Writing, Thinking, Ranting: July 2013

Reviewing and Reviewing and Reviewing

- 'creeps (on) this petty pace from day to day'

What you see here, Dear Reader, is a great big, fat excuse - a craven means of doing something, anything, except knuckle down to the LAST REVIEW of the manuscript of my work of genius.

But I have been hard at it, honest Miss (visions of wastrel student justifying indolence to granite-faced spinster teacher). The problem is that my relentless application to the job has manifested itself in video-clip brevity and my periods of thoughtful contemplation of my achievements are characterised by languid eternities. Too little time on and too much off.

The author at his luxury studio, hard at it

The facts are:

I've written 100,000 words;
the last word represents a recognisable end;
there is a goodly collection of characters doing interrelated stuff;
not all of it is boring - some may even be good;
there are highs and lows, trials and triumphs, of a sort;
I have broken many rules of successful fiction and will no doubt pay the price;
the latest review is no. 7;
I cannot stand the thought of a review no. 8.

And here's the question - are we there yet?

For what it's worth,

here are a few things I've learned about reviewing:

Step back and give the process time. In other words, allow a period of weeks (in my case months) between writing the original stuff and the hard graft of looking at it again, critically. You will be amazed (well, you may not but I was) at the quantity of amateur, embarrassing and bloody stupid writing you are capable of generating.

Equally, you will be thrilled that you have spotted this chaff and have had the good sense to find a better way to express yourself and thus produce a decent manuscript.

This bad-news / good-news maxim applies generally to all stages of review, although exceptions can occur. You may find, as I did that .......

One review stage may not be as effective as the one before. What, I hear you shout? Isn't it all about making the manuscript better? Well, yes, but a strange thing can happen - which is a powerful argument for doing more than minimal reviewing - and this is that progress is erratic. Getting better at writing is not linear and inevitable. Your review no. 3 may be worse that no.2, but it WON"T BE if you .......

Keep focused on the essential principles of good, successful writing. There are basic rules to keep in mind, especially for novice writers. Stick to them unless you are the new Mozart of creativity or a stunning expressionist of blazing sex.

The great do's and don'ts can be found in an avalanche of advice from published writers, academics, other learned commentators, editors, agents and associated hangers-on, so I won't offer a summary. In each revision just try to make the writing tighter.

I have no hope for myself, of course, having broken too many writing commandments on the way to producing something that, on the whole, is quirky and makes me happy. But note this: quirky is all very well - it's just not the safe-money way to start.

Good - that's much clearer

One revision is not good enough. If you are very happy with what you see at the end of revision no. 2 you are failing at trying to be a good writer. Get used to the truth that improving what you write involves self-criticism and pain. However .......

Reviewing, as with all good things, must come to an end. A good thing? Actually, buried in the tedium will be found the reward. Bit by bit you can see your manuscript getting better.

But it will never be perfect, whatever that is, no matter how many times you inspect and edit. The time comes when you must let go and do that most courageous thing, put your work in front of the public.

I just hope that I, and you, will have the pleasure some day of reading our published and acclaimed writing and saying, 'that word and that, and that paragraph, and ... what was I thinking when I wrote that!' But it's too late, and a good thing too.

Become a little harder on yourself with each revision. That is, strap your writing to a chair and grill it under the interrogation lamp. Ask tough questions. Among the scores of things you could examine are:

is it verbose;
why have you left no room for the reader's imagination;
is the prose sinking under an overload of adjectives and adverbs (yes, less can amount to more, and usually is, although it need not mean fanatical application of the Draino to scour your stream of thought);
is that sentence or paragraph or (God help you) chapter doing anything to advance the story;
at what point does my digressive, tangential 'colour' become distracting irrelevance;
does the sentence sound right - if I changed that word to a synonym would it bring balance and rhythm (music) to the sentence;
are you committed, even a little, to 'killing your darlings' - that is, weeding out stuff that you think is just fabulous but really isn't (like those bits that are extravagantly, perceptively, zen-fully writerly) - it will hurt, but the reader gets a better chance to know what you're saying;
is the dialogue real - read it aloud - or does it come over like a stilted demonstration of how to speak clearly to non-fluent foreigners or deaf octogenarians (but beware of writing dialogue in the accent of regional jargon or patois);
have I ... ?

STOP. This is becoming like a lecture. I could go on, but you'll find out anyway, one way or another.

Um, just one more thing, a fundamentally important thing -

is what you have on the page what you really want to say?

The last word on the effects of the whole exhausting but vital business of reviewing one's work must go to that icon of thinking, the incomparable Spike Milligan, who wrote and revised his sidesplitting novella Puckoon over several demented years. He said, and no more need be said:

THIS DAMN BOOK NEARLY DROVE ME MAD