Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Finishing a draft


On Monday I came to the end of the current draft of the wip (I've written on Fictionbitch about the all-consuming nature of the process), and this is the state my room was in after I printed the last page and walked away from it all. That's my old writing table to which I'm crazily, psychologically attached - I got it from a junk shop when I was a hard-up single parent and sat down then and wrote The Birth Machine on it. Everything I've written since - apart from what I've written in Wales -  has been written on that, so it feels really important to the writing process for me.

Scattered on the floor is the previous draft which I tore apart so radically, which is why it's all over the place, and the new draft - 40,000 words shorter! - is sitting on top of the printer. Under the table are the Pukka pads in which I hand wrote each day before typing up: I found I had to do that, cut right away from the previous printed draft, even when I kept the scenes, because I had a new overall perspective affecting the language, however subtly. So it was very much a rewrite...

On the desk are the notes I made last April, when I first started on it all, and the charts and timelines I drew for the characters and scenes, since I was changing the structure so radically (making it much more linear, in fact) with all their page references. In January, after a long break to promote The Birth Machine reissue, I abandoned that scheme and started again, having seen that I could make the book even simpler, but the charts with their page refs were still useful, and I used them right up to the end.

Notice the bits on the floor. But I won't be doing any cleaning in that room until I've done the editing...
It's never been decorated, either, and I'm not sure it ever will be...

2 comments:

adele said...

Well done you! Can't wait to read it and wish you all the luck you deserve. Hope you can now enjoy the rest of the summer!

Elizabeth Baines said...

Thank you, Adele. Yes, I hope to have a rest this summer for the first time in ages. I hope your work is going well.