Happy New Year! Having already failed in one of my resolutions from last year – to update this blog more than once a month, I thought I should rectify that as soon as I could this year. So, here we are.
The turn of the year also marks a writing anniversary for me – I started my first writing course on the 4th of January 2021, when I had no idea what I wanted to do with my writing, other than to take it a bit more seriously. That five-week course was the genesis of the novel I worked on throughout 2021. I think that having a complete draft of a story that wasn’t even a twinkle in my eye twelve months ago counts as a win!
Over the past few months, my writing focus has been on working up the second draft of my novel and engaging with a new writing course I started in November. Write Your Novel is a six-month course offered by the Australian Writers’ Centre and revolves around giving and receiving feedback on people’s work, and audio lessons. It is pretty demanding of my time and more than a bit confronting to know you’re going to have a detailed analysis undertaken of your writing, but I’m sure it will hone my skills as I work up my next draft of my story.
Speaking of which, I’m delighted to say I’ve completed the second draft of my novel! I’d hoped to finish this before the end of 2021 but missed it by a few days. The story has crept up to 159 thousand words, filling in gaps I hadn’t been able to work out in the first draft, as well as fixing up as many issues with the drafting as I could.
My redrafting process looked something like this:
1) Don’t look at it: I resisted the urge to reread what I’d done for at least a month so that I could come to it with fresh eyes. Ideally, I’d have put it away for longer, but redrafting became part of the writing course in November.
2) Print it out: Up to now, I’ve composed the novel entirely “on screen”, which is excellent when you want to search for terms, make global changes when you realise something isn’t working, etc. But the experience of reading on screen is very different to reading on paper – at least for me. I printed out each of the three sections one at a time (about 50k words each) and went through the process I describe below with each of them before moving on to the next section.
3) Read it: This is harder than it sounds – not because I didn’t enjoy re-reading what I’d done, but because it is difficult to spot any errors in text you’ve written – your brain “fills in the blanks” for any missing words, and jumps over mistakes. I found I had to concentrate hard on each sentence as it was actually written, not how I assumed it was. Even then, not every problem was picked up on the first pass.
4) Write all over the page: As I read, I marked up changes I needed to make, words I didn’t like, potential continuity issues I needed to cross-check, etc. Whenever I spotted phrases I didn’t like the sound of, I’d note them on the page for a later global search in the electronic version. I’d also hand-write new paragraphs and sentences that were needed to improve the story.
5) Back to the electronic document: Having worked through a 50k-word section, I’d then go back to the master document and work through each printed page I’d marked up, inserting the changes, searching for issues I’d noted, etc. I also took this as another chance to read the story and fix up anything else I noticed when looking at it in detail as I worked through my written notes.
The whole process took a lot longer than I’d imagined – not helped by a busy time at work, going through the course material, and of course, Christmas. I can see the benefit in putting the story away again for a while and looking at it afresh in another month or two – before I have to hand the whole manuscript over to my classmates for their feedback!
Reflecting on this first serious round of editing, my main learnings have been:
Familiarity with my intentions in writing a scene means it is challenging to spot when my intention hasn’t aligned with my execution. Ironically, it is much easier to provide feedback on other people’s work!
My first draft had a lot of “filter words”, which are things like “He saw”, “She thought”, “He noticed”, which are not needed – they get between what the character is experiencing and the reader. Chopping them out makes the story much more direct and places the reader closer to the action and thoughts of the characters. I understand this is a fairly common issue for new writers and is part of the “tell yourself the story first” that the first draft is all about.
I’ve read some other helpful hints for reviewing and editing your own stories, which I’ll look to employ for the next turn of the novel. One of these is to read the story in reverse order, paragraph-by-paragraph, so you don’t get caught up in the flow of the story but concentrate on what is written. I imagine that will take a while to do but will pick up issues I wouldn’t otherwise see.
For now, rather than extensive re-reading and re-working of the current draft, I plan to focus on getting more out of the novel-writing course I’m doing and looking for insights from the feedback provided by our tutor and the other students (not just on my work) that I can incorporate in my novel. The vast range of styles and stories attempted by my classmates means there are angles into the writing process that I would never have encountered through my own work.
So, 2022 starts with me in a very different place to the start of 2021 – I have a second draft of a novel, a website, and this blog. It reminds me of the beautiful quote from the Lord of the Rings (which we re-watched between Christmas and New Year to celebrate the 20 year anniversary of the first film coming out):
“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
Well, I’ve stepped out the door, and hopefully, by the end of this year, I’ll have a much better idea of where my path is taking me.
