The pleasures of weight loss

Right, one of the several purposes of this blog is to let you all in a bit on the actual process of the book I'm writing at the moment. In other words, the time I spend at the very unglamorous coalface of writing.  And that means, at the moment, a second draft.

My situation is this: My last book, The Knife of Never Letting Go, came out last May, and the year that it's had has been bewildering and wonderful and surprising and could fill a blog on its own. But it won't. What it does mean, though, is that the sequel - called The Ask and the Answer and out in the UK on 4 May (plug alert!) - has attendant responsibilities with publicity and so forth that its author will gratefully fulfil.

But all the while, I'll be writing the much-needed third volume, and it comes out, you guessed it, just about this same time next year. Having spent a feverish six months getting a first draft written, I've been continuing work on the second draft.

Which, for me, means cutting, cutting, cutting. 

This could easily go in the writing tips section (and it still may), but a very good rule of first drafts is that old saw, "Don't get it right, get it written." This was told to me by someone extremely pompous whose company I couldn't bear, but that doesn't mean he or she wasn't also correct.

First drafts are, for me, where I get to try everything out. Every silly, foolish, outlandish, and sometimes perfect idea that pops into my head about where the book might go. I don't worry so much about dead ends, because they're inevitable, and I certainly don't worry about having a good idea 2/3rds of the way in that I'll have to go back and pretend I meant from the beginning. 

That's why first drafts exist for me, because no one, and I mean NO ONE, ever reads my first drafts aside from me. And knowing that going in, I have a LOT more freedom to try things out, to overwrite where I'm struggling, to fall on my face and fix it without anyone ever knowing it happened.

Which means, of course, that my first drafts are a bit flabby. I open myself up to criticism here, of course, because both The Knife of Never Letting Go and The Ask and the Answer hover around the 500-page mark. But hey, that's how much story I needed to tell, all right? Get off my back.

And they used to be even longer. I wrote them and this current draft that way on purpose. Because in there somewhere, there's bound to be a glint of diamond that I can then excavate, polish up and turn into the real book I'd intended all along.

But to get there, I have to cut. Cut away all those hours where the writing was uninspired and I was just "getting it written rather than right", cut away all those experiments that ended up dying a natural death because something better came along, cut away the scenes that go on too long because I was letting them play out to see where they might go. Cut away, in short, many days of work.

And do I mind? God, no. Rewriting is where the real story, the one the book is demanding to be about, starts to show its sooty face. Themes emerge and can be clarified (in the sense that butter is clarified, a process of melting down). Emotions can be refocused, action made stronger and faster, dialogue cut away and reduced, scenes halved and halved again.

My main goal for a second draft is to cut away all the fat and let the real book take its first wobbly steps in the cold morning air. Its resemblance to the first draft is (switching metaphors) about that of a house of straw to a house of clay: similar in generalities and intent, different in quality and strength.

Draft three, of course, is the house of bricks. And draft four is where, by magic, you turn that house of bricks into a swan.