Do you have the bottle for a major re-write?

Yes, I have a cheeky little Sauvignon chilling in my fridge...

That might help but it's not what I'm talking about, sadly. I'm talking about bottle. Bravery. Even bravado. A touch of derring-do.

It's something that separates the sheep from the goats, writing-wise: the ability and willingness (OK, that's two things) to tackle a major rewrite. Some writers - and I'm one of them - feel that all their writing is rewriting. I'm constantly trying to improve, hone, think what might be better. But I am not talking about tinkering and self-editing. 

I'm not talking about going through from beginning to end looking for typos, or making one of your characters different, or removing a scene or thread, or adding a scene or thread, or removing examples of over-writing, or altering the pace, or injecting cliff-hangers, or strengthening a theme, or removing a theme. I'm talking about radical, fundamental changes that make the whole book different. I'm talking about The Big Rewrite. Brace yourselves. And get your bottle out of the fridge.

There are times, (and, in case you're a Supertramp fan, yes, it may be when all the world's asleep and the questions run so deep) when a BR is necessary. And at those times we must find the strength to bite the bullet and just damn well do it. 

Often on these occasions you've sensed (and ignored) an earlier whiff of eel-vomit*, a suspicion that this is not your best book, a blind faith that any holes will sort themselves by magic. You can ignore these whiffs if you want to - and sometimes, you have to because you don't know what the source of the whiff is yet - but eventually you will need to act.

(*I don't think eel-vomit smells but allow me some artistic licence. Eel-vomit is the word I regularly assign to rubbish writing.)

Let me tell you about a novel I've been writing. Let us call it Castle Crone, because that is what it is called (though it wasn't at first.) I started about four years ago. And "finished" less than a year later. I was happy with it, though I knew it had a problem with the ending - but I ignored this because it was to be the start of a series anyway - and another problem (or three) I couldn't quite put my finger on. But I felt I had something good and interesting and unusual and generally happifying. Agent loved it. So that was good. She sent it to publishers. They loved it. I received amazing feedback, including from one who said it was the best submission they'd seen all year but they couldn't take it because it competed with something they'd just commissioned. And by the way, they said, we wonder whether X quite works. And Y. And whether the ending is right?

To cut a long story short, two things happened. The recession hit, so publishers wouldn't commit to a major (expensive) series. And I found myself busy with the publication and knock-on effects of Wasted and then the new edition of Blame My Brain and then the contract for The Teenage Guide to Stress. However, during that time, I did rewrite it. Twice. Totally. Two BRs. Then I didn't like it so much, and nor did my agent. So we decided to wait till the time was right and see whether I'd like to tackle it again.

I rewrote it the following year but didn't send it out. I'd lost my way.

Ditto the next year. Wahhhhhh. 

By then, I had so many drafts I didn't know what they all were. They had document names such as "Castle Without Climber", "Final Castle With Climber", "Castle Crone With Dragon Bits", "Final Castle Sept 2011", "Final Final Castle Without Dragons" and "Final Frigging Castle".

Inspired partly by desperation, partly by a love for the world I'd created and partly by my agent, I've just done two more Big Rewrites in the last few months, including the one I finished last week, which I have called, "I'VE BLOOMIN DONE IT." 

WHAT WERE THE MASSIVE CHANGES?

1. Voice. Voice A, which I had loved (and which had made it feel really original) had to go, to make it more commercial. (Ouch, but there were good reasons - and, remember, I write for children.) Voice B transmogrified into Voice C and then a mixture of Voices A, B, C and D. Now, we all know you can't have a random mixture of voices, so that wasn't OK at all. So, I discarded B, C and D, and went back to a modified A - let's call it A2. My agent said that A2 was holding the pace back in some parts. So that wasn't OK at all. She said Voice A2 was great for one character's POV but not the rest. I didn't agree but I did what I was told, because she is Always Right. So, I then created a structured, reasoned alternation between Voice A2 and Voice E. Then I realised that Saint Agent was definitely right and I chopped Voice A2 some more until it was more of an A-. 

2. In one version, my MC was terrified of climbing, in a mountainous land where climbing is the most valued and necessary skill. In the next version, he was utterly brilliant at it, which, as you can imagine, changed everything. Like everything. Apart from the rockfaces and castle walls he had to climb. In the final version, he's utterly terrified of it... Most of the other characters also changed personalities. Often. 

3. Tense. In the first version, I used present tense, because I'd been writing Wasted, which is present tense. PT was quite wrong for this new story. As Saint Agent pointed out. Grr.

4. Structure. I can't even face telling you. 

5. Characters. There are a lot of them and I changed the relationships between almost all of them. Every change had a knock-on effect.

6. The ending. This was my final and almost last minute (heck of a long minute...) change, despite being the thing I'd known was wrong four years ago. The new ending is eleventy million times better. And so different as to be unrecognisable

7. The beginning. Because endings affect beginnings.

8. Stuff. 

The only thing that never changed is the Castle that forms the imaginary world. And that's interesting, as the whole point about this Castle is that is will not fall or be changed. It is immutable. Unlike books.

And now there is no whiff of eel-vomit!

What do I hope you will learn from this sorry saga?

1. That the writing process is not easy. But, it repays the effort. Be brave. It may be the hardest writing thing you'll do, but it will be the most important.

2. That the writing process is organic. A book doesn't arrive fully-formed. You have to grow it and shape it and be prepared to make mistakes with it and not to see them at first. I don't condemn myself for not dealing with them earlier. I don't think I could have done.
3. That a good agent is a thing of saintliness. 

4. That when there's a whiff of vomit, there's almost certainly vomit. 

Unless it's actually parmesan sauce. They do have a similar smell. However, if you know perfectly well that you haven't been cooking parmesan sauce, don't waste time thinking that's what you can smell.

It's your WIP whiffing. Take deep breaths and sort it. 

DEAR CRABBIT: what if I can't afford professional editing?

From a blog comment:

Dear Crabbit,
It would be great if you did a post on the best things we can do if we can't afford a full-editing service, Nicola. I'm on a strict family income and spending on my writing just can't take centre stage. I can save and build some money to use, and would love to know the best way to spend it to get the best advice for my work. I can see how important outside proof reading and editing can be, so I want to get it right with my limited resources!

Are authors supposed to notice their own errors?

What if your book has a few clunky sentences and/or punctuation errors when you send the sample chapters to a publisher or agent? Does this matter? After all, isn't that what publishers' editors are for?

Yes, it does matter. And your book may well never reach a publisher's editor if your manuscript, covering letter and synopsis have the marks of a writer who doesn't have full control of language. Of course, a typo is a typo and not a sign of bad writing. I'm prone to typos in blog posts and emails myself. But lots of typos in what is supposed to be your best effort at writing are the sign of a writer who doesn't know or care.

If you doubt me, read this agent's answer to the question. And it's Query Shark and Query Shark KNOWS.

Crabbit's Tips for Writers - 4: Publishing Yourself

Here is the fourth in my series of Crabbit's Tips for Writers. See the sidebar for links to the others. You can either read it in the post below or you can go here and download the complete document and print it out. Enjoy!

WEEDING OR EDITING

This is adapted from a much earlier post, but that one has been lost in the tangle of brambles and ivy, and I thought it could do with an airing. Especially since I'm in the middle of a novel revision and editing is uppermost in my mind.

I guess that the possible methods for self-editing are similar to the possible methods for weeding your garden.

1. Go from one end to the other, picking out all the weeds carefully.
2. Wander about, picking out weeds as you see them.
3. Decide that weeds are just plants with more determination and that, since everything is equal in God's eyes, they should be allowed to remain. (Please don't take this view of the weeds in your book. Not if you want to be published and read.)

Then I decided that this analogy is rubbish and that, as with all analogies, it is aesthetically pleasing and yet practically pointless.

There are, in fact, only three things you need to think about when weeding your garden:

1. You need to know the difference between a weed and a plant.
2. And you just have to get rid of the damned weeds. Doesn't matter how - just do it.
3. No matter how carefully you do it, you'll find more weeds at the end, because the removal of one weed often reveals another lurking beneath.

I decided that this is not complete rubbish after all and is a pretty good analogy for editing your own work, because:

1. You need to know what possible errors you're looking for - the difference between a good sentence / plot structure and a crappy one, just as you need to know what's a weed and what's not.
2. And you just need to get rid of the errors.
3. And when you've got rid of one lot, another lot is revealed.
4. So you get rid of them.
5. And so on.
6. Until your piece of work is weed-free.

Would you like any help with the identification of weeds? I am here for you, as ever. There are two categories of weeds in your literary garden.

CATEGORY ONE WEEDS are the choking bindweedy ones, which threaten to take over your roses and throttle the life-blood from them. (There are actually many of these in my real garden and at least one in my WIP.) These must be removed early on, by the roots, otherwise your roses cannot grow and your garden, frankly, is fit only for slugs and other vermin. It is, in the words of Rab C Nesbit, pish. Examples are:

• Poor characterisation - either in your MCs or your supporting acts. Do your characters always behave as they should? Does the reader like / respect/ identify with / feel for the MC? (We don't need to do all those things, but we have to care.)
• Pace problems - I wrote about that here.
• Tension issues - where is the tension? Is it in the right place? Is it satisfied at the right time?
• Voice slippages - see here.
• Major POV slippages - here you are.
• Story structure / shape / arc problems - over here.
• Saggy middle - hmm. I went searching for posts about saggy middles but kept finding myself mentioning them but never tackling them. This is rather the case in real life, too. I will have to tackle the saggy middle. Soon.
• Crappy ending - here.
• Story starting in the wrong place - gosh, I'm good to you.
• And a lot more - which is not very helpful of me but I have a book to write.

To be honest, you really shouldn't have let most of these anywhere near your garden in the first place. If you are a beginner writer, your book may be littered with these horrors, but a more experienced writer will avoid almost all of them before they appear.

CATEGORY TWO WEEDS are smaller things, which all writers will find in their first drafts and which we will apply the weeding gloves to with a commendable ruthlessness. Our editors and copy-editors and proof-readers will pick up any that we didn't spot but we want to leave as little as possible for these people. It's our book, not theirs. (Also, publishers nowadays don't like to use editors etc more than they need to. Grrr.) Category Two weeds are like those dainty things that try to pretend they're real flowers. Sometimes my husband thinks they are and he leaves them. Sometimes he takes out the pretty flowers instead. He is like a novice writer when it comes to weeding, which in his case it usually doesn't, actually. Examples are:

• Places where tweaks should be made to clarify characterisation / motivation / credibility.
• Clunky sentences - sentences where you have clustered a collection of clauses in an ugly order, for example, making it hard for the reader to read.
• Minor POV or voice slippage.
• Places where thre's too much telling when showing would have been better. Extraneous adverbs.
• Continuity issues - eg saying that the MC leapt onto the horse's bare back and then later mentioning the stirrups. I have done this. Oh and then there was the one [which made it through all the copy-editors and all the way into the printed book] where a girl flings open the door of a room which ten minutes before I'd said was locked on the other side...
• Typos, spelling errors, punctuation etc etc. And yes, there will be some in this post. I'll find them eventually. But probably not all of them, because this is a blog post and I can change it later. So shut up, please.
• Anything that doesn't sound absofrigginglutely perfect when you read it aloud, imagining that your audience consists of fidgety people who are assuming you've got nothing interesting to tell them and they're desperate to leave.

When you've done all that, there's only one more thing to do. Do it again. And possibly again. 

One of the problems is that the weed you removed may have hidden roots. You will have noticed the same in books: if you change one thing, you'll find you have created knock-on effects which now have to be dealt with. So, you do have to remove weeds and plot problems by the root and make sure you've not forgotten any tendrils. I suggest keeping a notebook as you revise and jotting down things you've changed, so that you can check that you've found all the consequences. However, this is a bit methody for me and I prefer the madness approach and the constant re-reading.

And when you're quite sure that no weed is peeping up between the soil of your well-raked flower-border, then you can let an agent or publisher see it. By which time, a previously invisible seed will have begun to sprout, and what you thought was perfection won't be. That's because perfection is unattainable in writing as in gardening, and you have to get over it.

Have I answered your questions? Probably not. See, I don't really have a method. I just do it. And do it again. I honestly think once you can identify the weeds, pulling them out is not that difficult. You can choose whatever weeding method works for you: just get rid of the little buggers.

Oh, and by the way, spell-check and grammar-check are the equivalent of weed-killer: they don't let anything grow. They kill indiscriminately and remove control from the gardener. They may have their place for some people but they are not enough for anyone. Real writers use their hands.

Here's one I made earlier, with not a weed in sight. (Obviously a lot earlier, since this is September and those are not Septemberish seedlings.)