Novel Writing as an Iterative Process

This is my way of saying I am going backwards and forwards, taking - as my rather Victorian grandmother would say - one step forward and two steps back.

I have been written to distraction, literally. I have been re-writing a short story ready for entry into the BBC New Openings Competition (deadline 2 December, for anyone who is interested), reading memoirs like a voracious autobiography-eater and I can’t help myself from opening files with little poems in, and making little alterations to them, almost daily.

As far as the book itself goes, I have revised the plot, having inputted the data from my original draft into a Plot Overview spreadsheet (see this post) and have been re-jigging the order of scenes to make it flow, and ensure that loose ends are tied up by the end. I imagine the next stage will be to extract and expand each ‘line’ and flesh it out into a full scene. This will help me to realise if there is enough drama, and tension. Hopefully I will be all set to start writing by the end of November.

My seven top tips for being as efficient as you can at the stage of structuring a book:

• Accept that you will feel you’re going backwards a lot, and that trust that invisible progress is being made.
• Turn off your Wi-Fi.
• Streamline your documents on your hard drive. File documents in separate folders. I use: admin; drafts; mechanics/research; character sketches, and setting sketches.
• Print your main documents out that you will cross-reference when writing, so that you will minimise switching between online versions when you come to write; this will only lead to distraction.
• When reading books, read slowly and carefully and notice the techniques that writers you admire are using to set up tension and narrative drive.
• When reading books, read slowly and carefully and notice the techniques that writers you *don’t* admire are using and be encouraged that you at least imagine you would do better.
• Seek advice from fellow writers. In the virtual realm, The Paris Review interviews, mostly all online, are indispensable.

The challenge: write a novel in the space of one year two days a week between 9am and 3pm

I was lucky enough to be awarded a bursary from Literature Wales last year to facilitate finishing my semi-autobiographical novel. The bursary period commences in a month, and I have a four week's lead-in to break into my routine. Two days a week for six months, I will drop off my youngest son, J aged 2, at nursery at 8.45am, and my daughter, M aged 4, at 8.50am. The times are important, in case you are wondering. By the time I get home I have just under six hours at my desk - read kitchen table - to get back into writing, and maybe even finish a book by next year. Not something I have had the opportunity to do - or even think about - much with two kids at home for four years.

The book was started in 2004 officially, though I have never written about anything else, really, except my own childhood. I hope I can get it out of my system: it would be nice to populate a novel with characters purely imaginary, scenarios the product of daydreams for once.

I didn't expect to feel the sense of loss I have felt these past two days in dispatching M and J into the hands of others. Empty nest syndrome, I suppose, but labeling feelings don't soften them. And suddenly I can remember my own experiences as a four year old in getting ready for school: my own mother tugging at my hair while knotting it into plaits, demanding keep still!; the warm smell of sandwiches, having been parceled up for three hours in a hot classroom, as I open my lunch box; nice cold, ice cold milk at eleven o'clock.

Luckily, I wrote down most of the bare bones of my novel before I had children; I see, now, how we live and see through our own children once they are born. My school days feel distant in a way that they didn't when I was in my mid-20s, able to hot hoof it off to Paris for a week to write. No such luxury now. I write between nine and three.