be for you to decide the passage is even better than you remembered—why not drop everything and read the whole book over right then? Get back to work on it! Hell, you’re ready! You’re fuckin Shakespeare!

You’re not, though, and you’re not ready to go back to the old project until you’ve gotten so involved in a new one (or re-involved in your day-to-day life) that you’ve almost forgotten the unreal estate that took up three hours of your every morning or afternoon for a period of three or five or seven months

Now, I know I’m not god damn Shakespeare. I’m not even Stephen King. I’m starting this journey at 39 and so far, my greatest achievement as an author is finishing the fucking rough draft. But, I do have a blind spot that I discovered in my editing. I realized my characters needed development. Some of them turned out flat.

Now, I know full well my normal tone when talking about myself tends to be self-deprecating. But what if I do let ego blind me to my weaknesses? And this is not just as an author, but as a magician, as a programmer… in any endeavour of my life, really. If I’m going to achieve what I want in life, I’m going to need to remember to keep my ego in check. Cage that fucker.

But yeah, let’s talk about how I broke that rule.

How, exactly, I broke the rule

In actual fact, I broke the rule in both the letter and the spirit. I broke that rule countless times over the last six weeks. I read a chapter of it at a Words Out Loud event last month. The characters, the world of Project Ouzel³ have been dancing in my head for the whole six weeks. I’ve been thinking about the sequels and writing short scenes and dream sequences. I’ve thought about my protagonist’s love interests, the flatness of some of the characters, all of it. I’ll admit that I haven’t actually edited a single word of the novel, but I haven’t let it rest either. I haven’t actually created the distance. And that’s the whole god damn point of the six week rule.

Why does this matter?

In not honouring this rule, what I cheated myself out of is the distance to read this in the eyes of someone who picks up the book with no knowledge of it. Or… as close to it as possible, as I wrote the damn thing so of course I have knowledge of it. Right now, I do not have the critical eye I need to give this novel the justice it deserves. As a result, I pushed my novel back six more weeks due to my own impatience. And, for that, I truly apologize.

Now, I know you probably don’t care right now. Nobody has actually read this book yet. Not an agent, not a publisher, not a single soul other than myself. This is probably going to be read years after the fact by people who want insight on how Project Ouzel was written. The people who are going to read this and know the book by its actual title instead of “Project Ouzel” are going to outnumber those who know it as “Project Ouzel”.

So, what am I going to do now?

The next step is to add, not necessarily edit. Which, to me, sounds crazy because this fucking manuscript is almost 89,000 words right now. This is going to mean that I’m going to need to slash through the book like I’m my main character in Project Mariah Carey when it truly comes time to edit. But, like I said, I learned from feedback that some of my characters’ voices are flat. That’s the first logical thing I can fix. There’s also giving Chapter 1 the mise-en-place it deserves.

So, over the next maybe week or two, I’m going to do that. Then, I’m going to put Project Ouzel down. For the full ass six weeks it truly deserves. Shouldn’t be too hard, I have over 20 manuscripts to finish anyway.

1. I cannot begin to tell you how hard it is to resist telling all y’all Project Ouzel’s name, let alone the rest of the books in the series [↩]
2. I cannot find the source of this quote, hence why I’m saying “allegedly”. It appears on quote aggregator sites, but I searched the Hermetic Library for it and couldn’t find it once. [↩]
3. yeah, I almost spilled the name of the project here when writing this post. [↩]