There's a complete draft of a novel in a drawer here. Nobody has read it. I've spent years on the world behind it, and rather longer than I'd like deciding when to let someone see the result.
The map exists. So does the history, along with rules that have made writing certain chapters inconvenient. Occasionally changing one would have solved a problem very neatly. I made myself keep it and find another way, because I wanted the world to make sense beyond whatever happened to be useful in that scene.
That part took time for good reasons. Leaving the finished draft unread is harder to explain. While it stays in the drawer, nobody can tell me the chapter I enjoyed writing is dull. I can keep imagining the book it might become without finding out what a reader makes of the one I've actually written.
I'd like her to read it, if she wanted to. There are characters I think I understand who might look quite different to her. She could stop at a sentence I've passed over a hundred times and ask why anyone would behave like that. I'd probably have an answer ready. The useful part would begin once I stopped giving it long enough to hear what she'd noticed.
Writing together appeals to me for that reason. We could know the same characters well and still disagree about them. One of us might understand a motive the other had missed, or care about someone who had only been there to make the plot work. Those conversations could send the story somewhere neither of us would have found alone.
The invented world should give us something to investigate too. I'd like its differences to affect how people live, what they need, and what they take for granted. If we change a rule, we have to follow what happens beyond the scene that made us want it. Some of the pleasure would be discovering that we'd made life awkward for ourselves and having to think it through.
Alongside fiction, there's another kind of book I can imagine writing slowly. We could keep notes about the land, return to the same creek, and notice what changes over the years. After enough seasons, we might have something worth sharing that was beyond us when we arrived. We'd have the early notebooks to check whenever memory began improving the story.
I'd also like to try writing for children. That would mean making a book someone small wanted to hear again, preferably without leaving the adult reading it wishing they'd hidden it after the third night. I expect that would take more care than the length of the manuscript suggests.
None of this requires her to want a writing career. She might enjoy reading and have no desire to spend an afternoon moving a paragraph. I'd still want to know which books she keeps returning to and what she finds in them. If she did want to work on ours, we could decide between us how the writing and editing should go.
We'd need to learn how to talk about a draft without making every criticism personal. Reading separately might help. So might waiting until the next day before I explain why a passage needs to stay. If she tells me she's bored, the first useful question is where it happened. She shouldn't have to produce a legal case before I'm willing to look.
I want the book to reach that stage. A reader might recognize what I was trying to do, or notice something I hadn't intended at all. Some of the response will probably be disappointing. I've left myself protected from all of it long enough. Whether she joins me in this or writing remains my own work, the draft needs to come out of the drawer.
