Big Picture Edits
I have just completed the “Big Picture Edits” on my last manuscript. My agent, has gone over my book with a fine-tooth comb and came up with an INCREDIBLY LONG list of things that don’t work/could work better/need expanding.
You know all those little lazy bit of writing you think will hide in the awesomeness of your plotting? They will be found out. All the slightly awkward bits of dialogue that you thought “oh, it will be fine“. It will jar on your reader as much as it did on you. And then there were all the little things I did not notice, for reasons varying from “I just love this character and will shoe-horn this conversation in, so it can shine its light upon all” to “well, I meant it to come across like this, so surely since it was in my head, you can see it too, in spite of me not having written a word for it to become apparent?”
All in all, the list of edits was about 100 bullet-points, some of which required barely a new paragraph, some which forced me to rewrite three chapters and add two brand-new ones.
And it was painful, I won’t lie. It took me over two months and extra 20k words But the book ended up being so much stronger as a result. I actually feel like it says what I need it to say now, and the characters are more consistent, more solid.
That’s the beauty of the editorial process, a collaborative one. It’s not meant to be easy.
So suck it up and enjoy the ride.
Books by Women
I have recently come across a Twitter thread by the wonderful Joanne Harris where she quoted a review of her own book, Chocolat, where the author of the review chose to describe it as a tale of a a single mother who liked chocolate. I kid you not.
That prompted an extensive conversation and wide-spread mockery of course, focused around how women’s books are often misrepresented simply because they are written by women. There’s a reason why Robin Hobb and JK Rowling chose to stay gender-neutral on the covers. Books by women are perceived differently. Let’s start with the sad fact that a lot of men will glance over a book written by a woman, assuming straight off that its intended audience are women. Nobody makes a similar assumption about books written by men.
It made me think about all the wonderful, nuanced titles by female authors which have been overlooked or miscategorised because of their authors’ gender. If a book is written by a woman and it has a hint of romance in it, the entire thing can be conveniently dumped in a “romance genre”. If it portrays family relationships or female friendships, it can be chick-lit and nothing more.
But when a man writes about the exact same subject we often automatically bestow an assumption of gravitas onto the work.
Now I’m not trying to be overly critical of the romance genre at all. There are some wonderfully written books in that genre, just like everywhere else. But it is undeniable that most men will not touch anything that has been dumped into that category with a ten-foot pole.
My favourite book of all time, one which I reread once every year or two, is The Blue Castle by Lucy Maud Montgomery. I would argue it’s a tremendously sensitive portrayal of loneliness and the habit-forming resignation to a life of social exclusion and anonymity. It shows the crippling fear of poverty, and female poverty especially, which has such power that it can stunt personal growth and thwart even the most modest of personal ambitions. It also describes the strength and determination required to break free, and the exhilaration which follows it.
But The Blue Castle is by no means a terribly famous or popular book. It’s seen as a romance and the subtlety and charm of it are stripped in the descriptions of it. You can buy it in paperback generally, with tacky, pastel covers usually reserved for Harlequin editions. The kind of covers which instantly signal “This is for women only”.
And all I want to ask is “why”? Not just why are women authors thus undervalued and misrepresented, but why are we depriving men of what could be, without a doubt, an oft wonderful reading experience.
Writing Scenes of Pain
Now my writing is filled with a whole lot of pain and hardship and difficulties. Misery writes itself, as we all know. But that could lead you to the entirely wrong assumption that I enjoy inflicting pain upon my characters. I do not. The scene I wrote today felt as upsetting to write as it was for my MC(well, close at least). The current WIP is a first person narrative, which adds another level of upset to the whole thing. As I type I channel the sensation of touch, smell and taste into the descriptions, because that’s what my character is experiencing. There is a sense of responsibility here. If you make your darlings suffer, you have to make it good. Suffering not written well feels trite and like a betrayal of this person you have created.
And, unlike in life, suffering has to serve a purpose. We’ve all sat through a badly written show or movie where the protagonist seems endlessly knocked about, but learns nothing, does nothing, and the viewer in the end gets the uncomfortable impression the authors of the protagonist’s suffering are either a)getting some unsavoury sort of satisfaction from the whole thing or b) they keep writing the same thing in the hope the next plotline will eventually reveal itself. Which, as we all know, is the first sign of madness.
But here’s the rub: striking that balance, where the suffering of the MC serves a purpose but not in a too obvious and realistic way is the hard bit. And each time I take from my MC something they love, or inflict physical pain on them, I hope I get it right.
Character sketches
Now for something entirely different… When I write I like to do a few sketches here and there: mostly of my characters and maps, though I have in the past done larger illustrations too. I thought I would share a few of them.
It serves a purpose further than just indulging my love for art. It fixes the characters in my mind. Though they might and often do change within the time it takes me to complete a manuscript, taking the time to pause and commit their features to paper gives me a sense of where they are and where they’re going. And once the manuscript is indeed finished, it’s interesting to look back and see the snapshot of how I imagined certain elements of my WiP at each moment in time.
50 thousand words
Yesterday I reached the 50k words point in my new novel. There is something about reaching that mark that feels significant. Ten thousand words and I feel “wow, I’m writing this thing”, I reach twenty thousand words and I worry how much I still don’t know about this thing I’m writing. Thirty thousand words and the plan for the rest of the novel tends to reveal itself to me, so I can gleefully jot it down. I reach forty thousand words and I begin to question and doubt everything. Is my main character relatable or did I make every single side character more fleshed out instead? Is the plot nonsensical? Can I write? Do I know how to spell “bureaucracy” (generally yes, after a few attempts)?
And then I reach fifty thousand words. And the end is in sight, regardless of how long the novel is actually going to be (my first novel was a whopping 110k words, and the feeling was the same). Suddenly the bullet points of scenes get rapidly deleted, as I run out of the story and the book is done (or the first draft at least).
Now I know this, because this is my third novel. I didn’t know what my “process” was around my first novel. I was beginning to have an inkling with the second one. And now I look towards the fifty thousand word goal like a rusalka looks to a witless young man lost by her pond. I clock it, I pounce, and the rest is easy (if possibly unpalatable to some people).
Slavic Myths
Myths and legends of all description have always held a deep fascination for me. The books available to me mostly covered the ancient Western belief systems, the Celtic, Norse, and Greek mythologies being the most easily accessible. The Norse gods with their unveiled desires and petty meanness, their heroic deeds marked mostly by unrestrained impulses of their immortal bodies, so different from the disembodied and unsexed godlliness preached at me by the Polish Catholic Church.
The Greek and Roman gods felt much the same, though they covered their selfishness with a thin veneer of elegant sophistication, filtered through the prism of centuries of Western art, romanticised beyond any hope of resemblance to the original. I read about them, and their heroes, with interest, although in my child heart I always held them in slight contempt. Better to be unashamedly wicked like Thor, Odin and Loki, than to pretend one’s wickedness holds some divine beauty in it. Apollo could stuff it, in my opinion.
Yet, even though I lived in Poland, of Slavic myths and mythical creatures I knew no more than most. Many of my childhood books were filled with Rusalkas and Utopce with the occasional Poludnica passing by. But there was no true structure to it, beyond the general atmosphere of foreboding marking all those tales. I loved them, but it did not surprise me how little access there was (and still is, notwithstanding some, more resent, excellent contributions such as Bestiariusz by [ TBC]) to any popular texts covering the subject.
There is in general, fairly little known about the prechristian Slavs. The Roman Empire did not reach us, and the written word came only part and parcel with the all-consuming Christianity, which assimilated what it could of the local beliefs, did its best to eradicate what it could not. And so the line between the gods and the mere spirits seems now blurred, and even those creatures which once might have been seen as benevolent forces in the life of men were twisted into something evil, malevolent, satanic even.
Perhaps, therefore, it was the advent of the new religion, so hostile to the old ways, why so many of Slavic legends and those of the myths we know, seem to carry with them the ever-present sense of dread and foreboding. Telling you there is no safety beyond the Church and its teachings.
In spite of all this, or perhaps because of it, there is something I have always found appealing about the old Slavic lore. The threat and the sense of the constant presence of the other, invisible forces around us, forces which must be acknowledged and appeased, are very powerful drivers, and they feed the imagination in a way they couldn’t if we knew all about them.
The threat of the invisible, the presence of what we can’t touch. And the fear and the awe that come with it. What a powerful force.
An evening with Salman Rushdie
I had the most exciting evening at Southbank Centre in London. As part of their yearly Autumn Literary Festival, they invite the greatest literary stars from around the world to give talks. Last year I was gutted to miss out on the Margaret Atwood one, and so I wasn’t going to mess around come this year’s line-up. So I secured the tickets for an evening with Salman Rushdie, that international super-star. It felt a bit surreal to see the man in person, I have to admit. I remember bonding with my now-husband discussing the guy’s works as we studied postcolonial literature together all those years ago.
I was nineteen when I came to the UK from Poland, a culturally homogenous country. It was an incredible thrill therefore to explore and learn about the blended identities of people laying claim to more than one cultural backgrounds.
But back to the evening at Southbank. Rushdie filled the Royal Festival Hall, which is truly as amazing an endorsement of his star quality as any awards he’d been showered with over the years. And he did not disappoint. Funny and engaging, he gave his audience a glimpse of his writing process (especially for the new book, The Golden House) and talked at length of the cultural and national identities which shape our lives and, most currently, the political landscape of today’s America and UK.
It felt a privilege to be there, and I look forward to reading his newest novel!