14-hour Third Draft Self-doubt Blues

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At 11.45 last night, after 14 hours of damn-near nonstop work, I finally sent off the third draft of Riptide Heart. It’s taken me so long because I hit a horrible stumbling block. For the first time with this novel, I didn’t know how to develop the story, and for the last week I’ve thought of little else. The stumbling block was as follows:

  1. Character A discovers a piece of information.
  2. Character A tells Character B the piece of information.
  3. Not enough time has elapsed between point 1 and point 2 to be convincing.
  4. Point 1 can’t be moved any earlier in the narrative without gigantic structural changes.
  5. Point 2 can’t be moved any later in the narrative without gigantic structural changes.
  6. Points 1 and 2 are too integrated to be separated without gigantic structural changes.
  7. I was unwilling to make any gigantic structural changes.

I turned it inside out looking for a solution. I tried rewrites, alterations, moving entire chapters – everything. But no matter which way I turned it, I couldn’t make it gel. Nothing felt right, and nothing was working. It made me miserable.

On Monday morning, lovely agent Sue dropped me an email, asking if the manuscript was ready. It wasn’t, but even as I replied, the block dropped away completely. Out of nowhere, I knew exactly what to do.

Yesterday morning, when I started work at 9am, I went straight to point 1, and deleted it. Then I went to point 2, and deleted it. Points 3 through 7 promptly became redundant. After a miserable week of stress spent questioning the novel, questioning myself and questioning the universe, this took me about 20 minutes. I simply hadn’t considered that as an option, and I’d wracked myself hollow trying to find alternatives. With joy in my heart, I set about tidying up the loose ends. My old flow came back in a heartbeat; rather than excising point 1 altogether, a brilliant alternative started shouting from the back of my brain. I made the switch. It worked.

With the last of my structural changes complete, I started, once again, the painstaking process of passing through the novel from start to finish. There’s no short cut to this, but I do it two or three times on every draft. It’s the fine-tuning and the rephrasing – the last check for chronology, for sense, for pace.

I could barely focus by the time I sent the manuscript away. My brain now feels like toffee and I have RSI in my right little finger (which, curiously, is the only finger I don’t use at all in typing, and consequently hovers under tension over the keyboard at all times), but after a week of anxiety, self-doubt and stress over such a small issue, I’m pretty happy with it.

Next up: Sue’s response. We’re getting closer to London Book Fair all the time. If I need to do another draft, it may not be ready for the fair, and I’m so keen for Riptide Heart to be a part. That said, I’d prefer it to be right, rather than merely on time. It’s fantastic to have such a strong editorial input from Conville & Walsh – their constructive, critical feedback is what energises my redrafts. Writing feeds on community, discussion and development.

A flock of Fire Cranes

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A flock of Fire Cranes

Here’s issue 2 of The Fire Crane, a magazine from New Writing Cumbria, which includes my short story ‘Nash the Mole’ as well as a selection of superb poetry, photography and landscape writing. The theme for this issue was ‘No Signal’, asking writers to question how we construct our understanding of the countryside.

I’d been thinking for some time about the traditional practice of hanging dead moles on a fence. This was how the molecatcher proved how many he’d caught, and then the land-owner would pay by the mole. The image had stuck with me for months; when I read the ‘No Signal’ brief, I knew I’d found a destination.

The magazine, which is printed as a newspaper, is available in libraries, museums and some bookstores throughout the county, and it’s free like a bee. Editor Mick North sent me not one but ten copies, which I plan to hide in random places. I’ll pop a link to the online version in the ‘Read a story’ page.

Once more onto the beach

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One of the hardest parts of redrafting is becoming immersed in the draft – again. When writing a long piece, I drown myself in the world of the story. The deeper into that world I sink, the further there is to come back. When I’m working intensely on a draft, spending days or weeks in the writing, I become moody and distracted, and I need to achieve a sense of holistic closure on that portion of the work to be able to push on with other stories or films or projects. 

This is now my third draft of Riptide Heart. It’s increasingly surreal to revisit words I wrote more than a year ago. I find it easy enough to jump back into the island of Bancree, to pick up the voices and the story and return to characters I’d said my farewells to – but emotionally, it’s difficult to step in and out of writing at those same levels of intensity, and that makes redrafting something of a rollercoaster. 

I think another few sessions should finish this third draft – hopefully by the start of next week. We’re getting closer to submitting the manuscript. I want to make Riptide as strong as possible, but the next novel is starting to sing to me, louder by the day.

Other People’s Bookshelves #12 – Layla of Impossible Alice

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I’m always fascinated by other people’s bookshelves, and this series by Simon from Savidge Reads saves me having to leave the house. Two good things!

savidgereads's avatarSavidge Reads

Hello and welcome to another nosey through Other People’s Bookshelves. Today we are joining layla to have a gander at just what she has on her shelves and why. Before we do though lets find a little more out about Layla. She has a government office job and lives in the gorgeous city of Norwich which thankfully has an independent bookshop, The Book Hive. She has been an avid reader since she was little, when she used to carry on reading under the covers long after she was supposed to be asleep! Both of her parents love books and so the house she grew up in was always full of books to read, and they took her to the library once a week – libraries are still magical places of discovery for her! She has been blogging for only a few months at https://impossiblealice.wordpress.com/ mostly about books, but sometimes about…

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Kill yr. darlings

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I set about the third draft of Riptide Heart last night, and cut out massive swathes of work. When I worked on the second draft, back in January, the greatest challenge was to actually start making changes to scenes I’d spent days or even weeks creating. I found myself pussyfooting around them, tentatively reshaping phrases and changing single words, rather than digging in to make structural changes. It was weeks before I stopped being so precious about redrafting. The third draft has therefore been strangely empowering – to simply blitz through the manuscript in one go, cutting paragraphs, pages and even entire chapters.

The third draft is now riddled with holes and littered with notes and reminders, but it was cathartic to do all the destruction in one swoop. Everything from here is rebuilding.

Redraft: take two

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Redraft: take two

Today’s post brought the manuscript of my second draft, including Sue’s notes. Much like the ramshackle clutter of the Conville & Walsh office, this is exactly how I imagined it should look. 307 pages of rumpled, tea-stained paper is much cooler than revisions in Word.

Quitting writing?

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I’m a writer. I’m compelled to write, and I love writing, but I nearly gave it up in 2012. The manic combination of a house renovation, an infant daughter and a stressful job scrambled my brain and body into exhaustion. I was slowly developing a second novel, but had few opportunities to write and only worked late at night with one thousand splinters in my fingers. With a brain like mush, I struggled to weigh the rewards against the mental torture and hours spent away from my wife and daughter. As driven as I am to write, I quietly considered quitting to concentrate on my family, my house and my films.

I was on the verge of abandoning the novel when my old university friend Ali Shaw got in touch. Ali is the amazing, award-winning author of magic realist novels The Girl With Glass Feet and The Man Who Rained. He is represented by Susan Armstrong of the Conville & Walsh literary agency. Sue was looking for new authors, he said – did I have anything I could send over?

I submitted a short story about a WWII fighter pilot. It’s an older story, written in 2010, but it remains one of my favourites. It was published in the second issue of Gutter magazine, and it’s fun to read aloud. I also sent a summary of my second novel, Riptide Heart. Sue called me up a few days later to ask about the novel. At that stage – October 2011, I think – it was about half-done, but Sue’s interest galvanised me into getting it finished. For the next eight months, on the rare occasions I had any sustained time to work, I crammed everything I could into my limited hours. As a result, the novel was written in frantic bursts – 1,000 words in 20 minutes, or 2,000 in an hour. On my last day of writing, I churned through 11,000 words in 14 frazzled hours. I spent another month redrafting, then sent it off.

I was proud of the story, but wasn’t expecting good news in a hurry. When Sue replied a fortnight later, I assumed it would be a rejection. It wasn’t – she loved the novel, and wanted to represent me and my work. This took some time to sink in. Even now, months later, I struggle to believe my luck.

I’ve now finished a second draft of Riptide Heart, and I’m about to start work on the third – which I hope to have completed in time for the 2013 London Book Fair. Sue has a fantastic editorial eye, and her observations have helped immeasurably in shaping my redrafts. Long conversations with writers like Ali and Iain Maloney, and my long-suffering partner Monica Metsers, have all helped too. Writing needs community as well as space. More than anything else, I’ve found I need people to read the project with some distance from the words. Working in such intense sessions means that sometimes I can’t see the wood for trees.

Regardless of what happens with Riptide Heart, this last six months has reminded me of how much I need to write. Like dreaming, writing is one of the ways I decode my world. Affirmation has helped me focus.

I’ve started this blog to record the process of working on Riptide Heart and future novels – I’m already planning the next. I’ll be posting updates about my writing, my films, the occasional book review, and links to things I think are interesting. So there.