Editing your own work is hard. And I don’t mean spotting things that don’t work, missing words, repetitions, inconsistencies, lazy words, and all the other gremlins that lurk in the manuscript. OK, that is hard. But the hardest part is getting rid of things you’ve written that aren’t needed. “Killing your darlings” – those bits of writing you enjoyed crafting, that you thought were a necessary part of the story, but now realise are clogging it with extra words that the reader has to wade through.
That’s what I’ve been doing over the last month or so. After submitting it for the Write Your Novel course I did with the Australian Writers’ Centre, I had some time off from the manuscript. Instead, I spent time reading my classmates’ novels and providing them with (hopefully valuable) feedback. I started reading their feedback on mine but decided I should put it away for a while, so I had some emotional distance from the work.
I started incorporating their feedback in August, deciding what I would and wouldn’t take on board, which was challenging. Receiving blunt feedback can be confronting, but I know it’ll make the final product that much better. Others will always see things you never would (or perhaps, don’t want to see!).
That was my fourth draft, which I didn’t blog about, as I went straight into my fifth draft. My focus for this draft was word count. But not the same focus I had in writing my first draft, which was about getting as many new words down each week as possible (I have a lovely chart of that here). This latest phase was about crunching my word count from 159k to something approaching 140k. Lots of darlings to kill…
So, I spent about four weeks hacking away at my manuscript. Printing it out, scribbling all over it, making notes, then back to the computer. Characters disappeared. Scenes excised with a scalpel. Funny asides obliterated. All very Orwellian – as far as anyone who reads my current draft would know, they never existed – they have been ‘unpersoned’. Filler words like ‘just’, ‘looked’, ‘all’, etc. were hunted down and killed.
And at the end of all that? I’d removed over 18,000 words, with the latest draft sitting at 141k – nearing the range where an agent or publisher might think about looking at it.
The short answer to Willy Wonka is: the sixth draft, obviously… But there are other aspects of the end-to-end process I need to work on. One of these is the “pitch” for my novel, which includes summaries at various levels, from as short as ten words, to a “blurb” length of 50-70 words, to a full-blown synopsis (say, 300 words). Having tried it a few times, I know this is an incredibly challenging task – not one I’m looking forward to, but which has to be done.
I’ll also be looking to get feedback on how I’ve portrayed some of my characters, as they have ‘life’ experiences that are very different to mine. I don’t want to implement them in an insensitive or inappropriate manner. Research and my own experiences can only take me so far.
So, that’s my update – based on my track record, I may not have another one until 2023! Hopefully, I’ll be a bit more organised (and have something worth updating you on) and get one out this year. Even if it is about my woodworking adventures…
Can’t wait to read it! One of the blessings of the pandemic was the gift of commuting time back to so many workers. You’ve used those hours more wisely than most! But if you need more procrastination time, we really need a dining table.
Thanks Polly – my next thing will be a river table desktop for my new desk – that might be the limit of what I can manage to produce with my current setup…