Indecisive
I've finished the (latest) rewrite of Benfro book two. Hooray.
All the pages I excised in the last rewrite have returned. And they've brought some friends along with them. Boo Hoo.
A little history, for those of you who care, or who have nothing better to do, or who should be working right now but can't be bothered and anyway the boss is away at a meeting all day so who's going to know?
The Ballad of Sir Benfro started off as a standalone fantasy. Quite early on in the proceedings I realised that it was going to have to be spread across several books - the story just kept on growing, and besides, people expect fantasy to come in series. However, earlier on in the proceedings, I had decided (for what reason I know not) to write the whole story from the point of view of the main protagonist.
Actually, I do know why I did it that way, but that's a blog for another time.
Anyway, I basically had 500 pages of single point of view narrative, and it wasn't really peppy enough. I also realised that I'd started the story about fourteen years too late. So I set about writing a prologue.
The prologue became another five hundred pages, only this time I introduced passages from the points of view of some of the other characters who had turned up whilst I was writing the first book. It was more fun, and so long as I kept it to just the four points of view, it wasn't too confusing. And it allowed for that old page-turning trick of ending each section on a cliffhanger.
This prologue-turned-book must have been good enough, because it was the work that landed me an agent. Hooray.
But that left me with the first book, now book two, written entirely from the point of view of just the one character. And too long.
First I went at it with the shears, clipping vast swathes of annoying and unnecessary introspection out of it. Then I sat down and worked out what the other three characters had been doing whilst not interacting with the main character. Then I worked out where in the story various scenes could naturally be cut. Then I sat down and wrote a series of short, snappy scenes from the other characters points of view and slipped them in, as the actress said to the bishop.
Finally I ran off a copy on the office laser printer and took it with me to New Zealand.
The beginning is quite good, though I say so myself. But it all gets a bit confused around the middle and towards the end the timelines of the different characters are completely out of synch. This apparently doesn't matter if you're George RR Martin - his latest epic has a get-out clause at the beginning explaining that the narrative isn't meant to be sequential. But it matters to me, especially when characters finally get together.
So the weeks since I returned to Wales have been spent trying to coerce the book into a semblance of order. This has meant writing more short, snappy scenes, and shuffling the existing ones around until they form something pleasing to the eye. Unfortunately there's just too much there for me to juggle in my head all at once, so I've had to resort to all manner of indexes, aide-memoires and scraps of illegible paper. Now that it's finally done, I can stand back and take in the whole - a vision of perfect beauty.
At least I hope it is.
This then is how I write novels. It's a bit like wrestling with eels, only less fishy and with fewer actual eels. I could call it the chaotic approach to writing, but that makes it sound much more structured and organised than it really is. My problem though is not that the process of birthing each story is so convoluted and painful, but that I can never quite stop tinkering with the finished article; never quite make up my mind. I really need Benfro book two to work this time, and work well enough for me to finally put it to bed.
After all, there's still books three and four to write.
All the pages I excised in the last rewrite have returned. And they've brought some friends along with them. Boo Hoo.
A little history, for those of you who care, or who have nothing better to do, or who should be working right now but can't be bothered and anyway the boss is away at a meeting all day so who's going to know?
The Ballad of Sir Benfro started off as a standalone fantasy. Quite early on in the proceedings I realised that it was going to have to be spread across several books - the story just kept on growing, and besides, people expect fantasy to come in series. However, earlier on in the proceedings, I had decided (for what reason I know not) to write the whole story from the point of view of the main protagonist.
Actually, I do know why I did it that way, but that's a blog for another time.
Anyway, I basically had 500 pages of single point of view narrative, and it wasn't really peppy enough. I also realised that I'd started the story about fourteen years too late. So I set about writing a prologue.
The prologue became another five hundred pages, only this time I introduced passages from the points of view of some of the other characters who had turned up whilst I was writing the first book. It was more fun, and so long as I kept it to just the four points of view, it wasn't too confusing. And it allowed for that old page-turning trick of ending each section on a cliffhanger.
This prologue-turned-book must have been good enough, because it was the work that landed me an agent. Hooray.
But that left me with the first book, now book two, written entirely from the point of view of just the one character. And too long.
First I went at it with the shears, clipping vast swathes of annoying and unnecessary introspection out of it. Then I sat down and worked out what the other three characters had been doing whilst not interacting with the main character. Then I worked out where in the story various scenes could naturally be cut. Then I sat down and wrote a series of short, snappy scenes from the other characters points of view and slipped them in, as the actress said to the bishop.
Finally I ran off a copy on the office laser printer and took it with me to New Zealand.
The beginning is quite good, though I say so myself. But it all gets a bit confused around the middle and towards the end the timelines of the different characters are completely out of synch. This apparently doesn't matter if you're George RR Martin - his latest epic has a get-out clause at the beginning explaining that the narrative isn't meant to be sequential. But it matters to me, especially when characters finally get together.
So the weeks since I returned to Wales have been spent trying to coerce the book into a semblance of order. This has meant writing more short, snappy scenes, and shuffling the existing ones around until they form something pleasing to the eye. Unfortunately there's just too much there for me to juggle in my head all at once, so I've had to resort to all manner of indexes, aide-memoires and scraps of illegible paper. Now that it's finally done, I can stand back and take in the whole - a vision of perfect beauty.
At least I hope it is.
This then is how I write novels. It's a bit like wrestling with eels, only less fishy and with fewer actual eels. I could call it the chaotic approach to writing, but that makes it sound much more structured and organised than it really is. My problem though is not that the process of birthing each story is so convoluted and painful, but that I can never quite stop tinkering with the finished article; never quite make up my mind. I really need Benfro book two to work this time, and work well enough for me to finally put it to bed.
After all, there's still books three and four to write.
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