Second Time Around

Not so very long ago, an interviewer asked me what I would change if I could go back and do my first book all over again. I laughed, not because it was a silly question, but because, bizarrely, I found myself in the position of doing just that. My publisher was reissuing my first book in mass market paperback and they had just offered me the opportunity to make any changes I felt necessary.


How often does one get to go back and do it all over?

I began writing The Secret History of the Pink Carnation in 2001 as a wee little twenty-four year old grad student (naturally, I thought I was old and wise and sophisticated), finished it in 2003, and saw its release as a hardcover in 2005 as an elderly and jaded law school 2L. It’s 2010 now. There’s been a lot of water under the bridge.

I firmly believe that any work is the product of its circumstances, rooted in a specific place and time. I couldn’t write The Secret History of the Pink Carnation today, any more than the girl I was then could have written the much more cynical Betrayal of the Blood Lily. Read any author’s work and you’ll see marked divergences as she changes and as society changes around her. Are there things I would have done differently about Pink if I were to write it now? Probably. Would I go back in my magical Reissue Time Capsule and change them now? Absolutely not.

Except for one small thing.

Yes, I admit it. Despite all my philosophical convictions, I did go back and change one line. It wasn’t a particularly big or important line—it was what I think of as a throwaway line—but it had been a thorn in my flesh since the book’s publication in 2005. Contemplating the prospect of an evening at Almack’s Assembley Rooms, my hero muses, “The prospect was enough to send anyone into a precipitate decline that would make the consumptive Keats and drugged Coleridge look like strapping specimens of British manhood.”

The line was intended as a deliberate nod to the Blackadder III silly poets episode, Ink and Incapability. (Hello, my name is Lauren, and I’m a Blackadder addict). Sure, I knew that in spring of 1803, Keats was only seven years old, but, hey, people knew this was all tongue in cheek, right? It was a nudge nudge wink wink between me and the reader. Besides, who would care?

You can see the train wreck coming, right? My little throwaway line blew up into a huge internet firestorm as the electronic lines started clacking. Before I knew it, people—who hadn’t read the book—were claiming that my hero had engaged in a whole discussion about Keats, in which, and I quote, he had called Keats a “pantywaist” for refusing to engage in the war effort against Bonaparte. ?!?! (My hero, Lord Richard, would like me to point out that he would never have used the word “pantywaist”. He is deeply offended by the implication and would demand satisfaction if he weren’t currently busy being reissued.)

That experience taught me a cardinal rule of historical fiction writing: no matter how clever you think you’re being, never throw the reader out of the story. It didn’t matter that I’d done it deliberately or that I knew exactly how old Keats was in 1803; the minute I lost the reader’s trust, the game was over. It wasn’t a fun lesson, but it was a valuable one.

And, in the end, I cut the line.

What about you? If you had the chance to go back, what would you change?