Create Distance Before Diagnosis

Stephen King advises putting a finished novel draft in a desk drawer for at least six weeks before rereading it. He gives the figure as his own minimum and says the length is up to the writer. His reason is that rereading too soon can’t be trusted.

In the hours after a draft ends, each sentence tends to come back to its writer with its history attached: what was meant, what was cut, what the scene was supposed to feel like. The eventual reader gets none of that. Rereading a fresh draft, the writer may hear intention and text at once, be unable to separate them, and fill the gaps without noticing. The diagnosis made then is confident and vivid and concerns the wrong object, a memory of writing rather than a page.

For the length of one reading the writer needs to be someone who has only the page. Time gets there by displacement, as other work and other concerns push the memory of composing down far enough that the sentences begin to say only what they say. That account is ours, not King’s. Distance makes diagnosis possible and supplies no insight of its own, and writers differ in how long it takes.

Some circumstances don’t allow much. A reporter filing to an edition may have hours, and a writer feeding a weekly or monthly serial may have a printer waiting. Hemingway’s morning rereading (Practice 81) shows the principle at a smaller scale, yesterday’s pages met after a night away from them. The interval can be a night, a walk or a change of room. Where even that is out of reach, the manuscript’s appearance can change instead: print it, set it in another typeface, read it aloud (Practice 57). None of these equals time, but each moves the text out of its familiar frame, and each is free.

Practice. On the day a draft ends, set a reopening date proportionate to the Work and to the life you actually have: overnight for a short piece, a week or two for an essay or story, longer for a book, with King’s six weeks as one writer’s stated minimum for a novel. Before closing the file, write half a page predicting what a stranger will find strong and what weak. Spend the interval on something else. On the day, read the whole text once with a pen used only to mark where your attention drops, and then lay the marks beside the prediction. Where they disagree is the first real information the draft has given you.