Revising my novel (again!)
A photo I took on a much needed break from staring at the Scrivener file!
After lunch on the terrace, I free-wrote in my journal. It was a Tuesday. I’d taken the week off work to focus on my novel. I thought it’d be helpful to narrate what I thought I was doing. I thought it might feel like I had some company while I was immersing myself in this story I wrote in 2020 and lived in 2008. By the end of the week, I’d completely restructured the novel, killed off a major character with a moment’s grief and cut about 30,000 words. I worked intensively. By the end of the week, my brain was mush. It was emotionally intense too. I transformed this book from a private creation that exists only inside my world to a story that other people will hopefully hold in their hands and read.
Back in 2020, I wrote my first draft by hand, transcribing as I went. I revised it completely from start to finish. That was early 2021. I was (am?) angry with myself for letting it sit for so long but also, it needed to sit for that long. I needed to be grounded in the present enough to make it possible to go back. Also, it’s not quite true to say I didn’t work on it at all. I re-read the whole thing and made notes in the margins. I spent my Easter break trying to improve the opening chapters. That work is hard to see in the morass of a very messy draft, but it happened!
My plan, for draft 3, was to work through the 350+ page document implementing the changes I’d suggested in my handwritten annotations. Working on it made me cringe. Many of the things I hate in other people’s books I found in my own. “Show, don’t tell” I repeated again and again. I laboured over it, page by page, shaping it like dough. There were many moments when it felt so awful, I wanted to bin the whole thing. I’m very familiar with that feeling but somehow, it was still a surprise. I thought that anything that was truly awful would have been weeded out by draft 3. NOT SO, MY FRIENDS. I hoped it’d be like a tough run. That I’d slog through the early part of it, completing small, discrete chunks and building momentum so that at some point, it felt like I was running downhill. That didn’t happen. As with many things in life, the only way out was through.
Structure was the thing that saved me. Chronology is very clarifying. I made (another!) spreadsheet reducing the book’s sprawling plot into a neat grid of rectangles. I re-watched this video on three-act structure and reworked the book, first in my spreadsheet and later in my Scrivener file.
Back in 2020, I’d watched the same video. I made a list of tentpole scenes and stuck them to the wall of my office. “I could build a story around this,” I thought and I did. 82,804 thousand words written on loose leaf A4 pages, 2,000 words a day over seven months. It was thrilling and exhausting. Many of those tentpole scenes are now on the cutting room floor. They were the scaffolding that allowed me to build the story and now (I think), they have served their purpose. It was deeply strange to spend a week inside something I wrote and revised while living a very different chapter of my life. Some days I was proud of myself and grateful for what my past self did. Other days (most days, if I’m honest), it was endlessly frustrating. I fought against the mess of the creative process, the feeling that everything was everywhere, an incoherent scramble of half formed ideas. (God I hope I’m not prempting the reviews!) There were moments I thought I’d have to re-write every word. There were days I wanted to switch to something easier - to write a column or compile some links. When it came to it though, I couldn’t stop. I had to prise myself away from the desk in the evenings, wilting with over-work but unwilling to step away.
Making a new spreadsheet was my way of making a plan. And a plan made it possible to keep going. You need a wide expanse of time to do the heavy lifting of creative work. There’s no way I could have snuck the gargantuan project of reimagining my novel into the 90 minutes before or after work. In that sense, it was a very good use of 5 precious annual leave days. In another, it wasn’t. It’s more than a month later and I haven’t opened the Scrivener file since. My goal was to enter this year’s IWC Novel Fair and I didn’t achieve that goal. My next step (aside from, eh, finishing the book) is to find some readers. I feel like I’m in danger of over-working my early chapters, changing words and maneuvering paragraphs without good reason. I plan to share it with people who love me, who I am sure will say “yes, it’s great. Keep going.” I’m also looking for some neutral readers and am in the process of convening a mini-workshop group for writers working on big projects. (Contact me if you want to know more!)
As always, I didn’t achieve as much as I wanted to. But, I ended the week’s work feeling sure of the story I’m telling. That’s hard to measure, but it’s impossible to proceed without it. It gives me hope to know that this messy, imperfect book exists. What I have is more than a collection of words, timelines and vision boards. It has its own beating heart and an engine that exists independent of me.
