In light of current advice to writers to bash on without looking back, it's refreshing to read Candace Bushnell (Sex and the City) on how she writes:

'The first draft takes me about six to nine months. It's really important to keep going back to the beginning and reworking it. I can get a bit obsessive - rewriting the opening paragraph up to 50 times.'

(Time Out Nov 13-19)

Makes me feel better about my own habit of revising one sentence before I write the next.

Sheila

Yes, I'm - for want of a better phrase - a prose builder, and so have to go back over and over stuff and adding to it until it feels right.
I'm not sure what a good prase would be for the writers who throw everything in, and then edit it down, but they seem to be the ones who can keep going to the end of the first draft before turning round and going back to the start to prune it down to size.


- NaomiM

I like 'prose builder', as distinct from 'fiddler' or 'tweaker'.

Sheila

Me, too! I'm an inveterate prose builder.
Susiex

Is it possible that writers really do just go from one page to the next for 80,000 words without stopping? I know these write-athons are very popular, with people pledged to produce so many thousand words by a deadline.

Sheila

Well Stephen King does. I think his target is 3000 words a day (I vaguely remember from On Writing, but I could be wrong on the actual number) and doesn't finish for the day until he's hit his target, which might be lunch time, or might be early evening. Then he can churn out a first draft in a month, and spend the next few months editing it.

Apparently even the NaNoWriMo target works out to something like 1500 words a day, which isn't actually that much: my unit of first-draft-writing in 1300 in four hours, and at that rate it takes me six months.

I know writers who can't move on from a page until it's perfect, and then never touch it again, and others who almost free-write their way through the first draft, though I don't suppose there are many who never ever change a word or a sentence. Re-writing and re-writing the beginning must be one kind of the former system: a focus for the process of working out everything that will come after. And it's true that the beginning can turn out to be way off-beam by the time you've got to the end - which is why I'd never suggest someone submits to agents and editors until they've written the whole novel.

Emma

I suppose writing the first draft down in one long go is a bit like Woody Allen. He likes the actors to improvise and ad-lib, then it's all in the editing after it's in the can. Although I've heard he can take ages with the editing and re-editing, until they practically to prise it out of his hands.


- NaomiM

Are you thinking of Mike Leigh? I was only yesterday reading a collection of Woody Allen's writings - he was a script writer for radio and stand-up comics before he made films and has written some very funny short stories. All his lines seem to bear his personal stamp. Mike Leigh's actors, in films like 'Happy -go Lucky', say they never know what's happening to characters outside the scenes they improvise. I liked his early films best, with then wife Alison Steadman, such as Abigail's Party and Nuts in May (my favourite).

I don't think creating a film script based on actors' input compares very well with a writer editing his/her own nanowriting. Or does it? Interesting aspect that I hadn't thought of. It seems to hark back to the idea of the writer 'taken over' by characters and plot when consciousness is weakened (by speed-writing).

Sheila