Writing Diary: March

 

When I last wrote this diary, I’d just got to the end of the first draft of my new book. Finishing that draft coincided with my getting something else I’d written back from my agent with lots of things to do and think about, which turned out to be perfect timing. The thing about first drafts is that you really need to write them and then turn your back on them. ‘Drawer time’ some writers call this. What it means is that you get your mind completely free of it, so that when you come back to it, you view it with fresh eyes. You can see what’s great, what’s less than great, where there are holes and inconsistencies. Drawer time is an essential part of the creative process and having something else to immerse your creative self in totally during that time is a perfect way to unshackle yourself from the draft in the drawer.

 

Did I throw myself into working on the book my agent sent back to me straightaway? No I did not. I griped and complained to myself about what they thought needed to be done to it. I asked writer friends for their opinions about the comments. I asked my agent for clarification on some points. I resisted and resisted. These changes were IMPOSSIBLE! They’d make the story into something else entirely! It wouldn’t be my story anymore. I reread the book from beginning to end. I calmed down a bit. I thought about it for a few days, a week. I did all the other things on my to-do list.

 

Then I started with the changes that made sense to me, the ones that were easy to do and wouldn’t have a knock-on effect elsewhere in the book.

 

Then I spent a good bit of time on the beginning. The first 5,000 words are key. Many of the people who are going to be involved in buying and marketing your book will never read beyond those first 5,000 words, so they’d better be hooky as hell. Mine needed more tension, more threat. I tend towards subtle, which has its place, but maybe not in these first 5,000 words.

 

I came to the big problem, the thing that according to my agent and their industry reader knocks my book from realistic YA speculative fiction into sci-fi: the inclusion of teleporting. My feeling is that it’s such a minor element in the book that it can't change the nature of the book. The way people travel is very important to the world-building and in this particular context, I needed something as near instantaneous as possible. But could I have almost instantaneous travel in a ‘realistic’ way? I just couldn't see it. So I wrote a list of possible ways to doing this by advancing technologies we have now. I came up with a solution. It’s not as elegant as teleporting and I’d argue that it still seems a bit sci-fi, partly because I had to give more explanation of how it works, whereas with teleporting, well, everyone knows how that ‘works’.

 

More reading, more tweaking. Another beginning to end read-like-a-reader read. And now the book's with a couple of useful readers for comments before I finalise the changes and send it back to my agent to see what they think.

 

Which means it’s time to open the drawer and take out that first draft again. I’ve read it through. There’s everything I expected: parts that work and parts that don’t, a big hole where I somehow missed out a scene that was on my plan, some overlaps because I wrote out of sequence. But, you know, it’s a great story. The beginning and end are in the right place. All the people are there. I can see where I need to build on it. Drawer time, folks – it’s invaluable.

 

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What’s what when it comes to editing

 

The editorial process can seem impossibly complicated to writers who are just starting to interact with the publishing world or who are thinking about self-publishing. One thing’s for sure – it’s not just a matter of handing your manuscript to a single editor and having it emerge publication-ready. There will certainly be several rounds (usually known as ‘passes’) of editing before your manuscript if ready for publication.

 

Here’s my guide to the process:

 

Developmental editing

This is the big-picture edit, where an editor (or possibly your agent or an editorial consultant you’ve approached yourself) will take a look at the whole manuscript and give you feedback on what’s working and what’s not. They’re going to be looking at your characters and their relationships, the pace of the book, whether the beginning and ending work, the themes and structures of the book. Bear in mind this could happen several times before the manuscript is ready to move on.

 

Line editing

OK, so you’ve got the story working properly, and now it’s time for an editor to scrutinise the manuscript line by line. They’ll be looking for inconsistencies, errors of fact, repetition, places where the language could be tighter. Think of it as a style and substance edit. The great thing about going through this type of edit is that in the long run it really raises your awareness of the language you use and the way you structure your work, so that you’re always upping your game with the next book you write.

 

Copy editing

A copy editor is looking for errors of spelling, syntax, punctuation and grammar. They may also be concerned with applying the publisher’s house style to your book. House style is the list of choices a publisher makes in the case of certain rules of style or spelling where there is more than one option that is accepted as correct. For example they may choose to use double quotation marks rather than single for speech or they may use serial commas for lists (sometimes called ‘Oxford commas’ because they’re required by Oxford University Press’s style guide). A line editor is quite likely to also point out some errors along the way, but they won’t be paying deliberate attention to these matters.

 

Proofreading

Proofreading is the final stage before a book goes to print. The proofreader will usually see the text and images laid out in final page form. They will check that all the corrections marked up by the copy editor have been taken in, that the copy editor hasn’t missed anything and that no further errors have been introduced. They’ll be looking at the words but also at things like the page numbering, the placing of text such as headings and captions, and checking that the fonts follow the style correctly. In some cases copyediting and proofreading may be carried out by the same editor, but this would usually be done in successive passes of the work.

 

The key to understanding the process is that it starts with the big picture and then gradually works down to the level of the smallest detail. You’re very likely to be sick of the sight of your book by the time it’s returned to you to approve and answer queries for the nth time. What a good thing there’s quite a gap between the end of the editorial process and the moment you receive finished copies of your shiny new book. Now you can love it all over again!

Header image: A few of the editing tools I keep on the shelf next to my desk.

 

Searching for silence and stillness

 

My time is squeezed at the moment. From having no shape at all apart from what I imposed on it, my day is now divided up by other people’s timetables. I’m going to school every day. I’ve been a supply learning assistant for several years, but when I get asked to do it, it’s mostly too short notice and I have other things on. But just before Christmas I was asked to go and help in school when the new term started, and I thought, why not? I’m not going anywhere, nothing is happening. A week later, it was announced that the school wouldn’t reopen after Christmas. So I spent the Christmas holidays assuming that I wouldn’t be needed. But as it turns out, they do need me. The teachers aren’t coming into school, they’re doing all their teaching online, but someone needs to be there for the kids who need to come to school and one of the someones is me.

 

I thought about taking a break from my writing. After all, I have no deadlines, no one’s depending on me getting anything finished. But I had a plan and I hate to set aside a plan. So, I thought I’d try working very early each morning. I haven’t had a desk in our house for a couple of months since everyone came home, but if I got up and worked first thing, I thought I could get an hour at my old desk before it was time for its current occupant to clock in.

 

And so I got up, I fed the dogs, I made myself a cup of peppermint tea. I kept the lights dim in the kitchen; I switched on only the desk lamp in the living room. I sat at the desk with my tea and I started to edit chapter one of my rough first draft. Working first thing is not new for me. I’ve long grabbed my laptop from beside my bed, set a timer and let the words flow through my fingers for an hour. That time in the morning my brain is fluid. The ideas come and my inner critic is silent. I can write to a plan or I can write freeform. Just a little later in the day I find myself at the mercy of hunger or I find I need to tidy things away, do chores, organise things before I can settle to do creative work.

 

I knew that writing in the early morning worked for me. The question was would editing work? It’s a very different skill, after all. There’s problem-solving involved and you need that inner critic up and firing. That first morning when I turned on the desk lamp and started in on chapter one, I took it very gently. Just read it. Just comment. Don’t start with anything sweeping. And the happy answer is that yes, I can edit first thing in the morning too. It’s extraordinary. When my alarm goes off I simply sleepwalk through all the things I have to do. Ten or fifteen minutes later, I’m at the computer and I just fall straight into the manuscript, picking up where I was the day before. I hear the bin men, I hear the dogs moving around, the family getting up, but the door between me and them is shut and they don’t disturb me. I immerse myself in the words on the page, I question them, I move them about, I polish them; I find gaps and I fill them; I find waffle and I excise it. I give that manuscript my all until my timer goes off, then I shut down the computer and go and get in the shower. I don’t give the manuscript another thought until I’m at the desk the following morning.

 

I’ve been searching all through this year for physical and mental space to do my creative work in my busy, full household. I’m used to working in silence and stillness and there’s been very little of that here. But through this new turn of events I’ve found my silence and stillness. It’s a joy.

 

Now for the hard work...

This week, after putting the finishing touches to Gingerbread & Cupcake (out December 1st!), I’ve returned to work on something that’s been set aside for several months.

It’s an idea that I’ve been playing around with for years. In fact, it’s been with me longer than almost any other project. The first notes I made for this book were written in 1995. Ironic actually, since it’s about the education of a witch and I would have been writing those notes right around the time that You-Know-Who was working on You-Know-What.

Just get on with it!

Motivation is tricky for people engaged in creative activities. The initial enthusiasm, the new idea that you’re desperate to work on anytime, all the time, that doesn’t last.

Most of the time it’s slog. It’s digging the foundations, setting brick upon brick, standing back and sighing over how little you’ve done or how it sags, right there, where it really needs to be strong, deciding that the twiddly bit you spent so long on is just totally wrong and will have to go.

500 words a day - update 2

So here I am, halfway through the year, and my word count is standing at 106,380. Yes indeed, I have written one hundred and six thousand, three hundred and eighty words this year. It took dogged determination to start with but now – usually – it’s perfectly straightforward. I tend to write first thing in the morning, as soon as I’ve had my breakfast and got dressed if I can, especially if I have somewhere to go. Weekends can be tricky; the routine is all to pot and getting up always takes so much longer. Also it’s much easier to accomplish if I am either alone in the house, or if everyone else is fully occupied. It’s most difficult if we have guests or if I’m not at home. But I have managed every single day so far, even on Brexit day, though I felt rather as though someone close to me had died.

So what have I achieved?

I’ve more-or-less finished the first draft of a book I started last year, which is currently put to one side waiting for me to be ready to grapple with it. It’s too long, possibly because as I was writing I was aware that it wasn’t quite right but I just kept firing off another 500 words and another in the hope that it would suddenly become right. It’s a sort-of romance to go with my other two self-published sort-of romances, but finishing it is going to have to wait.

I have two thirds of a brand new book which I planned very thoroughly earlier this year. I’m expecting to have a complete 60-odd thousand word first draft of this by the end of August.

I’ve also written a ton of blog posts and reviews.

The next big thing for me to tackle is a big edit/rewrite/new draft of Reivers, the dystopian novel I’ve been working on for three years or so now. Someone (!) wants to read it, but having taken a good amount of time to consider feedback from various sources, I have some ideas to strengthen it, so I’ve promised this someone the new, improved version by the end of the summer. I’ve already done a little work on it, writing a new element, but now I need to totally unpick the whole thing, analyse what’s good and less good in it, and then sew it back together. I’ve given myself the six weeks of the school summer holidays. I have a spreadsheet to keep me right.

What can possibly go wrong?

Well, it didn’t help that yesterday I was feeling a bit lazy, so decided not to get started right away first thing in the morning. Then, when I was just about ready to go, unexpected visitors showed up, the kind of visitors you need to invite to stay the night, so obviously getting to grips with a major rewrite went totally out of the window. (I did, however, manage to sneak off and write my 500 words and finish an editing job.)

So now, I’m ready to get started – although already behind – but I do wonder how it is going to work, writing 500 words of one thing and then trying to immerse myself in an extremely different thing.

I will tell you one thing, though. Even on the days when most of my time is taken up by things which are not writing, the thread of my 500-words that runs from day to day makes me feel that what I am, primarily, is a writer.

Hear that, world!

_______________________________________________

Claire Watts writes and edits fiction and non-fiction 

for children and young adults. 

Her latest YA novel is How Do You Say GOOSEBERRY in French?

Sticking to the plan

Amongst writers of fiction, there are two distinct camps: those who plan a book down to the finest detail before they start (the plotters) and those who start with the first line of page one and fly by the seat of their pants until they see where it takes them (the pantsers).

Of course, not everyone fits into one category or the other, and, of the people I’ve discussed this question with, the majority come down at some point in the middle, although most seem more inclined to the plotter end than the pantser. At the very least, they are likely to have some idea of the beginning and end of the novel they’re working on, even if they are not entirely sure what is going to happen in the middle.

WHICH WAY TO GO?

The advantages of intense plotting before you start are obvious: if you have a careful plan, you will never be stuck wondering what to do with your characters next and you shouldn’t end up with a manuscript full of holes and inconsistencies. You can work in all that stuff writing courses and manuals talk about: narrative arc, point of no return, hero’s journey … You can make sure your subplot doesn’t take over and that you never put a gun on the mantelpiece and don’t fire it.

The disadvantages are just as clear: if it’s all mapped out before you put hand to keyboard, isn’t the actual writing going to be tedious writing-by-numbers? Certainly that’s how the arch-pantser sees it. For them, the joy of writing is waiting for the muse to strike, the penny to drop, the lightbulb to appear above their head.

POST-ITS AND GRAPHS

Have you seen those walls covered in post-its that some writers use to work out their plots? Those terrify me. What is on each of those tiny bits of paper? How do you remember if you’ve worked each one into your novel? And the graphs with the lines that build up and plummet and build up again. 

What does that mean? When I started using the trial version of Scrivener, the writing program, it just confused me. I need to make a page (card? panel?) for each character? And for each setting? I suppose it makes sense, but, I thought either it’s all there in my head, or else it’s not but it’ll come out when it’s needed, no need to spend an age working out what some minor character’s mother’s called, not if it’s not important.

The trouble with going for the plotter approach is that plotting is a lot like doing exam revision. You may know that once you do it, you’ll be able to achieve your best work. But there’s always something more exciting to do than revision, and people keep telling you so many different ways of going about your revision that you get confused and then you’re completely turned off the whole thing, and, you know, what the hell, it doesn’t matter that much, you’re clever, you’ll manage perfectly well without bothering.

JUMPING RIGHT IN

In my writing to date, I have generally started with a setting and an idea where I’m going, plus a few of the stops along the way, I might even have a couple of pages of planning. But it’s only when I’ve finished that I review how the plot has worked – or how it hasn’t. As I do my first edit, I make a spreadsheet of what happens in each chapter, what the timescale is, the setting, the word count and notes about what needs fixing. I suppose, in essence, it’s what serious plotters do before they start.

With my first book, I worked this way because I didn’t have any idea what I was doing, or whether I’d ever even finish the book. Now that I know a bit more – from talking and reading and thinking about writing as well as quite a few years of practice – I’m beginning to acknowledge that this is an approach that wastes a lot of time. As I write, I’m concentrating too much on where what I’m writing is going and not enough on the fine detail of the scene I’m currently working on. And when I reach the end, I have no easy way to judge whether what I’ve written really works. I rely instead on instinct, which is, I suspect, skewed by the fact that this is my new baby. Putting the manuscript away for a while works, but adds yet more time to the process and means I have to keep coming back to a previous story when my head’s already moved on to the next thing.

COMING ROUND

Recently I’ve been struggling with an unruly plot that seems to be taking far too many words to get to where I’m headed. I’m on the brink of finishing – I’ve written the end – but I know there’s something wrong with it. I feel unable to stop and take stock until I’m certain that I’ve supplied whatever it is that’s missing. I’m perfectly well aware that some of what I’m writing is going to have to go, but I can’t see a sensible way to pull out of the story without making it harder to sort out.

I’ve also been reading The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne and my dog-walk listening of choice is the Story Grid podcast. The Story Grid is a system for planning and editing your writing. It’s intense and precise and requires a lot of work beyond actually putting words on screen, both before you start and once you’ve finished. Gradually all that stuff about points-of-no-return and inciting incidents and rising and releasing of tension is coming into focus for me. It’s not that I didn’t understand those things before; I just thought they’d come naturally as I wrote, the same way spelling and punctuation do.

I was just starting to come round to the idea that serious plotting before I start to write is a good idea. I like to experiment with my writing method. (I may even write by hand one day – but probably not; imagine all the crossing out.) I’ve been asking all the writers I know about their writing methods, and one of them mentioned that she’d spent six weeks at the end of last year doing intense plotting. My first thought was, “Six weeks? That’s way too long. What a waste of writing time.” But then she told me how much quicker writing the actual book was when she’d done the plotting first. And not just quicker, but also more immersive. She started each writing session already deep in her characters’ world and didn’t leave it until she stopped.

That’s the thing that’s sold plotting to me: the idea that you can step so lightly into the world you’ve created.

So, I’m considering working out my next book to a scene-by-scene level before writing a word. I’m planning a series of four so I suppose I’ll have to give due consideration to what happens in the sequels too.

Though I have to admit, I haven’t been able to stop myself from writing a few scenes already...

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Claire Watts writes and edits fiction and non-fiction for children and young adults. Her latest YA novel is How Do You Say GOOSEBERRY in French? You can read the first chapter here.