I. Love. Austin. That is all.
Well, no, that's not really all. I've been sitting out in the sunshine today making notes on the next (and, I pray, final) revision of The Difficult Second Novel. I wish I had got it right the first time but, really, that never seems to happen. And I completely rewrote The Cry of the Go-Away Bird twice before I signed with my agent and accepted the offer of publication. I have a much clearer sense now of how to fix TDSN, and a much clearer map of the plot in my head. Now it's just a matter of diving back in to the manuscript - a printed hard-copy - and actually doing it. I think a lot of the problems with the book stem from it being quite an unsettled year for me - because I have been all over the place while we made a lot of big life changes, the book became choppy and uneven too. I'm hoping to smooth that all out now. And I'm going to try a couple of new revision techniques: reading the whole thing aloud (which I know I should have been doing before now, but avoided); mapping out the imagery and leitmotifs visually, so that I can get a better sense of the rhythm of the thing; and physically rewriting some sections, even ones that I think are 'finished', so that I can re-evaluate them. Even if this means just copying out whole sections again, I think this will be really helpful - in small doses!
If I have learned one thing from writing TDSN, it is that I get my best results when I write the first draft in one continuous, unbroken period, without reading over or editing anything I have written until the thing is finished. I didn't do that with this book, and that mistake has continued to bite me in the bum over the past year like a rabid chihuahua with superior jumping abilities. Never again!
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