The Dreaded Novel Re-Write

I know in my bones that the novel will get stronger with a re-write, but I haven’t got a clue where to begin. A few days ago, I was rearing to go. I started up Scrivener, moved my old novel folder into a draft and helpfully renamed it to draft ‘0.9’ - the idea being that I am edging closer to version ‘1’ (a throwback to my days working in Information Technology). I then created three folders, calling them Act One, Act Two, and Act Three. Great stuff. I felt I was on the right track.

Fast forward forty-eight hours later, and I’m looking at this new draft folder and my mind draws a blank. It’s 6:20 am, my coffee is half drunk, and I can’t seem to think of anything. I run a search on Google, “How to ReWrite Your Novel” and come up with tonnes of blogs all filled with wonderfully vague bullet points that say a lot without helping. The answer isn’t going to be out there.

I’m so tired of this novel, and self-doubt is creeping in. Was it all a waste of time? Were people humouring me when they said it’s a cool idea? I don’t know. Part of me wants to toss it all in the bin and move on. The other says I’ve worked on this for so long, that I can’t give up at this last hurdle. No clue what to do next…

Post-Writing Fundamentals

The course ended weeks ago and I’m still buzzing from the inspiration it’s given me. The Writers & Artists’ Writing Fundamentals course are hands-down the best value for money I’ve ever had in a writing course, and Bill Ryan, the course leader, was fantastic in his feedback. The first thing I did when I finished the course was to put my novel in a drawer for a month and forget about it. I’d spent ten weeks engrossed in it, thinking through the characters and tearing chunks out of the various scenes. What surprised me most about the course was that reading and critiquing other writer’s works was a lot more useful than I expected it to be. Before this course I used to think that this exercise was just a lazy way of keeping students busy, but what I hadn’t realised was that by seeing the mistakes other people made, and listening to the feedback they gave me, I was starting to see a pattern to bad writing, and common mistakes. When you get your friends to read your novel, they’ll just tell you it’s nice. But when someone who doesn’t care about your feelings reads it, you get the feedback straight into the vein, and it’s a refreshing cold shower that jolts the system. Another thing that occurred to me before I made my weekly submissions was that I was expecting other people’s time to read what I’d written, and by being sloppy I was therefore disrespecting this somehow. All in all, the ideas I’ve had bubbling in my head over the past month on how to make my writing better in general, and Damaskopolis specifically, can’t stay in there much longer. It’s time to rewrite this thing into what it was always supposed to be.

Laptops charged!
Playlists loaded!

All systems are go…