In a comment to last week’s post about the risk of First Drafts as Final Drafts, my writing colleague Pantsless Justin asked if I think a story could be critiqued and/or revised too much. Absolutely. Patrick Nielsen Hayden, editor at Tor and instructor at a workshop I attended, calls this “crit burn” (like freezer burn) and says he can see it in manuscripts.

I don’t know exactly what tips him off, but I have seen heavily critted manuscripts that read somewhat scattered, as though they’re trying to do too many different tiny things. With critiques of my own writing, I can easily dismiss suggestions that are completely different from what I’m trying to achieve in that piece. And there are always suggestions that are brilliant–Charles Coleman Finlay says that if a crit suggestion is so cool that you wish you’d thought of it yourself, put it in.

Where I sometimes have trouble is the area in between. I can’t speak for anyone else, so for this discussion I’ll have to use myself as the example. I often wonder if suggestions that are slightly beyond my original focus might not be good things to change. I also often find myself subconsciously giving more weight to comments from people whose own writing I respect.

Part of this self-examination does come from the fact that I’ve only sold two stories. I have themes and types of stories that I like to write, and I have my own personal style, but I’ve only caught a couple editors’ attention. As with any new writer, there’s no way to know if I just haven’t hooked others’ interest or if there is a fundamental flaw in my fiction. So I always wonder if interesting comments are things worth pursuing so I can hook more editors.

Perhaps this is one of the points that the proponents of the First Draft is Final theory are trying to combat. The first draft may be your most original and pure, and changing it based on the comments of others might dilute that originality. But other readers can also see a draft from a far more objective vantage. Their comments can reveal ambiguity and erroneous interpretations. The benefits of finding those outweigh any risk of losing originality. All workshopping writers must eventually develop a balanced approach to heeding critique comments, especially if they want to become objective enough to someday be able to critique their own work.

There is a theory that your first draft should be your final draft. Some professional writers teach this, and they say you should only make changes if an editor asks for them. (I assume they mean the first full complete draft, ignoring any abortive starts or early versions that had the wrong ending.)

This could not be further from the way I work. Even after 1-2 weeks of outlining a story–worldbuilding, designing the plot, sketching the characters–I still go through one major draft before I send the story for critiques, another major draft on rewrite, then more critiques if the story still needs it and a third major draft. Each of these drafts includes 3-6 “subdrafts” that still involve major changes, partly because it takes me several iterations to get the language right for how I want to express something. I’ve also had several astute editors suggest changes to a few of my stories even after that, changes that were very good ideas, and I then went through a fourth major draft to impliment them. So my first draft is nowhere near final.

I know many other writers who don’t outline, and for them the first draft is their “feeling-out” process where they figure out the same sorts of things that I do in my outlining–the nature of the world, the progression of the plot, and the identities of the characters. The first draft is not final for them either.

I recognize that for many pros, the first draft may be the final draft. They know what they’re doing, and they’ve been doing it a long time. I don’t like my multi-draft process–I wish I could do it more efficiently–but it’s the only way I can get things to work for me. I hope someday I will be able to streamline it.

But as a college teacher, I’m dubious of telling aspiring writers that their first draft should be their final one. They don’t yet know what they’re doing, and encouraging them to submit their first drafts to markets seems almost irresponsible. They–perhaps “we,” because I count myself as still aspiring–must learn how to shape our natural output into a readable story for a genre audience. Rewriting is a vital step in this. Sending out drafts prematurely only leads to form rejections, which don’t teach anything.

So, First Draft is Final Draft: a Myth for most, Reality for a lucky, skilled few, a hope and eventual goal for me, but a risky message for aspiring novices.

I finished The Lies of Locke Lamora last week, but an element in the middle bothered me. Act I of the book (it closely followed a three-act structure) was mostly setup, but Act II introduced a supremely powerful new villain. This villain somehow knew every one of the protagonist’s secrets. He effortlessly out-maneuvered the most clever secondary characters, then the protagonist. The villain’s henchman wielded dominating power that left the protagonist utterly helpless.

Despite this almost comical power imbalance, the seemingly invincible antagonist made Act II a gripping read by wrecking the protagonist’s life. The tension level was off the charts. I kept wondering “how’s the protagonist ever going to defeat this guy.” Then in the climax of Act III, when the stakes were the highest, the protagonist used a simple loophole, a thing that he’d already considered in Act II, to easily neutralize the antagonist’s supreme power and defeat him in less than a page.

So I got to thinking about this paradox. A powerful antagonist will cause lots of conflict, which is good. But the more powerful he is, the harder it will be for the protagonist to defeat him. When the protagonist eventually does triumph, that victory needs to be extremely clever or brave or strong to make it feel justified.

In Locke Lamora, the protagonist’s eventual victory was way too easy, especially given the antagonist’s seemingly limitless power. But by that point in the novel, the gripping read of the middle (largely due to the conflict caused by that antagonist’s power) had already hooked my attention. I still found the climax weak, and partly because of that I’m not planning to read the sequel. But it seems that the dominantly powerful antagonist was a compelling element even though his defeat was unjustified.

I’m over halfway through The Lies of Locke Lamora, by Scott Lynch. I’m always curious in F debut novels to see what element might have caught the notice of the publisher. So far, the world of Lies is incredibly vivid; the story is a ripping yarn in the best classic F thief-tale style. But the shallow POV and the narrative structure are driving me nuts.

The alternating chapters of boyhood-Locke’s coming of age and grownup-Locke’s scheming leave me feeling jerked around. The boyhood stuff is solid, and the chapters are cleverly ordered so the timelines compliment each other. But every time I finish one of the current chapters, I hate to have the plot interrupted by another boyhood interlude.

The shallow omni POV also leaves me feeling distant from the characters. I don’t mind a narrative zoom-in or zoom-out at the start or end of a scene, telling me something outside the character’s view (like an unseen pursuer tailing our heroes). The POV at least head-hops smoothly from one character into another in the same scene, rather than abruptly. But I’m constantly distracted by the huge quantities of arbitrarily withheld information — things that Locke and the other POV characters obviously know but the author is artificially hiding from the reader to maintain suspense.

This all combines to make the narrative feel extremely distant to me. The POV does describe the characters’ simple emotions and physical reactions, but except for that, it feels almost cinematic.

Maybe it’s the back-cover comparison to Ocean’s Eleven that sparked this thought, but I think what Lynch has done is write a prose movie. His shallow POV communicates the characters’ basic inner thoughts, the same things shown in an actor’s gestures and expressions. Information that the protagonists know is withheld, just like in a movie, so the reader is surprised at the later revelations.

As a proponant of the limited third-person POV, I’m not sure how I feel about this. Limited-third evolved as a response to the rise of movies and TV–a way to get inside a character’s head that those visual formats could not achieve. Lynch isn’t so much regressing to the authorial omni POV of Tolkien and Lewis, but presenting his story in a movie-like format that is physically vivid yet shallow in characterization.

But if characters are defined foremost by their actions, is this shallow “movie” third-person all a ripping yarn type of story needs? In this age of F video games and F blockbuster movies, is a shallow “movie” POV good enough to reach most readers?