Letting the Bread Rest - Post Draft Thoughts

At one point, I was binging The Great British Bake Off, and

it got in my head that I could make bread from scratch. It didn’t seem that difficult when you aren’t racing a time clock or having judgmental experts leaning over your shoulder. I was right, but I also learned there was a repeat step in the process I never would have expected. That same step I am realizing is a pattern like a snowflake that you managed to get under a microscope to see its fractals. For a moment, those crystalline structures look like they could span the world, but then you realize you would never know they were there because they were so small. Yet without those molecules holding hands across fractions of millimeters, you could never make a snowball or a snowman. This unexpected step in making bread makes the difference between an airy loaf and a rock. It’s not baking soda or a particular amount of time in the oven. It’s rest.

After the dough is kneaded and formed, it needs “time to

rest.” If it isn’t given time to rest, there is a complete list of science that doesn’t occur, and it ruins the bread. This is utterly fascinating to me. If you do every other part of the recipe perfectly, but leave out the rest periods, your bread won’t bread, it can barely loaf around! Horrible pun aside, I can hear you trying to spin together where I am going with this. This is an author’s blog. This must be some kind of metaphor? It is, and it isn’t. I learned this lesson about bread in 2021, but like most lessons, you relearn and reapply throughout your life. I haven’t made homemade bread since 2021, but I was reminded of this lesson when I decided I was going to talk to you about post-dirty drafts.

Quick refresher for newbies to the blog. A dirty draft is just

a way of saying a rough draft, first draft, or zero draft. I picked it up after reading Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. It stuck with me because it frames that first draft in a way that allows me to view it with grace. It is okay if the draft is messy; it’s the dirty draft. I just finished a dirty draft this last November for NaNoWriMo, and now in December, I am charting a new writing course. Why? Because the draft needs time to rest, too. In general, most writers need to let a draft rest before editing because the story is still too fresh. You can read into the text details you never put down on paper and hold your darlings a little too close because the draft is so young.

I am letting Project OWM rest for that reason, and I didn’t

feel good when it was done. I love the characters, and the story has good bones, but I came out the other end of it wondering if this was a story I truly needed to tell. It is part of a series I was planning and gives me a lot of context for why events need to happen the way they do later in the series, but I don’t know if this particular story needs to leave my hands to make the whole series stronger. I have author friends who see how much I write and wonder how I can make it happen, and they are impressed with what I manage to accomplish. Don’t tell them how many novels I stuck in drawers because I didn’t think they needed to go beyond me. You see, half the fun in writing is learning. With each story and draft, I am slowly improving. I am gaining new skills, refining my voice, and building my style. If I were to edit OWM now, I would relegate it to my story binder and chalk it up to a learning experience. I need to give it space to see if that is true, or see if it should hold a place in the planned series.

My disposition is to be an over-writer, not in a word count

per story context, but in a way that I write a lot that doesn’t need to be part of the story. Sometimes it is to flesh out a character or world-building, and sometimes it becomes its own story. In the same series, I had a character I felt was too flat, so I started writing his backstory to understand him better. That backstory is now 54,000 words. Could I turn that back story into its own novel? Sure. Would it be a book I could stand behind? No. At least not right now. If I tried using that backstory as its own novel, I would be trying to publish it just to publish it, rather than because I think it benefits the series. Some people would scoff at the exercise, calling it a waste of time. However, it’s not. It is practice. It is refinement, it is building a foundation that will lend strength to the fuller story.

Experience, time, and distance are all good teachers.

During December, I will play around in my sandbox of ideas to see what sprouts life—more on that in another post. However, I will let OWM rest. It will stay safe from my overcritical knife and my undercritical coddling. It will hold a place in my heart and mind, just behind consciousness, allowing it space to grow again. I have the luxury of no overcritical judges looming over my shoulder. In a month, I will see what this loaf of story leavens into.