Normally I hate it. Now it seems I love it. Rewriting, that is.
The last two longer books I've written, White Crow and Midwinterblood (which won't be published till October) have seen a change in my attitude to rewriting. With White Crow, I thought this was because I really didn't like getting the first draft down as much as usual, so I wondered if the fun came in tinkering with afterwards. But then, I really enjoyed doing the first draft of Midwinterblood, so that's that theory out of the window. My alternative theory is that because I wrote the first draft pretty quickly, I didn't 'live' for a long time in its world, and therefore was not yet bored/fed up/angry with it.
I've just finished the second draft, and hope I've done enough of the major stuff that needed doing, there will undoubtedly by lots of little bits still to get right, but for a few more days at least, it's off my desk and in my editor's inbox :-)
In the meantime, I realise that we are all wasting our time worrying about writing the perfect children's book, when it was done in that episode of Black Books, with the elephant and his balloon. (The relevant section comes in at 17:24, but really the whole thing is painfully apt.)
Mind you, the stages they went through to get there seem awfully familiar...
1 comment:
I've ghosted fiction and am now striking out with novels of my own, and they're quite different from what I used to write. The stages I found easy when ghosting - outlining and polishing - weren't nearly as easy with my own work. So I might be looking forward to a satisfying polish and it will be every bit as hair-tearing as the first draft! What have I learned? Each book is going to be agony in its own sweet way.
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