The Art of Good Enough
A fresh start and a second chance
Of all the joys we’re looking for when we open a fantasy novel, perhaps first and foremost we want to be transported. We want that feeling – distinctly remembered but all too rare – of falling into a parallel world. A world marvellous and strange, yet so bright and real that for a while it seems more substantial than our everyday lives.
My debut novel, Shadow of the Wolf, presents a mythical, magical Sherwood Forest that has the power to immerse the reader as utterly as it engulfs Robin Hood. In her review of the story, Jackie Morris, co-creator of Lost Words, wrote: “Reading this book takes me back to that place in my teens where a book carried me away from all the worries of the world and the chaos in my head to another place.”
Other readers have found much to like in Shadow of the Wolf. The bestselling author Sally Green called it her “favourite book of the year.”
However, nothing is perfect. As its author, while I appreciate Shadow’s strengths, I’m more likely to fixate on its flaws. Ahead of its original publication, no matter how many times I rewrote the story, there were elements of plot or character that niggled me – that never quite seemed to work. I did my best to fix them all, of course. But a novel contains countless moveable pieces. At some point, you come to see that you could shift them around forever – endlessly tweaking the tweaks – and you still wouldn’t be entirely satisfied. At that point, you finally have to make do with ‘good enough’, and let the novel out into the world.
“A book is never finished; it’s abandoned” [Gene Fowler]
And so, when Shadow of the Wolf first appeared in bookshops, as proud as I was of the story, there were myriad ways I wanted it to be better.
As it turns out, it still wasn’t too late.
Because ten years later, my publisher announced that they intended to revamp my Robin Hood trilogy, starting by republishing Shadow of the Wolf. Ahead of the reissue, I asked if I could go back into the text and solve some of the glitches I wasn’t able to address the first time around. My publisher said yes…
And I immediately wished they hadn’t.
After all, here was a book I thought I had completed a decade ago. I’d spent that decade struggling to overcome writer’s block in order to complete the rest of my trilogy. And now here I was proposing to go back to the beginning and start unpicking the one novel I had managed to publish! Was the idea any more than masochism – or a return to the worst of my perfectionism?
Despite these doubts, the lure of this second chance was too strong. I reopened the Shadow files and began the revisions.
Most of my efforts were focused on the opening sections of the book. Here, we meet Robin and Marian as children, living together free and wild, growing up and falling in love. As such, this part of the story covers several years. In my naivety, as a first-time novelist, I thought the best way to span those years was to use abrupt time breaks – e.g. “Three Years Later.” I don’t know why I thought this was a good idea. Perhaps because I’d seen the technique used powerfully in graphic novels and films. I have since learned that prose novels don’t like time jumps of this sort. Especially not when used repeatedly. They’re too jarring. They leave the reader disorientated, without that vital feeling of having solid ground beneath their feet.
So the first thing I did was remove a section break, and two of the time jumps, before knitting the jagged ends together. As part of this process, I ended up cutting around twenty pages of the original text, and deleting several whole scenes.
There was nothing particularly wrong with these scenes; they read well enough and were relatively entertaining in their own right. Perhaps that’s why I didn’t remove them the first time around. Or maybe I was just too close to the story and so couldn’t see what was in front of my eyes. Now, though, with all the time that had passed, I could see the novel more dispassionately. Also, I hope that in that time I’ve become a better writer and storyteller.
In any case, it seems obvious to me now that those scenes were serving no vital function – they neither moved the story forwards nor did much to deepen our understanding of the characters. In short, they were redundant – so I cut them out. The interesting question now, of course, is whether readers agree. Those who read and loved the original iteration of Shadow might regard such cuts as a kind of vandalism. They might think I’ve made the story worse. If anyone reads both versions and has a view on this, I’d love to hear your opinion.
Elsewhere in the story, the changes I made were less radical. I trimmed some paragraphs where I thought the action dragged. I made some tweaks for clarity, or to heighten emotional impact. I made some continuity changes to tie in with the rest of the series. (The most substantial of these was to kill off a character who failed to turn up in book two!) All of these edits, I hope, make Shadow of the Wolf a more enjoyable read, and improve The Blind Bowman series as a whole.
But there’s another reason why I count this process as a success. And that’s all the improvements I didn’t make. Because this novel, like all novels, still has its flaws. I might have tried to address each and every one – and lost myself in endless rewrites. But I resisted that trap. If any problem didn’t have a clear and obvious solution, I left it alone. I trusted it was already good enough. In short, I set boundaries, and spent weeks on these revisions rather than months. And this for me is a major sign of progress. It shows me I am moving past my perfectionism after all. And that, I hope, means many more good novels to come.
The all-new Shadow of the Wolf is out now. I’d be delighted to hear what you think.
Thanks for being here, and happy reading!
Tim
I live in the US is the new version going to available on Feb 1st? And if so where can I get it?