Thursday 28 July 2011

A murky pit

I haven't posted for a while, because I'm so immersed in the murky pit of my novel that I'm afraid any words not directly linked to it will just come out as jibberish.

I'm currently trying to take my 44,000 word novel up to commercial novel length. It's hard because I thought I'd told the story, and now I realise I missed bits out. Bits that I assumed, at the time of writing, would be easily filled in by the reader, and now realise probably wouldn't be unless they were reading it with my head. And, really, I don't think many people could handle being in my head.

The term murky pit is not supposed to be a negative comment - it's more the feeling I get when I look up after several hours with my head in the computer or huge folder of paper. My head is swimming, I feel jetlagged. The black words on white paper dance about, and I'm sure they re-order themselves when I'm not looking.

The fact that this part of the process has coincided with the start of the school holidays, a heap of decorating and therefore a whole lot of furniture not in its rightful room, AND a chocolate craving the size of Antartica, means my head really isn't in the right mood for blogging too.

(I've also just realised I totally missed the Booker longlist announcement, so I have absolutely no opinion of it whatsoever.... And I call myself a writer!!)

4 comments:

  1. Good luck with the revisions. I'm sure you can fit them in, in all that, you know, spare time you've got ;-)

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  2. I suppose it will force me into that 'distance' I'm supposed to have before I edit, if nothing else!

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  3. I have a great book on writing to be published and there is a section of advice for if your first draft comes in short. Some of the advice is to create an extra character, someone who will come in and conflict somewhere with someone or with a situation. Stir it up a bit.

    It sounds as though you know some of the extra you are going to be adding anyway. Wishing you lots of luck with it.

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  4. Hmm, an extra character is worth thinking about. There are certainly gaps which might benefit from another viewpoint. Cheers Rebecca, that's the first time I've ever seen advice for too-short, usually it's for those pesky first-time novelists who manage to overwrite 50,000 words... I always look on them very enviously!

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