Editing onscreen vs offscreen

Why does what you’ve written take on a different character when you print it out? Yesterday I printed out what I’d written of The Black and the White so far (about 18 000 words) as I wanted to get back into the book after an enforced 10 day layoff caused by the play, my Mum’s 70th birthday and attendant visits, then sorting out the Ultimate Frisbee Freak for university and taking him up on Sunday.

So, I printed out the words I’d written and proceeded to read them.

Now, you need to bear in mind that, of the (at least) two kinds of writer I am not of the ‘get it down fast and dirty but get it down’ variety. I find it impossible to move on to the next chapter until I’m pretty satisfied with the one I’ve just written. In theory this should keep later editing to a minimum. It doesn’t. I don’t know whether I’m a) a perfectionist b) inefficient c) indecisive or d) all three but, anyway, these chapters that I’d printed out had already been scrutinised, read aloud, cut, augmented and polished. Each had at least four versions of itself saved in a folder marked ‘chapter x’.

And still there was work to do.

Things which I would have expected to notice first time round – infelicities of style, repetitions, saying things twice, confusing paragraphs where I knew what I meant but the poor reader would have to be telepathic to grasp – suddenly leaped out at me.
Was it the ten days’ distance from the words?
Or just that it was printed and not in ‘first draft’ mode on the screen?
Or perhaps I’m being unduly self-critical and not allowing myself the luxury of writing myself in to the book in peace without expecting it to be instantly satsifactory.

I know that lots of longhand first drafters say that when they type up what they’ve written and see the words appearing as print onscreen, they immediately see what needs to be changed, rewritten etc. The change from scrawl to ‘clean text’ seems to be part of the editing process.

So, should I routinely print out my chapters once I’m happy with them on screen?

What does everybody else to in this context?

Finished...

OK, so, well, it's done... the editing of the work in progress is finished. It is a work in progress no longer.

I am a little on the exhausted side but, on the whole, cautiously pleased with how the thing's turned out. A finished novel is never quite the towering work of genius (ahem) that you envisaged at the outset but, from my far from objective position with my nose permanently grazed from the grindstone, it looks OK.

As I said to my editor, Will, ideally instead of sending it off to him (which I now have) I would leave the book somewhere for three months to forget about it, then read it with fresh eyes, cry 'Aaargh' or something articulate like that and set about re-writing the whole thing.
Or maybe I'd say 'Hmmm, not so bad after all..'
Who can tell?

Anyway, the point is, it's done, it's sent and there's nothing more I can do about it for at least a fortnight because I'm going away.
I shall be out of email and blog contact because I'm going where there's no internet (my parents house) or internet cafe (the town nearest to my parents farm) so I shall be incommunicado.

It'll be good for me.

Let me just say it again - the book's finished!
Hooray...
For those who haven't picked it up from various ramblings here over the last few months, it's called Not One of Us. At least for the moment.
I really should update the Work in Progress page on the website... remind me when I get back... got to go and pack.

Have a fab Easter everybody!

Waverton Good Read Award Shortlist

Well, Testament didn’t make it to the short list of the Waverton Good Read Award but the whole experience was great fun – especially being invited up to Waverton to talk about the book. What the people of Waverton are doing with their Award is so different to any other literary prize in Britain that I feel it’s very much to be encouraged and supported. Ordinary people who don’t depend on the literary scene for their living are putting in a lot of time and effort reading, commenting on and voting for Good Reads. Fantastic. I hope Borders’ sponsorship places the Award a little more firmly on the literary map and that we start seeing books with ‘Shortlisted for the Waverton Good Read Award’ and ‘Winner of the Waverton Good Read Award’ stickers on booksellers’ shelves. .

The shortlisted novels are:

A girl made of dust - Nathalie Abi-Ezi
The Outsider- Sadie Jones
Spider – Michael Morley
Child 44 – Tom Rob Smith

Four very different books – I’ll be fascinated to see which one wins.

Meanwhile, the editing is bringing Not One of Us into much sharper focus for me and the whole thing is beginning to feel like a finished novel instead of a work in progress.
The structural edit’s done, now I need to go over it one more time tightening the language, sharpening the focus yet again, pruning where I’ve not yet been ruthless enough.
This time next week I might actually be getting to the stage where I’m ready to let another human being read it.

Trampled by a herd of toddlers...

So, with the first draft of the Work In Progress finished around teatime on Sunday 22nd (cue champagne) on Monday 23rd I started editing my friend’s non-fiction book – all 51, 029 words of it.

It took me 2 eight-hour days to do the spelling, punctuation and grammar sweep (and to get a feel for how it read as a whole book after reading chapters as they were produced) and another 11-hour day to do the structural and content editing.
On Thursday I’d arranged to travel to Buckinghamshire to catch up with an old schoolfriend and on Friday I was being gainfully employed.
I had gone 12 days without a break. (Seeing the friend was lovely but, for an introvert, not a break.) By Saturday I could barely string a sentence together and that’s when my non-fiction writing friend came round to work through my suggestions in front of his laptop, MS’s Track Changes feature to the fore.
On Sunday, I allowed myself to slump and cursed the fact that the Other Half and I have given up alcohol for lent. (Actually, by Friday, we were saying things like ‘maybe we could give up except for Friday evenings…’)

So, today I am sorting emails, writing this and catching up with the housework which has been horribly neglected for the last fortnight. Currently, our house looks like a badly-run ironing agency in a parallel universe where the vaccuum cleaner has yet to be invented.

Editing will have to wait until tomorrow.

As far as half term and the finishing – in draft – of the WIP (working title, Not One of Us) goes, I can give you a feel for how much I ignored my family (the boys were away for the latter half of the week) if I tell you that, in an average writing week - four days of actual writing - I produce between 5000 and 7 000 words whereas, during the week before last, I wrote over 23,000 words in 7 days.

I’m told that 25% of the calories you take in are used by your brain. Well I think my brain was taking more than its fair share during the last couple of weeks because my body feels as drained as my mind. I feel positively post-viral.

But still… it’s done. There is a book. And, given that I’ve been trying to get this particular book into some kind of shape since before MNW offered to publish Testament, it’s taken a while. I spent 18 months on an earlier version which I just left on one side when it was 80% finished and 120 000 words long. The current version, started last April, has incorporated the historical elements I had already written - something like 40 000 words - but, given that Not One of Us currently stands at 201,331 words I have been quite busy since the end of April 2008. I just wish I’d worked out who was supposed to be telling the story – and therefore what shape the story was going to take – a little earlier.

My younger son, known to long-time readers of this blog as The Bassist, asked whether the final chapters, having been written so quickly, were going to be easier to edit or more difficult. ‘Cos maybe, as he put it, I was really in the zone when I wrote them.
Good question.
I feel at a loss to know how long the edit is going to take. I’ve done quite a lot of structural work already – in July I looked at the previous three months’ work and realised that one of my characters wasn’t coming through strongly enough so went back and restructured. I’ve also done other tweakings on the way. So I’m hoping that the basic shape of the thing is right.

But whether my characters leap off the page as the people they are in my mind; whether the themes that the book is structured around are too opaque, or – possibly – too laboured; whether the ‘flow’ of what is a slightly unusually multi-viewpoint book works… I won’t know any of these things until I start reading it.

What I would do – ideally - is read the whole thing through in one go. But, given my slow reading speed this would take almost 12 hours, so that’s not going to be possible. Not with a family to live around.
Also, just reading wouldn’t be possible. Not realistically. I’ll need to make notes about what needs to be changed and, possibly, how. That will slow me down. So it’s going to take, if I’m sensible, between two and three average days' work to get the thing read from cover to cover and begin to think about where I’m going with it. So I should start tomorrow and hope I get it all done by close of play on Wednesday as I’m gainfully employed again on Thursday.

But, should I begin with a read-through, or should I edit the last part of what I wrote in that hectic week, which amounts to about 15 000 words? If I don’t, that’s going to have had considerably less editing than everything else as every other section of the book has been read and tweaked, word by word, at least three times.

And, all the while, I still feel as if I’ve been trampled by a herd of toddlers after babysitting them for 24 straight hours.

Ah well, today’s been a nice day off…

I have a cunning plan...

OK, as I seem physically unable to bring the writing of the work in progress to an end, I have done something which is going to make me finish it this week. It was supposed to be finished last week – in my mind at least. And we’re talking first draft, here, not the totally finished, hand-it-to-editor item. Sigh…

So, what have I done?

I have agreed to edit a friend’s non-fiction book.

In fact, since he is in a hurry, I have not only agreed to edit it in a kind of 'oh yeah, when I've got a minute' way, I have agreed ona timetable for the week following half term:
Sunday - he will email the final article to me.
By Wednesday evening I will email his 50 000 word typescript back to him, liberally laced with the speech bubbles of MS Word’s ‘track changes’ feature.
He will then pore over my suggestions and all the punctuation I have provided and we will email back and forth (apart from when I’m at work on Thursday) until Friday evening.
He will then come over on Saturday and we will work on the whole thing most of the day.

In other words I WILL HAVE A WEEK WHERE I WILL BE MORALLY UNABLE TO WORK ON THE WIP. I therefore must finish this week.

And, then, following this frenzy of punctuation and suggestion, I will be mentally cleansed and prepared for the hard-core editing of my own work necessary if I'm going to get the book to Will (my editor) before Easter.

So, it’s simple, if you want to force yourself to finish your book, agree to interfere with somebody else’s.

First Draft Struggles

Some writers loathe it, others view it as a necessary evil but would prefer somebody else to do it, others – like me – positively look forward to it. Editing.

Actually, perhaps editing is the wrong word. I do editing all the time – yesterday’s work always comes in for a stiff combing-through before I get on with today’s effort – but perhaps what I’m really talking about is second-drafting. I’m with Stephen King on this – your first draft is where you work out what your book is really about (as opposed to what happens) and your second draft is where you make sure that you’ve done all you can so that the reader is also aware that your book is about more than simply the storyline.

But Stephen King plans his books better than I plan mine. I’m also discovering not only what my story is about but who the characters are, how they interact with events and how they feel about each other. And a whole load of tweaking, rewriting, enhancing and chopping is going to have to go on in the second draft to bring some of that to the forefront because, as so often happens, the way they feel about each other turns out to be what drives the narrative.

One of the reasons I’m looking forward to second drafting at the moment is because finishing the first draft is such hard work. I’m at the stage of the novel where the final 20% usually almost writes itself but the work-in-progress is refusing to do that. It’s sitting back with its arms crossed going ‘No, you do it. This was your idea.’

I’ve just come to the end of a long set-piece which I had known was going to be there for some time now. It was hard to write because it involved following my characters through a particularly action-packed and significant day and my writing tends to focus more on particular key episodes and conversations here and there, rather than – for me – such a relatively long time-frame.

The struggle to get it done in a way I’m happy with has put back my self-imposed schedule. I had hoped to have the first draft finished by Easter. That’s tomorrow. So the new deadline is the end of May, when the Other Half and I are planning to go away for a week. It would be good to go on holiday knowing that I wasn’t leaving my characters at a crucial point; not having to spend the week with a nagging worry at the back of my mind as to whether I was going to be able to pick up the psychological thread exactly where I had dropped it.

However, I’m hoping that I can gather enough speed and momentum as the days lengthen and my energy levels increase to finish the second draft by my original target date of September, so I’ve got something I’m happy to show Will, my editor.

At the moment, though, that seems a long way off.

Beware - editing in progress.

It’s weird, being at home all day and not writing. Home is my workplace, the kitchen (or occasionally the living room) is where I write so it feels strange to be sitting here reading or watching DVDs with the boys instead of in front of my laptop. By today (ie not quite a week since I last touched the work-in-progress) the fidgettiness was too great and I had to do something. The Ultimate Frisbee Freak was out doing what he loves best, the Bass Player was ensconced in the front room with his girlfriend and Family Guy DVD, the Other Half, being some species of angel, was doing our tax returns (I don’t do numbers and forms freak me out totally) so I was free to play around with words to my heart’s content. I started editing the most recent chapter.

The generally accepted lay-off before your work starts not to feel like yours and you can, therefore, achieve the distance necessary to savage it is six weeks. (Though one of the ancient Greek writers said you should bury your scroll in a jar for three years and forget about it before coming back to it in a completely objective state of mind. Seems a little extreme…) I was giving it six days... Unwise. I waded in with the computing equivalent of the red editing pen (mark and delete) and cut a swathe through last week’s efforts. Too wordy here, too colloquial there, this person sounds too much like you (ie me), that person seems to have forgotten he’s Welsh, why does he sound like a nitwit… there was nothing I was pleased with.
‘That’s quite a nice bit of description’ a timid bit of me suggested as the heavy DELETE hand looked like descending. I read it again. Nice. Hmm.
‘I think maybe you’ve caught what you wanted that person to say rather well’ the timid half of me, gaining courage, suggested. I read it again. Growl. No. Could do better. DELETE.

Mood plays a big part in editing. Sometimes you’re not in objective enough a frame of mind – you might be too pleased with yourself, allowing blatantly weak writing to slip through and reproach you in a later draft or – like today – you might be in a combative state, swingeing about you with the cutting edge of literary endeavour, determined not to let yourself get away with anything less than wonderful prose. Why am I in a combative mood when it’s the lovely Christmas holidays? The Puritan work-ethicist in me says that days and days of sitting around watching bad TV, eating empty calories and drinking too much alcohol is bad for me. And, I’m sorry to say, it’s right. I need treats now and again, a shared bottle of wine here, a box of chocolates there. A lovely book to be read all day every now and again.
Not EVERYTHING! NOW! FOR A WHOLE WEEK!
All my mental space was filled up with sugar and spice and all things over-indulgent. I was in the mood to be harsh with myself. The hair shirt of literature hung around my shoulders.

Bah. After twenty minutes of self-flagellation when the chapter in question looked to be in serious danger of being reduced to a couple of paragraphs so tightly-worded they made text-speak look like purple prose, I stopped and hit SAVE.

Why the hell did I delude myself (and everybody who reads this blog) a few days ago, that editing demands any less time, effort and mental space than actually composing in the first place? In actual fact, it probably needs more. Instead of just pouring the whole thing out in a big splurge of subconsciousness, you’ve got to be alert to subtleties, nuances, resonances with other bits of the book; your ear has to be open for similies you’ve used before and things which characters have become too fond of saying. Although in real life people repeat themselves endlessly, if you make your characters do it in your books, people get fed up and assume that you didn’t edit tightly enough.

To be fair to myself, I’ve had six days of (almost) unlimited reading of exceptionally well-honed and edited prose so the first draft of my rawest and most recent chapter was never going to measure up. So, if an hour here and there for the next week isn’t going to work, what am I going to do to stave off madness and familicide? I suppose I could brave the sale-hitting hordes and go and work in a coffee shop in town every morning while everybody else is still in bed. (Why is it that I can work surrounded by strangers whereas even one family member in the house at home and I’m hopeless?) Or I could give up trying to work and wait until things return to normal next week...

What do you reckon, people of the blogosphere?

Reading and writing over Christmas

Firstly, sorry about the abrupt change back to this 'look' for the blog but I was being driven mad by the font difficulties on the other one. Think of it as a new year's resolution, only early.

Anyway, on with the post.

Will I get any writing done over the Christmas holidays? Extremely unlikely – I find it really difficult to work with anybody else in the house, never mind in the same room as me. So, as the Other Half has all of next week off (hooray!) and the Ultimate Frisbee Freak and the Bassist will both be here work on the book will probably go out of the window.
Having said that, there is stuff I can do, editing being a completely different animal to creating something - the difference between washing up and having created the meal in the first place, I reckon – so I may do some of that.

Stephen King, in On Writing, which I had occasion to mention here a while ago says that one of the things you need a first draft for is to see what your book is really about. Not the story, but what preoccupations and themes lie beneath the story. When he comes to read the first draft of a book, about six weeks after finishing it (during which time, he says, it will be ‘aging, and (one hopes) mellowing’) he says he is

‘..looking for what I meant, because in the second draft I’ll want to add scenes and incidents that reinforce that meaning. I’ll also want to delete stuff that goes in other directions.’

I found that an incredibly helpful comment. How, I wondered, have I written four books - one about to be published, for goodness sake! - without knowing that that was what I was supposed to be doing on my read-through of the first draft? Maybe that’s why Testament had to go through so many revisions, because I didn’t really know what it was about until I finally got to grips with my story and got the contemporary narrative to really resonate with the historical thread.

It had always been my intention to have the dual narratives in Testament act as glosses on each other, each informing the reader’s understanding of the other, rather than just have a plot-driven book where the modern-day characters simply needed to solve the mystery of Kineton and Dacre College’s foundation in order to sort out their own, twenty-first century problems. (Though they do that as well.) But I don’t think I’d really worked out what my book was about at a deeper level. Where was it all coming from? Once I’d realised that it was about picking yourself up after disappointments and shattered expectations and living your life with what you had rather than what you wished you had, I was away.

With the work in progress, since reading that piece of advice from Stephen King, I’ve been consciously reflecting on the story every now and again and working out what it is about; what the story means for each of my characters and for the shape and flavour of the book as a whole. I think that’s going to be especially important for the climax – that scene towards which everything should be tending, where tensions are released and disparate strands are brought together made.

I think I might have a go at doing some of that kind of reflection over the holidays rather than trying to move the book forward by producing new stuff. It will probably help when I come to re-start in the New Year as I’ll have an even clearer idea of where the book is going and why. That’s if I can tear myself away from the stack of books I’m hoping to get for Christmas…

Having said that, I’m still working my way through my birthday haul with Karin Slaughter’s Skin Privilege, Joanne Harris’s The Lollipop Shoes, David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green, Peter Ho Davies’s The Welsh Girl and Philippa Gregory’s The Boleyn Inheritance still to read and David Baldacci’s The Camel Club only just started. The joys of being a slow reader!

So, hopefully, it’s going to be a fab book-filled Christmas. Instead of writing, I shall indulge my other passion and read incessantly. But I am slightly worried aobut when I am going to find time to learn how to use the breadmaker I know the Other Half and I are getting from her family. Any tips for machine- breadmaking from book-blog-readers?

Publication date woes

Heard today that, due to ‘technical difficulties’ in the ‘production department’ of MNW, the publication of Testament has had to be put back by two weeks. Drat!! So, instead of the New Year thrill of seeing it on the shelves and on the Internet on January the 4th, I’m going to have to wait until January the 18th. It’s only two weeks, I know, but is still a bit of a disappointment.
After all, it’s been almost a year since I had the fateful email from Will Atkins, the MNW commissioning editor, telling me that he really liked Testament and that MNW would like to publish it. On January 4th 2008.

It was more than slightly amazing to me that his email contained so much detail. Publication date, price, terms – all there in black and white. When I’d submitted the MS to MNW four months previously I had assumed that the best I could hope for, some time in the future, would be a carefully worded email expressing interest and asking me to come and talk to them about the book. My previous experience had led me to believe that that, in itself, would be a minor miracle. But no – we love your book and we want to publish it. It’s this, it’s that, it’s the other (sparing my own blushes by not directly quoting from v. complimentary email.) End of story.

Of course, it wasn’t the end of the story. There was some polishing and rewriting – though no radical structural editing of the kind I was expecting after brushes with other publishers (which were along the lines of ‘we really like the historical strand but aren’t sure about the contemporary, are you quite happy with it?’ I re-wrote the contemporary strand completely – characters, storyline, the lot – on the basis of that question alone. And the publisher still didn’t like it enough to publish…) Then there was copy-editing… Am I alone in finding the comments of copy-editors, their changing of punctuation and suggestions as to alternative words, infinitely more annoying than the more swingeing comments of commissioning editors? Perhaps I am – perhaps it was just because I had met Will, liked and trusted him and would, pretty much, have considered anything he said before deciding not to do it.

Editing was done entirely by computer without paper ever intervening. Will sent me a version of the book with his suggestions logged in the ‘track changes’ option in MS Word. I then changed or didn’t change things as suggested (or elsewhere if I suddenly realised I needed to change other stuff I hadn’t seen before) and my changes were also logged, in a different colour. So, we could see who’d suggested what and who had done what. And why - you can add comments to your own or somebody else’s changes. Amazing stuff! Doubtless all you pros out there are going ‘tchah, track changes, old news’ but for me it was a revolutionary piece of technological wizardry!

The copy editing was done on paper – not sure why but involved the familiar tons of typescript and the poor postman standing at the door before shoving it into my hands. At least it wasn’t like the old days when MS would come back with the familiar ‘Thank you for sending us your novel…’ letter to ruin your day.

Then came proof reading. Finally, I saw Testament as it would appear in print, each block of page-sized text sitting, looking slightly lost, in the middle of an A4 sheet. Somehow, a lot of errors seemed to have crept in at the typesetting stage so I had to keep my wits about me. Fortunately, as mentioned elsewhere, I read very slowly which is ideal for proofreading. I’d be really interested to know how many more errors the professional proofreader picked up than me.

As an unwelcome consequence of the proof-reading experience, I’ve become hyper-critical of typos and errors in published books. ‘Pah’ I cry, ‘somebody didn’t proof-read very carefully did they?’
You can all do the same to Testament when it comes out as I doubt very much whether I, at least, was able to spot 100% of the errors.

Proof reading finished in the middle of October and – as far as I can gather – the book was re-typeset and sent off to be printed and bound and have its jacket fitted cosily around itself ready to sit fatly on shelves.

Since I’ve been privy to all previous stages, I can only assume that it’s printing, binding, jacketing or getting the thing into warehouses which has gone awry. See, I don’t really know what ‘production’ entails apart from the bit of handwaving above.

Anyway, I shall remain in the dark and bide my time until the 18th of January when, all being well, Testament will finally see the light of bookshops (or at least the inside of an Amazon warehouse). I heard today that most Waterstones, Borders and Books Etc will be stocking it, along with lots of small independent bookshops which are MNW’s lifeblood.
THANK YOU SMALL INDEPENDENT BOOKSELLERS – THIS AUTHOR LOVES YOU! Some of you are even on my daily blog reading list...like Simon and Tim down at the Big Green Bookshop.

So, if you have a local independent bookshop – sadly, we no longer do in Canterbury - please do order Testament from them, they (and all of us at MNW) need all the support you can give them (and us!)