Last night I finished reading The Wilding. It was good, an enjoyable read—and a quick one. I read it in three nights while nursing the baby to sleep. It wasn’t quite as good as I’d wanted it to be, though, for two reasons, both of which seem useful to me as I dig in to my own next book:

The first: You can see the author working. You can see him stretch and sweat and sometimes miss his mark. In an essay published in Poets & Writers, which you can get to if you click on the link for “Revision as Renovation” on this page, he talks about the process of writing The Wilding, and how extreme his editor’s revision notes were. He more or less rewrote it to her specs, rather than his own vision for it, and that shows. You can see in the text (or so it seems, only he knows for sure), where his ideas end and hers begin. It hums and hums and hums along, then goes all clanky and hollow, then hums and hums and hums along again… So…yeah. Editors are good. They can be great. But I’m suspicious of a book rewritten so much to someone else’s idea of it. As a former boss liked to say, “A camel is a racehorse designed by committee.”

The second: He makes the stakes high–extremely high–and puts his characters in real danger, which is great, but…well…I don’t know how to say this without spoiling the ending of what is still a good read. Let’s just say I found he set those high stakes and then backed away from them. I don’t know if it was a question of nerves or marketability. If there was a darker ending that the editor or marketing department steered him away from? It rang false at the end, though. Unsatisfying.

And yet…I had a good time reading it. I wanted to finish, wanted to see what happened. I guess there’s a lesson in that, too.