I'm writing this week. One of the things I did today was read a whole chapter from the first draft out loud. It required a large glass of water, being such a warm, dry day, but it was immediately illuminating.
Apart from the fillip of enjoying the prose and wanting to write more of it, reading the text aloud gave me instant feedback on some things that I had missed:
1. Clumsy phrases
'A visitor to the city' seemed fine when I wrote it and reread it in my head. I still think that it should work. But I can't say it – not clearly, deftly. It's the double [t] of '…tor to' and the similarity between '…sitor' and 'city'. So that's got to change.
2. Repetition
'City' this, 'city' that, blah blah blah 'city' … unintentional repetition can make prose so dull. A lot of repetition I can pick up reading in my head, but not all of it. I was surprised at some of the words that kept chiming out of the text – when you hear them they become obvious, you start to listen for them and they get more annoying each time.
3. Odd punctuation
When I ran out of breath, or was forced to pause when I didn't want to, I had to alter the punctuation. I felt instantly assured in changing it: that is, reading aloud gives me a stronger sense of what is correct for a sentence. This is true for the syntax overall.
4. Unnatural dialogue
I love writing dialogue, and it's fun to read. You have to act a bit to read it out loud, but you spot the unnatural bits straight away. I also removed a few 'he said' 'she said' phrases when they arrested my performance mid-flow. Not now Bernard!
5. Contradictions
Surprising number of these. 'It made it harder to speak but drove on the speaking'. Huh? I think that when I read in my head I accept and study the words more, as though searching out their poetic resonance. But when read aloud, phrases like that just sound stupid.
And they were just the obvious things. Worthwhile, this reading your work aloud. Which is what these guys said.
A few days ago I went to London for the launch of Saraswati Park by Anjali Joseph. She is the first from our Trinity College English set and also from among her UEA Creative Writing MA peers to get a novel published.
Anjali has already been picked out by the Telegraph as possibly one of the best young (that’s under 40 in literary life) novelists in Britain – not bad to be listed alongside Zadie Smith et al at any rate. If you’re looking for something to read over the Summer, you could do much, much worse than picking up a copy of her debut novel.
I loved the launch and after parties because of all the other writers there. Some had deals done and were approaching launches of their own; others were redrafting their manuscripts, half way through, or still mulling over ideas. But we all shared a common identity, multifarious as it is. We were all writers, and writers of fiction at that. In Cambridge I’m more often surrounded by small children or IT geeks (pretty sure my colleagues don’t read this blog, but in case they do, I know, not all of you are small children), both of which can be delightful.
But this felt like coming home.
It may have been the wine, but I felt tremendously energised by the evening. It was fun to meet some other writers from Cambridge especially, one of whom turned out to be my five-year-old’s best friend’s mum. She is going to introduce me to other writers and groups in Cambridge. It is such a relief to find other people round the corner going through the same creative processes, who might understand why I’m doing what I’m doing, and might give me feedback and advice. A welcome tonic to the hours spent alone coercing words to come out onto a laptop.
Most interesting of all was that all nearly all of the writers I spoke to gave me the same counsel. The first guy leaned toward me on the Tube and said, ‘let me encourage you like a trainer encourages an athlete when he slaps him in the face: the pain is only just beginning.’ He was on a fourth draft of his novel, that is, his third complete rewrite. ‘Take your time,’ he said, ‘don’t let anyone rush you. Publish when it’s ready.’
Others said the same thing. Take your time. There is no point pushing something out before you’re really happy with it. It takes ages to edit, to redraft, to rewrite. One girl said by the time she got published she could recite the whole book word for word. She said that by then she ‘hated the characters, the good ones and the bad ones.’
This isn’t advice I’d had from anywhere else. Most people just want to know when I’ll be finished.
I’m still aiming to get the first draft completed this year. But after that? Don’t rush me. I’m a writer.
1) Last week was a terrible writing week. I'm not going to blame dodgy refereeing decisions. The players simply weren't good enough.
Pete's father was a doctor.
He looked intelligent and paused
before he said things. He moved his family
to a bigger house with an orchard
and a pantry full of vegetables and fruit
where we ate carrots if we hadn't filled
already from the apples in the garden.
Ed's father was not his real one.
He was a photographer with a secret
darkroom through a cupboard upstairs
who never said a word but hung his black-and-white
pictures halfway up the stairs where we'd stop
to look like we did at his camera magazine
when the erotic issue came out.
Donald's father was an accountant
but he used to play for Scotland.
He still dressed up in shinpads
and shorts to boot the ball round with all
of his sons. He bought one of them
some drums and Donald who couldn't play
but joined our band anyway a guitar.
My father was absent in his room,
there but not there.
There is little to tell except the time
he got angry with my mum and threw
the radio at the wall.
It smashed, but he never hit her.
He never did anything.
I love a good first line. How many novels can you recognise from the opening sentences below? Before and after you use the Internet to find out?
Any time from a week last Monday our next baby is going to arrive. The last time a baby arrived in our house he had no name for 6 weeks and stopped me writing my novel for a year.
This time it's going to be different.
Why?
Secondly because we should be better at the fourth attempt than any previously at receiving small, vulnerable and disruptive persons into our family with the minimum of fuss. (This is not a family blog, but if it were, the advice would be to accept all help offered, sleep in separate rooms, plan absolutely nothing for 3 months, move the baby into a nursery posthaste, and remember that you always hit the wall before you stabilise).
Thirdly, it's going to be different because I know what I'm doing with the book a lot more. Last time I was writing in an adroit style that felt rather put on. It was clever and droll and too hard to sustain. I was still trying to work Rowling-style in a café and my job was more emotionally engaging and hard to shut out during writing weeks.
At least these were the excuses: if I had really wanted to make progress I would have recognised these limitations quicker and solved them.
The next few writing weeks might be tougher than normal, but I'll attack them nonetheless. It's going to take some earlier nights, some writing through the tiredness, continuing regardless if the words are poor, perhaps some obstinacy in sticking to my allotted days even when the rest of the family are stretched too.
Of course, I'm phenomenally blessed to have a healthy young family and the opportunity to write a book in the first place. I'm grateful for this, every day.
So thanks to all who have been asking how the book is going. I'm keen to get on with it, just as my wife is keen to get on with the birth (for it to be over, at least). We appreciate your support – and might need it a little more pressingly over the next few months.
To babies and novels!
PS. The current shortlist for baby names is: Atticus, Elias, Irving, Lewis, Ossian, Sebastian, Soren, Wilder and Wilf. Vote for your favourite in the comments below. Hat tip to workboywork, who named his bicycle in this manner.
