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.

Thursday last ...

... on Thursday last I gave my second novel, whose working title is Hope Remains, to my agent.

And now I feel oddly bereft.

I have become so used to spending my days immersed in the sadnesses and joys of the characters, in watching them move about in my head, in omitting long passages that I had planned for them and in discovering the things that they led me to ... that now my days feel empty.

The original idea for the novel came from the fact that my great-grandmother survived the sinking of the Titanic ... but facts do not a novel make and so I invented a life and a love for her. What she realises about herself in her lifeboat in the cold lonely mid-Atlantic is at the heart of the novel both emotionally and actually (there's a pleasing symmetry in that).

I hope the language serves the characters and their stories well but now, until my agent has had time to read the book and tell me where she thinks it needs work, I have to leave the characters and their stories alone.

And I find that I miss them.

In the nursery rhyme Monday's Child, Thursday's child 'Has far to go ... '. I hope that Hope Remains and its characters won't have too far to go before a publisher provides them with a home. (And I find a better title!)

And it's been odd, but since October last I have never once felt like MATing ... perhaps I've kicked the habit?

Not posting, but writing

I'm working on my second novel so I won't be posting for a while (not even to MAT).

I don't know how long a while is, and I won't know until I get there, but the SOED says:

A period of time, considered with respect to its duration.

and, a little less obliquely:

The time spent (connoting trouble, effort or work) in doing something.

So that's what I'll be doing (not, please note, whiling away the time which implies that nothing will have been achieved by the time the whiling ends). And that's why I won't be posting for some while.

Builders and fishermen, a MAT with a purpose

I am MATing, but there is a point. (Well, I would say that wouldn't I?)

Last night the boyf and I were talking about writing and I said I felt as if I was assembling, not writing at the moment. I'm just collecting the already-written pieces of my third (sorry, second) novel and putting them into a different order now that I've decided to write the story in the third person. I said I didn't feel really connected to what I was doing the way I do when I am struck by an idea that I think will work, or when I have managed to make the language sing. I was just assembling.

But the boyf said, wisely, that we have to be builders as well as interior decorators when we write and that all the foundation-laying and brick-assembling, let alone the plastering, plumbing, wiring and insulation, have to be done before we can do the bit that makes the heart sing.

He told me that in the days when he was in the building trade, the plasterers and bricklayers, the plumbers and electricians would ask to come back to a job when it was finished - just so's they could see how it looked when the walls were painted, the carpets laid and the curtains hung. They wanted to see the beautiful results of their invisible work, results that couldn't exist without all that they had done, even though all that they had done wasn't visible.

In his Memoirs Pablo Neruda wrote:

The work of writers has much in common with the work of ... Arctic fishermen. The writer has to look for the river and if he finds it frozen over he has to drill a hole in the ice. He must have a good deal of patience, weather the cold ... look for the deep water, cast the proper hook, and after all that work, he pulls out a tiny little fish. So he must fish again ... eventually landing a bigger fish. And another and another.

A moment ago I didn't know I was going to go from assembling to fishing ... but that's what happens.

At the moment I'm building: assembling, bricklaying, plumbing and wiring. When that's done I will put on my cold weather gear and go fishing. And when I finally make it back with my catch ... towards the middle of this year with any luck ... I will begin eating, decorating (and singing).