Writing and rewriting

The Secrets of Life and Death has had another round of tidies and spruces, and is back to my agent. It's been a steep learning curve. To some extent, my first drafts are just an indulgent ramble for me, to see if I fall in love with the characters or the plot. Second drafts are more considered, more with a reader in mind, expanding the plot if needed. Third drafts are for making sense, tying up loose ends, finding the pace. 


Then the real work begins. Although further drafts only take weeks or even days, they are essential. Pruning figures highly, and listening to my agent has been essential. She read the book as an informed reader, rather than a friend or fellow writer. She's looking for aspects of the book that can be tightened up, focused, paced better. That's what I was hoping to get from the MA, but in the end a few concise emails have changed my writing more than the master's degree. Fellow students on the course were wonderfully generous beta readers and made a lot of 'writing' suggestions. 


A last run through the hard way - read out loud - highlighted a number of bits of weak, clichéd or just repetitive writing. One week of polishing later, and off it goes for the pitching to editors. It's a relief, mostly because I'm itching to get back to Baby's Bones, which is evolving into second draft already. I'm incorporating some of the suggestions I used to good effect on Secrets, and it's working.     

Off to be tested

I received the last round of edits from my agent, mercifully words and phrases that needed cutting, and a few misguided commas. As two of my MA student friends had also picked up a variety of odd phrasing, extra punctuation and repeated words, I spent a few hours polishing and tidying, and sent it back. Although the agent is on holiday for a week, then she is going to run an eye over it and send it out to see if anyone likes it. My job is to sit quietly, get on with my writing, and wait. The one thing I haven't really mastered. So, I'm spending the time working through a collection of poems for the Mslexia poetry pamphlet competition. 


I have a problem a lot of poets face...if you write about experiences you have had, even remotely, people assume every word is true. So, even though you applied a lot of poetic license, rolled two experiences into one, added a similar experience a friend told you about and imagined how you would feel now, it is seen as absolute, complete autobiography. So, when I write a poem it's about my processed and blended memories and feelings. It's dramatised for effect, with insights added from life, and from reading. Now I am writing a series of poems about me and my sisters, both of whom are dead. I started by ordering my older sister's birth and death certificates, heartbreaking. Now, I wasn't even there, and my parents were incredibly young and the events must have been heartbreaking. But there it was, in black and white, a terrible drama of a baby born too soon, ironically the year doctors discovered surfactant, and started the research which led to premature babies of Joanne's age being saved routinely just a few years later. Imagining her life is based partly on what I know from having spent 3 weeks in a neonatal intensive care unit with my eldest child. 


My other sister died from taking an overdose. This is far trickier for me, as all my family were equally bereaved, equally devastated, and will have their own unique perspective. We never actually 'remember' anything, we reconstruct it from actual sensory information recorded at the time, what we know about the event, and then it's coloured by all the times we've reconstructed it before. Memories get distorted, rewritten, explained. Add to that poetic license, the other deaths I have attended, a good dash of imagination, and I have written about Sarah's death in a way that might appeal to an audience. It's going to be very different from the memories of my remaining loved ones. I'm worried that they might be hurt, or upset, or perhaps angry that I have used my sister's tragedy for my own ends. 


Myra Schneider said, at a workshop I attended, to put those thoughts aside, that the work, the art, has to be created, and the personal relationships are separate. She had a very unhappy relationship with her parents, which can't have been improved by her writing about it, but she shrugged. As long as the aim wasn't to hurt, but to find some truth in the poem...


So I'm risking it. Putting twenty poems together with the help of workshops produced by Mslexia, to create a narrative that explores me and my two sisters, and where I fit in. It also touches on what it is to be a daughter-in-law and a mother. It's been a fascinating journey, and I hope my family will understand. It may help that my mother is a poet too...   

New draft, new title, new pace

I decided to do an MA a couple of years ago, and it was a positive experience. I don't think I needed to do it learn storytelling, nor the basic craft of writing, but it definitely how to approach my own work as a reader. It also gave me a lot of confidence in research, allowing the new information to colour my book, until the final book is now definitely colourful. What it didn't teach me how to pace a novel, which was my main reason for doing the MA. 


That I have learned over the last few weeks. After a first read, the agent gave me simple but sweeping feedback on the newly titled, The Secrets of Life and Death. The historical strand needed developing, and investing in. So I sat down and wrote new chapters, effectively finishing the story, rewriting the whole thread to build tension. She also suggested I allow the emotional chapters more room, more emphasis, what she described as 'more violins'. The truth is, I tend to underplay emotional scenes. I'm worried about them being too emotional, but also, I tend to deflect my own big emotions with wisecracks, and so does my main character.


The second round of suggestions from the agent were to look at the baggy, unfocused middle chapters in the contemporary strand, and trim them down. I managed to find four thousand words I didn't need, quite easily, and rewrote one of the contemporary character's plot line throughout. This meant chasing him through every chapter subsequent to his arrival.


I also put 'LY' into 'find' on MS Word, and tracked down four hundred adverbs I really didn't need, or could write more powerfully. A few words like 'rely' and 'belly' were highlighted, but out of 99,000 words, a shocking 800 were adverbs. Adverbs are often unhelpful because they are shortcuts, abstractions, which tell rather than show. 'She walked cautiously' could perhaps be better written as 'she crept forward'. There are so many more emotional, active verbs, so adverbs are a cop out. I left a lot in speech, where we use them all the time, but was horrified how many times I had written 'really'. What a useless word! Really!

Second albums

It's quite difficult to write a book, edit it, rewrite it, polish it and put it out there for possible cruel rejection. Having got an agent (just pausing to pinch myself) I'm now aware I have to come up with a credible 'second album'. Although I just wrote a book I liked, rather than tried to think in terms of markets and editors, I wonder if I shouldn't be so relaxed this time.

Agents and editors want career writers, not one book wonders. I had already started A Baby's Bones, and was enjoying the story of Sage and her uncovering of the past, but I'm aware it probably wouldn't make a good second book for The Secrets of Life and Death. I've left Jack and Sadie bloodied and bruised, and they need to work out where they are going (and so do I). Writing a credible follow up (I hate sequels and trilogies) is sensible but I'm not sure how to go about it. 

So I've looked around at second books that follow a strong first. Some of them are, frankly, a bit weak, especially those that are written as the middle of a trilogy. I loved Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy but The Subtle Knife feels like the weakest to me. The novelty of the world building in the first book, Northern Lights, is over and the story is building to a big finish in The Amber Spyglass. 

I feel a pressure to go even bigger than book 1, as if there has to be an escalation. I suppose unless I do sell a book, and the editors there suggest a direction, I'm in limbo, and I can carry on writing for myself. It's a rather nice feeling. In the meantime, Jack and Sadie seem to be working on a  conundrum that might yet throw up the right antagonists. Otherwise the book is going to have to be called: Jack and Sadie go Gardening.      

Things have moved on

Borrowed Time is being renamed! As I worked on the edits, the agent came up with The Secrets of Life and Death. So I rearranged the whole historical strand and am much happier with the book. It's off for line editing, and then on to be prinked and tidied and ready for an editor to look at. 


Meanwhile, I have started looking at the next book in the series, easy as I have a major plot from my first draft of Borrowed Time (as it was) that I discarded because the one I eventually used was better for characters that didn't know or trust each other. Now they have formed a prickly unit, they are ready for a different kind of challenge. 


Like the first book, there is a second story strand - this one the history of the place itself, weaving its past into the present. It's distracting me from waiting - which I have never been good at.

Editing for the agent

The meeting with the agent went extremely well - she is knowledgeable about all the bits I'm not, like publishers, marketing, what makes a book sell. So I have an agent. Now she's given me a lot of changes to make, some very minor and some rather larger. I've decided to take her advice to the max, giving me a new way to completely restructure the book. I now feel, with her help, that I really understand my book (which seems strange, since I came up with it!), through the eyes of someone who has read and enjoyed it. 


Editing is painful, and with each idea I feel some resistance but, after reflection, I have been able to either see her point of view and make the changes, or recognise the problem and come up with a new solution.


Psychologically, I'm aware of the atmosphere we are immersed in as writers - it seems impossible to actually write a book and get it published. So this process of getting closer seems unreal. That makes it difficult to take it seriously, but working for the agent, sticking to deadlines, producing work to order - that is familiar territory. That I can manage, I've even tidied up the book-room and my desk (I doubt if anyone would notice much difference but I know). 

It's official - I'm a runner up in Mslexia's first novel competition

I'm very excited here, to see my name in print with the magic words 'runner up'. The article also names, finally, the winner, whose poetry is amazing and I'm looking forward to reading her book. My own journey is moving on, I have a meeting with an agent organised and hope to report back next week. It seems to me that the publishing world is fairly terrifying and complex, and an agent would help enormously. Keep your fingers crossed for me.


Meanwhile, writing A Baby's Bones (I finally came up with a working title) I have enjoyed doing historical research. I have a copy of the Earl of Leicester's household accounts (amazingly, not a best-seller), which I got second hand. What an amazing read, as they note down 'for your Lordship', every expense of running a 300 man household in five actual houses, as well as his quarters at court. Everything from 'a dozen fowles' to a coffin 'for the chylde of Rychard Pepper, steward in your service'. Fascinating stuff.


It did make me consider an issue of income. I don't make any money from my writing (yet) and it costs money. Books, printer paper and toner, even travel for research all add up. Not to mention, not actually bringing in a wage. I've started keeping receipts for books and stationery, but don't earn any money so I can't do anything with them. I was wondering if there was a book out there for authors about running a business as a writer? I would be grateful for any suggestions.