It’s been full-on for the past week as I try my hardest to meet an academic deadline to get the development edit into my PhD supervisors by Easter, plus Draft 1 of a B-plot which, after five years of working on this one story, came to me last year.
My back can’t take much more sitting down, so here’s a selection of recent morning musings on my Facebook live diary about writing the seventeenth century witch trial work-in-progress.
Happy Spring Equinox to anyone else who’s always surprised when it’s not on the 21st.
March 20th. 05.58 approx. Today I'll attempt to pull together ideas for an All is Lost chapter for Tom's plotline out of the mess of multiple chapters I left as dross in Draft 1, with the new thoughts informed by my new fear that the Draft 1 ending is wrong. Not totally wrong. The basic idea is salvageable, I think, but it needs to be more nuanced if it's to be plausible. I'd like to type it, but I think that's just the urge to get it done. Rushing this won't solve the problem. My March ABBA post is due tomorrow so maybe I can think this problem through 'on paper' for that. Not yet six am.
March 19th. 06.58. A day of life jobs. I'll go back to Alys if I get a moment. Then I should write an ABBA post. Hmm. Not ideal if I'm still even vaguely thinking I might make the Mar 31 deadline, though the request was 'by Easter', so, what if I say Tom's development edit & Alys's Draft 1 will be done & dovetailed by the close of Easter Monday? Doable? Pic: yesterday's dog walk. Twas lovely.
March 18th. 06.05. Woken to a desire to put the work-in-progress aside after yesterday's dismal discovery of yet more major revision being needed. After three months plus of solid concentration it felt like a kick in the teeth to find I'd left chapter after chapter essentially at the Draft Zero stage of meandering half-discovery with a veneer of nice writing that utterly fails to tell a story. I should have flagged it up as needing wholesale rethinking. Surely, I knew it did. That's the end-March deadline blown.
March 17th. 06.31. Waking up to a big question. Is this 'a' development edit or 'the' development edit? Unfortunately, the answer isn't the one I want it to be, nor the one my PhD timetable expects it to be. By definition, if I'm still writing Draft 1 for Alys (or horror of horrors, Draft Zero, fumbling more or less blindly towards her story) then this cannot be 'the' development edit, and whatever I deliver to my PhD supervisors will be preliminary.
Is that conclusion an opportunity to break free from the self-imposed pressure to get it 'right' right now or a threat of more (endless) procrastinating because I don't have a deadline? Is craft a strength (let's get this done) or a weakness (let's package Alys & Tom's stories into industrial-shaped containers)? I guess the answer is personal. The deadline is hugely motivating, but I am fumbling in the dark for the dovetailed ending, hoping my storytelling instincts are good enough. With The Goose Road the denouement was the thing that my editor said she bought the manuscript for. That's a truism for any book: it's only as good as its ending.
So, a lot to play for but how do I play it? Plough on or step back & plot? In other words, what have I learnt about myself as a writer since starting out seriously to write fiction in 2007?
March 16th. 06.55. NB, I need a table charting Tom's shifting opinion of the trials from brilliant examples of justice to fiascos by the time he meets Beth, and ultimately to examples of injustice by the end. I probably need to add an explicit statement about each change of heart to keep myself & the reader aligned with this arc [so that the Act 3 deviation between his beliefs and what he's writing is clearly shown, rather than the reader needing to be told].
NB 2, identify the exact point Tom's story enters its Act 3. There will be opportunities as well as constraints from Alys's story taking some of the weight of the James denouement. Keep an open mind where Tom act break might be [e.g. this chapter you're working on!!!] [NB it wasn’t. All is Lost & the Dark Night of the Soul chapters are still to come.]
NB 3. Don't get frustrated. Tom's story has changed a lot because of the introduction of Alys's plot. Don't expect it to be simple to dovetail the two.
Re the development edit in general, it's interesting that I remembered the current London sequence as being aligned with the Draft 1 denouement, but yesterday I found a whole chapter that make absolutely no sense. From memory, I'd layered into this chapter Tom's evolving thought process about the past, having not known what it needed to be in Draft Zero, the very first full draft in which I was working out what the story might be.
Basically, the story was more evolved in my head than on the page.
I'll have to be meticulous about expunging this old story DNA from the development edit lest it damages the beast that is 'becoming' on the page. It will almost certainly take a fast read through of a printed version to see if I have made this arc clear. But that will have to wait till after I've dropped this version into the PhD system.
Re writing in general, this story needed to be edited at speed to establish coherence. Hopefully, being forced to draft Alys's story at speed will limit its incoherence. Overall lesson about discovering a stream-of-poo when you thought you were almost 'there'? Don't be fooled into thinking any of this is easy.
Rowena House Author on Facebook.
No comments:
Post a Comment