THE WRITING LIFE – THE FINAL CHAPTERS

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For quite a while now, I’ve been blogging about my experience of writing my third novel. It started as a series of ten posts, partly so I could chart my own progress but also because I thought it would be interesting for other writers to follow the ups and downs of the writing process. At first, I posted every week, then it drifted into every two weeks with a break after I submitted my first draft, which turned out to be around 75% crap! I dusted myself down, salvaged the little that was worth salvaging – the heart of the story – and started again.

Now, I find myself nearing the end of the current draft, which I’ve decided to call draft 1B, on account of the fact that although it’s technically a second draft, it’s so very different from what I originally submitted, it almost counts as a first draft. My deadline is the end of August, which is five weeks away. This will be a period of quite intense activity so I’ve decided to post every week until I submit this draft. 
This week, I’ve worked on the novel every day except Friday, when I was travelling back from a short break and catching up with emails etc. We had a lovely three day break in Haworth, West Yorkshire, where the Brontë sisters grew up and wrote their wonderful novels. It’s a great place to visit, and a great place to write. Here’s a rather windswept me up on the moors, communing with Emily and trying to breathe in some inspiration.

So, in awe of what the Brontës managed to achieve – without the luxury of cut and paste – I returned gratefully to my computer, ready for some seriously long working days over the next five weeks. Here is where I’m up to at the moment:
I see that in last week’s post, I was up to 82,000 words and I had three, possibly four chapters still to write. Today, my word count is 86,455 and I’ve written two new chapters. and yet somehow, I still seem to have two, possibly three chapters to write! I also need a short epilogue, though I don’t know what that’ll contain yet, and I probably won’t until I’ve read the whole novel through again.
One of the (many) problems I’ve had with this novel is the different viewpoints and timeframes – there aren’t a lot of them, but it’s a complicated mix. I have one character who we see in the present, the recent past, and the distant past. This can get confusing, so I’ve decided to put the present day sections in the present tense as a way of making it clearer for the reader. Going through all those sections right from the start is a fairly boring, technical job, but I need to get that out of the way before I start a serious edit.
After that, I think I’m going to read the novel through before attempting those last couple of chapters. I’ll print it out and make lots of notes on the MS as well as a list of things to be done, chapter by chapter. I’m hoping that inspiration for the final chapters will come during that process. 
My goal for this time next week is to made the tense changes and to have at least begun reading through from the start and making notes. I’ve started what I think will be the penultimate chapter, but I’m a bit stuck at the moment. l’ll keep going back to it over the next few days, but I’m not going to make that my focus just yet.
Let’s see how I get on!
If you’d like to know more about me and my work, or if you’re interested in attending my workshops, please visit my website, like my Facebook page or follow me on twitter

THE WRITING LIFE – THE VALUE OF WASTING TIME

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I was feeling a bit fed up the other day and absentmindedly picked these a few bits and pieces (some are weeds, I think!) from my teeny garden. Just looking at their prettiness cheers me up enormously.

Things are generally going much better with the novel now, and I’m up to 82,000 words of the new draft, and there are probably another 8,000-10,000 to write. Technically it’s a second draft, but if I’m honest, the rewriting has been so extensive that it’s more like a first draft. In fact, I worked out the other day that there are only about 15,000 words of the original version remaining, if that. Maybe we’ll call this one “Draft 1B”.

I’m struggling to get back into it at the moment having had an enforced few days away from my desk. One of the reasons for this was that I decided to change my workstation arrangement to make it easier for me to stand for part of the time while I’m working. I’ve read a great deal about ‘standing desks’ and thought I’d give it a go in an attempt to reduce my back pain.I wanted to set things up so I had the option to stand or sit. Re-arranging the monitors and keyboard meant unplugging and moving things around, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to sort out the electrics, which up until now have been a horribly jumbled mess of cables and extension leads.

So I arranged a couple of quotes, and now have proper office-type trunking and sockets along the wall at desk height. It looks much neater and tidier, and I can stand and type using the big monitor, or I can sit down, lower the keyboard and use the smaller screen. So far so good!

All this means I’ve lost some work time though, because apart from all the time spent disconnecting things, clearing space for the electrician, then rearranging everything and plugging it all in again, it seems my headset took exception to being unplugged and has decided to give up the ghost. As regular readers will know, I have severe RSI in both hands/arms, and if I type or am using the mouse for more than twenty or thirty minutes I suffer debilitating pain. Fortunately, I have a spare USB mike but then that decided to play silly buggers, too, so I had to wait until my son, who’s a technical whizz and without whom I would be tearing my hair out, had time to dial in to my computer and sort it out for me. He’s done that today – thank you James!

I’m writing this at 4.30 in the afternoon, so technically I could still get a couple of hours in on the novel, but you know what it’s like when you’ve slipped out of the ‘zone’. Instead of knuckling down, I’ve been faffing about, tidying my study and leafing through old notebooks. Interestingly, I found quite a few notes I made for the current novel that I’d completely forgotten about. Only scraps – a little bit of back story, perhaps, a character or location detail. These aren’t important plot points, but things that will hopefully add depth and texture.

To make sure I don’t forget about them again, I’ve copied them onto little pieces of card or scraps of paper and tossed them into a shoebox along with notes I’ve made more recently. When I embark on the Big Edit before submitting this draft, I’ll go through those scraps, discarding what’s no longer relevant, and working in the things I think will enrich the story. After my first novel was published, and to a lesser degree, after the second one, too, I kept coming across similar notes and thinking, ‘Ooh, that’ll be good for…’ And then I’d remember that it was too late!

So, it’s not been a complete waste of a day, and I’m looking forward to immersing myself in the novel again tomorrow. I have three, possibly four more chapters to write, then an extensive edit. Now the end is in sight (well, not the actual end, but you know what I mean) I’m really excited about getting those chapters drafted. One of the things I’m enjoying is changing the label on the Scrivener corkboard from ‘to do’ to ‘first draft’. I suppose I could just make a list and cross them off, which would undoubtedly be satisfying, but not quite as satisfying as this.

I plan to post it again in two weeks, by which time I hope to be working on the final chapter. Wish me luck!

To find out more about me and my work, visit my website, like my Facebook page or follow me on Twitter

THE WRITING LIFE – CRAPPY FIRST DRAFTS

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The blog is a little overdue again, partly because I’ve been working hard like a good novelist, and partly because, if I’m honest, I’ve been a bit stressed and nervous this last couple of weeks. As regular readers will know, I’m struggling massively with my third novel. Far more, I think, than I did with books one and two. I wrote a pretty disastrous first draft. Well, I suppose there were some things I could keep. In fact, it wasn’t too far away from this brilliant pie chart, which I printed off some time ago from  writingyablogspot.com and pinned to my noticeboard.

In my case, rather than forty per cent ‘not entirely hopeless, possibly reusable bits’, I probably had about twenty-five per cent. Where the pie chart suggests fifteen per cent ‘unnecessary back story’, I reckon mine was about twenty per cent. And I’d say twenty per cent of that draft contained scenes (and characters!) that belonged ‘in another story entirely’.

Yes, fellow writers and esteemed readers, it was crap with a capital ‘C’. Thing is, there were those ‘not entirely hopeless’ bits, and there was five per cent gold (potentially gold, anyway.)  I knew that somewhere in that draft was a story I definitely wanted to tell, so I virtually started again. I kept my central characters, rewriting them quite extensively, I got rid of a major character and two minor ones, and I rewrote a fairly important character to incorporate some of the things I’d lost by dumping the others

The initial structure was chronological but jumping forward years at a time with pointless ‘filler’ scenes in between (what was I thinking??) and although I knew it didn’t work, I couldn’t see what to do to make it work. I’m still wrestling with the structure to a certain extent, but it’s definitely working better now.

Anyway, to come back to why I was feeling stressed. I’ve never made any secret of the fact that I’m finding this novel challenging, I’ve been extremely open and honest, not only with you lot, but also with my agent and editor. Other writers have questioned the wisdom of this, (and don’t think I haven’t questioned it myself!) But at the end of the day, if you’ll forgive the cliche, I see no point in pretending everything is going swimmingly when it just plain isn’t. So, during my last conversation with my wonderful agent, Kate, I told her that my confidence was swinging wildly from, ‘yes, I’ve got it now,’ to ‘why the hell would anyone want to read this?’ We had a long chat and then Kate suggested it might be helpful for me to polish up and submit my first fifty pages to her and my editor, together with a chapter breakdown outlining the structure of the rest of the novel.

It took ages to ‘polish up’ the first fifty pages, because so much had changed. (these were the new fifty pages, mind, not the original ones) Every single decision you make impacts on the rest of the novel. I had to rewrite several chapters simply because I’d changed the layout of the house! Anyway, eventually, I managed to get those fifty pages in the best shape I was able to at this stage – they’ll change again, of course – and I sent them off.

Then came the tense waiting. They would either say, yes, you’re on the right track, carry on, or no, this really isn’t working.

They got back to me within a week, which, knowing how busy they both are, I really appreciated. Basically, the news is good. There are issues that need addressing, but overall they think it’s working much better, they think I can do it; they say carry on!

The relief! I hadn’t realised quite how tense I was until I got this feedback. I read the email twice and then felt my whole body slump, as though someone had pulled the plug out. I then had to curl up on the sofa in my study and have a little nap, after which I felt much better and was itching to get back to it. I’ve said I’ll deliver this new draft by the end of August, and there’s quite a bit to do so I need to really focus now. I still have several new chapters to draft, and lots of editing and rewriting before I submit. And of course there will be lots more revisions afterwards.

So after well over a year of false starts, wrong turnings, rubbish drafts and re-drafts, I now feel as though the end is in sight. I’m feeling good at the moment. I know there’s loads more work to do, but I’m feeling much more confident about doing it now. Watch this space!

if you’d like to know more about me and my work, do have a look at  my website, like my Facebook page and/or follow me on Twitter

THE WRITING LIFE – RETREAT, HOLIDAY, & AN ITALIAN TRANSLATION

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A fairly short post this time. What do you mean, “good”? I’ll start with a picture of gorgeous early morning sunlight pouring down onto the sea at Scalby, which is near Scarborough, just because I find it so inspiring. This was at six in the morning, and it was worth getting up early for.

After the doom and gloom of previous posts, I’m sounding a bit more cheerful this time, mainly because I’ve made good progress with the novel over the last couple of weeks. We had a week’s holiday in Scalby, where part of my new novel is set. It was a quiet cottage holiday, lots of eating and drinking, reading, writing and enjoying this gorgeous sea view. (above) I also spent a lot of time walking along the Scarborough seafront (below) and thinking about my novel.

You may remember I’ve been struggling with structure. I’ve gone through several stages of planning the structure, refining all the time, but while we were away, I think I finally bashed it into a properly workable shape. I typed out a chapter breakdown in three different colours to denote the different strands, and I’ve found that helpful. I came back feeling much more positive. Then, three days later I was off again to a writing retreat. I’ve blogged about these several times before and regular readers will know that I am a huge fan of the writing retreat.

The one I’ve been on this time (for the fourth time!) is particularly conducive to work because it’s just me, in my little room, with my wonderful host bringing me meals and encouragement. And the meals – I’m surprised I haven’t put on a stone! This was one day’s lunch:

If you think you might benefit from this retreat, which is in the Forest of Dean, you can find details here It works very well for me because if there are lots of other writers around, I’m tempted to spend too much time chatting. But here, I really work! During my five-day stay, I moved the new draft forward from 48k words to 66k. Probably around 3000 words were imported from a previous draft, but even they were edited. I still have a lot of work to do, but it’s all looking much healthier. Now I’m home, I’m trying to crack on, and resenting having to do admin, shopping, laundry etc. Ah well.

In other news, the Italian translation of The Secrets We Left Behind will be published soon, and I’m quite happy with the cover.

I can’t say I ever saw it as a thriller, but hey, what do I know?

This evening (4th June) I’m off to the Derby Literary Festival with four other local writers. We’ll be reading from our work and talking about books, writing and publication and taking questions. do come along if you can – it’s £4 but it’ll be worth it! Details here: Hallam writers on the road – to publication

I’ll leave it there for now, because I need to sort out my reading and talk for tonight. but if you’d like to know more about me and my work, please visit my website, like my Facebook page or follow me on Twitter


THE WRITING LIFE – AMERICAN AND GERMAN EDITIONS

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Do click on this to see it in all its glory – the cherry trees in our road

Thought I’d just start with a picture of what I see if I stick my head out of my study window and look to the right – never fails to cheer me up!

Anyway, I’m ridiculously busy at the moment, not only in terms of the redrafting, of which more in a moment, but with teaching work. As you may know, I’m an associate lecturer with Sheffield Hallam University and have been supervising some students on the writing MA this year. It’s all been a bit frantic in the last couple of weeks because four of my students were about to hand in their complete novels (so proud of them!) They handed in last week, and I thought I’d have a bit of a break before it all starts again in October. I hadn’t realised I would be called upon for marking….

So basically, I now have a phenomenal amount of reading to do over the next few weeks. It all needs to be read, marked and comments written by 12th June, and between now and then, I have a week’s holiday,(yay) a few days on a writing retreat (double yay) a dental appointment, a hospital appointment, three days of babysitting, and a visit from my mother! Pass the gin!

With all that coming up, I find myself slightly on the verge of hysteria. On the upside, The Secrets We Left Behind has just been published in America – the cover is very different to the UK version, but I rather like it.

Also, I’ve just received my copies of the German edition of The Things We Never Said. The German title translates as, I Have Always Loved You.

Pretty cover, isn’t it?

Anyway, back to the current novel, my third. With all this work piling up, the thing that I’m most concerned about is the resultant lack of progress on the redrafting. Progress is slow. This is the most extensive redraft I’ve ever done, and while I’m convinced that there is a good, deeply emotional story at the heart of my idea, my confidence is wavering on my ability to do it justice. As the late, great Iris Murdoch once said, “every book is the wreck of a perfect idea”. You weren’t far wrong there, Iris!

Having said that, on Monday I had a lovely reassuring chat with my agent, who said she thinks I’m much further on than I think I am – I hope she’s right! We’re going to touch base again in a few weeks, when I hope I’ll have made a significant surge forward – I’m hoping to get a fair bit done while I’m on holiday, and then I have a few days’ retreat, and I always get more words down in that situation than in any other.

A quick word about writing on holiday – I’ve had one or two writer friends express surprise that I do this. One once said, ‘a holiday should be a holiday’. But although writing is a job, to a certain extent, a writer is who you are, and you can’t take time off from being who you are. While I can’t compete with Stephen King who writes 364 days a year – he takes Christmas Day off to please his family, then admits that he usually sneaks off and writes a couple of hundred words even then – I am of the opinion that if you have a work in progress, why would you want to take a whole week or even two away from it unless you were stuck? I was chatting a while ago to Gavin Extence, author of The Universe Versus Alex Woods, and The Mirror World of Melody Black, and he said that he loves writing on holiday, because even if he just does a few hundred words a day, every one of those words feels like a bonus, because he’s been enjoying a holiday at the same time.

What do you think? Do you write while on holiday? If not, do you spend time thinking about your WIP, or do you take a complete break in the hope that your subconscious will crack on while you’re relaxing?

That’s about it now. I’ll be back in a couple of weeks, hopefully with some significant progress to report!

If you’d like to know more about me and my work, please visit my website, like my Facebook page, or follow me on Twitter (Though I’ll probably only be sticking my head in to Twitter now and again over the next few weeks for obvious reasons!)

THE WRITING LIFE – MORE REDRAFTING

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Oh dear, I thought it was three weeks since my last confession – I mean blog post – but it appears to be four. Health issues have held me up a bit, including a bout of debilitating back pain from which I still haven’t fully recovered. Back pain is an issue for many writers, so it’s possibly worth talking about for a moment before I move on to my writing progress. We all know we’re supposed to get up and move around every 20 to 30 minutes, but how many of us do? It can take me an hour to get myself into ‘the zone’, so the last thing on my mind once I’m there is getting up and breaking the spell.

My son set up a clever little system on my PC where reminders to take a break flash up on my screen. It worked for the first day or two, then it got on my nerves and I turned it off. I always thought I was doing the right thing by ‘sitting up straight’, but my physiotherapist told me that was part of the problem – I was sitting up so straight all day that I was going to bed with my back locked. He recommended a good exercise for this: sit deliberately slumped, then with your right hand on your left shoulder and left hand on your right shoulder, rotate from the waist as far as you can go in each direction. Repeat a few times.

I do ‘core stability’ exercises too, but as soon as my back improves, I forget to do the exercises and it gets bad again. I clearly need to change the way I work. I’ve been looking into the idea of standing desks. At the moment, I’m improvising and have my laptop wedged on a high-ish, wide windowsill. I can’t to do much typing like this, because I have RSI in both arms, but I use voice recognition software so I can dictate and use the keyboard occasionally while standing rather than sitting. So far, so good. You forget you’re standing after a few minutes, and I certainly feel it’s better for my back.

And so to the novel. Regular readers will know I’m having terrible problems with this one, particularly in terms of structure. Over the last few weeks, I have spent many hours staring at the screen until my eyes hurt, trying to figure out a way to put the whole thing together.

Rearranging slips of paper always helps!

It’s one particular character’s story, that of the mother, that’s causing me the most problems. We need to see her past story from her viewpoint, but her present from the point of view of her daughter, who is the central character and whose own stories, both past and present, are told from her viewpoint.

In the end, I was feeling so despondent about finding a way to do this that I decided to temporarily abandon the mother’s story and just concentrate on how I was going to structure the daughters past/present stories. So I wrote a list of scenes, using a different colour for the scenes set in the past, then I cut them up and spent ages rearranging them into what I hoped would be a workable structure. Only then did I go back to the mother’s past story. I typed out the scenes I wanted to include – there are fewer of these than of the other two strands – changed them to a third colour, then cut them up and tried to intersperse them among the daughter’s past and present scenes.

I found I was feeling mildly less stressed simply by being able to see those scenes laid out roughly where I want them to be in terms of how I want the story to unfold. The problem I have now is finding a way of weaving them smoothly into the other narrative. I think I’ve come up with a way of doing that, but don’t really want to reveal it here. If it works, hopefully you’ll read it in the finished novel; if it doesn’t, I’ll be moaning on here and telling you all about it over the next few weeks!

I’m really struggling at the moment with lack of time, even though I’m virtually a full-time novelist. I  teach as well, but it’s very part-time – one evening class a week and some one-to-one sessions with MA students, so it shouldn’t dominate my time. Nevertheless, I seem to need a 36-hour day and a nine-day week, and I suspect my days would be quite full even without the teaching. Non-writers often imagine that authors sit at their desks for seven or eight hours a day just churning out words, but there are lots of other things we have to do. (I must blog specifically about this one day!)

Today, I’ve spent quite a while on emails, for example, and I often find answering an email will simply bring forth another email which will also need to be answered. Today, I’ve dealt with a query about an author event, questions on pronunciation from the American narrator of the audiobook version of The Secrets We Left Behind, an email from my accountant, and emails from three different writer friends (all on writing matters!) I regard Tweeting and Facebook-ing (can Facebook be a verb?) as part of my job, too, though I’ve been woefully inadequate in that area over the last few weeks.

Although it seems a rather bizarre thing to say, I’m looking forward to going on holiday for a week in May so that I can spend a bit more time on this novel!

To find out more about me or my work, visit my website, like my Facebook page or follow me on Twitter @sewelliot

THE WRITING LIFE – YORKSHIRE POST LITERARY LUNCH

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I feel I should start this blog, ‘it has been three weeks since my last confession…’

You’ll see why. Anyway, a slightly late post this time, partly because if I’d kept to the fortnightly posts, the next one would fall on Easter Monday, when anyone with any sense will be eating chocolate, not sitting at a computer reading my blog. The other reason is that this time last week, I was at the point of despair with my current draft and I couldn’t quite bear to talk about it. I’m feeling a little more positive now, though, so here’s what’s been going on.

First, I was ill. Not properly, seriously ill, but a lingering head cold which then turned to sinusitis. With a painful, bunged up head, I couldn’t even think straight, never mind sort out the complex structural problems with my novel. Even worse, I spotted a major plot flaw, and not surprisingly, this induced an intense plummeting in confidence. This was all Not Very Nice. I racked my brains (my poor, thickening, stuffed up brains) but I couldn’t think of a solution. Then I had a good chat with an author friend who reassured me that it was a solvable problem, that I’d just got myself into a can’t see the wood for the trees state. She made a couple of suggestions, I wrote the scene I’d been so worried about, and hey presto, it works! At least, I think it does.

I still have structure/viewpoint problems, but I’m sure I’ll find a way through those eventually. So not much tangible progress since last time, I’m afraid. Time has been a bit of an issue, mainly because of my teaching work, which involves a lot of reading as well as the face-to-face meetings. But, as I always tell my students, you need to make time, so I’m ring-fencing some days over the next two weeks to really focus on the issues with this draft.

Last week, I was lucky enough to be a guest speaker at the Yorkshire Post Literary Lunch at the Old Swan Hotel in Harrogate. There were around 120 guests, which is the largest audience I’ve addressed so far, so I was a teeny bit nervous. However, I managed to get through it without making a tit of myself. I could see smiling faces, I got the odd laugh, and a few people came up afterwards and said they’d enjoyed my talk, so phew! I was made very welcome by the organisers, and had the pleasure of meeting my fellow speakers, the acclaimed crime writer David Mark, and the poet and novelist Wendy Bardsley.

As you can see from this is not very flattering (of me) press photo, David, who writes ‘gruesome’ thrillers and is charming and funny, was more the star turn, with Wendy and me as his backing group! It was a lovely event, though, and I enjoyed the day immensely.

Being at the Old Swan in Harrogate was tinged with sadness for me, because the last time I was there two years ago, was to attend a family gathering in memory of my dear grandma-in-law, Winifred, who’d died aged 96 the previous year. I first met Winifred when I was in my forties and she was approaching ninety. My husband hadn’t seen her for some years, and we prepared ourselves to ‘make conversation’. But Winifred turned out to be an attractive, fiercely intelligent, witty, wise woman with whom I hit it off immediately. We soon became close friends, despite a 40-odd year age difference.

It was nice to be able to mention this at the lunch in connection with The Secrets We Left Behind. One of the themes in the book is female friendships, and my central character has developed a close friendship with her much-older mother-in-law. Yes, that character, Estelle, is based on Winifred! One of the joys of being a writer is that you can play God to a certain extent. Ian Rankin said in a documentary recently that if someone annoys you, you can ‘bump them off’ in a book. I wrote Estelle partly as tribute to Winifred, and perhaps as a way of feeling I was spending a little time with her. My great sadness, as I told the Literary Lunch guests, is that she died a few months before I got my publishing deal. She would have floated up to the ceiling with pride.

On the subject of publishing, my first novel, The Things We Never Said, is published in Germany this week, under the title Ich Habe Dich Immer Geliebt, which translates as, I Have Always Loved You. It has a rather lovely cover, too.

That’s about it for this time. I hope to have moved forward much more decisively by next time. My novel group is meeting this week, so I’ll get some feedback on that tricky scene, and I’ll also run my structural problems past them to see if anyone has any bright ideas. I have a few appointments over the next two weeks, and I need to start preparing the short story course and teaching after Easter, but apart from that, I should be able to crack on.

I hope everyone has a good Easter break, and let’s hope the weather is a little more clement two weeks from now!

To find out more about me and my work, please visit my website, follow me on Twitter @sewelliot, or like my Facebook page

THE WRITING LIFE – RETHINKING, REDRAFTING

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For no other reason than I love this picture and don’t want to publish this blog without including something pretty to look at, here’s a snap I took in November while on an Arvon writing retreat at Lumb Bank

By ‘eck, I’ve been working hard these last two weeks. Not that I don’t always work hard, you understand, but now I’m talking back-aching, neck and shoulder-aching, brain-hurting sort of hard. It’s structure, you see. I keep thinking I’ve got it nailed, then as I start to write, I realise, Oh, that can’t go there, because that hasn’t happened yet and it’ll give away that other thing … Or something along those lines. This has happened several times over the last couple of weeks, and I really feel as though I’m taking two steps forward and one and a half back; maybe one, if I’m being optimistic.

The main problem is, I think, that I have two viewpoint characters, one whose head we’re in both in the present and in the past, and the other who we only see from the first character’s viewpoint in the present, but into whose head we go in the past. So I’m basically juggling Character A present, Character A past (both from her viewpoint), Character B present (from character A’s viewpoint) and Character B past, from her own viewpoint. With me so far?  Thought not. If anyone knows any novels where something similar happens, pleeeeeease let me know!

Anyway, in my last post, I mentioned having cut more than half my original draft. It was scary, but necessary. I had lots of lovely supportive comments both on Twitter, and on the post itself. My thanks particularly to Rachael Dunlop who said that she’d had a similar experience, but rather than cutting, she put the original MS aside and started again from the beginning, because, she says, “at least this means the word count goes up and not down.” This is good psychology! I’ve now done the same thing, starting with 15,000 words (all completely new or significantly rewritten). I still have all the original scenes on my desktop for when I need to refer to them, but so much has changed that there’s very little, if anything, that I can simply paste into the new draft.

Because of the structural issues, there is a great deal of thinking to do, and while I’m normally in favour of taking a break now and again to let my subconscious do some of the work, I spent one day away from it last week and found that it set me back considerably because I lost the train of thought I’d been following with a particular problem. Having said that, it’s not good to have no breaks at all, so the best solution I can think of for now is to make sure I look at the work every day, just so that I stay familiar with it, and also to keep a large notepad beside me so I can write down every idea/possible solution as it comes to me. Then I just need to cross it out if I decide not to use it.

The current new word count is 23,760, so I’m not quite making my target of 5000 words a week, but then I know it’ll be much higher some weeks because it’ll simply be a question of rewriting, rather than completely rethinking. So, I’m plodding on, slowly but surely.

I’m trying to stay positive and optimistic, and it really helps that spring is on the way – here’s another lovely picture to prove it:

And just to round off, I’d like to share a couple of nice things that have happened since my last post: I’ve been invited to speak at the Yorkshire Post Literary Lunch on 26th March, which I’m looking forward to immensely, and also, I’ve had another one of those rather special reader emails. It’s always lovely to hear from readers (and I always reply), and I particularly like the emails where they include something about themselves, or why the book had particular resonance for them. Just after my last blogpost, I received an email from a reader who said that, due to family/work circumstances, she’d got out of the habit of reading and hadn’t read much at all for the last twelve years. My books, she said, had ‘reignited’ her love of reading. How lovely is that?

This is the second time a reader has told me that one or both of my books have started them reading again after a long break. I can’t think of many things you could say to an author that would be more pleasing than this. And as always, I’m immensely touched when a reader takes the time to write and let me know that they’ve enjoyed my books. In fact, even as I’m typing this, I’m smiling!

And on that note, I’ll sign off and see you in two weeks time with another update!

To find out more about me and my work, please visit my website, follow me on Twitter @sewelliot, or like my Facebook page

THE WRITING LIFE – RETREAT, RETHINK, REDRAFT

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When I last posted two weeks ago, I’d done lots of thinking and planning for this gargantuan re-draft. I hadn’t started the actual rewriting at that point, but was hopeful about the progress I’d make while on a writing retreat in the Forest of Dean. Here’s a picture of the balcony outside my room, bathed in golden afternoon sunlight.

Part of my revision process has involved getting rid of a character who’d had quite a substantial part in the novel. What I’d realised, though, was that while he did have some important work to do, the storyline that sprang from him was complicating matters, and wasn’t really relevant, so he had to go. Here’s the fun post in which I gave him the sack! The home for redundant characters

But as I say, he did have an important role, so I then went through every chapter that featured him and identified what was essential to the storyline, the things I just couldn’t afford to lose. I decided that most of those areas could be covered by another character, so her role has now become much more important. I’ve essentially combined two (possibly three) characters.

I marked the bits from the original character that  I wanted to keep and the rest, even the good stuff, had to go. Before I left for the retreat, I’d cut 36,000 words from the draft, and I did it (almost) without flinching.

I then printed out the remaining 59,000 words. First, I identified chapters that I thought (in my foolish naivete) could be kept with minimal rewriting. I went through the rest with a highlighter pen, marking out what to keep rather than what to cut. I didn’t start deleting at this point, though – I’m brave, but not that brave! I knew there would be a lot more to go, but I didn’t think I could take seeing the word count plummet much lower until I had some new words to replace them.
Off I went on my retreat with the chapters I’d decided to keep – about 30 of the original 50. I wrote a new opening chapter, then rewrote what I’d decided should be chapter 2, and that was the point at which I realised that, because of the changes in character, location, the year in which it’s set, and the order in which I’m telling the story, I need to rewrite virtually everything. Yep, everything. Because even the events that are staying, even the conversations, even the characters’ thoughts – will all be at least slightly different because of the other changes.
At this point – understandably, I’d argue – I muttered a few choice expletives. Then to calm myself, I opened the doors to the balcony, took a few deep breaths and feasted my eyes on the lovely morning sunshine before returning to my laptop.

It was good that this realisation hit me on the first morning of a four-day retreat; if I’d have been at home, I think I might have gone back to bed or hit the gin or something. But I cracked on. If I’m going to make this novel as good as I think it can be, then twiddling about with paragraphs I’ve grown fond of is only going to cause me more problems in the long run. So I wrote new chapters, I rewrote existing ones to the extent that often only a tiny part of the scene remained.

I’m still struggling with the structure, because although, like my first two novels, this story is about how the past can affect the present, it’s a more complicated timespan showing two characters’ lives over a number of years. I’ve started in the present, and need to gradually reveal the past. I tried planning the whole thing, but found that impossible, especially as so much has changed, but I’ve planned the order of the first few chapters and will continue to write a bit, plan a bit, write a bit etc. By the end of my four days, I’d ditched more than half of the original draft, and had written just over 15,000 words, about half of which were completely new.

Now I’m back home, I’ve printed out the ‘to keep’ chapters – these are chapters with an important message or emotion, but which may still be set in the wrong place and time, and may still contain redundant characters. I’ve written a couple of lines at the top of each one explaining why the chapter is important, and this is helping me to rewrite as I go along.

Despite the huge changes, the heart of this novel remains the same, and despite the mammoth amount of work I have to do, I’m feeling passionate about it. Please tune in in two weeks to see where I’m up to!

In the meantime, if you fancy coming to a one-day writing workshop in Sheffield, there are two coming up – check out the workshops page of my website

To keep an eye on what I’m up to, you can like my facebook page or follow me on Twitter  @sewelliot

THE WRITING LIFE – A FEW STEPS FORWARD

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As I write this, the sky outside my window is an unbroken blue and the sun is bouncing off rooftops and windowpanes. Snowdrops are out, and even daffodils are stretching their heads upwards. Everything is growing, everything is full of life. This is the perfect time to be ‘creating’, and I’m trying to harness all that wonderful creative energy so that I can pour it into my novel.

In last week’s post, I talked about the feedback I’d received and the massive amounts of work I now realise I have to do on novel number three. I said that undertaking a major re-draft is a bit like climbing a mountain. Last week, I was standing at the foot of that mountain looking up into the foggy distance and wondering where I would be now, a week later.

Well, the summit is still shrouded in mist, but I have taken a few steps up the mountainside. I’ve been working pretty hard this week, although it feels a bit frustrating, because I still haven’t done any actual rewriting. There’s been a great deal of thinking and planning, making new timelines, writing scene summaries and moving index cards around.

Finding a timeline that will work has been incredibly difficult. I thought I had it sorted until I realised that it made one of the characters much too young for what happens at the time. The timeline is a microcosm of the whole novel in that if you change one thing, everything else shifts as well. Anyway, I think I have a workable timeline now. I’ve written a list of the key scenes chronologically, including dates of birth and deaths, and now I just (ha! “just”!) have to work out the order in which these things are revealed to the reader. This is fairly complicated, because there are two viewpoints and the story happens both in real time, and over a number of years before the novel opens. One day, I’m going to make life easy (well, easier) for myself and write a novel that is set in real time and where the story happens as we go along!

The amount of work I have to do is daunting but I’m also feeling excited about it again now, because even though I can’t quite see the top of my writing mounting, I’ve started the trek, and that feels good.

If you’re at a similar stage with your work, it might help if I share this comforting advice from my lovely agent when we were discussing this recently. She told me to look after myself and be kind to myself, because this stage is the literary equivalent of the metaphorical ‘eating for two’ in pregnancy – not literally ‘eating’, of course, but nourishing and nurturing yourself in order to feed the baby (novel) you’re growing, and building up your strength in readiness for the massive output to come,

So I’ve been trying to do that. Yes, I’ve been working every day, but I’m also allowing myself time to read, time to think and the odd non-working trip to a coffee shop – maybe even featuring cake!

I’m going to leave it there for this week. I’ll post again in two weeks’ time when I come back from my retreat in the Forest of Dean. details here I’ll have four clear days where I don’t have to think about shopping, cooking, walking the dog or any other domestic responsibilities. I’m hoping I’ll have significant progress to report on 23rd of February.

Oh, and before I go, I should mention that I’m running a couple of one-day writing workshops in Sheffield soon, on 28th of February and 28th March. These days are always fun, always productive, and, people tell me, incredibly inspiring. If you know anyone who might be interested, the full details are here.

Happy ‘almost Spring’ everyone, and happy writing!

If you’d like to keep an eye on what I’m up to, please visit my website, ‘like’ my Facebook page or follow me on Twitter @sewelliot