Week 32 - Eight Days A Week

With just seven days to go until the end of my “structure re-write”, I have eight chapters to work through.

Time for some deep breaths.

The saving grace here is that as I have progressed through my novel from those tentative early chapters through the awkward teens to the assured twenty somethings, I have found that less and less work is required on the structure.

While I would like this to be because my writing has improved from dull cliche-ridden juvenilia to assured maturity, with Hemingway-like dialogue sparkling like a Tiffany’s diamond; it might actually be that I just had more of an idea what the hell was going on by Chapter 25.

My new character - Dr Styles - is now firmly embedded within the text and with his inclusion, the book’s structure is now taking on a fully formed shape.

Just in case you’ve forgotten, I have broken my second draft into three stages. The first was a read through with red pen in hand, marking out all the structural inconsistencies and contradictions. The second period - seven weeks in total - is the re-write based purely on structural changes (i.e no prose polishing).

This has proved to be harder than anticipated. The temptation to re-write passages that while structurally correct, look about as polished as the floor of my local kebab house at 3am on a Saturday, has been very strong.

Yet if writing to deadlines teaches you anything, it’s how to stick to time constraints. So with a little luck, and the age old tradition of working too many hours in the day or so before deadline, by this time next week I will (have to) have got to the end of the middle stage of my second draft.

I then get to take a full seven days off. The idea being that you lay aside your novel completely so that when you return a week later to write the second draft properly, you approach with the fresh eyes.

It will also be my last break for four and a half months. After that, I have a clear run through the summer to finish my second draft and then write the third and final draft, to be completed by the end of week 52 on 20th September.

But that’s all in the future - and better not to dwell on too much. For now, I need to get to the end of my current task - take a week off - and then begin what I hope will be the enjoyable task of writing the second draft.

It’s a lot of work - and there will undoubtedly be many temptations in the summer to distract me from my task - but at the end of it, what would I rather have: a sun tan or a novel?