The rewrite, continued ...

For various reasons (life in all its glorious unpredictability, mostly) I find myself re-rewriting my second novel.

It's not an unusual state, after all, all writing is rewriting (finally found the man who said it):

Writing is rewriting. A writer must learn to deepen characters, trim writing, intensify scenes. To fall in love with the first draft to the point where one cannot change it is greatly to enhance the prospects of never publishing. Richard North Patterson

My new delivery date, to my long-suffering agent, is 18 April. Here's a beautiful image (from Flickr) for that day:

May my second novel (whose title, at least for the moment, is WRITTEN in WATER) bloom as beautifully, very soon.

Rewrites and primroses

I've just delivered the rewritten manuscript of my second novel, WRITTEN in WATER (as it is now called) to my agent. Wish it luck, please.

I've written about the novel before, here, but it was a while ago (writing a novel is like climbing a mountain, you keep reaching a summit which, you discover, has another summit hidden behind it). And here as well, when it didn't have a good enough title, among other things. And here, if you really want to read any more or go back that far.

And primroses ... :

because they thread their way through the novel and so, even though they are outwith the season, as one of the characters says in the novel, this photograph, which came from here (thank you) is to wish my manuscript luck when it lands on the publisher's desk, and because I hope the primroses will bring me luck too, and show me that this summit really is the summit (for this novel).

And now for a complete rewrite

When George Plimpton of The Paris Review [pages 6-7] asked Hemingway why he rewrote so many times, he said:

I do it to get the words right

He was right. Of course he was right. He always is. (He also wrote standing up. Perhaps I should try that.)

Since 16 June, when I delivered what I fondly believed to be an almost-finished draft of my new novel to my agent, I have read her report and her reader's report and we have met and I have written a new plan for the novel and said agent and reader have reported on my new plan and we have talked again and during the whole process I have realised:

that there are many ways to tell the same story

The trick is to choose the way that best serves the particular story you are writing. (Not as easy as you might think.)

But as I begin the rewrite I am excited and enthused and delighted by what lies ahead, and altogether a rather more grown-up writer than the one who began this process. (I reverted, when I first read the reports, to a spoilt, five-year-old, misunderstood child but by the time we met I had, mercifully, recovered my senses - and my age - and arrived full of ideas for ways to rewrite along the lines they suggested.)

I am still searching for a title. At the moment it is SONG of the STARS but I hope a better one will occur as I rewrite. But if any of you should come up with a title for a novel set in late Victorian/early Edwardian and just post-World-War-One England and Scotland, whose central dramatic event is my protagonist's survival of the sinking of the Titanic and her change of heart and character as she tries to cheer her frightened fellow passengers beneath the bright stars (it was a calm, cold, extraordinarily starlit night) I would love to hear from you.

And in case you were wondering why all the hills, they're not indicative of the ones I must climb as I rewrite, but of the beautiful Lomond Hills in Fife where my protagonist will live for part of the novel.