Crises in the present tense and their averting

I've now reworked about a quarter of the novel which means, given that it's the quarter that needs most work (the first), that I've done the bulk of the heavy lifting, as it were. But yesterday I had a bit of a crisis about the restructuing. To understand the crisis, you need to know about tense.

The novel, in its previous form (I won't say original form as that beast died long ago after my first readers had read the first 100 pages) began with a prologue in the present tense. We then moved back in time six weeks or so to begin Part 1 of the book which explained how we'd got to the prologue. Part 1 was written in the past tense. At the end of Part 1 we'd caught up with the mood and timeframe of the prologue and Part 2 was written in the present tense.

Since I've now hacked away at those six weeks and made the prologue problematic if not redundant, I decided to abandon parts and to write the whole thing in the present tense. I know, given Philip Pullman's recent remarks, that this looks like a 'brave' decision but I'd always wanted at least the latter parts of the book to be in present tense as it allows for a final catastrophe in the life of the first person narrator more readily than past tense. I also felt (and I made this decision before reading, or hearing the furore about, Wolf Hall) that a historical novel written in the present tense would have a better chance of breaking the barrier between now and then, that the reader might get more readily involved, be more prepared to suspend their disbelief and enter into that world. And, given that the fourteenth century is so long ago as to constitute a really different country, that seemed important.

Anyway, by Monday night, I had got to the stage where I felt that writing it all in the present tense had been a mistake and that Mr Pullman was right when he said that it makes it impossible to show a wide temporal perspective. I began to long for the little asides in present tense which I'd allowed myself in the midst of the past tense narrative, the hints to the reader that things are only going to get worse; I mourned the loss of the moment when the reader finally caught up with the prologue and began racing, headlong to the end. I was, in short, having a crisis of confidence.

So, I printed out the first hundred pages – roughly the section of the novel I've reworked so far - and I began to read with a view to re-winding back into present tense.

But I'm not going to. Because present tense works. Right from the new opening, which has the flavour of the prologue but is now very firmly unknowing of what is to come, I think it works. And, because it works, I now see the tense-devices tricks I was playing with in the previous version as facile and a bit cheap. I went back and read some of the asides and found them artful (not in a good way) and nose-tapping. I've never really been convinced by obvious foreshadowing of the 'if only I'd known then what I know now' variety in other people's work, so why was I perpetrating a slightly more sophisticated version of the same thing in my own?

I like the new present-tense narrative. It's taughter. Interestingly, despite cutting the slides into present from past, it feels more emotionally keyed-up, not less. And it also makes flashbacks much easier to write. There's no convoluted use of the pluperfect in the seguays from main narrative past tense to flashback past tense; as we spring back into the main narrative with a sprightly 'now' it actually means 'now' and not 'in the main timeframe of this book which is set in the past and is actually, therefore, then'. And I'm finding that having the main character reflect on the past from the standpoint of a present to which he cannot possibly know the resolution gives his recollections a poignancy which they wouldn't have if he was already in the past, narratively speaking.

Gold stars to those who kept up with that.

So, crisis over. Others may not like it, specifically putative agent and subsequent editors, but at least I like it now. And that's a huge part of the battle for a decent novel, isn't it?

Rewriting - advice

While I am engaged in the re-write all this seems very germane. I'm particularly interested in Elmore Leonard's opening advice - cut, rewrite then cut and rewrite again.

Rewriting the Novel - everybody's at it!

There's a lot being said at the moment by Macmillan New Writers (eg here and here as well as here at HB) about the rewriting/editing process and it's obvious that there's something of a divergence of opinion on the whole process. Some love it, some dread it.

I'll come clean, now and admit that I really enjoy the process of rewriting. I enjoy it so much that I'm constantly at it. I edit a huge amount as I go along. At the most basic level, I'll change a sentence twice or three times in the writing of it, just because I'm thinking and working out and weighing up the sound of the thing as I go along.

This will correctly suggest to you that I don't know what a sentence is going to sound like until I've actually written it; I have a vague, subconscious feel of what's happening and the act of writing turns this into something more real, more concrete.

I remember reading an interview with somebody, once – I think it was Mary Wesley – who said that writing on a typewriter made you far more economical with words and less prone to having to rewrite as you had to work out each sentence in your head before you started. That wouldn't work for me. Not at all. I'd go into terminal stall. I need to find out what a sentence is going to say by watching and listening to it unfold. And then rewriting it so it says it better. And then again. And then I'll move on to the next sentence.

But the editing doesn't stop there. That's the beginning. At the end of each day, I go through the day's output, rewriting, cutting, adding, trying to get it exactly right.

The following day, I read the previous day's work again, out loud. Again, I tweak sentences, add, cut and re-think. That'll take an hour or two. Then I start writing new stuff.

I'll go through the whole thing again when I read through the chapter before I add it to the file containing the whole of the work to date. That means each chapter has been through numerous batches of rewriting before I've even got to the end of what we probably shouldn't call draft one of the novel.

I can hear your question now. 'What the hell is there left to rewrite at the end?'

Well, actually, quite a lot.

In just the same way that I don't know what a sentence is going to say until I've written it, I find it really difficult to structure my books until I know what they're really about.

Let me explain what I mean when I say 'really about'. I'm not talking about plot, here. I know roughly what's going to happen – the beginning, the end, a few key events in between - before I begin, but what I don't know is what it's all going to turn out to mean. I don't start writing thinking 'ah, this is a book about loss/alienation/fear of being abandoned/insert your own overarching theme' I just wait to see what things emerge. I may have a notion of what will turn out to be important, but I'm loath to commit to that before seeing how my characters interact with each other and where they go with the action I've sketched out for them.

The other thing i'm often hazy about is motivation. If you know what happens but you want to let your characters develop naturally and not force them into some kind of cardboard cutout persona, then you're setting yourself up for a lot of reworking. I've spent a lot of time whilst writing The Black and The white getting to grips with why one of the characters does a particular thing – not just any old thing, a seminal thing that sparks the whole of the action. I tried one motivation but the whole thing just wouldn't gel – I was trying to force the issue and rely on my own interpretation to decide why he did it rather than just writing the story and letting him show me why he did it.

OK, I've just read that and it sounds flaky. I used to hate it when heard authors saying 'my characters just did this' or 'they just wouldn't do what I wanted them to' and I'd think 'they're your characters, make them behave!' But the truth is, if you're writing character-driven fiction they're only your characters up to a point. And after that point, they're you (or your unruly subconscious) and are you always under your own rational control?

So, anyway, the point is, I can't work out the best structure until I know what the important themes are and I can't decide why the events of the plot happen until I know who the characters are, and I can only find out both those things by writing the damn' story. [The whole 'write your characters' biography down to their earliest memory and their inside leg measurement' thing has never worked for me. I've tried it and one of two things happens. Either the characters fail to become real and I'm just making the whole thing happen rather than finding out what really happens, or the minute I start writing the book, they become somebody else and I might just as well not have bothered with the whole biog thing.]

The point of this rambling is that I'm always going to be stuck with a certain amount of structural rewriting because of the way I allow my novels to develop.

At the moment, I'm managing to cut at least half the material from the first 70 pages because I now know what matters and what doesn't, and also because some of that material needs to come later in the book for reasons of character development and suspense. But I couldn't possibly have written the book in its current (ie rewritten) form from the beginning, because I needed to find out a) what it was really about behind the plot and b) who these people really were behind the vague notions I had of the characters moving my plot forward.

Given all that, it's a good job that I like rewriting, isn't it?

Rewriting the Novel - Day 3

When you're rewriting/reworking your novel – as I am – and you have jumped to page 38 and started there instead of continuing to allow your novel to begin on page 1 like any sensible person, you need to decide what to do with all the information contained in pages 1-37.

I am deciding this by reference to a list of questions I have asked myself. I jotted them down at the beginning of work on Monday under the inspiring heading 'Questions that need to be progressively answered.'

They emerged in no particular order and I shall quote them in full for your bafflement:

• Who is the saint?
• What has happened to M and what did the saint have to do with it?
• What happened between M and his F and why/how? (I would leave you to guess but, prosaically, F = father)
• Birds.

This last is not a question, just an aide memoire.

Of course, how to do backstory is a question a million writers before me have had to answer. That is, after they've answered the far more important question – is any of this backstory necessary?

It is necessary. Honestly.

And, now I've got M feeding the reader titbits of his backstory instead of laying the whole thing out in one go, there's a lot more scope for the unreliable narrator thing.

I like unreliable narrators.

Or do I?

Rewriting the novel – end of day 2 - not The Road

Today, things are beginning to take shape. I'm beginning to see how the new, streamlined beginning of The Black and The White is going to work.

I've decided that the best place to begin is with chapter 5. However, that does not mean that I am simply jettisoning the first 4 chapters, in a bid to out-extreme-edit Nicola Morgan (see previous post for details).

No. Fortunately, I have not allowed myself to be so self-indulgent as to write four irrelevant chapters. But...

The big but is the book's structure. The novel is a quest narrative and, fairly obviously, the main character needs to get off on his quest as soon as may be if the reader's not going to be sitting there tapping a foot and looking at their metaphorical watch. Until today, 'as soon as may be' effectively meant page thirty four, halfway through chapter 4. As of today, it's page one.

OK, now I've said that, readers of HB are likely to fall into two camps:

Camp 1 - Of course it needs to be page one! Not to start with the quester on his quest on page one is like starting Goldilocks and the Three Bears with the marriage of Goldilocks' parents and their subsequent rather uneventful honeymoon in Colwyn Bay.

Camp 2 – You can't just wave him off on page one! How is anybody supposed to know what the quest is all about if he's already setting out on it when we first clap eyes on him? Where is the princess with the demanding line in tests of commitment? Where's the king who doesn't really want anybody to marry his daughter and stage a hostile takeover bid for half the kingdom? Or whatever.

And there, friends, is the dilemma. Yes, if it's a quest narrative, he needs to be on the quest, hanky-wrapped belongings over his shoulder on a stick. (No, my character doesn't have a hanky - a) a handkerchief, as such, would be anachronistic and b) it would be altogether too Dick Whittington.) But there's also the need not to leave the reader totally in the dark as to why he's on the quest at all. (Which, by the way, is what Cormac McCarthy does in The Road. I have to admit, I didn't get more than halfway through TR because it is depressing to a horrible degree but there was never a sniff of an explanation of where they were going or why they were going there. Call me picky, but I'd have liked to know. I'm told, by those who have actually got to the end of TR (son no. 2) that I'd have been none the wiser (just much more depressed) if I'd read to the end. 'They go south' he said, when I asked. 'Why?' I asked. 'Because south is where they're going' he said.

Anyway, rant over. Let's re-focus on the novel I actually can re-write as I like.

OK, I acknowledge that 34 pages before the waving off with the hanky-wrapped etc. is probably being a little too generous with the scene-setting. But a lot of what happens in those pages is going to have to go in somewhere. Some of it – maybe five pages – has already been slid (in substantially modified form) into what were chapters five and six and are now chapters one and two. (Stay with me here.) The reader is getting the information in a significantly more oblique form than previously and, in a novel with a strong mystery element, this can only be a good thing.

So; so far, so good.

You'll have to keep reading if you want to see how I decide to deal with the remaining couple of dozen excised pages and their associated information.

And I may have to rant some more about The Road, because two of the four people who have, so far, read portions of The Black and The White have compared it to that depressing (but yes, I know, very literary) work. But you'll have to wait and see.

Reworking the novel - day 2

So, I've fallen at the first hurdle. Failed to blog yesterday as I spent the evening editing a short story for a friend. A very good short story, I'm pleased to say, and one which needed only a tweak here and there rather than some kind of root and branch hacking.

Anyway, the rewriting. I started yesterday morning with a huge brick of 412 typescript pages sitting on the dining room table. The structural element of the rewrite is going to consist, largely, of deciding what elements of the first 75 pages are really essential and deciding how to weave them in elsewhere in a felicitous manner.

Reading those first 75 pages again, I recalled a recent post on Nicola Morgan's blog that contained this advice on editing:

• Shorten chapters, unless they are already stupidly short. Alter the places where they begin and end so that they usually end mid-action. Give every chapter a knife-edge beginning and ending. Do not let your reader stop reading.

• Remove much more description than you want to.

• Ditto with back-story, philosophy, scene setting and world building. Just because you know it, doesn't mean the reader needs it. Think iceberg.

• Remove at least two of the first five chapters. Just do it. See what happens.

• Remove all your favourite sentences.

Now, for me, some of those are a bit extreme. The last one, specifically. But, in general, I take her point. Self-indulgent writing is no good to anybody and will just be flicked past, if the book is read at all.

My chapters are already pretty short but, as she advises, I'm not sure all of the first six need to be there. Ms Morgan would undoubtedly dismiss chunks of them as world building/back story/scene setting. Can I remove two? Yes, though bits of them will need to turn up elsewhere.

She's right about description. I like a well-turned phrase as much as (probably more than) the next reader but if the description goes on too long, however exquisite it is, I find myself skipping to the next salient bit. So I've always favoured the 'key but telling details' in terms of description. Less is very definitely more.

So, what do I have at the end of my first day of reworking?

• Five paperclipped chapters with bits of text highlighted and 'put this in when/after/before...'

• A completely reworked first chapter.

• A mild feeling of having ended up with a ball of string composed of five different strands which I now have to untangle into a single thread.

As AL Kennedy would say, Onwards!

Later: Not sure why the font changes halfway through that post - sorry!

Lights out, people still home...

I suppose it was inevitable given my rant about the dark the other day that the lights would go out in our house.
One day there was flickering in the kitchen, next day (which would be the day my parents arrived to see the Bassist in his school play) there were no lights in the kitchen, the downstairs loo, the utility room or the cellar. Fortunately, the socket circuit was unaffected so we were working by the light of our SAD lightbox which was slightly surreal.

Amazingly, when I rang the electrician he said he’d be out today ( I was thinking Monday at the earliest) and when he came (which was at the time he’d said he would arrive, more miracles) he was able to fix the problem in twenty minutes with the aid of a natty head-torch. As he went down the steps of the cellar (where the fuse box and other things electrical whirr and shine and have their mysterious being) he looked more like a caver about to navigate an unknown system than an electrician who was about to discover and change a dodgy, burned-out fuse module (or something).
So we are lit once more – hooray! I don’t like using torches, unless it’s to read in bed so I don’t disturb the Other Half.

I wish glitches in novel-writing were so easily fixable. I wish I could delve into the depths of the work in progress, metaphorical head-torch affixed,a and surface mere minutes later waving a burned-out bit of narrative and saying ‘that’s it, everything should be fine now.’
But it’s not that easy.
Having said that, things are proceeding nicely with the work in progress after months of chopping, fitting, dashing ahead and then meandering at the pace of a bemused snail.
I’m not sure draft one (or is that draft three and a half?) is going to be finished before Christmas but it’ll be a close run thing.
Then there’ll be the small matter of a couple of months of editing… I know the book is too long (over 150 000 words already) and there are bits which need some reworking but I think I’m happy with the overall shape and flow now.

Still, it’s taken me the best part of two and a half years to write, though I did stop and pretty much start again in April and begin a complete rewrite with different characters and a different backstory which, inevitably, affected the narrative as I’d originally conceived it. The same things just can’t happen to different people, not unless you’re writing a ruthlessly plot-driven novel.

So, much as I say I’d like to be able to fix things quickly, I guess I wouldn’t. Anything good – including revisions and rewrites – takes time to get right, so it needs whatever time it takes.

I’m blinking glad the lights are back on though.

Getting There

When you start revising bits of your book, one thing leads to another. Bringing in one of my characters earlier in the action seemed like a relelatively simple manoeuvre but, once I’d started, all sorts of other things became necessary so that she could appear sooner. And those necessary things are having a dramatic impact on the book – for the good, I hasten to add. Its original sprawl over the first hundred pages (me writing my way into the book) is being tightened and focused, the cut and paste functions of MS Word, not to mention the option of being able to view two documents side by side onscreen, have never been so busy on my laptop. And I’m getting there. I’m a much happier writer this week than I was last. Events are more clearly defined, as are motivations, characters are getting sharper. I’m pleased.

During a particularly doldrummy period over the weekend I read an interview with John Mortimer in which he said something to the effect that he’s only happy when his writing’s going well and if it’s not going well he’s in despair. Well I know exactly what he means. It just messes up my whole life if the writing’s going badly. there was a phase when it felt I was never going to get this book right and, as this is the second major re-write, that felt like a big deal.

Does anybody know which famous author it was who said that what they liked about writing was the sensation of just having finished a book? That they didn’t particularly like the process of writing? I know I’ve read it somewhere but I can’t remember who said it, though I have in mind it was a woman writer. Probably means it was Hemingway knowing the accuracy of my memory. But that’s what I’ve felt like recently – the pleasure in writing had begun to fade and I was beginning to just look forward to having finished. Now the pleasure in the process is back, thank goodness!

By the way, in case any of you aren’t regular readers of Tomorrowville, do go over and read David’s latest post on point of view. It’s fascinating and may spark an answering reflection here in a couple of days when the cut ‘n’ past is assuming manageable proportions…

Structure, sonnets and novels

I have been thinking a lot about structure recently and decided that more is better. OK, let me expand on that as it is – I realise – a little vague. I think I need to have a structure on which to hang my novels rather than letting them evolve in a haphazard way. Over the five novels I’ve written (if you include the wip which is about to enter 2.0 territory) I’ve tried pretty much every putting-a-novel-together method from detailed chapter-by-chapter breakdown from the off to ‘ok I know where I’m headed, let’s see where the journey takes me’. And I think my optimum modus operandi is somewhere between those two. I need a structure tight enough to give me security but not so tight as to prevent the characters coming to life and surprising me. (Or me, frankly, having a better idea in the middle of the book and changing the whole planned course of the second half.)

I think maybe it’s a bit like poetry, which I’ve written for thirty years and more (dear God that makes me sound old!) entirely for my own benefit. Mostly I write in free verse and use rhyme and metre to suit my purpose but sometimes, if I really want to flex my poetic muscles, I’ll write a sonnet. I prefer the English or Shakespearian version (rhyme scheme abab cdcd efef gg) to Italian version (abbaabba then cdecde, cdccdc, or cdedce). It’s a bit more like a short story with a twist at the end in that couplet.

I can’t say I’m a wonderful exponent of the sonnet but I do enjoy writing them. The discipline of distilling a thought or a feeling or even an event into those fourteen lines can be wonderfully creative for somebody who’s inclined to let things get a bit flabby.

Free verse is more flexible, obviously, and allows me to search for the refrain or the repeated line/image which is central to the poem and allows me to highlight it with rhyme, metre and repetition.

I think my novels need to be a combination of the two. I need anough form to make me think in a careful, structured way about what I’m doing – to weigh more easily whether things belong and to give me a means whereby the thing can be shaped into a lean, sinuousness. But too much form and the thing is constrained, there’s insufficient room to see those recurrent motifs, the call-and-echo between characters in the past and the present, the surprise burst which takes both reader and writer’s breath away.

It’s going to be an interesting re-write, folks. Watch this space.