Monk Quixote

I’ve been a lit­tle quiet of late. I’m try­ing hard not to dis­tract myself. *SQUIRREL*

Pre­am­ble

I’ve been edit­ing away, try­ing to make the redraft a bet­ter book. I’m about half way through, I’d esti­mate — a lit­tle shy of 48,000 words. For the most part these are new, or at least tweaked. I’m break­ing sev­eral agents’ rules — writ­ing first per­son, present tense — but it’s the way I can most com­fort­ably tell this story. It is, after all, the story of me. Or a not-too-far-from-me me, at any rate.

The story has a new title, and a new nar­ra­tive arc. It still (prob­a­bly) has too many char­ac­ters, sub-plots, sym­bols and gram­mat­i­cal faux pas. But it feels like a bet­ter story. I think the moti­va­tion of the lead char­ac­ter is a lot more obvi­ous; his eccen­tric­i­ties are more human, and there’s more of a thread to keep people’s atten­tion. I’m tempted to struc­ture it as a ‘write your own adven­ture’ book, but I sus­pect this will ulti­mately fall into the ‘nice idea, but for another day’ category.

The lists of things I think about when I think about redrafting

As I edit, or add new text,I’m try­ing to make more of an effort to be aware of what has just come before, for the reader’s sake. The process is anal­o­gous to mix­ing paint, but I will usu­ally retreat a few para­graphs from where I want to start, and start edit­ing there instead. The the­ory is that this will iron out incon­sis­ten­cies in mood and tempo, as I mix one day’s words with another’s — or, cru­cially, at least I am more aware of the effect of a change — espe­cially if it’s nec­es­sary (eg after an emo­tional scene I like to put in a descrip­tive sec­tion, which partly shows the character’s state of mind in terms of what he says and how he responds, but also gives the reader a break from too much dialogue).

It’s a the­ory, anyway.

When I get to the writ­ing proper, I am try­ing to keep this in mind as I tweak, edit or slash:

• How does this scene fit into the over­all plot? Focus on the main plot — sac­ri­fice micro-plots or things that seemed funny the first time round. Audi­tion each scene. Does it deserve its place in the story? Will it hold me back?
• How does this scene relate to what the main char­ac­ters want?
• Do I need to speed up or slow down? Have I done too many similar-paced scenes on the spin? (I’m using coloured-index cards in Scrivener to give me an instant view of this)
• Am I using dia­logue where reported speech would be more efficient?
• Am I using char­ac­ter actions enough, or too much? I’m prob­a­bly over­fond of stage direc­tions to indi­cate mood.
• Do I need to break up time with a descrip­tive thought, or sen­tence. Or use another char­ac­ter to inter­rupt, or impede?
• Is what I’m writ­ing credible?
• Is it nat­ural? No-one’s walked in with the bag marked ‘McGuf­fin’ too obvi­ously, have they?
• Have I writ­ten this before? I am really rather good at hav­ing the same idea sev­eral times over sev­eral days. Often in neigh­bour­ing para­graphs. Have these char­ac­ters met already — ini­tial descrip­tions being one of the worst culprits.
• Lastly, am I writ­ing to amuse myself — ie does the reader really need to know?

There’s another list, which is to do with lin­guis­tic tics:

• Remem­ber that peo­ple rarely call each other by name in two-person dialogue.
• Don’t ‘just’ do things, ‘actu­ally’, ‘really’, or ‘you know’.
• Watch for slang. I’ve thought long and hard about this, but the Amer­i­can reader will just have to work out what bloody, bol­locks and the tube are.  Because obvi­ously that’s the least of their worries.
• Don’t ‘obvi­ously’. Although I know I have, and it hurts.
• Check the num­ber of smiles.
• Check the num­ber of stares, hard or otherwise.
• Check the units of booze or caffeine.
• If Tom must stare out of win­dows and gen­er­ally be a bit of a moper, help the reader be on his side. Or give them the oppor­tu­nity to laugh at him. Farce is quite sat­is­fy­ing to write.

I’ve made a cou­ple of colour­ful mind-maps to try and keep myself on track. I have all my plot points, and deci­sions to make as to what to keep in or throw out, but the mind map is help­ing me to focus on what Tom (lead character):

1. wants — I have four boxes here, these lead to:
2. what would suc­cess look like  — each box has sev­eral off­shoots, lead­ing to at least one:
3. what stands in his way — either char­ac­ters, or sit­u­a­tions, or back­story, lead­ing to:
4. res­o­lu­tions — how these obsta­cles are overcome.

Each level is a dif­fer­ent colour.  I already have a time­line doc­u­ment of sorts, and I can map most of the 3s and 4s to this time­line. Things that don’t fit either need to go, or I need to resolve them dif­fer­ently, or I need to write into the timeline.

I also did a rela­tion­ship dia­gram of all my char­ac­ters, and used dif­fer­ent colours to indi­cate dif­fer­ent things– type of rela­tion­ship, are they a helper/hinderer, are they inci­den­tal or do they advance the plot etc. The colours help to draw peo­ple together across the page.

Com­bined, these draw­ings have really helped me to boil down the main ques­tions I think that my story needs to answer, in order to make a ‘sat­is­fy­ing’ plot. This is dif­fer­ent from ‘what the novel’s about’ as with­out the eggs, there’s no erm, egg-nog. Not that my book is about egg-nog. Although it is about nog­gins. And good eggs. And bad eggs.

And lots, and lots, of onions.

I’d wel­come any comments.…