More words change your perspective

Published by neil on December 7th, 2008 Leave a comment »

A few months ago, when buried right in the middle of my novel writing, the thought of discovering a problem with the story large enough to consider rewriting perhaps 20,000 words and killing perhaps another 15,000 was horrific. Oh how attitudes change.

I’m 110,000 words complete in the second draft and a flaw has occurred to me within the pacing and structure of the story. The cause is simple and unsurprising: in my week-on-week working to create segmented 20 minute (about 3,500 words) audio book episodes, I have instinctively structured the story around those small segments.

This has created a rather odd story flow when all the pirces are joined into a single, continuous whole.

I knew some work would need doing

There was no doubt from the start that there would be a further re-work before I would feel comfortable tagging this book as finished, but the amount of restructuring as a result of serialization has surprised me; yet is not at all daunting.

My whole attitude to the writing process has evolved over the past year. At the start, I wanted to finish as quickly as possible, racing through sections to keep pace not only with the weekly audio episode schedule, but also my self-imposed notion of hos long I could continue to work on this. The thought of running more than a year on this single project did not sit comfortably.

Now, so far into the book with such a huge effort investment into it, the idea of a large amount of effort still to exert offers no concerns at all. Now, my attitude is if it needs doing, it must be done.

Deciding when it’s finished

A creative work is never truly finished, in my opinion. One must get it to an acceptable point of release, then let it out into the big wide world and move onto the next project.

The changes to Persistent Spirit will dramatically improve the pacing of the middle story. Right now it really does feel as if it has been created in small chunks. The story starts to accelerate, then there’s a cliffhanger point, then it builds once more to another cliffhanger. The rhythm of the text, to me, seems very contrived and is reflected by the flow of events through which the characters travel.

If it takes another year to get it to the right place ready for publication, then so be it (I don’t feel it will take that long, I should add). These novels are never going to be Pulitzer or Booker nominations, but they have to be “right”, at least in my mind.

Tags: Challenge, editing, re-writing
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