Speaking too soon again...

There I was congratulating myself on having a thoroughly reliable bus: result?  Oil all over the garage floor, skinned knuckles (my hands actually start leaking blood as soon as I touch a spanner), and just a little swearing.  It's nothing too serious, but fixing this leak still requires the removal of the exhaust which is, on these vehicles, an utter pain in the arse.  But I suppose it's good for me to keep my mechanical eye in, as it were, and on the way I'll get the chance to do a few bits of preventative maintenance that should keep her purring happily for a few more years' yet.

And there I was too, saying I was putting down my second draft and moving onto something else.  Well, I suppose that was half-right - I did put down my second draft.  I moved instead, straight to the third, without pausing to finish.  There was, as I've said previously, a spark missing, and I was never going to find a spark by mechanically flogging a dead horse.  Far better to cut the losses and proceed straight to the major surgery - a rewrite, changes of viewpoint and tense, deepening and turning of the plot.

If any one element does such a thing, then plot keeps readers turning pages: so I'm devoting more and more time to making sure I understand what's going on.  I'm not in the business of drawing up a rigid scaffold and sticking to it ruthlessly, that's an approach I've tried before and that yields the stiff, joyless results you might expect from a process that removes, at a single stroke, much of the impetus behind discovering new and interesting turns in the story - namely, language.

I'm a firm believer that language on its own can be a powerful agent of creativity.  Words suggest others, changes in tone and viewpoint suggest other words that lead, in turn, to other places and different stories.  Cutting myself off from that removes much of the fun of the creative journeying my writing takes me on. That's not to say I don't have to exercise restraint or discipline - of course I do, otherwise I'd never get anywhere.

Which, to complete the bus/writing allegory, applies to fixing oil leaks too.  Because at times like these it's restraint and discipline that keep me from smashing the thing with a sledgehammer, or worse - taking it to a mechanic.

Falling in again...

Even though my non-fiction project boasts the magnificent word count (thus far) of a mere 340 words, it's done the job.  By taking my mind off the story completely, in the last couple of days I've been able to go back to it afresh - reinvigorated and full of insight.

How I go about it from here is a matter of some slight concern.  Do I reread the whole thing, mark it up and then trawl through my notes in a thorough, scholarly fashion?  That doesn't sound very like me at all.  Do I throw the whole first draft in the bin and launch into writing the whole thing again from memory, the point of the first draft being only to help me understand the story more deeply?  I know there are writers that do this, but it seems to me that by doing so I'd be in danger of forgetting those rare passages of prose in the first draft that stand tall. 

For now, I'm settling on rewriting each chapter one at a time.  I haven't marked it up because I know the major changes I want to make.  Marks on paper seem to set things in stone, and I'm curious to find where else this story goes in the rewriting.  It's a curious mixture of refining and further exploration.

Second drafts and letting go

I'm really enjoying revisiting this novel-in-waiting after the thriller stalled.  Partly, that's because it's such a completely different type of book:  thrillers are all about plot and tight, sparse language.  If your prose interferes with the page flipping, inhibits the pure story-telling, then that's bad.   The story I'm working on at the moment is much more about the carnival of language, as my Creative Writing lecturer at Massey puts it. 

An exercise I've always enjoyed is trying to write like  foreign languages translate into English. Translated Spanish and Italian novels , for example, have this wonderful quality to them - I can't really describe it as anything other than a lilting music.  Books written in or by Indians - whether in another language first or in Indian - have their own music too, a curious mixture of sub-continental flare and a tight, correct use of words.  (I wonder what a linguist would say about that: if British Colonialism is the common ancestor of modern Indian English and English English (for want of a better word), why is it that the Indian version seems to be so much more correct?  Has the presence of other languages in the country slowed the evolution of the language, or do they contribute in some other way to keeping it more correct?  I digress, wildly.) 

This story's set in Italy, rooted in a time at the end of the first world war.  So it's an interesting exercise trying to find the right voice - there's not only geographical considerations, but historical ones too, and it contributes to me using language in a way that I, at least, am loving, which in and of itself drives the story in ways I hadn't planned or foreseen.

Which does present its own set of problems.  Because I'm so proud, really, of some of the writing I've done, it makes the whole business of re-envisaging areas in the story rather bereaving.  This side of editing is one I suspect many novelist struggle with:  after all, carrying out a complete revision of a short story is one thing, but investing the time and energy to completely chuck out a whole novel?  The thought of it would make a strong man weep.

Maybe I'll get to the end with a better understanding of what's going on with this, look back and decide to chuck it all out and start again. What's fun though, is letting the language alone be the driver.

Oddly enough, I'm finding that working on this is also rekindling my confidence to go back and tackle the thriller again when it's time. I can't help but feel that maybe at the end of the day, they're all parts of the same puzzle.