Editing

I call it editing but really it's a case of procrastinating and putting off the painful re-read and the butchering of my initial words. Although they're very special to me I am not under the impression that they are perfect; I love my story but I definitely know that my grammar and syntax leave a lot to be desired.

One wonderful friend once said to me

'What has the comma ever done to you?'

At the time I thought she was being a bit picky, the fullstops were helping to create tension right? WRONG. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Whilst I was editing the first six chapters I laughed a lot; in some cases I was right and the short snappy sentences helped with pacing and drama buuuuuut most of the time it just made the writing seem really immature and under developed.

I've always had an interesting relationship with grammar. I was in all the top sets at school but for some reason I just didn't absorb those useful lessons about the English Language. All the way through uni I'd have lecturers comment that my syntax needed improvement and I completely ignored it because I didn't know what it was. REALLY STUPID! I was daft enough to look at it and go 'huh?' and then put the considered and constructive criticism aside and forget all about it next time I wrote something. I am proud to say that in my Masters year I finally asked my Dad (my own personal editor) and I now understand what syntax is. Sadly, I'm still crap at it.

Is any first time writer ever comfortable with the idea of letting someone else read their book purely to pick holes in it? To have someone just read it to identify each and every mistake? To point out how you have failed with nearly all the basic language techniques (I say 'nearly all' because I am still hopeful that the years of my Dad editing my work has had some impact on my writing technique)?

Unfortunately I know that one day I will have to hand my book over to somebody for the sole reason of finding all the mistakes I have made. BUT for now I am hiding from grammar and syntax and focusing on the storyline and making it the absolute best it can be; mainly trying to fix the holes in the plot and to redefine the world more effectively. Excitingly, this means that I get to write whole new sections and develop characters and their plot lines more fully which, means that I get to spend lots of time in the world that spent so much time creating.

Although editing can be a scary process it does mean that I get to disappear into my own thoughts and justify the glazed look that my friends and family have come to know so well.  

Mum's Feedback

First...

Mum's birthday was the deadline I had set for the completion of my first draft and I am amazed to say that she only received it a week late (maybe a week and a half). I sent it to her as soon as Ed had finished making it look cool in ebook format, which it really did; I had a massive geek out when he showed it to me.... it looked like an ACTUAL ebook!

Next...

I had to wait... and it was excruciating. I didn't want to bug Mum and make her feel pressured to finish it, so instead I texted Dad incessantly. Stuff along the lines of;

'Has she started yet?'

'Has she said anything?'

'Do you know where she is?'

'Has she reached the part where... oh, well, I can't tell you, it'll give it away'.

I also tried to disguise my stressing out with texts that masqueraded as everyday questions;

'How are you?'

'What are you up to today, having a lazy day?'

I'm pretty sure I fooled nobody...

Then...

I got a text when I was at work saying

'Just finished. Wow. Love it, love it, love it'.

Well, that made my heart race. I thought it would take her much longer to finish. When I had checked two days before she was only half way through.

I got home as quickly as I could; and I mean quickly, I wasn't stopping for anybody. As soon as I got into the house I raced upstairs and rang her. We spoke for a full hour about my book. A full hour (happy dance)! Admittedly, probably due to the intense bias of being a mum, she didn't really have any criticism for me. It took some probing questions from me to smoke out the gaps in Mum's responses; things that I hadn't made clear enough... for example, a whopping great plot changer had been completely missed! She blamed herself, but for me it was excellent feedback because I want people to get it straight away. After all, it's not like someone reading it in Australia would have me looking over their shoulder saying 'Oh that bit? Oh that means...'.

My first bit of feedback was awesome. I felt GREAT, really like I had achieved something. Dare I say it..? Like a budding author... No too soon.

The other really exciting thing was that Mum started guessing what was going to happen next... she didn't guess BUT she had some great theories; theories that made me stop and take note, to really consider the possibilities of what she was thinking.

Obviously then my imagination went off on one and was fired up to write the next book. I stopped and forced myself to be disciplined; with great difficulty I convinced myself that the priority was to polish my story (Grammar and technique is a massive hurdle that I am ignoring until I'm happy with the plot).

So editing hey? This should be fun...

Today I was asked how I finished my book...

Unfortunately I had to swallow the bitter pill of reality and admit that my book is far from finished. There is a horrifyingly scary amount to do before I'll run the agent, editor and publisher guantlet! Even then I have to expect them to say it is not finished.

BUT I can tell you about how I got from a blank piece of paper to a first draft.

The truth is this... I can't remember the moment when the light bulb 'dinged' above my head, or I started imagining characters in my head (never talking to them though, I hear this is a bad sign?) but the whole novel was actually born from an entirely different idea. It certainly didn't 'ding' into my life. I suspect it was more like a six hour shift at the library, with the beginning of an idea ruminating until I decided I had to do something with it.

Now I do remember the day I decided to do something with it. I sat down and decided that I wanted to write in the first person and that for this idea my main character would be a boy. Then after a page I scrapped it all and thought 'No I don't want the main character to be a boy, I want it to be a girl'. Again and again I scrapped the first page and chuckled to myself about my silly fantasy of thinking that I could just sit down and write. Who did I think I was, J.K. Rowling, Suzanne Collins or Stephanie Meyer?

My housemate peered into my room and asked what I was doing so I launched into a 'Don't you think it's a good idea' speech about my new idea. We got excited and thought it'd be a great film, obviously someone would want to pick up the rights, right?

Oh the naivety! The idea changed DRASTICALLY from that afternoon but the useful thing for me was talking t through with somebody and getting excited about them saying 'Yes, it is a good idea'. As soon as you hear that, it gets a teensy bit easier. For a while I wrote down notes that I wanted to happen and they always referred to the main character as 'Girl'. I couldn't write from the character's p.o.v before I even knew her and I couldn't just sit down and think 'It's Tuesday afternoon and I have nothing to do so I am going to write',

Then, on a three hour train ride I found my character and I found her voice just by sitting and thinking about the story. She stemmed from a 'what if' question.

I'm not saying it hasn't been done before, because it has, but 'What if she woke up and didn't know who she was, where she was or why she was there?' Then the name just came to me. Caro.

So after months of stewing, I had her name and I had her 'What if' and realised that I'd got to the point where I just HAD to start writing. As soon as I had that it snowballed and I wrote solidly for the whole three hour train journey. I didn't scrap a single thing (I have now, but lets scoot past that and revel in the moment!).

For months the idea swam around amongst my final uni project and my dissertation and I occasionally wrote but it was more about getting to know them in my head (wow when I talk about them in my head it does sound like I'm heading into the crazy) and creating the world WHICH is the hardest thing. (When you read a book and don't even question the complex and creative construct of the world you're reading about, please stop and think about how awesome that is.)

When out of uni, as I've said before, work was scarce and I found myself with way too much spare time on my hands.

Too much spare time = lots of thinking time.

Lots of thinking time = (for me) over thinking the depressing lack of work, money and social life.

So instead my lots of thinking time became my writing time. My boyfriend, quite possibly fed up of my down time that came from lots of thinking, said that I should be like a proper writer, that I should treat it as a job.

And I did.

I wrote everyday.

There are many, many documents and guides that I probably should have read during the writing process, but I didn't and I still finished. That is because I didn't stop. Of course, now I have to go through and use the knowledge of all these fantastic writing guides to edit and to help shape my ideas.

There are loads of different pieces of advice, but for me the key was...

Write. Keep at it and just write.

'What if?'

When some people see YA before a genre they instantly dismiss it and I say 'SHAME ON YOU' to all of those people. The tag young adult only means more accessible, it doesn't mean that the genre or topic of the novel will be dealt with softly in order for a younger audience to appreciate it. In fact, it often means taking heavy and hard hitting plot lines and applying them to a young person, putting these difficulties into the world a young person lives in just helps them to relate to incredibly difficult situations.

I just love the 'what if?' aspect of a dystopia; worlds that are created in response to a 'what if?' For example;

• 'What if reality TV turned into a way of controlling the rebellious masses by airing a hideous gladiator-esque competition?' - The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins)
• 'What if love was seen as an infectious disease?' - Delirium (Lauren Oliver)
• 'What if we found a way to live forever?' - The Decleration (Gemma Malley)
• 'What if the UK never solves it's debt problem?' - After the Fear (Rosanne Rivers)
• 'What if aliens invaded?' - The 5^th Wave (RickYancey and looooaads more)
• 'What if we lived in just five virtuous factions?' - Divergent (Veronica Roth)
  
• 'What if global warming causes the earth to become hostile and the poor live among it whilst the rich float in cities in the sky?' - Terra (Gretchen Powell)
• 'What if we lived strictly by one person's vision of purity and goodness?' - Article 5 (Kristen Simmons)
• 'What if royalty was decided by a dating competition?' - The Selection (Kiera Cass)
• What if all that mattered in the world was how we looked and life being one big party?' - The Uglies (Scott Westerfeld)

I can't even think of a 'what if?' for Unwind (Neal Shusterman), read it and you'll see what I mean. But hey, what if that actually happened?

I wish the whole series looked like this.

Of course these dystopian realities are made up of more than just one 'what if?' but those 'what if?' questions make us reflect on the world we are currently living in and the choices that we, as individuals, make. After the initial 'what if?' we often branch out into 'what if that happened to me?' and that moment of self reflection amongst societal reflection is something really quite special.

Of course, currently I'm living in the fantasy created by the question;

'What if I can actually get my book published?'

Craft Night!

So Ed decided that he only wanted to read it if it looked like a book. He promptly made a list of all the things he would need for DIY book binding, went into town and bought the equipment, got home and he was in instant project mode.

There was lots of printing but the word document was made into a PDF and the printer and the computer had a little conversation that organised all the pages into the right order, so that they could be printed in eight sections.

Ed getting all geeky with the printer

Our eight different sections

This is the point that I got really involved and forgot to take any pictures BUT the next things that happened were really exciting. I folded all the pages for an hour (well that's not exciting,, but the rest is I swear), then put holes in the fold of each of the sections with a cool tool from Ed's toolkit, then sewed the sections together. At that point I got a little bit too involved and for some reason he listened to me, this resulted in having some pointless holes all the way through the book because I didn't trust that the tried and tested method would hold it together...plank! Then we stuck all the sections spine down to a piece of material with flappy bits either side and stuck them onto the cover we'd made earlier (Blue Peter eat your heart out!).

I'm sure that my limp explanation above has given you absolutely NO real insight into how it was made but here's the link that helped with our crafty night: http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-bind-your-own-Hardback-Book/

LOOK WHAT WE MADE!

It's a book

Still a book...	Super cool front page
Bottom left... yeah that's my monogram!	The middle of the book.

We also tried to make marbled paper for the opening pages, but with no inks (because they're reeeaaallly expensive), so we tried using oil paints watered down with linseed oil:

The paint just sank to the bottom!

It didn't work, we just made a mess.

OK, so what happens now?

Now comes the reeeaaallly reeeaaallly long editing process and part of that means that I actually have to let people read it. Without the response of others I have no idea what works and what doesn't. So, like any sensible writer I didn't just send my 'baby' out to the wolves just to watch it get ripped apart, I've started with the best of critics. The ones who have your heart in mind when they're reading. My friends and family.

Within this bunch are varying degrees of critique and bias; I'm aware that some might read it and instantly love it because I wrote it, some might not be able to be completely honest, and some might be scared of upsetting me. However, I do feel that I have a good selection of people who support me and want me too succeed enough that they really would be honest. I'm not saying that bias won't be there (I'd be stupid to set myself up with readers who wouldn't ease me into the feedback process gently), but for the first set of beta readers, I want their words to come from a kind place, even if the critique is negative.

There are some people who have been reading it step by step as I have written it. One friend (you know who you are) is probably the only reason I continued to write past the first chapter. Every week she'd read a new chapter whilst we worked at the library (Sorry to my supervisor, only after we'd done all of our work... I promise) and she convinced me that not only was the idea good, but that I could write.

Other friends have been reading it chunk by chunk to get a little bit more continuity.

Then Mum, Dad and my boyfriend, get to read it all at once, as though it were a real book.... exciting right? But in all cases they're only just seeing the finished vision (I say vision because it's certainly not the finished product).

Bring on the first round of beta readers;

• Dad – Now Dad is super supportive, but over the years I have come to know when his feedback isn't going to be good, it always starts with 'Hmm i's interesting'. As soon as I hear those words I get the irrational crazy only a daughter can have towards her Father. Also over four years of academic writing I have trained Dad to be my grammar blood-hound because, to be brutally honest, I suck at grammar and syntax (I didn't even know what syntax was until my third year of uni).
• Mum – Mum I love you and I'm hoping you agree with everything I say below. Again, super supportive like Dad, but without the discipline needed to read something if it doesn't grab her from the get go. This is also a great thing because if it does grab her I'll know I've done a good job.
• Holly – A friend who also writes and has been very supportive of this whole process. We're brutally honest with each other and we'll say instantly when we think something doesn't work. We won't dress it up as something it's not, if it stinks, it stinks.
• Naomi – Probably the most gentle of my first round of beta readers, but even so after reading the first chapters amongst the praise, she didn't tip toe around what she didn't like.
• Ed – Last but not least, my boyfriend. He is incredibly honest with me. He once said 'Real writers would sit down every day and write something because it's their job, that's what you should do' and I really took it to heart. That advice helped me to finish the first draft.

So now it's just a case of waiting for their responses. It sounds like the easiest part right? WRONG. It's so nerve racking. Definitely one of the more terrifying things I have done.

I'll keep you posted.

The Thrill of the First Draft

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! I finished my first draft. If I told myself this time last year that in a years time I would have just finished an 83,000 word first draft I would have laughed. A big, booming, belly laugh. But I did... and this is how it happened.

About a year and five months ago I was on the final stretch of my Masters year and looking for anything to distract myself from all the deadlines tumbling towards me. To be honest, it wasn't the most sensible time for me to decide to check out of my masters degree; I had a dissertation to write (well, research, plan and then write... I left it a little late! I don't recommend it), I had a final performance coming up and I had absolutely no plan of what to do with my life when it was all done.

I suddenly decided to read for pleasure for the first time in four years. I couldn't believe I had forgotten how much I loved curling up with a book and reading, shutting myself away from reality and completely immersing myself in a world so beautifully different from my own. Twenty books later I realised I'd let it get a little bit out of hand... my wallet was empty and I had fallen behind on my studies (still hadn't started the dissertation).

The worst thing was that I felt like I had completely exhausted my chosen genre, young adult dystopian fiction. (Only now do I realise how many more exciting YA dystopian novels there are out there, but hey, I was new to this world.) I'd read The Hunger Games, Divergent,Unwind, The Declaration and Matched amongst other fantastic YA books and I was desperate for something else.

I'd always dabbled in concocting stories, but in a non-committal way; 'wouldn't this be a great idea for a book/movie?' It always intrigued me that I was lacking imagination for writing plays considering I am a Drama and Theatre Studies graduate. I worked in a library so always had plenty of time to think and one day it just came to me. The Idea. It was a light bulb moment. I spent six solid hours shelving books and thinking solely about the story that was taking shape in my head.

Even though my shift finished at 1am I went home and wrote the first chapter. That weekend I wrote three more. Over the next couple of weeks I wrote the first TEN chapters. It was a miracle to me, sitting down and writing my dissertation struck my heart with fear and dread, yet I was voluntarily writing thousands of words.

Reality check. Three weeks before my dissertation was due I finally sucked it up, put my novel down and put my academic hat back on, wrote that and then... couldn't start writing for me again. I had some sort of writers block. To be more accurate I had FEAR. I had finished my degree with First Class Honours (Whoop!) and I was at the point where I had to decide. If I continued writing my book what was I trying to say? That I was a writer? That I actually thought something might come out of my hobby?

It seemed ludicrous to devote that much time to something that wasn't going to feed me, clothe me, or pay my rent. I was scared to say I wanted to write because what right did I have after studying Drama for years (see what I did there... write... right?) I did not want to fail, I mean nobody does want to fail, but pursuing something that I hadn't even studied seemed crazy to me. So, I did the adult and responsible thing. I moved house, got a job and let my story brew in the back of my mind.

Things didn't really start off how I planned, I couldn't get enough hours as a Theatre Practitioner, so I started teaching singing... I had moved to a new place, and was finding it hard to make friends (who knew it'd be so difficult out of school and uni, I was constantly asking people out on friend dates) and the severe lack of money made me house bound.

'Sooooooo' I thought one day, twiddling my thumbs, 'what shall I do...?' I reasoned that it was OK to start writing my book again, I didn't have work and I needed a hobby that relied on just me. So I sat myself at a desk and wrote. I tried to write everyday and once again the novel took over my life. I thought about it everywhere; at the gym, at breakfast, in the shower, on the bus,in bed, watching TV, when I was teaching, when I was cooking. You get it, I thought about it all the time.

I'd always known how the first book would end, but suddenly, it was here... In fact at ten on Sunday 4^th August I knew I'd finish it that night. I'd had a couple of false alarms during the week, but this time, I just knew.

At 11.53 I finished my first draft.

Look how thick it is :) 

Silence and calm swept over me and for once, the only thing that was in my head was this; 'I can't believe I finished it.' I spent the next hour in a bubble of disbelief and as I let myself sink down into my bed I was looking forward to a night of nothing. The light was off and I was thinking about work the next day (I'm not the best at switching off). 

Just as I was drifting off, at around 2am, I realised that the thrill of the first draft wouldn't last past that moment...a deeply terrifying thought hit me.

Oh crap! Now somebody has to read it. 

Needless to say, I didn't get any sleep that night.