Writing Backwards

On 1^st March 2010 I set myself the challenge of completing the rewrites of my novel in three months. In the books I’ve written about writing (How to be a Writer etc) I’m always going on about the need to redraft a book many times until it’s perfect. I thought I’d be able to get through several drafts in three months, but it took that entire time to do one draft (remember this book is more than 180,000 words). And at the end of that draft I still had sections of the book that simply contained notes such as ‘Otto chapter needed here’ or ‘Insert Ratty chapter’.

Towards the end of the year I made a small change to one of the lead characters, and the knock-on effect of that change necessitated that I cut 23,000 words from the text (instead of being a true war hero I made him a fake war hero – more interesting and original, but all the fighting sequences in which he featured had to go). This was just as well, since the new chapters I’d written to fill in the gaps had pushed the word count above 200,000, which I see as a sensible upper limit. So the word count peaked at, I think, about 203,000, was then trimmed down to 180,000, and has since crept up again to 189,000. It’s like a bush that keeps growing and needs regular trimming to keep its overall shape. It means I’m writing backwards sometimes, but it really is like cutting out the dead leaves and giving space for the rest of the plant to bloom.

I’m going to set myself a new three month challenge, now. I’m going to attempt the following:

1. Finish the current draft, which involves major restructuring, new characters, new chapters, a new beginning and a new ending (I’m 80% through that draft right now).
2. Complete a fast read-through and minor editing draft, just to make sure the major changes and new themes hang together well.
3. Complete a slow ‘quality of language’ draft. This will involve saturating my head with bestselling contemporary and literary fiction to ensure that the quality of my writing (stylistic techniques, imagery, vocabulary, pace etc) stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the best of them. My possible distant relative Joshua Ferris is already inspiring me with his demonstration of the craft of writing in his new bestseller The Unnamed which I started reading yesterday.
4. Complete a quick logic and consistency draft (checking for logical progression of events, revelation of information, consistency in characters and speaking styles).
5. Proofread the book.
6. Read the whole book out loud to ‘Er Indoors. It’s amazing how many mistakes jump out at you when reading aloud even when you think the book is already perfect.

There are bound to be further issues to fix after that, but I’m confident I can finish this book by summer 2011, a mere 15 years after I scribbled the first draft of the first chapter in red biro in a hammock in the south of France. I certainly hope so, anyway: after 200,000 words I’m almost out of ink.