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.

Armageddon outta here

After all my talk of doomsday films yesterday I saw on the news that Western Australia has experienced a storm of Biblical proportions with hailstones the size of tennis balls and considerably more rain than they are accustomed to. I was concerned for the safety of the lovely people who run eBooks.com in Perth, which suffered the worst of the weather’s aberration. At least their website was still up and running, which was a good sign. Some of my books are available as eBooks on their website, so while I was there I took a quick peek at how my writing guides were doing and was delighted to see that How to be a Writer is the number one bestseller in the Language Arts section: www.ebooks.com/subjects/language-arts-disciplines/. Cool. I hope my novel can achieve that kind of success when it eventually sees the light of day.

I reached a small milestone towards that goal today. I’m now at page 100 (A4, single spaced) in this editing sweep. Just 176 to go, and then it’s back to the beginning to work on specific aspects of the book such as character vocabularies, subplot, tension etc. Today I worked on another fun scene involving the old Volkswagen camper van: it runs out of fuel and gets pushed down a hill into the jungle so that two characters can hide out in it for a while. They figure that with the engine, fuel tank and gearbox at the back it should still be a runner even if it hits a tree.

As I go through this edit there are times when I think a new chapter is needed to break up the ongoing main plot with a peek at what’s happening in the subplot, but I’ve reached a stage where I can’t write those subplot scenes because the detailed sequence of clues, their meanings, and the way the characters interpret and act upon them have all still to be decided. So for now I’m putting in notes such as ‘SCENE WITH RATTY IN HIS HOUSE?’ or ‘ANOTHER RATTY OR ORLANDO/OTTO CHAPTER?’ where I think such a scene would be appropriate, and I’ll pick up on those loose ends in the next edit. Hopefully by then I’ll have all the intricacies of the interweaving plots worked out.

It might be necessary to storyboard the plot on postcards so that I can get a visual impression of how everything fits together. I also have some novel writing software somewhere that’s supposed to help with that sort of thing. I’ve not used it before, but I might give it a go if I can find it.

By way of a change I started work on a couple of non fiction projects today. I have a series of guides for writers planned, and today wrote a little about how to find time to write and about how to find a place to write. Both are very important topics for writers who also have to work for a living, and I think they’ll make great little books. I won’t progress very far with them until the novel is finished, though. I may be good at finding time to write, but I’m not that good.