I think the problem is that we have an image in our heads of how the book should IDEALLY be and if the reality doesn't live up to that ideal we feel like we've done a terrible job. We're our harshest critics.

That, I'm convinced is true. my parents are artists and often turned their canvases to face the wall because they were so hacked off with what they'd painted. Five months later, when the image of what they intended to paint had disappeared from their minds they could take a dispassionate look at what they'd actually produced and judge it more fairly.

Rod - I hanker after your assurance. Why? Has that happened for you? (Tell me it has...)

I agree that it's very hard - if not impossible - to maintain consistent standards in our writing. I know there are dark corners of all my novels, including the published ones, where I'd rarther people didn't look too closely (very much as there are in, for example, my kitchen).

But.... is it necessarily about variations in quality - about having an off-day (or an off-few-weeks)? Because even in the most finely crafted novel not every passage would 'sing' in quite the same way, would it? The thing would be unreadable if the same levels of excitement were generated by every scene. Novels need texture. The big, high impact scenes need quieter chapters in betweeen them to give them space to breathe; the poignant parts need lighter passages to ioffset them; the slow, careful descriptions need bits of zippy dialogue to balance them out.

So maybe the bits that aren't 'singing' aren't crap at all - just necessary ballast to keep the book afloat?

Just a thought.

Rosy x

In other words, maybe it's not really 'uneven quality' at all - just uneven (i.e. varied) tone?

Could be. Think I'm far too close to see right now...

cherys, I've mailed you, so as not to bore the tits off the rest of WW. It's a long email and you will be bored, very bored.

I've had an interesting time, proof-reading a printout of the text of ASA to go into my PhD submission. I haven't read the whole thing through for about eighteen months, just flipped to find little bits to read at readings.

When I handed it over to Headline, as it were, I felt as you do, Cherys, that there was a lot I thought was great, and some really cringe-making dodgy bits - as mentioned above.

What's taken me hugely by surprise is that, actually, it's much less polarised than that: it does all integrate and work together, the quieter, less obviously 'good' bits of writing, as Rosy says, are necessary ballast and one reads them as such, just part of the journey: a plain bit of functional A-road in between the twisting mountain roads, and the racetracks.

I think one thing that's gone, as you say of your parents, is that I've forgotten the circumstances of its writing: the bits which I struggled with, the bits which wrote themselves, the bits which replaced some darlings I had to murder. Before, my reading of what I'd ended up with was coloured by those, but now (though I haven't completely forgotton the agonies) I can read it more innocently. It's like meeting a long-ex-boyfriend and remembering, quite cheerfully, why you liked him.

Which isn't to say you should wait 18 months to read it. Just that, actually, as you say, you're just way, way, way too close to it at the moment.

Emma

It's like meeting a long-ex-boyfriend and remembering, quite cheerfully, why you liked him.

This amused me because just today I was thinking the book was like that awful boyfriend you could never quite bring yourself to introduce to friends because they'd tell you the truth about him.

LOL, Cherys!

R x