Inexhaustibility Required: Either I'm losing my mind or it's all just normal and never mind

From Gillian Flynn to Christie and Highsmith, proof that the writing of mysteries is a laborious task

Do most mysteries and suspense novels require more revision than, say, literary novels? Are they, in some ways, actually harder to write?

Possibility one: it’s just me, and other suspense novelists get things right the first time.

Refutation one, the case of Lisa Jewell: After Then She Was Gone was submitted, Jewell’s editor spent several days brainstorming with a second editor and they came up with a completely different way to end the book—a “radical suggestion”—which Jewell accepted and implemented.

Refutation two, the case of Gillian Flynn, in her own words: “In Sharp Objects the murderer wasn’t even in the first draft of the book. I had a completely different killer and didn’t like it. So I went back and realized I kind of liked this character I had been playing around with, and all of the sudden I had the murderer.”

In case you read that quickly: The murderer wasn’t even in the first draft of the book!

These aren’t the only examples I found while googling over the last few weeks, trying to assuage my endless-revision anxieties. In many cases, the writer herself or the writer in conjunction with an editor radically reshaped the plot and sometimes cast of a “nearly finished” book, transforming things as essential as whodunnit, howdunnit, and whether we are going to cry or cheer at the end.

Infinite doors, infinite drafts. Do readers have any idea? (GIF from Giphy.com.)

So why don’t crime writers talk more about this?

My hunch is that most people who have published mainly within one genre—one with some fairly fixed ideas about what should happen (a crime, usually a solution to the crime, a harrowing journey for the crime solver, multiple surprises and reversals)—can’t compare their experiences with those of writers from other less convention-bound genres. But some of us are genre hoppers. We’ve seen how different reader and publisher expectations can be.

When I wrote my debut (historical/literary) novel, The Spanish Bow, it sold quickly to a large publisher as their lead title. Then an even bigger surprise: the editor spent lots of time talking with me about character nuances, but she didn’t request substantial revisions.

At the time I would have told you differently, because I didn’t understand the difference between line editing (tweaks on the small scale) versus massive developmental editing (which can impose tectonic shifts to plot and character). I thought I was revising when, in fact, I was really just polishing.

Nothing about that book’s structure and plot changed from the first draft I sent my agent, before she was even signed on as my agent, through publication. I was an apprentice writer, and I don’t think my abilities explain the light revisions.

My first novel was treated as an essentially finished story and I was treated as someone worthy of respect—maybe too much respect, come to think of it. No one suggested I should plot differently or even trim digressive episodes, of which there were many. I was only asked to clarify occasional intentions at the paragraph level and learn how to use an em dash properly. (Baby Writer Me didn’t know that’s what that long dash was called.)

It was a one-off experience.

Fast-forward to my last two novels. In the case of The Deepest Lake, my first published suspense novel (after five non-suspense novels), I ended up writing two drafts with completely different third acts.

In the case of my current manuscript, which I’ll call WBL, I have made even more substantial changes to character and plot.

If I can just punch my hand through this plasma layer, I will discover my finished manuscript hiding somewhere in the darkness beyond

I expected to take the holidays off this year. Instead, I spent nearly every day revising—again—for a January developmental edit deadline. At times, I felt excited and optimistic. At other times the following thoughts tormented me:

• Is it just that I’m getting older and everything takes me longer?

• Were previous edits this demanding or do I have authorial amnesia?

• Where the f-ing eff eff did all these typos come from? I thought I corrected those already!

• Is technology making us all worse self-editors? (In the old days, authors had to retype their drafts from scratch—or, um, they had their wives do it.)

• How many more ways am I going to have to change the details of this silly murder?

• If I read this full manuscript one more time, will my head actually explode?

And so, I went in search of answers, including that Gillian Flynn quote at the top of this post.

More from Flynn:

“I feel like I write about three books for every one that gets published because I kind of go all over the place. It’s almost like a ‘Choose-Your-Own-Adventure’ where I write ‘what-would-happen-if-this-happened.’ And then I write about fifty pages of that and say, ‘That’s not working at all,’ so I’ll chuck that and start all over again.”

Three books for every one.

Now, not every famous crime author reports extensive redrafting. Consider Agatha Christie. She wrote fast and usually didn’t look back. As her grandson recalled, “She wrote in a very natural way and she wrote very quickly. I think a book used to take her, in the 1950s, just a couple of months to write and then a month to revise before it was sent off to the publishers.”

Her speed is sometimes attributed to the time she spent thinking and taking notes before she started writing.

And then again, not all of her books are equally esteemed. Whereas Gillian Flynn was willing to write the equivalent of three full manuscripts in order to have one that really worked, Agatha just kept publishing a book a year, one after another—some gems, some stinkers.

But before we agree that slowly polished gems are better, think of all the classics we might not have if Agatha had written at a slower pace. Two of her most popular and many-times-adapted books, Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile, were her 16th and 25^th.

(My personal favorite of her mysteries, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, was #6; many authors today don’t publish even six novels in a career.)

At first, Agatha seems to disprove my theory that mysteries are harder to write and revise. After all, she only took a few months to write them.

However, Agatha didn’t write only mysteries. Absent in the Spring, penned under the name Mary Westmacott, was a subtle, melancholic literary novel with a conspicuous absence of dead bodies.

And how long did it take Agatha to write that literary novel? Under one week. (Again, she spent a very long time thinking about it first, prior to writing her lightning-quick draft over a brief holiday.)

But it never helps to compare oneself to the insanely productive Agatha Christie.

Instead, it might help to take sustenance from the slightly-more-average Patricia Highsmith¹. The Talented Mister Ripley author admitted to her own vexing multiple drafts and outright failures, adding, “A writer should not think he is bad or finished [if a book fails to get to market] … Every failure teaches something.”

And furthermore:

“You should have the feeling, as every experienced writer has, that there are more ideas where that one came from, more strength where the first strength came from, and that you are inexhaustible as long as you are alive.”

With that quote—one of my all-time favorites— I wish you an Inexhaustible 2025, Friends!

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COMMENTS: Please tell me if you are currently in revision hell (or heaven). Do you think the writing of mysteries/suspense/crime fiction requires more drafts? How do you deal with the feeling that you will never be finished?

1. Average, that is, except for Patricia’s Highsmith near-constant state of inebriation and her tenderness toward pet snails that she smuggled over national borders, as well as her naughty romantic entanglements and manipulations.