I think e-readers are cool. I like the idea of not having to cart a bunch of books, even paperback ones, onto a plane where weight is always a factor in how much you can carry and how much of a pain in the ass you’ll be to the people behind you. But it’ll be a while before I pick one up, and not just because of budgetary constraints.

For me, a thin plastic device will never have the same feel in my hands as that of a few slain trees and copious amounts of ink.

It’s the same reason I go about revising the way I do. Once the first draft is done, I take advantage of a printer and actually put the words down on paper. Then into a binder or series of folders it goes, to be picked apart with a pen. Words are crossed out, moved, scribbled in the margins. Were I more ambitious/creative person, I might even take scissors to it, revising the work in decoupage form. “Hey, check it out! I turned Chapter Six into this coffee mug!”

Okay, maybe not.

But it’s physical. It’s a real thing. It’s every bit as necessary, to me, as a rejection letter. It’s evidence that I’ve created something. Granted, in first draft and even second draft form, it’s unlikely to be something of stratospheric merit. But it’s still something that sprang out of my imagination, ran right down my arms, flowed into the page and took on a form & function all its own.

My point is that, in order to get the thing organized in a way that it makes a lick of sense to other people, I need to work with it physically. Doing so in a word processor or electronic medium will never quite do it. I might put the revision right back into a word processor, but this middle part of the work, that first transition from raw creation to refined marketable product, happens in the real world, as something tangible, a sacrifice made by the aforementioned pulp and pigments.

Besides, I couldn’t have looked at a scroll bar in an e-reader the same way I did the first five volumes of Scott Pilgrim and wonder where the hell the time went. Both finishing a book and finishing that step of revision are accomplishments, and they feel more like accomplishments worth enjoying if there’s the physical feel of closing the back cover.

Sometimes, you have to stop yourself and realize that something’s not quite right. You’ve got some great elements put together but the end result isn’t quite as good as it could have been. There’s nothing wrong with using chocolate and butter together, and butter compliments corn, but somehow you ended up with a chocolate and corn confection that doesn’t work as an edible dish. It’s impressive in its presentation and the effort you provided, but nobody’s going to eat it.

But the chocolate’s good. Stick with that. Just try doing something else with it.

The metaphor’s a bit of a stretch, I know. But the notion is this. If you’ve written something, and constructive criticism points out a lot of elements that just don’t play to the work’s strengths, strip out those elements and do something else with those strengths. Preserve the core of your story, its key ingredient.

Most stories have a core, a fulcrum upon which the work turns. It could be an uplifting revelation the human condition, a tragic moment of heroic sacrifice in the face of the horrors of war, or a stinging bit of social or political satire. If some of the story doesn’t work to support that core, that does not mean the core is bad. It just means you need to change how people approach it. You have to get and hold the reader’s attention so you can reach that core, allow them to see exactly what you’re trying to say, and get them thinking about it, especially if you can plant the seed of thought that continues to grow long after they finish enjoying your work.

I know I keep bashing on Star Wars, but it’s a perfect example of how not to do this. Lucas established in his original films that the life of Anakin Skywalker had been a tragic, almost operatic rise and fall from grace into the darkness of Darth Vader. When he said he would go back and tell that story, I for one was excited. The depiction of a great villain starting out as a great and noble hero makes for some great storytelling. At least it could have. Instead, Lucas pandered to demographics, focused on spectacle rather than substance, and reduced the supposedly noble Anakin to a whiny, selfish, mass-murdering traitorous asshole.

Don’t do that.

If you need to scrap the bulk of your story and start over, hold onto the good parts. No, not the darlings, those need to get dragged out behind the shed and shot. I’m talking about the core of the story. The reason why you sat down to write it in the first place. The thing that keeps you up at night thinking about it and follows you through your waking hours.

Well, maybe, that’s just how I feel about it, but anyway…

Preserve the key ingredient, throw everything else out, and start over. Mix in some new things with that chocolate.

Like caramel.

Great. Now I’m hungry.