Week 36 - Humble Beginnings

As I was making the fundamental error of trying to work on my novel while a certain curly-haired nature presenter was waxing lyrical on the television, it occurred to me that creating a second draft is a strange experience. It makes you wonder about your frame of mind when you wrote the first one. I’m finding that some pages contain paragraphs that are near-perfect and don’t need as much as a semi-colon moving.

Others seem to have been written in a drunken haze by a short-sighted chimpanzee.

No wonder you always hear that no writer writes a good first draft. I’ll take comfort from that, even if I imagine the likes of Ian Rankin and PD James don’t have to make quite as many changes as I have.

Of course, it’s satisfying to correct such sentences/paragraphs/pages and there’s nothing like the feeling that you’ve really bottomed that particular section. Yet it can be time consuming. I read recently that J.R.R Tolkien’s son said of his father that his life was a constant battle against time. I certainly know what he meant.

As it happens, I am still managing to hold onto the coat tails of time; but as the weeks pass, it becomes more and more difficult.

One of the ways I try to counter this is working at the same time every day. It helps fool the brain into thinking a particular time is work time and it seems to be working...so far...

Another tip - taken from Kate Mosse’s Tips for Writers - is to speak your dialogue out loud. This not only helps make your dialogue sound more natural, but it also helps get you through those times when you’re struggling to stop your mind wandering. It makes for a great change of pace and never fails to re-focus my attention on the novel.

Unless, of course, Kate Humble’s on television.