Ends

Hi all

 

The homework for this week? Please think about the end of your novel. We've already talked about ends, but I'd like you to write me a final paragraph. It might help clarify your ideas about what you want to achieve for your characters.

 

 

Here's what we discussed last time:

 

Editing

Vladimir Nabokov said: ‘I have rewritten – often several times – every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.’

Most novels are written not once but again and again. Most writers revise, and revise, and revise, seeking to make their work as good as it can possibly be.

This sounds like hard work, but revising is actually a lot more fun than it sounds. The revision stage is when you look at your work, congratulate yourself on what you’ve achieved, and then build on it. Personally, I enjoy revising. After all the labour of trying to conjure up characters and situations from thin air, revising is like a holiday.

A clarification is needed here, though. There are really two kinds of editing. The first involves the small edits, word changes, paragraph repositionings and adjective deletions that are done when wiser counsel prevails. You can do this as you go along: in fact, I find it helpful to edit the previous day’s work before starting on any new writing, since it helps me to immerse myself in the world of my story and limbers up my writing muscles.

The second kind, however, involves major structural changes: alterations of point of view, the insertion or deletion of major characters, the change of locations. It involves addressing the novel as a whole, either as a first draft or as a serious chunk of writing. If you can leave a delay before going back to do major revision, it will almost certainly benefit you. Put your novel on a shelf for a month or two, and then return to it with a fresh eye. You will see much more clearly where it could be improved, and you will also have acquired a necessary degree of ruthlessness; distance from your everyday struggles will give you the courage to cut and change with broad strokes.

Revision is often about cutting (see below), but it is also about expansion. When you are really imaginatively caught up in telling a story, you might write rapidly, telling it in ‘skeleton’ form as you rush from one plot development to the next. Only later do you go back and add material, filling in what needs explaining, solidifying characterization and adding descriptions.

Be careful here, though: something you add can dislocate other parts of the book. A character may have cropped hair at the beginning of the book and a few pages later their hair may be at waist level. Also look for consistency in dates, seasons and weather. Is someone wearing a T-shirt in Edinburgh in January?

Cutting

As mentioned, much of your revision will involve cutting. In a way, this is inevitable. Writing is about exploring and risk-taking; some explorations will reach dead ends, and some risks won’t pay off. These failed experiments must be pruned. It can be very painful to cut what you have spent a lot of time over, but you must think of it in terms of the good of the finished product, and be brutal – cut out whole pages or chapters if they seem to intrude or break up the flow. A novel is not like an exam in which you must ‘show your workings’.

Here are some things to look for when cutting:

• Exposition. This is the dreaded ‘information dump’ (or even more crudely, ‘infodump’) in which you regale your reader with your research: historical information, technical details of a subject, the family pedigrees of your characters when these have no relevance to the plot. These are ‘the parts that readers tend to skip’.
• Pointless dialogue. Cut conversations that don’t lead anywhere, don’t advance characterization or develop the plot, or which have no tension.
• Overblown descriptions. Remember Robert Louis Stevenson’s remark about scenery – we hear too much of it in novels. Similarly with opulent descriptions of buildings or interiors. Single telling details can be much more effective.
• Characters who don’t seem to be contributing much or are too much like other characters. Characters should, if possible, have a job to do. If one character loses a key, at least consider the possibility that the person who finds it in the street could be someone who later crops up and has a role in the plot – and not someone insignificant who we never hear from again.
• Anything deliberately obscure. Readers will not generally appreciate arcane references designed to be comprehensible to .01% of the reading public, or baffling foreign words intended to impart exoticism.
• ‘Over-writing’ – see the next section on ‘murdering your darlings’.

Finally, don’t throw away the material you cut. Something that is cut from one place may belong in another. Put your cuttings in a scrap file on your computer. Even if you never use this material, it could still be useful. Re-reading your scrap file may serve to remind you of something about your character or plot that could be done differently.

Murder your darlings

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in his book On the Art of Writing (1916) talked about a Persian lover who hired a professional letter-writer to convey his passion. The letter-writer produced a missive dripping with fulsome vocabulary and courtly turns of phrase. Sir Arthur went on:

Well, in this extraneous, professional, purchased ornamentation, you have something which Style is not: and if you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: ‘Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it – whole-heartedly – and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.’

In other words, if something you’ve written seems particularly excellent, it may be a prime candidate for cutting.

That doesn’t mean that everything that satisfies you is bad. But you should subject these ‘darlings’, these fine turns of phrase, to very close scrutiny. A startling image, for example, in which one thing is compared bizarrely to another, may seem like a flash of genius, but can disrupt the flow of a narrative, especially if it follows hard on the heels of another bizarre image, or doesn’t fit with the general tone of the book. Intrusions of an authorial voice saying something amusing, or reflecting on how the book is going, should also usually be considered very carefully. Purple passages in which locations are established may be a little yawn-inducing.

In short, look for the things you are most pleased with, and ask yourself why they seem to stand out so much. It may be because they don’t belong there.

See you next time!

Gary