Editing and polishing my manuscript

Trafficking that was.....

This photo shows the first complete version of Ham and Jam that was completed two years ago on the Arvon Tutored Retreat that I was awarded. It has now undergone several reincarnations including two total rewrites. One where I took the number of points of view down from four to two and the latest one where I moved the setting of the whole story from France to the UK. At times it has been like pulling teeth, at other times it has flowed, totally unstoppable, like lava down a volcano.

The original story had sex, drugs and alcohol in it - after all that was my PhD. The latest version has none of these but does have a bit of violence and a shooting. I am pleased with this version and am confident that the rewrites have definitely improved the story. I realised I was writing  a thriller, something that never occurred to me I would ever write. But I loved doing it and look forward to doing more.

Having done the rewriting, I am now in the position of editing, editing, editing and polishing. It can be quite painful and tortuous as you try and make the manuscript as perfect as possible. This weekend I will find myself asking questions of the MS such as:

Am I telling anything I have already shown?

Is the dialogue relevant the story and moving it on or is it a bit 'talking heads'? (talking heads is where characters are doing a lot of talking but not moving the story forward)

Have I just info-dumped? Instead I need to drip-feed this information in. Resist the urge to explain.

Have I remembered to use the setting as a character? It can create moods etc - think the moor in Wuthering Heights.


Have I left some stuff to the reader's imagination?

After that, and using the 'Find' tool, I will search for the following words and try and replace them: 'as', 'very', 'then' and 'suddenly' - plus any other 'ing' and 'ly' phrases. I may not get rid of all of them but I will check that  there is no better way of saying it.

The slightly disheartening part of this is that you know if, and when, you show your completed manuscript, which you have lovingly crafted and can't see how it could possible be improved, they will promptly spot holes, mistakes and ways of making it better. Don't give up, listen and see what works for you, but most importantly don't ever be precious about your manuscript.

Right I am off to pull a few teeth ;-)

This song, Paper Birds,  is written and performed by one of my ex-students, Meg Burrows:

Writing and Sychronicity

Synchronicity is acausal connection of two or more psycho-physic phenomena, as coined by Carl Jung. Or in simpler language it is about coincidence. Freud might even call it uncanny. It is those moments when you think about someone you haven't heard from for ages and they phone you.

I had my own moments of synchronicity this week. At the weekend I was at an excellent conference entitled Great Writing organised by Graeme Harper. Here as well as giving a paper (I will blog on this later) I chaired two brilliant panels. One panel included a paper by Hannah Kent of Flinders University, Australia, which was entitlted 'Intuiting Agnes: Synchronicity, Research and the Writer's 'Hunch''. This was a fascinating paper about Hannah's trip to Iceland and how she kept coming across people who had information pertaining to the novel she was writing. She related this all back to synchronicity. Then on Facebook a link to a blog was posted which was also exploring synchronicity and how it can be used by writers.

I decided to put my penny's worth in too. I believe that synchronicity is very important to writers and we are not always aware it is happening. I would like to think there is some magic to it but logically I think it is more a case of the fact that we are very aware and highly tuned into what we are writing. Consequently we immediately pick up on anything that has a vague connection to it.

A couple of years ago when I was on an Arvon retreat I had been working on my novel Ham & Jam. In this novel I talk about Bill Milins who was the piper with Lovat's Special Brigade during the D Day Landings. Having just written the chapter that involved him I got up and went to the kitchen for a drink. The daily paper was open on the table where someone had abandoned it. The lead story was how Bill Milins had recently died. I hadn't seen or heard anything about this until I saw that paper. It was a very strange feeling. But this is not the only one. I have had many experiences like that and I am sure I am not the only writer to do so.

Synchronicity can also be a really useful plot device that can help move your story on and tie things together. I was writing yesterday and one of my characters was walking along a street when she looked up she saw a red car. This red car could have meant nothing except there had only been one other car mentioned in the whole story so far and that was, yes, a red car belonging to a particularly unpleasant character. A whole new plot line appeared in that brief moment that would create both cohesion and drama to the story. She was going to be kidnapped. When I started writing I had no idea this was going to happen. My unconscious stepped forward and took over. As writers I think we do need to have faith in these sudden diversions. It can take the story to a whole new level.

Have you had moments of synchronicity?

Here are The Police singing Synchronicity

The importance of settings

Caen

This week I have been talking to my students about the importance of settings when writing and the role they can take. I often find myself writing on assignments that there is 'no sense of place', that I have no idea where this particular story is happening. I am in no doubt that the writer of the piece knows exactly what the place looks like but has just failed to get it down on the page or even forgotten as the story is so real in their heads. They forget the reader is not privy to the inner workings of their brain.

I have been guilty of it too. I know I have previously told you that I write cold and edit/rewrite hot, where I go back and paint the picture, fill in the details or add the embroidery, however you want to describe it. I also know I am a very visual writer. The story plays out like a film in my head and this is the challenge to get that film down on the page so that the reader can see it to.

Setting can be vital. It can support or impinge on your character. It can help to manipulate the mood, reveal a character or move the action along. It can even set the period that your story is set in. Setting can include not just place, but architecture, artefacts, technology, books, food, clothes etc, etc, the list is endless. When writing it is always a good idea to be specific. If you are talking about seeing flowers, say which flowers. If you are talking about clothes, be detailed. All of these add a further dimension to your work, they can bring it life and lift it off the page. And this is not just applicable to the realist novel, even in your fantasy worlds there has to be a setting, a sense of place.

The picture above is of a square in Caen. I went to Caen the year before last as that is where my novel, Ham & Jam, is set. I needed to experience it in order to be able to bring some verisimilitude to my writing. I wanted to be able to see it, smell it, touch it, taste it and hear it. I write for young adults and they may not notice that I have got minor details right about Caen, but I will know. Researching your setting is as important as researching your characters I believe. I love doing both.

We are always told that as writers we should carry notebooks round to record snippets of conversations we hear, ideas that come to mind or characters we see. In mine I also draw things I see, by the way I can't draw to safe my life, but I can create enough of a picture to remind me what I was looking at. For example, there is a very bad drawing of a tree in my current book. It was a tree I saw on a train journey. I was travelling from Edinburgh to Inverness to go on an Arvon course. A spectacular journey which I highly recommend. On the way amidst a mass of pine trees was a clearing and in the centre, totally on its own, was a twisted and gnarled dead tree. How did it get there? How did it die? One day it will appear in one of my stories because that is what I like to do, make collections of characters and settings that I know eventually will appear in my work.

How do you research your settings? Does your story play like a film in your head as you write? Enjoy creating your sense of place in the meantime.

Here is Van Morrison singing 'Keep It Simple' because that is what we all need to do.

The end of a chapter...maybe

 A friend sent  me a wonderful Rothko picture today as she has spent the weekend going round art galleries. It sounded like a wonderful time. We had spent some time together earlier in the summer which included an indulgent moment sitting in the Rothko Room in Tate Modern followed by a glass of champagne. Moments like that add to the 'rich tapestry of life'. I can hear my brother cringing from here as this was a saying he and my mother used to use all the time. It came to mind the other day when I was involved in a Facebook conversation about editing. I am someone who writes cold and edits hot. That is not the normal way round so I keep being told. I get the bare bones of the story down so I know I have a structure and then go back and edit it by adding in the 'colour' to bring it to life.

I keep trying to write at the moment but life gets in the way as there are things that need finishing. I do sit there with my manuscript and pencil ready to give it a go but the mind always drifts off elsewhere. There is part of me that wishes it was this time last year as I was about to embark on a Writer's Tutored Retreat having been awarded an Arvon Grant. It allowed me a whole week to write without any interruptions apart from the odd text message. It was the most wonderful experience and gave me the opportunity to finish the first complete draft of the PhD novel. But it was also a time which allowed me to remember why I write and why I love it so much. If you get the opportunity to go on a Arvon course or retreat take it, you will be surprised by how much you get out of it. Not only did I get write in peace and quiet but also I met up with a great group of like minded people with whom I am still in touch.

This piece of music was one of the old girl's favourites. It is all drama which was her all over. Tomorrow, hopefully, will be the end of a chapter connected with her that needs desperately to be finished so we can all move on. Fingers crossed