- Ghosts
- A teenage girl main character and her best friend
- An older sister who died in New York
- A suicide
- A falsely accused murderer
- A literal mad woman in the attic
- A jilted bride
- Old letters and diaries
- A ghost hunting expedition
- A fire
- A missing uncle
- Separated parents
Anyone who’s read Flying Tips will be like, ‘WHAT!’ None of
this is remotely connected to the
final version.
Things that did survive to the final version:
- About 1000 words
- Lou
- The circus family history
And that’s it. I ditched the rest.
I know a lot of writers who are at the point of sending out
manuscripts and getting feedback from agents and editors and being told they
need big revisions. And they’re bravely getting on with it but it takes guts to
make big changes and of course everyone complains about how hard it is. To
which I want to reply ‘1000 words. Out of
50,000!’ But that’s not helpful.
Every writer knows about killing your darlings but I’m not
sure we really get it. In theory, we know it means, ‘if there’s a bit you
really love, it should probably go’ but in practice we think it means, ‘if there’s a bit you really love but you secretly
know it’s flawed, it should go.’
But how often do you cut a bit that isn’t flawed? That was actually quite good. How often have you
deleted an entire character you really liked? A plotline that was interesting,
a subplot that was working perfectly well, a chapter everyone said was great, a
whole novel you’ve been working on for ten years?
The current issue of Mslexia
has a whole article on when you should admit defeat and give up. We’re so used
to giving each other encouraging pep talks about keeping going, this seems like
heresy, but sometimes it really is the right thing to do. Not only for your own
sanity but for the books and characters that will never exist if you don’t give
up and move on. Either temporarily or completely.
The very first document saved in my Flying Tips folder is
dated 2005. I wrote 50,000 words and I could have finished it, I knew where it
was going, the plot was all worked out. And then I just stopped. No big reason,
all I can say is that I just wasn’t interested enough to go on. I put it away
forever and wrote something else. I finished my second attempt at a novel and
it got me onto the Times/Chickenhouse shortlist and it got me an agent but it
never got published. My third was abandoned halfway through, as was my forth. I
was starting to panic at this point, imagining my agent sitting at her desk in
London tapping her fingernails and staring at her phone (which she wasn’t, of
course. She’s a very busy woman with better things to do.)
In desperation I
went back to the abandoned Flying Tips and started making notes for how I could
change it. But it had been so long I barely remembered writing it and I knew
that I didn’t want to just continue from where I’d left off. I was basically
scouting around for a new main character when Finch came along. And he came via
a typo (‘he’ instead of ‘she’). It was that easy. Suddenly he was there and the
rest of the book fell into place like dominos and was written within a year.
I know loads of writers who have struggled on with the same
novel for ten, fifteen years, or even longer. The more time and effort you put
into it, the harder it becomes to quit because you’ll have ‘wasted’ so much
more (though nothing’s ever wasted really). They drag themselves to their desks
day after day, dreading it. I half admire these writers because I am really not
the self-punishing type. I give it a good shot and I’m by no means lazy, but if
I’m not happy, I quit. I’m like a very mild-mannered hedonist. I’ll complain
bitterly for a while, but the instant I hit the point of not sleeping, not
eating or crying at weekends, that’s it, I’m out. Life’s too short. I do wonder
what keeps these very persistent writers at it? Is it about failure? Not being
a quitter?
I’m quite proud to be a quitter. I’ve had so many hobbies
I’ve lost count and I’ve quit most of them. But the other way of looking at it
is, I’ve tried everything.
Photography, book-binding, pottery, ballet, paper-making, jewellery-making,
soap-making, gardening, a post-grad in library management, knitting, crochet, guitar, keyboards, ukulele, dressmaking, yoga, poi dancing, Hawaiian dancing, juggling,
drawing, psychology, sign language, Italian, Icelandic, I was a professional
belly dancer FFS. The last time I went to enrol at the local college the woman
pulled up my file and said, ‘Whoa. You’ve done a lot.’
I have. I’ve got an amazing amount of random information and
experience under my belt from which to someday write stories. But I couldn’t
have done half of it if I hadn’t quit the other half. I highly recommend quitting.
There are other projects to be written. While you’ve been nursing
your ailing WIP for ten years, how many other ideas have passed you by? And
maybe all that WIP needed was some distance.
I often want to say to writers, ‘My God, you wrote this and
it’s really good and you’re only 25, if you can do this now then in ten
years, you’re going to be freaking amazing!’ And I genuinely mean it and it’s a
lot more than you could say to many writers, but of course if you actually said
that to them, their faces would fall through the floor. If someone had said it
to me, I’d have collapsed. Because you want it to happen NOW. Ten years? It’s
going to take ten years before I can write something publishable?!? Or twenty?
Or thirty?
Yeah, it might. The final version of Flying Tips was
actually a breeze to write (don’t throw things at me). Once I ditched my main
character for a new one, it went like clockwork. But let’s just examine that
sentence. I ditched my main character.
That was probably the hardest bit of the rewrite and I think a lot of people
will tinker at the sentence level forever rather than face big changes like that. And it took me ten years to get to that point, but
it’s a much better book and I’m very glad I waited for it.
Since Flying Tips, I’ve abandoned one full, and one half
novel and yet another 30,000 word draft. Which itself was a rewrite of a 30,000
word draft that was a rewrite of a 30,000 word draft.
I think quite often, if we have a workable idea, we cling to
it like limpets because we’re terrified there won’t ever be another one. We’re
afraid to sit back and wait for a better one to come along because that feels
like time wasting. Especially if you’ve got an agent/publisher/contract
waiting. But I’ve done that thing where you press on through with a workable
idea because you feel like it should
work, and it’s resulted in several complete but not very good novels. I learned
a lot from writing them. Mainly I’ve learned to be patient. And to cut and run.
She blogs about Writing, Gardening and VW Campervanning at weewideworld.blogspot.co.uk
@KMcCaughrain
