16. What do you do to celebrate when you finish a draft?
After I finished my last draft of Lessons to Learn, I got married and headed off to Europe for two months. However most of the time, the celebrations are a little more low-key: perhaps a trip to a café for a hot chocolate with a new book or magazine. It’s a chance to print off a complete copy of the work-in-progress, then shut down the file, and leave things be for a couple of days, a week, a month, before I start editing it again.
17. One project at a time, or multiple projects at once?
So far, I’ve only been able to deal with one novel-sized project at a time. But I’m also usually working on other mini-writing projects, whether it’s short stories, articles, poems, blog entries, letters, and so on.
18. Do your books grow or shrink in revision?
Lessons to Learn and the current work-in-progress both started out as short stories, so they’ve definitely grown from that format!
A couple of years ago, I would’ve said that I was a short story person; that all my ideas for stories arrived in an under 3,000 word format. Now, I do think about an idea in terms of a novel-length plot and complexities, but even so, my books still tend to grow in revision.
For me, the first draft of a novel is about getting the bones of the story down. It’s about working out how I’m going to get to that end point which I have in my head. Revising is about expanding the story around that, so the word count definitely goes up during the editing process.
19. Do you have any writing or critique partners?
Not at the moment. I know I’m going to need people to critique this draft when I’m done, but right now I have to just write it.
20. Do you prefer drafting or revising?
Let’s see. I enjoy the freedom of drafting; the feeling that when I sit down and write that I could take the story anywhere. However, it’s hard work to get the words flowing sometimes, and the finished product always seems so far away.
When I’m revising, I’ve got the full story there in front of me and I’m working to make it better. It can be tedious at times, going through chapter by chapter with the red pen (or the red track changes function on Microsoft Word), but at the same time I like having the opportunity to say ‘what if?’ What if I remove this character? What if she said something different here? What if I took out this paragraph or removed this sentence? Would the meaning still be there?
When I’m drafting, I say I prefer revising. When I’m revising, I say I prefer drafting. Actually, that sounds like I don’t enjoy writing at all, which isn’t true. I’ve loved to write since I learnt I could write, and it’s something I want to continue doing for a very long time.
If anyone has a question which I haven’t covered here, please feel free to leave a comment below and I’ll try and answer it as soon as possible.
