Posted Monday June 29th 2009
by Patrick Ness

Well, I’m finally putting my money where my mouth is. After all these tips and blogs, here at last is a piece of original writing by yours truly for you to judge as you will. If you haven’t read it yet, do so, and then read the rest of this blog, as there are a few spoilers (and a bit of engineering revealed).

It was always part of the duty of the Writer In Residence to write a short story for the site, and I had lots of swirling ideas about what I might do. Most of them, unfortunately, were entirely inappropriate for a family website. 

Luckily, though, my favourite idea, which kept nudging itself forward, was one that would hopefully work for everyone. In The Knife of Never Letting Go, Todd meets Viola in the swamp, of course, and we slowly come to learn that she’s crash-landed at the head of a convoy of settlers.

But what chain of events led her there? Readers kept asking, and hey, since I knew, I thought, why not make that the story? A treat for fans as they wait the long ten months (and counting) for book three, but then of course there’s the challenge of making it a story that works for everyone else, too. Just the kind of challenge I like.

And so I began. For you writers out there, I went through six heavy drafts of the story, with lots of paragraph by paragraph rewriting in each of those drafts. In a rarity for me, draft six is actually 200 words longer than draft one (though it’s 1000 words shorter than draft two), because I wasn’t happy with the structure in draft one and re-sequenced it, necessitating a few more scenes. 

Which I then cut back. And cut back again. And then had people read it, and cut it back some more. The feedback I received from my key readers was terrific (and eerily unanimous), saying for example to cut back on a ridiculously over-enumerated section that bored everyone but me, and in another good idea, to cut down on the repetition of a certain theme which, in early drafts, I was quite vigorously bashing you over the head with. Readers are always going to understand more than you think they will. Trust them, they’re clever.

As for the rest, I knew what I wanted the story to do, I knew how I wanted it to feel, so the drafts were mostly a matter of getting it to that spot. It wasn’t always easy. The back and forth structure can be a very tricky one. You have to get the weight of each scene exactly right or the momentum dies. That was a challenge. 

As was the purposeful hard break away from the back and forth structure that happens near the end. I’ve mentioned in one of the tips about how you can set up a rhythm for a reader, and then take the risk of breaking it. I didn’t set out with that mercenary thought in mind, but when I got to that part of the story, it just felt right. Viola’s been jolted out of her ordinary life quite violently, so why shouldn’t the reader be, too? Again, not planned that crassly, just the right feeling as I got there. If you get these instincts when you write, trust them, they’re usually on to something.

Also in contravention of my own practice, the last line of the story changed a number of times. As I re-structured and re-weighted the story, trying to get it to the right feeling, what Viola needed to leave us with changed slightly. Sometimes it was a question I asked myself: What would the truth of this for the Viola in the story really be?

And as I wrote more and got to know her better, that changed slightly, until at last she was saying the right thing. This is the wonder of many drafts. If you keep listening, your story will eventually reveal its proper self to you

So, that’s a little peak behind the curtain (not too much, though, or the story dies a little). And now it’s up to you to tell me if I’ve succeeded or failed. I know how I feel about the story. It’d be very interesting to hear how you do.