Great post! Found you on Simon K. Jones interview post and wanted to swing by for a gander. Very inspirational, the fact that you had extreme writer’s block and now 3 novels releasing in the span of a year. It gives me hope for my novel which I’m (finally) almost finished editing after originally writing it during my first NaNoWriMo event back in 2009—15 years ago!
A writing querry for you: Many of the books and articles I read are mainly based on writing books, but hardly any address the EDITING aspects. For me, I wrote the majority of my novel in the required 30 days of the NaNoWriMo competition. The story wasn’t complete until 2015, when I came back to it and finished the story in around a month. Since then, I’ve been on-and-off editing the novel. So the editing has lasted 1,000x longer than the actual writing!
So here’s my question: After your epic writer’s block, and after completing the re-/writing of your three novels, how did you get through the editing stages/phases? I’m looking to 80/20 my editing so I can move on to finally writing the sequels to this novel, similar to how you’ve done with your own trilogy. Any help and advice in your own process of finishing your series is much appreciated.
Many thanks, Eric, good of you to get in touch. I’m glad you’ve found these articles inspiring. Whatever else writing stories might be, it certainly requires a good deal of grit and not giving up! Your specific question about editing is an interesting one. I once heard someone say that novelists shouldn’t be called ‘writers’ but rather ‘re-writers’ because so much of the work is actually reworking our initial splurge of words. Certainly that’s been true of my novels so far. I think that initial gallop through the first draft can be very useful in order to see if you’ve got a story at all, and what sort of story it might be. It digs up raw material. Almost like dream stuff. But then the hard work begins - shaping that raw material into something that might be of interest to a reader. For my first two novels, that rewriting/reworking felt endless, but with the third one it happened much more smoothly. So I think with practice we can get better at revising and so get to a finished draft more quickly. I hope that's useful...Good luck!
Thank you for this. I do not intend to comment on every one of your posts, but I can't resist and they have been too interesting and provocative not to so far! You are one of the Chosen, a traditionally published author with a real agent and and a real editor and mass-marketed paperbacks--so the dispatches from your world are sacred. I wrote my first novel freehand and finished it age 20. I wrote the next two freehand too. These days, since I write in the snatched margins of life between part-time secondary school teaching and part-time house-husbanding with two young children and a wife recovering from cancer, I mainly write on a laptop with the internet turned off, either at 5.30am or in my son's naps or very late at night. I do still write freehand sometimes but I find that I get frustrated with taking time to type it up when my time is so limited anyway. I agree that it is slower but more...freeing. Here's a question for you, and myself: What happens if you write your first novel freehand and it *doesn't* get picked up by a world-famous imprint and published to critical acclaim? What if instead it gets rejected by agents? What was the difference between your manuscript and mine? Most likely, that yours was better! Why would that be? Maybe you read more books before you wrote your first novel, had more practice, maybe the idea, plot and characters were stronger, maybe you have more talent, maybe you were luckier, maybe all of the above in some combination. What should the person who didn't get their first freehand-written novel published, nor their second, third, fourth or fifth, do? Give up, or carry on? The trouble is, nobody else can tell them the answer to that question. The writing needs to be done for the joy of it, in the flow, not with one eye on how it will go down or how it will be received. And maybe that's the trick for second and subsequent novels for a published author, just like it is for an unpublished writer? I don't know. Sorry, I'm not entirely sure why all of that came out in your comment box! Sorry to clog up your comment section with stuff, but I can't bring myself to delete it ;)
"The writing needs to be done for the joy of it, in the flow, not with one eye on how it will go down or how it will be received. And maybe that's the trick for second and subsequent novels for a published author, just like it is for an unpublished writer?" That's it, exactly. Whether we've been professionally published or not, the challenges and frustrations are real. There are so many factors outside our control. We don't even truly choose the stories that come to us, let alone how they will be received once they're written. A huge amount of it is down to luck. But there are choices we can make to maximise our chances - to make the most of whatever talent we've been given. At the very least, we owe it to ourselves to make this work enjoyable. For me, writing freehand allows me to sink deeper into the story, to lose myself in it more completely - and yes, to better enjoy the process. That doesn't mean it's ever going to be easy. We need to make a living. Real life carries on around us. It sounds like you are carrying more than most. You have my fullest admiration that you're still managing to get words on paper, in spite of everything. You also have my thanks for engaging so fully with these articles and taking the time to comment. I truly appreciate it.
Of course! They're fascinating and helpful. FWIW, you may already know there is a device on the market called a 'FreeWrite' which is basically JUST a word processor (no operating system, no internet browswer, no apps etc.) and doesn't let you jump around within text easily, but does let you upload writing to the cloud. It's stupidly expensive though. Instead I bought something called an 'AlphaSmart' second hand from ebay which is essentially a very budget old school version of the same thing, one up from a typewriter but again you can export your words to a computer. The only reason I don't use it more is because the clacking of the keys is prone to waking up my children in the early mornings! Good advice about talent; thank you--I'll go on making the most of and honing what talent I might have as best I can, and get on with living the rest of life the rest of the time...
We're definitely on the same page - years ago I brought an old dumb computer that does nothing except word processing! I transcribe onto there after writing freehand. Anything you can do to get the barriers/distractions out of the way. And yes, you're right: writing can be all-consuming, but there are always more important things. Writing has to serve life, not the other way round!
Great post! Found you on Simon K. Jones interview post and wanted to swing by for a gander. Very inspirational, the fact that you had extreme writer’s block and now 3 novels releasing in the span of a year. It gives me hope for my novel which I’m (finally) almost finished editing after originally writing it during my first NaNoWriMo event back in 2009—15 years ago!
A writing querry for you: Many of the books and articles I read are mainly based on writing books, but hardly any address the EDITING aspects. For me, I wrote the majority of my novel in the required 30 days of the NaNoWriMo competition. The story wasn’t complete until 2015, when I came back to it and finished the story in around a month. Since then, I’ve been on-and-off editing the novel. So the editing has lasted 1,000x longer than the actual writing!
So here’s my question: After your epic writer’s block, and after completing the re-/writing of your three novels, how did you get through the editing stages/phases? I’m looking to 80/20 my editing so I can move on to finally writing the sequels to this novel, similar to how you’ve done with your own trilogy. Any help and advice in your own process of finishing your series is much appreciated.
Thanks.
Many thanks, Eric, good of you to get in touch. I’m glad you’ve found these articles inspiring. Whatever else writing stories might be, it certainly requires a good deal of grit and not giving up! Your specific question about editing is an interesting one. I once heard someone say that novelists shouldn’t be called ‘writers’ but rather ‘re-writers’ because so much of the work is actually reworking our initial splurge of words. Certainly that’s been true of my novels so far. I think that initial gallop through the first draft can be very useful in order to see if you’ve got a story at all, and what sort of story it might be. It digs up raw material. Almost like dream stuff. But then the hard work begins - shaping that raw material into something that might be of interest to a reader. For my first two novels, that rewriting/reworking felt endless, but with the third one it happened much more smoothly. So I think with practice we can get better at revising and so get to a finished draft more quickly. I hope that's useful...Good luck!
Thank you for this. I do not intend to comment on every one of your posts, but I can't resist and they have been too interesting and provocative not to so far! You are one of the Chosen, a traditionally published author with a real agent and and a real editor and mass-marketed paperbacks--so the dispatches from your world are sacred. I wrote my first novel freehand and finished it age 20. I wrote the next two freehand too. These days, since I write in the snatched margins of life between part-time secondary school teaching and part-time house-husbanding with two young children and a wife recovering from cancer, I mainly write on a laptop with the internet turned off, either at 5.30am or in my son's naps or very late at night. I do still write freehand sometimes but I find that I get frustrated with taking time to type it up when my time is so limited anyway. I agree that it is slower but more...freeing. Here's a question for you, and myself: What happens if you write your first novel freehand and it *doesn't* get picked up by a world-famous imprint and published to critical acclaim? What if instead it gets rejected by agents? What was the difference between your manuscript and mine? Most likely, that yours was better! Why would that be? Maybe you read more books before you wrote your first novel, had more practice, maybe the idea, plot and characters were stronger, maybe you have more talent, maybe you were luckier, maybe all of the above in some combination. What should the person who didn't get their first freehand-written novel published, nor their second, third, fourth or fifth, do? Give up, or carry on? The trouble is, nobody else can tell them the answer to that question. The writing needs to be done for the joy of it, in the flow, not with one eye on how it will go down or how it will be received. And maybe that's the trick for second and subsequent novels for a published author, just like it is for an unpublished writer? I don't know. Sorry, I'm not entirely sure why all of that came out in your comment box! Sorry to clog up your comment section with stuff, but I can't bring myself to delete it ;)
"The writing needs to be done for the joy of it, in the flow, not with one eye on how it will go down or how it will be received. And maybe that's the trick for second and subsequent novels for a published author, just like it is for an unpublished writer?" That's it, exactly. Whether we've been professionally published or not, the challenges and frustrations are real. There are so many factors outside our control. We don't even truly choose the stories that come to us, let alone how they will be received once they're written. A huge amount of it is down to luck. But there are choices we can make to maximise our chances - to make the most of whatever talent we've been given. At the very least, we owe it to ourselves to make this work enjoyable. For me, writing freehand allows me to sink deeper into the story, to lose myself in it more completely - and yes, to better enjoy the process. That doesn't mean it's ever going to be easy. We need to make a living. Real life carries on around us. It sounds like you are carrying more than most. You have my fullest admiration that you're still managing to get words on paper, in spite of everything. You also have my thanks for engaging so fully with these articles and taking the time to comment. I truly appreciate it.
Of course! They're fascinating and helpful. FWIW, you may already know there is a device on the market called a 'FreeWrite' which is basically JUST a word processor (no operating system, no internet browswer, no apps etc.) and doesn't let you jump around within text easily, but does let you upload writing to the cloud. It's stupidly expensive though. Instead I bought something called an 'AlphaSmart' second hand from ebay which is essentially a very budget old school version of the same thing, one up from a typewriter but again you can export your words to a computer. The only reason I don't use it more is because the clacking of the keys is prone to waking up my children in the early mornings! Good advice about talent; thank you--I'll go on making the most of and honing what talent I might have as best I can, and get on with living the rest of life the rest of the time...
We're definitely on the same page - years ago I brought an old dumb computer that does nothing except word processing! I transcribe onto there after writing freehand. Anything you can do to get the barriers/distractions out of the way. And yes, you're right: writing can be all-consuming, but there are always more important things. Writing has to serve life, not the other way round!