Half Way Through: Ten Tips for Editing Your/My novel

I’ve spent a week or two now carrying out an in-depth edit on the first half of the new novel and am very much reminded of  the words of John Braine in his 1974 book How To Write a Novel 

'The most difficult task for a novelist is the movement of people between time and place.'   

This deceptively simple statement occurs to me every time I embark on some heavy duty editing.

For me beginning a novel, involves researching, thinking, imagining, writing sketches, making bubbles of action and linking them into some kind of loose structure. It involves collecting images, drawing people and pictures, making maps (see my post about Mapping the Imagination).

So now, I’ve just finished the half-way-through-edit and here for you  is my new list of

 Top ten things to do on a half way edit.  

This involves: 

1.     Gradually recognising and refining your own style (always learning …)

2.     Establishing the strong foundation on which you will build the rest of the novel

3.      Inserting earlier the significant detail now emerging in the narrative.

4.     Reinforcing time/place where it seems useful

5.      Ensuring consistency in place and characterisation

6.     Checking continuity of action 

7.     Changing, evolving and establishing names as characters reveal themselves

8.     Recognising and endorsing the significant characters and points of view

9.     Ensuring that the structure is doing its job for the reader. - This could include the way the
       chapter and part structure work

10.                        Recognising structural implications for the rest of the novel

After that at last you (and I!)  can think forward to the second half of the novel. For me this means more thinking, more imagining, more images, and … er … another map…

I thought maybe you’d like to see some Work in Progress

… Lleu raises his hand. I close my eyes and think of the statue of Branwen in the centre of the pool in my father’s house. Then I raise my hand and, side by side, Lleu and I begin, steady step by steady step, to walk on fire. We do not hurry.  The crowd breaks into great applause as finally we leap back onto the grass at the far end. The old priest, still standing there at the end of the fire pit waves his staff across us and sings a blessing. I am filled with energy and delight and smile broadly and wave at the great circle of people there. Lleu holds up his arms in a victory salute. The young stick fighters beat their sticks against each other making a rattling rhythm. A pipes-man squeezes out a few notes. Another man makes his elk horn pipe squeal.

Lleu smiles and shushes the crowd. ‘Would any here like to walk the fire as do my sister and I?’ He grins broadly at the chorus of groans…

The Michaelangelo Option

In my workshops I am always looking for ways of expressing how  a large novel emerges  from the sprawling largesse of ideas, inspiration,  life experience, literary apprehension and  academic research that go into the writing of a novel. For me this can only really be expressed  by analogy.

Because in another life I taught pottery I often use this very practical art to help me illuminate the process of making a novel and making it work. So -  

You start with this great sloppy pile of clay                               (your ideas etc – see above).                                                           

Then:                                                                                                      Búcaro. Museum no. 307-1872 (V &A Museum)

You let your clay dry a bit.

- Some salient notions and structures emerge from the mass (see above…).  

You observe  the colour and consistency of the clay.

- Imagine the energy of a particular  story potential in the mass.

Then you take a useable handful and put it on a board.

- Write sketches that might be an element in the whole of the novel.

Then you ‘wedge’ your clay, slapping  and pushing it on the board to drive out air bubbles that might explode in the kiln and ruin your creation.

- Test out the potential for order in your speculative writing; consider whether the sketches and ideas can sustain a whole novel without destroying it before you start.

Now you centre your air-free clay on your wheel, start spinning and  pull your shapely pot out of the hard packed clay.

- Now you write your novel…. it will take much longer than throwing a pot , although it is no more or less art.

Then last week at the Ashington workshop I  met Julie, a sculptor who is writing a novel,  so we had some fun thinking through the Michaelangelo option as an analogy for the novel writing process.

Michaelangelo allegedly searched and searched the Carrara quarries for the right giant  block of marble to fulfil his commission to create a great statue of David.  When he found it and embarked on this enormous task he said that David was already in there, in the block of marble, and his task  was to free David from the marble with his  sculptor’s tools.

That also could be a good analogy – chipping and chipping away at a resistant mass to allow the shapely novel to emerge.

So on the way home from Ashington I  wondered whether - as a novelist  - I was a potter or a sculptor, a thrower or a chipper. Both analogies  in their own ways, work for me,  but my feeling is I’m more a thrower than a chipper: I tend to like building up rather than cutting out.

This writing  business can be great fun.

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