Not an “academic exercise” at all, Atthys, but a crucial test of your ability to take your agent’s criticism and suggestions to heart and fashion a new, vital work from the ruins of the old.

Of course it hurts. Of course this process is deeply painful, bewildering, frustrating. Ego-diminishing, exasperating, exhausting. You were prepared to make minor changes and tweaks to your work and now someone’s come along and smashed the whole damn thing to bits, pointed at a gleaming fragment or two lying on the ground and said, “There! That’s your story. Start with your best, most riveting bit of narrative and proceed from that point.”

You must feel like Stephen King, forced to cut hundreds of pages of narrative from The Stand simply because his publisher’s presses couldn’t print a larger, mass-market book. Or Mark Twain when he was originally penning the too-hot-to-handle satirical essays that became the posthumously-published Letters From The Earth. (“What publisher is gonna touch these? Who am I writing for? Why am I doing this?”) Or Harlan Ellison, when Hollywood Big Shot #438 made stupid, enraging remark #22,654 to our long-suffering hero. Or any Renaissance free-spirit who chafed against the strictures and control of the medieval Catholic Church when creating their masterpieces. (“Nude figures on the Sistine chapel, Michael? Really? Really?! Well . . . never mind; we’ll paint clothes over them later.”)  Or . . . but you get the point.

You must fashion a new, vital work from the ruins of the old.

Of course, if you’re absolutely certain your agent is dead wrong you could just toss the work aside, proceed with your next novel and let posterity re-discover this lost writing and applaud your genius in the distant future. (Hey, it worked for Twain! And many another good writer. Could work for you. Or rather, your corpse.)

Or you could fashion a new, vital work from the ruins of the old. Not a better novel, necessarily (you’re too close to the work now to feel that it could ever be that) but a different one, a playful variation on a theme.

This is no mere “academic exercise.” On the contrary, it will take every bit of artistic talent, grit, dogged determination and iron self-discipline you’ve got to tear this thing apart and put it back together again.

I think you’ll do it. If nothing else to prove to yourself—and your agent—that your original version was better: more interesting, faster-paced, engaging—superior in every way to this new, vital work erected upon the ruins of the old.

Of course, your artistic reputation is at stake. Well, the beginning of one, eh? So you won’t be too cavalier about doing this re-write; you can’t afford to. Too much is on the line.

And since you’re already going to pay in blood, sweat and tears you may as well have some fun while you’re doing it. I’ll bet you won’t be able to resist sharpening a bit of description over here . . . Working in a jot more sensory detail over there . . . Tweaking, tuning, testing. Refining, purifying, polishing.

After all this isn’t hackwork you’re engaged in. And you do have a roadmap to work with: a completed novel and your agent’s suggestions. That’s a lot more than you started with.

I’ll bet you won’t turn out a leaden, tone-deaf piece of crap. A lifeless, dispirited assemblage of meandering narrative and rambling dialogue, nonsensical details and herky-jerky story telling. Or, to speak directly to your worries: You won't inject needless flashbacks, interminable info-dumps and other artificialities into your novel. Professional pride forbids it.

No, I’ll bet you fashion—aw, you saw this coming!—a new, vital work from the ruins of the old.         

And that's exactly why I phrased it to you the way I did, Atthys. If I were in your shoes (except I'm not, and never will be, since I don't write novels) I suspect I'd feel the same way. In order to summon enough energy and enthusiasm to proceed I'd have to treat the re-writing of the novel as a kind of stylistic exercise: that is, follow the advice given me and do the best I could to create—not a better, but a different—kind of book.

I won’t patronize you. (Patronization = a subtle, honeyed form of belittlement. )

So when you tell me you received this news/advice with mixed feelings of dismay, consternation and (subtext) terror, I empathize.

But I also think to myself: his agent’s probably right. (This will be your first published book, after all.) But Atthys is too close to his work to see it. He’s got to psyche himself up for a monumental undertaking, one that will call upon every ounce of grit, talent and determination he’s got in order for him to see it through. So what do I tell him? What can I say that will help?

Because here’s the thing: I don’t know that your agent is right and you are wrong regarding the book; I merely assume it due to your inexperience. Your instincts and aesthetic judgment may very well be spot-on regarding this novel, but then where does that leave you?

Uh-huh. With an unpublished novel sitting in a desk drawer.

So what’s to do? It’s clear that your wife’s well-meaning remark—“treat it like an academic exercise”—didn’t work for you. It didn’t work for you because, I suspect, you’re one of the rare breed that thinks of his writing as a kind of literature, not mere hackwork. So treating the rewrite as some kind of “academic exercise” leaves you cold, unmotivated, slightly depressed.

That’s not gonna get you anywhere.

I say I have I have no direct experience of this kind of thing but that is a lie.

In fact, I went through a similar experience—not in degree, but of kind—to what you’re facing now.

As quickly as I can re-tell it: some years ago I went and read the novelette “The Final Flight of Major Havoc” at a juried critique of industry professionals in a public forum (a bar in Chicago). The writing was universally reviled, mocked and condemned.

I went home stunned and bleeding, feeling like a wild-eyed calf that barely escaped the butcher’s skull-crushing sledgehammer—barely alive, struggling with two crippled forelegs, a broken back and a concussed, ringing head.

I sat down in front of the computer, fired up my story. Looked at their collective critiques, back to my story. Raging and cursing I ripped the damn thing apart and re-wrote it with a completely different tone, pacing and plot. I killed off almost every thematic element that appealed to me and ended with a closing line that expressed my utter horror and despair. (Oh, I also eliminated about 70% of the words.)

Then I fired the story off to the sole editor on that particular panel (that very night) and sat back in my chair with a queasy, heartsick “that’ll show ’em!” feeling in my gut.

My aim was to demonstrate to the editor how ridiculous the story was now; how absurd and wrong-headed and tone-deaf were the criticisms that had turned my miniature masterpiece into a bit of ephemeral puffery.

You guessed it: the re-written story came back accepted for publication. With a feeling of utter unreality and growing incredulity I read the editor’s kind, encouraging words and insightful analysis of why this new story was superior to the old.

Flash forward now to the present (some ten years later): I still have both stories. I just re-read the original version the other night. Which one is better? Neither. They are different, as opposite and contrasting as night and day.

But only one version got me published, paid, mentored.

So what’s the moral here? Sell out to “the Man”; betray your own instincts; willfully destroy your own best work in some misguided attempt to appeal to a fickle, increasingly doltish and semi-mythical “mass market” reading audience?

I don’t think so.

I think you have to take a deep breath and plunge into the rewriting with a kind of half-crazed, despairing energy. In so doing you will find news ways of making old material work.

In other words: I think you have to fashion a new, vital work from the ruins of the old.

Good luck!

Atthys, I just did what your agent asked you to do. In the hope that knowing how I did it might help you, here goes:

Cut out the beginning, all the gestation right up to where the story begins to breath. (Pick a spot.)
Keep that material! Use it like notes and weave the necessary bits back into the story where the story must have them. Archive the leftover material for another day.

It's hard but it can be satisfying to see the difference, before and after. Your story may well be stronger for losing some weight.

You Wrote: "I think Tom Waits once said that it's easy to fall in love with all the varying shades of brown in your work, but to anyone else it just looks like mud."

LMAO!  I've been a mud lover. Still am, no doubt.

This is the sad truth when art mixes with industry.
It's all about consumption.
I've thought about that: what if a publishing house likes 50% of my novel, but they want a different beginning, or worse, a different ending?
What would I do?

 I know what I would do.

 I would comply.

 I would destroy my baby for the sake of publishing it.
Or at least I would trick them into believing that.
For it wouldn't be my baby what they're forcing me to cripple with what they think are stylistic amputations and prosthetics. I’m not that kind of creator.

 It would be its clone!

 The original would be safe on my hard drive, encrypted under a couple of 516-bit passwords and two or three magic spells.

 I would put its clone under so many transformations that in the end it would look as if it was written by them, not me. And then I would brand my name on its forehead and send it out to prostitute itself among the other attractive, fast-paced, cool, easy-to-read, youth oriented abominations, in the hopes that it would bring me money and, specially, fame so, one day, my real creation, and the other new creations that may be in hiding under those bits and spells, may see the light of day without having to expose them, defenseless, before the prying pimping eyes of the industry.

 Just make sure that by then you don’t turn into one of “them”.

 Cheers  - and congrats on this opportunity!