Stuff it in your desk drawer!

Source: photo taken by the author.

How can you tell if something you've written has real staying power and lasting value? Perhaps you've heard writers talk about the fabled “desk drawer.” If given the luxury of time, writers can set aside their early drafts (by, for example, putting them in a desk drawer) and then pull them out months -- maybe even years -- later to look at them with “fresh eyes” for revision. Basically, the extended time away turns you into a different reader than you were while writing the first draft, and you are sure to identify areas for improvement that you overlooked in the heat of first-draft creation. Of course, a daily newspaper writer on deadline does not enjoy this luxury of time (even less today, in the era of 24-hour internet news). Nor, certainly, does a student scratching out an essay within a time limit for a “writing on demand” standardized test.

This “desk drawer” theory applies to reading as well as writing. Spending “time away” from a book and then re-reading it will tell you whether or not it’s a worthy book. Should you find yourself later in life re-reading a book you either loved or hated in school, you will sometimes discover you now hold the opposite of your former opinion about it. That’s not because the book has changed, but because you have. A substantial chunk of life experience has made you a different person … and a different reader. As the Greek philosopher Heraclitus put it, we never step in the same river twice. The current has irrevocably changed the river just as time has altered us.

Sometimes, however, a book holds up and continues to impress us throughout the stages of our life. These books are the keepers. For example, when I was a teenager, my brother-in-law left an old copy of the science magazine Omni at our family home. Bored one day, I picked it up to read and was drawn into the novella “Sandkings” by George R.R. Martin (probably due to an accompanying illustration). I recall tearing through the pages of this gripping science fiction/horror tale, completely unable to stop reading. Years later, I stumbled across the same story -- now out of print -- in an anthology of award-winning science fiction tales. Re-reading Martin’s story as an adult, I was still captivated. Today, using a battered photocopy, I teach “Sandkings” at the start of every school year as a “can’t miss” story. Even the most reluctant readers will be swept up by its suspense and startling imagery. “Sandkings” is a little known masterpiece of suspense, pacing, structure, foreshadowing, and establishing mood.

As a young man, I read with keen interest the nonfiction book Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer upon its first publication. About ten years later, when I made a mid-career change into teaching, I re-read the book with an eye toward making it a summer-reading assignment, and I thought, “Wow, this is still an awesome book.” Ten years after that, I re-read it yet again as I considered adding it to my regular 11th-grade curriculum, and I thought, “WOW, this is STILL an awesome book!” Across a span of 20 years, from age 30 to 50, Into the Wild has continued to have a profound impact on me. As it does also on the teenagers I teach. Whether they consider Chris McCandless to be a dreamy impractical fool, or a profound transcendental thinker, or something in between, few of my students are apathetic about his portrayal in the book.

So remember, whether you’re writing or reading, if you want to find the really good stuff, give it some time!

© 2014 Bob Dial.  All rights reserved.