he made it into a publishable book out of a naive mess.

I don't know about i, ii, or iii, rosy, but it does seem to me that the final, submitted, ms, is still only a draft, albe it a polished one. The prose is good, typos & grammar corrected, the story is there, the characters are fleshed out, but then the really hard work comes of getting it into publishable shape, for which you need the fresh eye of an editor.


- NaomiM

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- I think sometimes we worry about trying to get things too perfect before submitting, when really it's good to go, or we're fiddling while Rome burns (ie, it's fundimentally flawed).

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- which perhaps brings us back full circle to the old debate about whether writers are made or born. I'd say inate writers can get away with tweeking, while 'made' writers - I'd like to say usually, and I apologise if that frightens some people - need to bite the bullet and go for the almost complete rewrite of a first draft.

A good deal of my working on the second draft is bringing out things which I spotted emerging in the first draft. Usually thematic: if I realise there's a theme of being an overlooked younger sister, I'll alter a bed-time story that's mentioned in passing from Jack in the Beanstalk to Cinderella, say. Sometimes that develops, and I find myself changing scenes and events a bit to make more of it, or using a scene to bring in a different younger sister to layer things up. But it might be character: Lucy in TMoL only really came alive in the second draft, she was a bit of a puppet before, and I went through and layered in all the things I'd realised/discovered/invented about her.

Some will just be writing better: tightening and heightening, and for me more often expanding for more atmosphere/sense of place/tension, but occasionally cutting some description that isn't really earning its keep.

When it comes to others' input, I can't alter proper plot and character things just because I'm told to. I have to a) agree with an editor/agent/supervisor that as it is, it's not working, and b) see my way to make it work better, which will either be by re-writing the scene, or by finding an equivalent scene which does it differently, and makes up for what's been lost. It's a trivial example but for instance, if I was beginning to think I had to cut the bed-time story scene for some reason, I'd be okay to have a scen outside in the day to do the job, if instead they walked past a theatre and saw Cinderella was being performed.

Emma

Hi
In response to Rosy, I change quite a lot as I go, all the things you mentioned - adding, cutting, deepening motives etc. Also relocating scenes to a stronger symbolic backdrop - getting people out of kitchens and waiting rooms and on the move, knee deep in stuff, so they don't feel like actors hanging around the wings waiting to do their bit in the story, if that makes sense, which is how they often appear in draft 1.

But there's also an odd process I've noticed where I get a strong impulse to write a banal scene in which nothing much appears to happen, then in bed or on school run I'll suddenly realise what's actually happening there, and why it's relevant, or what that walk on character is in for, and rewrite accordingly.

Rosy, I write the way you do: every chapter is re-read, rewritten, edited as I go until it feels as good as I can make it. But now that I'm on second draft, I'm finding there are huge swathes of stuff that can go, and that new scenes need to be written - and am also facing up to the fundamental 'flaws' in the novel which need addressing (well, I think I am!). I have no idea what effect all this will have when I read it at the end - and whether there'll be more tweaking/rewriting to do then. The worrying thing is that I began with about 90,000 words and at the rate I'm going will be down to about 70,000...
Susiex

I get a strong impulse to write a banal scene in which nothing much appears to happen, then in bed or on school run I'll suddenly realise what's actually happening there, and why it's relevant, or what that walk on character is in for, and rewrite accordingly.

Yes, I often only realise what a scene's really for after I'm well into it. It thought it was about them going to a film because I needed them to bump into the villain, and it turns that long before we get to the villain one character suddenly comes out to the other...

Emma

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Susieangela, do you think that without the polishing and re-drafting, if you'd just got the bare bones and the roughly-right stuff donw, you'd still have realised the big structural things that needed changing? Or not, because all the polishing is part of the process that leads to that realisation?

I get a strong impulse to write a banal scene in which nothing much appears to happen, then in bed or on school run I'll suddenly realise what's actually happening there, and why it's relevant, or what that walk on character is in for, and rewrite accordingly.

Well I'm not sure about a strong impulse, these scenes are usually the ones I write when nothing else seems to be coming and it's hard work, but ultimately rewarding, because, as you say, one suddenly finds a use for them, or at the very least they spark off a useful scene or plot thread.

Susieangela, do you think that without the polishing and re-drafting, if you'd just got the bare bones and the roughly-right stuff donw, you'd still have realised the big structural things that needed changing? Or not, because all the polishing is part of the process that leads to that realisation?

Um. Maybe I'd have realised sooner,if I'd done a rough draft. I think the 'fundamental flaws' are things I'd skated over or fudged a bit. Don't know. Very mixed up about it all at the moment!
Susiex

I get a strong impulse to write a banal scene in which nothing much appears to happen, then in bed or on school run I'll suddenly realise what's actually happening there, and why it's relevant, or what that walk on character is in for.

This rang loads of bells for me, too! Writing (when, like me, planning is minimnal!) tensd to be a very intuitive process, and scenes appear, and then their purpose becomes clear as you begin to write, or even half way through. I so agree!

Rosy

This rang loads of bells for me, too!

And me. I've often written in details, or whole scenes, that don’t really seem relevant and then realised later why I've done it. That’s one of the reasons I rarely junk anything before the final stages, and I love the light-bulb moments when everything slots into place.

Dee

One thing that always shocks me when reading back what I've written is just how repetitive my language becomes. I found this phrase in some dialogue this morning, for instance:

'Mr Parker, this deal matters to us a good deal'

I really must have been asleep when I wrote that or, more likely, my mind was skipping ahead to the next segment & not concentrating on what I was writing at that moment.

So I have to spend a lot of time reviewing and 'decluncking' my language.

Well as Louise Doughty said in her Novel in a Year column, if you don't write anything you've nothing to edit into shape

Oh good. Not alone in that banal-to-relevant process.

Another one is conflation. I write two flaccid scenes or thin characters then merge them and they start a spark. That happens a lot. Which is one reason I have to rewrite so much. Hoping the instinct towards complexity from the outset will come with experience...

C

So I have to spend a lot of time reviewing and 'decluncking' my language.

This is me. I write fast and without any sense of where I'm going (someone in another thread charmingly described is as vomiting onto the page rather than bleeding slowly).

Sometimes I go back & edit the last chapter, especially if I have been too busy to write & have lost momentum. Otherwise I just keep going until the end and then I go back to the beginning & start the second draft. This involves a lot of decluncking & taking out the repetition but rarely involves anything radical in terms of restructuring (I might take stuff out but rarely add anything in).

When I get to the end I then go back to the beginning & start again. This can go on forever as the clunkiness is always rampant & distressing & takes a hideous amount of pruning. I have been to 9 drafts before now on a novel that I never showed to anyone but just shoved in a drawer.

As I've said before, I think the urge to write may involve some kind of genetic malfunction

I think the urge to write may involve some kind of genetic malfunction

LoL! I think it's a particular manifestation of obsessive compulsive disorder...

Emma

It's interesting how you put it, Rosy. I am doing a first draft at the moment, it's very rough and all in the wrong order. I am doing a mixture of throwing down bones and re-reading and editing to flesh out characters. As minor characters have developed and caught my interest, their motivation has developed and that has chaged the book because I have found ways of telling things and interesting sub-stories I would like to tell, and the plot has changed slightly as a result. To me, style is the same thing as pace and tension - the way you say something is how it happens, if you see what I mean, so I am working on these aspects simultaneously.