Introduction
Getting to the end of something is really hard. You plough on and on in the same furrow and it’s difficult to lift your head out and see how far you’ve come and where the end of the line might be. You’ve got the whole shape of this piece of work in your head; you want to do justice to it all.
I think it’s counterproductive to stay in that same furrow. Whenever I’m working on something, I like to have other things on the go. I always have my journals and notebook, of course. But I also like to set myself exercises as I go along, to distract me, to re-energize me. If I’m writing something long and involved I need to step away from it sometimes in order to remind myself what it is I’m doing.
For instance, something I find very useful is a warm-up writing exercise in which I give myself twenty random words and then have to write a short piece in about half an hour or so that contains each of those random words. I circle twenty words in a piece I’ve already written, take them down as a list and then set to work.
I make myself write some kind of precis about the bigger piece of work I’m doing. If it’s a novel I have to write about its characters, its plot, its themes. There’s a fair amount of squeezing and lateral thinking has to go on in order to get all of my random words in there. They could include ‘Kiev’, ‘thighs’, ‘astrological’. It means I’m reapproaching my story from a completely different view. I shouldn’t be too tied down to essential facts. This being just an exercise, I can change those facts and the results can be quite surprising. A little bit of lateral thought can do wonders for your writing. Also, what happens when you do a spot check like this on what you really think your writing is about, is that you find all sorts of interesting preoccupations coming to the fore. It’s like taking a biopsy of your writing mind. You can read the piece back and think: So that’s what I think it’s all about. It might be very different to what you initially thought.
This kind of thumbnail sketch of the piece allows you to see the shape of your work. You are looking at the work down the wrong end of a telescope and you can suddenly see it from a different angle.
To me, the process of revising any piece of writing is about looking at the work from as many different angles as possible. It’s like holding up an object you’ve made – a pot you’ve thrown, a jumper you’ve knitted – to the light and looking for flaws and other points of view. You turn it round and examine it. You wonder how it might be different or better.
In the process of revising, it’s important to scrutinize every single element of the writing to make sure they’re all as good as they can be, but it’s important to look away for a while, too; to regather your resources so you can come to it fresh. Otherwise you can get snowblind, still pushing away at the same furrow.
I’ve always thought it’s better to have too much than too little. One way of looking at the process of revising is in terms of pruning away the excess. I’ve used the metaphor of film-making before and I will do here as well. Now you are in the editing suite, after your months out on location and in the studio. You’ve shot take after take from multiple angles. Sometimes your characters fluffed their lines, other times the set fell down and people wandered haplessly into shot.
Here in the cutting room you’ve got masses of material, stored in cans, in notebooks and on separate pages and you can piece the whole thing together in the solitary hush. Here you can get back to what your original conception for the piece was going to be. You can craft it and watch it come to life as an organic whole.
Watch how much drops away onto the cutting-room floor: ribbons of sharp, shiny film, tangles of lopped-off lines of text.
You’ve got to be quite brutal with yourself at times. If something isn’t working take it as far as you can, and if it still doesn’t work get rid of it. Get rid of it also if it’s too opaque, too obscure. But also if it’s too explicit and expository. Often we find lines in our work that are not so much meant for the reader, but are simply notes for ourselves. Chapters that begin, ‘That day she learned something about the true nature of desire . . .’ don’t have to begin like that. Lines like, ‘ “You bastard,” I said, crossly,’ can be trimmed and made to imply more than they already do.
Readers like to be told just enough so that what they’re reading is comprehensible. But they don’t like to be told too much. They like to infer things from the text. They don’t need you to explain absolutely everything; that way they feel patronized and oddly redundant.
You should be complicit with your reader. Leave them telling, juicily implicit gaps. Let them do a little work in putting together the whole picture. If you are alluding to classical, Biblical, Shakespearean, Miltonian sources, don’t footnote it. This isn’t academic writing.
Virginia Woolf used to refer to the common reader: one whom she could assume was bright enough and wanted to be challenged enough by her writing. She could assume this person would follow her wherever she wanted to take the text; they would work to keep up with her. We have to assume this, too. Don’t talk down to your reader. They’ll hate you for it.
Don’t over-egg the pudding. If you put too much in in the way of explanations and sudden revelations, the reader will hate you, too. There’s nothing I hate more than suddenly becoming aware that the author is Trying To Tell Me Something. When suddenly the props and masks drop away and we’ve got what Alan Bennett calls the Author in Disguise, lecturing us. The Author suddenly dispenses with all their conjuring effects and they’ve started to hector us like an evangelical. Beware of telling your readers What Life Is All About. They won’t thank you for it.
We all want to do it, however. We wouldn’t be writing if we didn’t think we couldn’t, at some point or other, have a stab at telling everyone What It’s All About or What’s Wrong With The World. Have a look through your work at the revising stage and remove all those bits. We’re in the business of writing fiction and poetry. We’re not writing aphorisms. The hours are longer.
Revision could go on for ever. I’ve known people reduce their work to almost nothing, to doilies. Part of the skill is knowing exactly when to stop. You’ve got to learn to say: This is as succinct and as honed as it will ever be. It says what I want it to say. It’s something I’ve made that has gone through a certain journey and contains details that surprise me, that I didn’t know would be there when I embarked on it. It’s a piece of work that only I could write.
This is what you want to have: something only you could write.
During the revising process you want to take out all the material that just anyone could have written. That’s why writing tutors always bang on about getting rid of clichés. Clichés are just shorthand for other people’s experience; we use them to communicate with each other in life, but we don’t need to use them in fiction or poetry, where more circuitous, idiosyncratic means can be employed. We’re not necessarily looking for the shortest route between A and Z. In your work it needn’t rain cats and dogs on dark, stormy nights. Clichés are always dead language; a slipshod rendition of second-hand experience. Everything should come out fresh, as first-hand experience. Clichés always come about when writers haven’t looked at the real world long enough and hard enough.
It’s often necessary and important to have other people look at your work during the revising stage. You can look at your own writing from all sorts of points of view, but the things that other members of a writing group can tell you will always surprise you.
There will always be some criticism that takes you completely by surprise; something you would never have thought of. Sometimes it is valid and useful, other times spurious and partisan. But you need to hear as much of it as you can and utilize or jettison it at will.
You are intending your work to go before as big an audience as possible. If criticism is given with care, consideration, accuracy and sympathy, then it can’t hurt you. You are talking about an object in the world, something you have created, and you are invested in; but it is still an object that can be criticized and improved. You have to let people have their views on it. You can’t let yourself become precious about your work and attempt to hide it away or retrospectively defend its weaknesses.
Is it communicating everything you wanted it to? Your other readers can let you know what they get from it. Listen to them. You should be fascinated by what they have to say.
Is this character working? What do you make of them? Is this dialogue really the way this character would speak? What meaning do you get from this stanza? How does this connect to this broader theme? What do you understand by this image? Is it a concrete image, one you could almost pick up and hold in your hand? Is this plot twist really necessary or does it seem very contrived? Is this setting solid and three-dimensional? Are we being dragged through this part of the story too quickly?
Has the full potential of the material been realized?
It is important to realize that writing isn’t like sport or playing a musical instrument in a concert. You aren’t doing this live. If your attention slipped and you played a bum note or dropped the ball, or if you were waving at someone in the audience during a boring moment, or if you were overcome with tiredness and had to have a rest and run on automatic pilot for a while, it doesn’t matter.
You are not playing football and that isn’t a cello wedged between your knees. What you are doing is something they would never televise live. Something that on the outside looks incredibly dull: you, sitting there with your paper and pencil, frowning and doodling away. You’ll never be under any pressure to do this live in front of an audience and have one chance only to make it absolutely perfect. We don’t write under examination conditions, thank God.
You have the chance to take the criticisms that you and your colleagues make and return to the text. You can always draft it again.
A novel is a game for two players. The book may get written in solitude but it kicks into life only when a reader’s imagination collaborates with that of the writer, so in working out how best to secure and sustain that collaboration, writers might usefully recall what most engrosses them as readers. In the early drafts of a piece, you are still working out what you are trying to say to yourself, and too much mental trafficking with an audience at that stage can inhibit the flow of your imagination. But if you mean to go public, then sooner or later you have to consider the legitimate needs of your readers, and a large part of the process of revision will be about making sure that you have given their imagination all the room it needs to work.
In this respect Henry James offered the novelist three key words of advice: ‘Dramatize, dramatize, dramatize.’ His disciple Percy Lubbock turned the recommendation into a rule by insisting that ‘the art of fiction does not begin until the novelist thinks of his story as a matter to be shown, to be so exhibited that it will tell itself’, and the cry of ‘show, don’t tell’ still rings across writing workshops. To understand why, you need only ask which is more immediately engaging – to witness an event for yourself or to be told about it afterwards by someone else?
A brief example will show what the distinction between showing and telling can mean for fiction. If, in a first novel, an author had written, ‘The boy broke down and began to cry so wretchedly that the other small children started howling too,’ he would, rather dully, have told us something. When, in Lord of the Flies, William Golding wrote that ‘his face puckered, the tears leapt from his eyes, his mouth opened till they could see a square black hole . . . The crying went on, breath after breath, and seemed to sustain him upright as if he were nailed to it,’ he has unforgettably shown us something. By which I mean that he has brought us so closely into the presence of the weeping child that we can see him and hear him and feel our own inconsolable portion in the sense of universal grief he disturbs in the other ‘littluns’. Who could prefer the told version to the shown?
Yet forty years after Lubbock’s book The Craft of Fiction, Wayne C. Booth pointed out in The Rhetoric of Fiction that showing is itself only one among the diverse strategies of telling, and that direct telling can work potent magic, too. Consider, for instance, the opening of Paul Auster’s Moon Palace, with its recklessly overt résumé of the story we are about to read – all telling, every word of it, but told to magnetic effect.
What’s more, if we insist on showing everything, especially things that might more effectively be told, then it won’t be long before we start to bore the reader. The error shows itself in the common tendency of young writers to begin in the wrong place, so that we must watch the leading character get out of bed, stare in the mirror, eat breakfast and so on, to the point where we begin to lose interest long before some intriguing encounter seizes our attention. In those dull circumstances, the collaboration with the reader will end before it’s properly got started. So what seems to be in question is the right choice of narrative strategy at any given moment. Do I tell the readers this or should I show it? Which approach will most effectively draw them into the dream of the novel, and keep them there till the dream is done?
Reading and dreaming have much in common. In both we generate images out of a limited visual field. These images move and disturb us because we feel that we are immediately involved with them, at times more intensely than with our everyday experience, yet they arrive without overt explanations and require us to work for meaning. Also, unlike those of film, the images we find in books and dreams are unique to each of us, the work of our own imagination. So my Heathcliff does not look like yours, and when either of us tries to tell someone else about a dream we’ve had, or a book we’ve read, we know just how much gets lost.
Now dreams remain a great mystery, but their vocabulary of images seems to allow the oldest, pre-verbal parts of the brain to speak to the neocortex, thus opening a channel of communication between the conscious and unconscious minds. By flexing all the inward senses of the imagination, fiction can tap us into that hotline, too, and when that happens, good writing literally works like a dream. And what may most deeply excite us about it is the fact that we have been set free to dream the story for ourselves.
This freedom of the imagination is of profound, countervailing importance in a time when we are so often the passive recipients of information and reportage. So there may be more than just literary reasons for the emphasis on showing over telling in most fiction workshops. But what matters here is the recognition that, if we are to create and sustain a lively dream in the imagination of the reader, then much of our revision will be about questioning our choices of narrative strategy, altering them where necessary, then fine-tuning their effects.
In practice this means hunting down those moments that unintentionally tip the reader out of the dream. They can be considered under two broad headings: problems that arise from underwriting, when the author hasn’t done enough imaginative work to secure the collaboration of the reader, and those of overwriting, when the reader is crowded out by the author trying to do too much.
Merely telling the reader something that’s crying out to be dramatized is a form of underwriting. William Blake once wrote that ‘he who does not imagine in minute particulars does not imagine at all’, and it seems clear that if we don’t bring the focused energy of the imagination to bear on the scene we’re writing, then we’re unlikely to activate its full potential for exciting the reader’s interest. The result is inert wordage that leaves the reader cold, so it’s as well to keep an eye out for the symptoms.
Prominent among them is the retreat into abstraction. Watch out for a reliance on abstract nouns in your writing, particularly those to do with states of feeling. Simply to announce that a character is ‘filled with fury’ or ‘rotten with jealousy’ is the weakest way to make your reader feel the impact of their emotions. We have your word for it but little else. However, if you show us the children wincing as Harriet throws the curry she’s just cooked across the kitchen, or we see Ken straining to overhear a telephone call through a closed door, then we draw our own conclusions. It’s a useful exercise to forbid yourself the use of keynote words such as ‘fury’ or ‘jealousy’ when dramatizing an emotional condition. Similarly, when you find yourself writing about an important conversation, ask whether your readers might not prefer to hear the exchanges for themselves, particularly as characters are revealed through the different ways they use the language, and dialogue can subtly move the narrative along.
Of course, this kind of dramatized showing is much harder than straight telling, and in good writing there’s no distinction between language and content, so the success of a piece will depend on how skilfully your words perform the show. When you come to revise a draft, ask yourself, for instance, how many details have been blurred by the broad-brush adjectives you’ve used to depict a scene. Is there a more limber way of conjuring the characters into the reader’s presence than merely attaching descriptive tags? Does your use of adverbs short-circuit energy out of your sentences by labelling actions that a sharper movement of the syntax might quicken into life? And when you come across a cliché, take it for what it is – a sign that you’ve nodded off and it’s time to recharge your imagination. Somewhere behind that prefabricated block of language lies a living moment. Close your eyes, activate your inward senses, then write and rewrite till you’ve hit a pitch of high fidelity. After all, if you don’t care enough about the characters and events of your story to do them imaginative justice, why should the reader stay inside the dream?
Overwriting indicates a failure to trust the imagination of the reader. Consider how much of the pleasure of reading comes from inferring that which has nowhere been explicitly stated. A writer who pre-empts such moments of realization by obtrusive winks and nudges soon becomes a bore. The same is true of any lack of economy and concision in your prose. By making a careful selection of details from a scene that you’ve imagined for yourself ‘in minute particulars’, you free your readers to visualize it, too. But if you pile on the adjectives, or double the contents of your sentences through the loose use of similes, you are more likely to crowd them out.
Often enough you’ll find that less can do more. A marvellous letter written by Conrad in 1899 demonstrates what this principle means in practice. A friend had asked his opinion on some stories he had written, one of which contained these sentences: ‘When the whole horror of his position forced itself with an agony of apprehension upon his frightened mind, Pa’Tua for a space lost his reason. He screamed aloud, and the hollow of the rocks took up his cries and hurled them back mockingly.’ Conrad sharpened the passage, to powerful effect, simply by cutting out a quarter of the words. Bearing in mind his general admonition that the author hadn’t left enough to the reader’s imagination, you might like to work out which words he cut.
Sometimes we overwrite out of the desire not so much to show as to show off; and sometimes, less exuberantly, out of anxiety to make sure that our meaning gets across. Either way we have to learn to ‘murder our darlings’ for the greater good of the book, and this can come hard. I was so infatuated with a sentence in one of my own novels that it passed unscathed through every draft, right through to the galley proofs, when my wife declared that she had always hated it. I woke up and saw that either the whole story dramatized what the sentence had to say – in which case it was redundant – or it didn’t, in which case that sentence alone wasn’t going to save the book from failure. It was an edgy moment, but I knew that in the end the finished work had to speak clearly on its own terms, uncluttered by the author’s attachments. That sentence might have helped to keep me on track throughout the writing of the book, continuously reminding me what it was supposed to be about, but the reader had no use for it. So I struck it out, and have long since forgotten it except as a happy reminder of the satisfactions of revision.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn celebrates the importance of such moments in his novel The First Circle, where one of the characters, a prisoner in the Gulag, speaks movingly of ‘the rule of the last inch’. It’s a rule that applies near the end of a project when you sense that, despite all your efforts, the quality you were after is not yet quite attained, and there’s still more to be done before the long journey of the work is over. The rule of the last inch is simply not to neglect it. It’s a rule that all writers who care for their craft will strive to take to heart.
Don’t judge your first draft too harshly – or yourself. The first draft of a novel is allowed to fail. It is allowed to do so at a second, a third and a twentieth. The idea that your prose should immediately stand to shiny attention is unreasonable and self-defeating. Its very imperfections are actually invitations to know it more deeply, to engage with it. It doesn’t have to be perfect until it is finished – and, sometimes, not even then.
Put it aside for a while. Let it brew. D. H. Lawrence would often keep his first draft of a piece in a desk drawer and refer it to it only occasionally while he rewrote from memory. William Carlos Williams’s advice was to put the draft away until ‘the conditions under which it was written’ were forgotten. In the meantime you become a different person, you become other than the person who wrote it and can judge it more objectively.
You might consider this relaxed attitude unwise, but where is the rush? Time spent on a book, Anthony Burgess observed, is of no real concern to a reader. If a first draft was written in white heat, let it cool down before you handle it.
When you are ready to face it, take out the first draft and read it. Just read it. Read the first draft without comment or addition – no matter how your hands itch to correct it and your head aches at the experience. Don’t charge in. See what’s there.
If you use a word processor, print off a hard copy and read that. The screen with its neat fonts and straight rows can be very deceptive. Besides, this is closer to how your reader will experience your work. You need to know this experience, too.
Once you have read it, read it again.
This time attack it with red pen, pencil, scissors, glue, cut it, cross things out, tick the good bits or, taking a tip from novelist Tony Warren, invest in a set of markers. Reread the draft using one marker to make a line in the margin for plot, another for any subplots, one for each character’s development, one for dialogue, one for style policing. This will give you a testing overview of your work and how it flows. The marks will suggest where to cut, where to amplify, where a character is being neglected or the plot stalls.
You have to remain at heart that ambitious enthusiast who wrote the first draft but also be objective enough to become another person, one who can look at that work fairly and constructively. John Steinbeck’s practice when redrafting was to ‘become’ three people. ‘One speculates and one criticizes and the third tries to correlate. It usually turns out to be a fight but out of it comes the whole week’s work.’
Ask questions. All the time. Is this what I want? What is it I want? Does this work? Am I trying too hard? Remember this is not an exam. There are no right answers, and take refuge in retaining a certain amount of ignorance. It is important to know what your intentions are in a work but too much knowledge can be prohibitive. If you can summarize your intentions too succinctly, why bother with the elaborate disguise of a novel?
Read your work aloud. Record it and go for a walk with it playing on your phone. It’s a good way of making it other, of becoming your own reader, of taking words off the page and into that private place inside a reader’s head where all the best novels come alive. Or listen to the recording with the draft in front of you. You will find that, often inadvertently, you change words as you read them, elide others, become aware of where sentences are too long and breathless and others are insufficient. It’s also a useful way of testing your dialogue. Note where you stumble over your own prose. Smooth it out.
There may be great changes to be made. Salman Rushdie’s first draft of Midnight’s Children was 900 pages long and written in the third person. Just one of his decisions on redrafting – to adopt a first-person narrator – meant every sentence had to be changed.
Be prepared – and brave enough – to make such enormous changes as well as small ones, but, also, if a scene bogs you down move on to another. Let the unconscious mind solve problems, too. The novel is always at work in your mind even when, physically, you are far away from it. The answer might come to you three days later on top of a bus or in the bath. It may be that the scene troubling you doesn’t belong in the novel at all and its intractability is its only way of letting you know this.
Sometimes it is not your work that is tired and inadequate, it’s you. You are human. This happens. The text is all potential. It wants to be realized, perfected. Leave it a while and return to it in a more belligerent mood. That said, it is often when one is most disenchanted that one makes the most merciless cuts.
Remember, your first drafts are allowed to be messy, sketchy and inadequate. Try simply copying it out afresh. It may seem laborious but this is what redrafting is: quiet, long, patient work.
Every now and then, when drafting, try writing each sentence separately, leaving a line on each side of it. This allows you to look at each sentence, see how long, how rhythmic or, even, how necessary it is – and the space around it allows you to fiddle and rewrite it. This practice will also alert you to the sentence as a thing in itself. Prose has rhythms, metre, variety, just as poetry does, and a novelist must not be deaf to them. As John Gardner puts it:
Prose, like poetry, is built of rhythms and rhythmic variations.
Like poetry, prose has rhythms and rhythmic variations.
Rhythm and variation are as basic to prose as to poetry.
All prose must force rhythms, just like verse.
Play with each sentence. See what sounds it contains. This may lead you into some fine lapidary writing but remember that prose can work by being seemingly careless. In prose, Thomas Hardy noted, inexact rhymes and rhythms now and then can be more pleasing and effective.
Is your work correctly punctuated? Punctuation is the breath of language, vital to a writer if you are to make sense, vital to readers if they are to understand exactly what you intend. To spend weeks, months, years on a novel and not endeavour to make it as accurate as possible is madness, laziness, simply ungenerous.
Use technology. Most word processors have a grammar check – you might find them hateful and you can dismiss what it throws up but, at the very least, it is a neutral – if insensitive – judge of what you have written.
Or have a friend read your work for grammar, spelling and punctuation. Friends will be much more helpful and willing to comment on such things than on its literary worth.
If there is someone you can rely on to read your work wisely and well, cherish them but don’t abuse them. Only have recourse to them when you absolutely must. Far better, in the end, to be your own critic, be your own cheerleader, and there are days when you will need to be both. You cannot rely on others to tell you when your work is going well. Of course, everyone relishes praise and feels the need for feedback but, ultimately, you are blunting your own perceptions by replacing them with the opinion of others who may be too biased or too fond to give you the response your work needs.
Far better to use your journal and record your doubts, anxieties, victories as your work evolves. By honest appraisal of your own efforts – by the very act of putting down your thoughts – you may come to solve the problem that is currently occupying you.
Most drafts are either underwritten, overwritten or, more often, a mixture of the two. That’s allowed and to be expected. Redrafting is a correcting of these tendencies. If a draft feels sketchy, in whole or in part, ask yourself if you have kept the reader sufficiently in mind. If it is overwritten maybe you are trying too hard. Lawrence Durrell said overwriting occurs when one is uncertain of one’s target; underwriting may occur when you are too blithe or indifferent to it. If you know a landscape really well, you may not have bothered to describe it to a newcomer. You may not have communicated it.
Identify your intention in a novel as a whole and in a scene in particular. You may have more than one – you will have – so what is the most important thing you want to communicate? Carol Clewlow says you should ask yourself what is the one thing you want to do in a scene and then concentrate on just doing that – the rest will follow if you let it.
Perversely, having identified your intention – love is a lie or love is the only answer – try to illustrate it with maximum restraint, disguise it, imply it. A novel is not a lecture. Stendhal said, ‘Find out what you most want to say and then try very hard not to say it.’ This will give your writing a secret agenda. Writing with a secret agenda gives prose a pulse, a hidden but very real sense of animation. John Gardner in The Art of Fiction describes an exercise in which you are asked to describe a barn as seen by a man whose son has just been killed in a war. Do not, he says, mention the son or the war or death. ‘If worked on hard enough, a wonderful image will be evoked, a real barn would stand before us but one filled with mysterious meaning.’
This approximates to the great mantra in creative writing circles: show, don’t tell. Gardner’s exercise forces you to do this. It dissuades you from explaining everything. This patronizes the reader. Let the reader also work. Readers are often intelligent and get by with hints and clues. They like this kind of thing, even prefer it.
Point of view or POV is about who is telling your story. It is one of the most crucial decisions you will make when writing a novel.
When redrafting, experiment with these points of view. Negotiate with your material as to which is the best one to adopt. Whichever point of view you choose, whether you keep to one POV for the length of a novel or change it from scene to scene, be consistent. To sit in, say, Snow White’s head for the majority of the story and have the action filtered through her is one thing, but dipping into the Prince’ s POV for a paragraph here and there just looks clumsy and diminishes tension.
Dialogue is not best done with absolute fidelity to true speech. We may hum and ah in real life, digress and stutter, but a novel is not real life: it is representation of it and your dialogue must re-present the spoken word. We may artlessly chatter but characters who do so bore and tire the reader. If you have a garrulous character, suggest garrulity, don’t reproduce it.
Graham Greene learned from John Buchan and R. L. Stevenson never to interrupt an action with exposition, analysis or long description. Dialogue is also a form of action. It must propel the story. Try not to clutter it. Avoid ‘he averred’, ‘he exclaimed’, ‘he riposted’. Use ‘he said’, ‘she said’ – it becomes invisible after a while – and then use this construction only to avoid confusion, say, if there are more than two characters involved and, even then, as unobtrusively as possible.
Don’t stop to admire the scenery. A room is best described by the character who inhabits or visits it. To stop the action to describe landscape and then resume the narrative is just not wise.
Look at all your adverbs and adjectives. Think of them as valuable coins. Spend them wisely. Don’t waste them. A table that is ‘old, wooden, scratched and pine’ is no longer a table, it is a list. The table is lost from view. A man who ‘runs quickly’ is a weak verb and a weak adverb. Have him ‘pelt’, ‘dash’, ‘race’ or ‘rush’.
Look at anything that ends in ‘ly’ and consider saying goodbye to it.
Do you have too many italics, words that you strongly feel you must emphasize? Perhaps with exclamation marks? Lots of them! Loads!! Cool it. This is typing, not writing. Rephrase them to convey a character’s excess, not your desperate insistence that they are excessive.
Spellchecks are useful but they do not pick up the differences between ‘their’, ‘there’, ‘they’re’, ‘it’s’, ‘its’, ‘whose’, ‘who’s’, ‘you’re’, ‘your’, ‘road’, ‘rode’, ‘where’, ‘wear’ and so on. Such errors in a manuscript imply that while a word processor’s spellcheck has scanned it as methodically as it is able, the writer has not. And if the writer can’t give close attention to the text, why should a reader?
Watch out for any confusion of singular and plurals and, also, tenses. Such errors need the most careful of checking and you must be prepared to groom your drafts with absolute care and discrimination. In dialogue, tense changes occur naturally. In exposition, they look clumsy and can confuse.
Outside dialogue, you almost, nearly, never, seem to, like, just, sort of need the words ‘almost’, ‘nearly’, ‘never’, ‘seem to’, ‘like’, ‘just’, ‘sort of’. Rather than suggest or describe something genuinely ambiguous, they more often signal a writer’s refusal to search for the precise word. I would also add ‘so’ and ‘then’. Most sentences can do without them and can be reshaped to sound both more active and concise.
Beware repetitions and redundancies. They slip in if you are not vigilant, if you are not looking at every sentence, holding every word up to the light. ‘She hugged her close to him.’ ‘He looked up and saw that round orb of day, the sun.’
Avoid using the passive voice in exposition. (Passive voice is best avoided.) It can give prose a dead, inert quality, not what is needed when writing a strong action scene.
If in doubt, leave it out. If a word, a phrase, a paragraph, a chapter really belongs, it will find its way back. You might find it easier to slaughter a particularly admired phrase if, instead of abandoning it altogether, you record it in your journal for later use, building up a private thesaurus of good lines that have yet to find their true home.
Writing a novel entails a great deal of working back and forth between the small detail of the novel that makes it real and the general shape that holds all these details in place. You must think of everything all the time, attend to plot and to character, make sure dialogue is convincing, that the prose is expressing what you wish it to do. Your novel will be finished when you and it agree it is. Someone asked me yesterday, Okay, when do I stop redrafting? Trust me. You will know. The text will shrivel away from you, tired of your attentions and say, ‘Enough. I’ll do as I am.’
And then you have to leave it be.
Wondering how a good woman can murder
I enter the tent of Holofernes,
holding in one hand his long oiled hair
and in the other, raised above
his sleeping, wine-flushed face
his falchion with its unsheathed
curved blade. And I feel a rush
of tenderness, a longing
to put down my weapon, to lie
sheltered and safe in a warrior’s
fumy sweat, under the emerald stars
of his purple and gold canopy,
to melt like a sweet on his tongue
to nothing. And I remember the glare
of the barley field; my husband
pushing away the sponge I pressed
to his burning head; the stubble
puncturing my feet as I ran,
flinging myself on a body
that was already cooling
and stiffening; and the nights
when I lay on the roof – my emptiness
like the emptiness of a temple
with the doors kicked in; and the mornings
when I rolled in the ash of the fire
just to be touched and dirtied
by something. And I bring my blade
down on his neck – and it’s easy
like slicing through fish.
And I bring it down again,
cleaving the bone.
‘JUDITH’, FROM THE HANDLESS MAIDEN
M writes poems out quite often in one draft. That’s amazing to me. But I don’t think it matters that it’s different for me. The way I work is like a painter, or sculptor, slowly building up an image, or images – and that involves a lot of experiment, and cancelling, and trying again.
MY NOTEBOOK, JUNE, 1992
I wrote ‘Judith’ in July 1992 during the first two days of a stay at Annaghmakerrig, a retreat for artists in Ireland. The poem came out of one of those serendipitous conjunctions that seem to happen if you give time to writing poems and are open to anything that presents itself. To read it now is almost like reading a poem by someone else. It seems fluent, as if it was written straight out. Going back to my notebook, however, it’s possible to see the chaotic material out of which it was born: the personal story that combined with the story of Judith. My notebook, I should state, is at the centre of my writing. The process that for many other poets goes on in the unconscious is recorded in the jottings made about dreams, places, things I’ve read and thought, as well as in the actual drafts of poems.
‘Judith’ is a dramatic monologue – written in Judith’s voice. But even before I discovered the story of Judith I had begun to think about the idea of ‘speaking for women’. Scrawled with my left hand, just before I left for Ireland, is ‘a letter to myself as a child’, which ends:
I am glad that you are a female child. You will have all the potential that a woman has; and more and more coming into this world now. You’ll have a view of the world as a woman that is a neglected view. You will be able to speak for women.
Key themes in the poem – grief being transformed into anger into action, action versus passivity, separateness versus merging of identity – were also already emerging. ‘IRELAND’, I wrote,
just the name I love . . . IRE means anger – land of anger – but it isn’t – land of freedom/and limitation. I’m not going to be so rigid – I’m going to be more flexible, more experimental.
I had been reading Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae and had begun to apply her distinction, in a chapter on Spenser’s The Faerie Queen, between the ‘embowered woman’ who is always merging and the self-definition of the ‘armoured woman’ to my obsessive mourning for a relationship that had ended more than a year previously. Freeing myself as a writer, I was beginning to see, was part of the same process as freeing myself from this relationship: being open to change, moving from grief to anger, using anger positively to find a strong, independent voice. Sitting by the Conway Falls, on the drive to the ferry, I saw the journey as a metaphor for this:
The motorway round Birmingham a sort of hell – industry, pylons, wires – and within an hour I’m here. Things do change; more quickly in a car. But the moral is you could stay on the M42 in that hell – and to leave it you have to move. As I did on the journey and I’m doing in my life by going to Ireland. It’s different; it will change things. Allow the possibility of changing in my head – moving from clinging to loss of R. A lot of that still in my head – journeys always make me think of him – although what I must remember is that although I was mostly very happy on our journeys together, I couldn’t find the separateness to write. I experienced through R too much.
Writing in my notebook on the first morning, I’m partly the writer, identifying myself with the tradition of women poets, partly still the wounded woman, trying to conduct a kind of self-therapy. One of the first entries is about my writing space:
Disappointed with room at first: quite small and no bathroom – but now I like it – still the wonderful view over the lake and in exactly the same place – over the entrance hall – as Emily Brontë’s room at Haworth.
Then, I’m back with the relationship, describing the deer I startled with my headlights the night before on the way up the drive and watched struggling to free itself from a fence:
I must define myself more clearly. I merged with R like that deer caught in the barbed wire and then I panicked and hurt myself so much in trying to extricate myself. If the deer could have been calm and thought about what was happening . . .
Then the writer surfaces again, prefacing a list of poems from Perdido, by the American poet Chase Twichell, that I want to reread with a declaration that resembles Keats’s idea of the ‘voyage of conception’ as ‘delicious diligent indolence’:
I am going to write here – but I have to come at it slowly – read poems – let ideas gather in my head like clouds.
Just before I went to bed the previous night, my first night in Ireland, I picked a book out of the bookcase in my room because it had a postcard sticking out of it that I thought might give me inspiration. It turned out to be written to a Miss Foster to reassure her that ‘we are all well except that I have a cold’, but the book was a King James Bible and the card was ‘inserted at the story of Judith’. Why I didn’t write about this immediately that morning – considering the impact it was to have – is very odd. All I can think of is that the delay was a necessary part of the incubation process.
The first mention of Judith in the notebook is the title, ‘Judith/dream’, written above an account of a dream that again connects with the idea of speaking for women:
Another of the dreams when I wake in my room. I wake because there are 3 (then 2) women/girls sitting on my bed and talking. I think at first they are women who are staying here. But when I sit up and talk to them I discover they are ghosts of people who used to live in the house. One takes a tiny chair and goes to work in a very small cupboard – because she’s a ghost it is no problem to her. They suggest (I think) that I might write poems about them.
This is followed by a transcription of the whole of the dull message on the postcard. Then, at last, there is the key passage where finally, excitedly, I decide:
Judith is what interests me: the card is in the story about her cutting off Holofernes’ head. Surely that is a subject for me. I mean to have a go at writing it very directly with a lot of physical and sensual detail. There’s quite a lot there already. Now H. rested upon his bed under a canopy, which was woven with purple, and gold, and emeralds, and precious stones.
(I could tell the story in her voice, or his – I must check out more of the background.)
Judith was one of the Bible heroines pictured on the stamps I collected at Sunday School. I must also have seen some of the many paintings of Judith cutting off Holofernes’ head. But I hadn’t previously read the story. As I discovered when I searched later, the Apocrypha, from which it comes, is omitted from most Bibles. Briefly, the Jews are holed up in a hillside town by the Assyrian army who have cut off their water supplies. The people, as summarized in my notebook, ‘are ready to submit’. The priests want to ‘leave it to God’. Judith, who has spent the last four years grieving for a husband who died of sunstroke in the barley harvest, ‘uses her intelligence – does something’. She dresses up as a prostitute and goes to the tent of the enemy general and, as is described in the poem, cuts off his head while he is in a drunken stupor.
The Book of Judith consists of sixteen chapters and is full of details that could easily have clogged the poem. Sleeping on it gave my unconscious the opportunity to sift out the elements that were important to me. The narrative of the poem derives essentially from three verses in Chapter 13:
6. Then she came to the pillar of the bed, which was at Holofernes’ head, and took down his fauchion from thence,
7. And approached to his bed, and took hold of the hair of his head, and said, Strengthen me, O Lord God of Israel, this day.
8. And she smote twice upon his neck with all her might, and took away his head from him.
The difference in the poem is that I omit Judith’s prayer and insert instead her interior thoughts as she contemplates the murder. This wasn’t a conscious decision but, as subsequent notebook entries reveal, a process of imagining myself in Judith’s position and asking questions – rather like an actress trying to get into a part.
Judith rouses herself from a long period of protracted grief and inaction – I suppose we would call it depression – to carry out an extraordinary and courageous act. My situation was not that different. I was also in a state of grief. I wanted to rouse myself to write. A great chunk of Judith’s story consists of a description of her preparatory rituals – prayers and penances, as well as dressing in beautiful clothes. The rituals I was employing were not dissimilar:
I love this room: the red paint on the outside of the windows, echoing the red of my blouse hung over the chair.
But, unlike Judith, who exhibits unambiguous confidence and conviction, I was full of twentieth-century indecisiveness:
I feel good/together/strong/that I can find language. But is that a good state to write in?
Maybe I should feel that I’m falling apart – that words are the glue that will hold everything together.
The first fragment of what looks like poetry begins as a kind of invocation to myself to become one of Paglia’s ‘armoured’ women but ends up recognizing how difficult this is:
Squeeze myself into the armour
draw a hard line
but I am always sprawling
trying to join
In the armour – absence – nothing but air –
suck you into myself.
I obviously felt ambivalent about writing in a way that was so exposing of my emotional weakness. On the next page, under the title ‘Judith’, the lyric ‘I’ is abandoned for a more distanced and objective third person:
Judith
knew what she had to do
Beauty had got her nowhere
Her beauty was waste.
Use it/the parable of the talents
At that moment she could have loved him –
the choice in her mind
Sex
Passivity is what she hates . . .
Blaming
Had she blamed god when her husband died
dying of boredom no sex
does it for the excitement of it –
violence/how can a woman be capable of violence?
how be the opposite of everything she’s been brought up to be?
what is the motive?
rage? what rage? the rage of grief?
This isn’t poetry, but it had got me thinking about Judith’s motives and the question that propelled the poem: how can a woman be capable of violence? By investigating my own grief and anger I put myself in Judith’s position:
She has to keep him believing that she’s fallen in love with him, that she’s going to let him sleep with her – she has to bring out his best instincts; and in that moment when she does, she almost falls in love with him.
Excitement/like before her marriage/as if she was going to bridal bed.
Softness, hardness/armour that must seem soft . . .
The danger is that in the act of seduction Judith will be seduced. She has to appear soft on the outside (Paglia’s ‘embowered’ woman) but inside retain her hardness (the ‘armoured woman’). ‘Armoured woman opposed to embowered woman (Paglia, p. 92),’ I wrote in my notebook. Earlier I had copied out an aphorism from the story: ‘For ye cannot find the depth of the heart of a man, neither can you perceive the things that he thinketh’ (Judith 10: 14). Pages of theological debate, I now know, are devoted to the question of whether this virtuous woman actually slept with Holofernes.
At this point my inspiration and resolve seemed to slip away:
I’m so afraid I won’t write anything. Nothing today – and I’m so tired. It might help to look back at last year’s notebooks – to see how poems come.
Matthew said, ‘Nothing comes out of nothing’.
He doesn’t write poems straight out. He makes notes. Thinks about something.
Maybe I can write the Judith poem – begin with the field, the heat, her husband dying. She told him not to go out that day, so her anger defied her, the clinging woman he was trying to separate from.
Scenes (1) barley field
(2) cut to idea
(3) cut to Holofernes’ tent
Why do I want to write it?
‘Matthew’ was the poet Matthew Sweeney, a friend whom I have always found full of good advice on writing. Making notes is often a good idea. Also changing tack when you get stuck. It didn’t matter that I changed the structure of the poem later. Just the concept of writing it as a series of scenes gave me the impetus to continue, to renew the excitement of the story and its sensual details.
I began immediately, with a fragment that links the death of the husband in the barley field and the murder, as in the final poem:
When they carried him in
he was already stiffening.
They carried him in from the heat
at that moment she raised the knife
she loved him more . . . the husband they carried in
from the barley field
already stiffening
whose frothing lips
she turned away from in revulsion
pleaded in dreams
to be kissed . . .
That last image came from a dream about her husband a widowed friend had told me. But it was too melodramatic for the poem and with it I lost the momentum of the story.
Went into the lake – poem MAKING LOVE TO A LAKE – I displace my own weight – keep my separateness, the lake moves to make way for me, folds around me, sun on it – like being hit by bright stones that emit light.
I feel so much better/more alive.
Braced by the dip in the icy lake, I began work on Judith again: a lyric poem in the first person. Again, the voice was both mine and Judith’s:
It was the only place
I felt safe in your arms . . .
was the most dangerous,
bits of me dissolving
like a watercolour
held under running water,
the ideas in my head I thought were stone
so strong and clearly defined
like statues made of jelly
sucked on your tongue
until they were nothing
but a sweet taste.
All the time I was mixing my experience with Judith’s. I was in Judith’s story but writing about my emotions, trying to turn Paglia’s ideas about self-definition and merging of identity into sensuous images.
In the following pages – filled with attempts to write the barley-field scene – I again reverted to a third-person voice. But the memory of walking across a field of stubble in open sandals is mine, from the previous summer:
They’d called to her from the white heat
of the barley field, and she’d run out
without shoes, the sharp stubble
puncturing the soles of her feet . . .
Then, there’s another attempt to begin the poem:
Judith.
Grieving widow,
life no meaning,
she has sucked him into her
when he died he’s left empty space
and now there was nothing inside
but a roaring wind . . .
the white hot
furnace of grief
Again, I’m in Judith’s story but using my experience, both literally and metaphorically. Once, on holiday in Crete, I climbed with R to the chapel on a hilltop. The doors were off their hinges and a ferocious wind was filling the chapel with its fury. There was a smashed oil jar on the floor and a white muslin curtain that billowed as if alive. It was so desolate and terrifying that we left immediately. This was the origin of Judith’s ‘emptiness’ as ‘like the emptiness of a temple with the doors kicked in’. Initially, I tried to find images that expressed ideas about the loss of identity involved in a woman’s longing to have her emptiness filled by a man. For instance, ‘She wanted to take him into her, / the peace of not being, / of the man filling her / like an ocean with his tides / and moods’. I rejected these as attempts to convey my experience rather than Judith’s, besides, the ocean didn’t connect with her story.
I brought together the image of the chapel with a detail of Judith’s actual mourning ritual from the Bible – ‘she set up a tent for herself on the roof of her house’ – to create a sense of both her literal space (on the roof) and her interior emotional space:
At night she lay on the roof
like a temple with the door
kicked in, open to the roaring winds.
‘Chapel’ was transposed to ‘temple’ because of the context. It took a few more drafts before I finally made explicit the connection, hinted at earlier (now there was nothing inside/but a roaring wind), between Judith’s ‘emptiness’ and the ‘emptiness’ of the desecrated chapel.
There are pages of drafts before I finally got round to tackling the murder. The bones of the final version are there in my first attempt:
As she held his hair in one hand
and his
innocent
she gazed into his sleeping face
and felt the tenderness
of a mother
and she raised the curved sword
& with two blows
the bone cut off his head . . .
What had to be added was the fleshing out.
In the next draft this is already happening:
In one hand she held his oiled hair
in the other his curved blade,
and what she felt was tenderness,
the old longing to be sheltered and safe,
to melt like a sweet on his tongue
to nothing.
The images from the previous draft of ‘dissolving like a watercolour’ and ‘statues made of jelly’ that are ‘sucked on your tongue / until they were nothing / but a sweet taste’ (I must have been thinking of jelly babies!) have become much more simply and evocatively ‘melt like a sweet on his tongue to nothing’. Finally, the Paglia ideas of ‘empowerment’ have been integrated into a sensual image. A picture of Judith is emerging that juxtaposes violence and tenderness.
The voice of the first day’s drafts wavers between a first and third person, but is predominantly in the third person. This is also true at the beginning of the second day. Then there is a break in the notebook – two blank pages that probably coincide with a lunch break. Back at my desk, I write:
I’ve just been talking to Paula and Janet. I get such strength from women now. They think I look lovely with grey hair.
This input of female solidarity and confidence boosting obviously had a beneficial effect. From this point on the voice becomes unequivocally ‘I’, and much stronger. The fragments begin to come together into a cohesive narrative, and gradually the whole scene with all its sensual details begins to unfold. This is the final manuscript draft in the notebook:
In one hand I hold his oiled hair,
in the other raised above his wine-flushed,
simple face, a curved blade. He’s my enemy
and what I feel is tenderness, what I most
long for is the weakness to put down
my weapon, to press myself
to the warmth of his warrior’s
body, to lie under the green jewels,
the purple and gold silk
of his canopy, sheltered
and safe until dawn. And I remember
the men’s shouts from the barley field,
running out into its golden heat
without my shoes, the sharp stubble
puncturing my soles, feeling
the inside sucked out of me, knowing
my husband was dead even before
I flung myself on his already cooling
corpse. And then the nights
when I lay on the roof – my emptiness
like the emptiness of a chapel
with the door kicked in, open
to a roaring wind. And the mornings
when I rolled in the fire’s grey ashes . . .
In a few respects this draft marked a backwards step. Some previous sections of the poem that get into the final version have been omitted: ‘the longing to be sheltered and safe’, for instance. There’s another earlier draft where I referred to ‘the fumey (sic) warmth of his body’, and this has disappeared, too. Fortunately, because I had kept the earlier drafts I could go back and recover the lost bits. However, I must have felt some confidence in the draft because at this point I began to work on a typewriter borrowed from the library.
All the later manuscript versions of the poem begin:
In one hand I hold his oiled hair . . .
This plunges the poem right into the action – but offers no explanation of who ‘he’ is and no sense of place. Among the typed pages, though, there’s one that begins prosaically:
I am Judith about to murder Holofernes . . .
It shows the advantage, if the right words won’t come, of writing anything, even if it’s a statement of banal fact, because further down the same page the poem begins for the first time:
Wondering how a good woman can murder
I enter the tent of Holofernes,
holding in one hand his oiled hair . . .
Somehow I had to go through the process of taking on being Judith – ‘I am Judith about to murder Holofernes’ – before I could properly begin the poem. Once I had done this a much better opening line flowed from my early questions about Judith’s motives. ‘Wondering how a good woman can murder’ establishes that the voice is both mine and Judith’s. The juxtaposition of ‘good woman’ and ‘murder’ establishes the central paradox of the story. The first three lines are satisfying, too, for the verbal echoes of ‘wonder’ and ‘murder’ and the alliteration of ‘Holofernes’ and ‘holding’ and ‘hand’ and ‘hair’.
I wrote out draft after draft of the opening, the details building gradually. The adjective ‘long’ was added to the hair, not just adding a detail to the picture but the repeated ‘l’s and the three stressed single-syllable words (‘long oiled hair’) lengthening and slowing up the line. Holofernes’ ‘drunken little boy’s face’ of an earlier draft became the more sensual and visually evocative ‘his sleeping, wine-flushed face’, the repeated ‘s’ sounds emphasizing his stupor. The ‘little boy’ went with the idea of ‘a mother’s tenderness’. I wanted to emphasize Judith’s sexual longings, not her motherliness. I decided to use the actual name of the weapon from the biblical text, ‘fauchion’. This wasn’t in the COD so I later changed it to ‘falchion’, which was. I added ‘unsheathed’ both for the repeated ‘sh’ sound and because I wanted another precise detail for the picture as well as to create a sense of danger.
The detail of rolling in the ash of the fire doesn’t enter the poem until the final written draft in the notebook (see p. 276). In the Bible story ashes are part of Judith’s penitential rite in preparation for the murder: ‘Then Judith fell upon her face, and put ashes upon her head, and uncovered the sackcloth wherewith she was clothed.’ The ‘rolling’ in ash was my addition. Because the typed drafts aren’t numbered, it’s difficult to work out precisely how it developed. Ashes are very resonant in terms of spiritual experience. On Ash Wednesday, at the beginning of Lent, churchgoers are marked with ash on their foreheads. It also connects with female rites of passage. Cinderella works and sleeps in the ashes. There is a connection with carnal experience and with death.
There are several drafts of the poem that break off at ‘the ash of the fire’, as if I didn’t know where I was going next. As previously mentioned, there is a version that continues: ‘And now I want to (be) filled again, filled with my enemies moods and tides’. The phrase in the poem that I am most pleased with, that seems most to embody Judith’s loneliness and longing – ‘just to be touched and dirtied by something’ – seems to have grown suddenly out of the voice of the poem, as if it had written itself.
The final manuscript draft of the poem broke off at ‘the fire’s grey ashes’. The ending didn’t arrive until the typed drafts. Again, I had to fumble my way towards it. For instance, there’s a version that reads:
And I bring the knife
down on his neck, and it’s easy
like slicing through fish,
and down again, splintering
the bone like a bullock’s.
In the final version ‘the knife’ becomes ‘my blade’, emphasizing both the function of the knife and its appropriation by Judith. Also, ‘like a bullock’s’ has gone. I might have liked the alliteration, but ‘fish’ is enough. The added simile weakens rather than reinforces it. The double blow comes from the Bible – ‘And she smote twice upon his neck with all her might, and took away his head from him.’
In an almost final draft, the last two lines read:
And I bring it down again,
splintering the bone.
I know one reason why I changed ‘splintering’ to ‘cleaving’ (‘cleaving the bone’). My ex-husband brought me back a cleaver from China. It was a fearsome weapon and, as he also came back with a mistress, my children hid it. I’ve seen fishmongers using a cleaver to chop straight through an eel, cutting through the spine. ‘Cleaving’ is a much more forceful word than ‘splintering’. It adds to the effect of an act that is both shocking and violent and connected with a woman’s domestic life, with cooking.
By the end of day two I had a typed draft of the poem that is very close to the final draft. It is titled ‘Judith & Holofernes/Murder’. Before I settled for the direct and simple title ‘Judith’, I toyed with the idea of calling the poem ‘Murder’, but rejected it as unnecessarily sensational as well as redundant, as the word ‘murder’ is in the first line. ‘Holofernes’ went because I wanted to stress that the poem is Judith’s story.
Wondering how a good woman can murder
I enter the tent of Holofernes,
holding in one hand his long oiled hair
and in the other, raised above
his sleeping, wine-flushed face,
his falchion with its unsheathed
curved blade. And I feel a rush
of tenderness, a longing
to put down my weapon, to lie
sheltered and safe in a warrior’s
fumy sweat, under the emerald stars
of his purple and gold canopy,
to melt like a sweet on his tongue
to nothing. And I remember
the golden heat of the barley field,
the shouts of the men, the sharp stubble
puncturing my feet as I ran,
flinging myself on a body
that was already cooling
and stiffening; and the nights
when I lay out on the roof –
my emptiness like the emptiness
of a temple with the doors kicked in,
open to the roaring wind; and the mornings
when I rolled in the ash of the fire
just to be touched and dirtied
by something. And I bring my blade
down on his neck, and it’s easy
like slicing through fish.
And I bring it down again,
cleaving the bone.
The main change between this draft and the final poem comes in the barley-field section. I kept coming back to it until about six weeks later and it is still probably the weakest part. I changed ‘golden heat of the barley field’ to ‘glare of the barley field’ because ‘glare’ was more threatening and more suggestive of the effect of bright heat and therefore the probable cause of the husband’s death. It also helps the poem’s rhythm and sound: ‘glare’ forms a sort of half rhyme with ‘stars’ and enables the line to run on instead of ending dully and abruptly with ‘I remember’. I inserted ‘my husband pushing away the sponge I pressed to his burning head’ because I wanted an image of Judith with her husband that would show her as nurturing and at the same time give her a motive for her anger.
There is one other change. At the point that I moved ‘my emptiness’ to the end of a line to give it more emphasis, I edited out ‘open to a roaring wind’. I wanted to connect ‘nights’ and ‘emptiness’ and ‘mornings’ – all now at the end of lines. I also wanted the poem to move more swiftly to its conclusion. I now wonder if this was the right decision. By rearranging the line breaks I could retain ‘open to a roaring wind’, producing an assonance between ‘in’ and ‘wind’ that would slow the poem down before the image of rolling in the ash and maybe create a stronger, because even more physical, impression of emotional and sexual loneliness:
and the nights
when I lay on the roof – my emptiness
like the emptiness of a temple
with the doors kicked in, open
to a roaring wind; and the mornings
when I rolled in the ash of the fire
just to be touched and dirtied
by something.
It must be true what Auden said: that a poem is never finished, only abandoned.
Well, you’ve finished it. The manuscript sits on your desk, a wad of paper. Months and months of work. Done.
Or is it?
The best thing to do when you’ve finished something is to leave it for a while to stew. Do something else. Start a new story, toy with some ideas for your next novel, take a few days, a few weeks, a few months, away from your desk. Don’t read it. Forget about it. This is the most important part of the writing process.
However good you might think your work is, in the endorphin-filled moments of finally crossing the finishing line, you will be sure to look at it a few weeks later and see mistakes. To revise your own work you need to be able to look at it as if you were not the writer. And this takes a crucial, critical distance.
The final edit is always the most difficult and, often, the most boring. When something is 90 per cent done, the last 10 per cent can feel like purgatory. As an idea the work has run its course, there is nothing much new to say so the excitement can often fizzle away. Only hard work lies ahead, correcting sentences, altering paragraphs, tightening the structure and making sure that all the elements of your story are intact. This work is vital. It is the final layer of polish and pizzazz that will make the narrative or poem seem tight, right, complete.
Raymond Carver wrote and rewrote his stories obsessively. In his introduction to his selected stories Where I’m Calling From, he writes passionately about how he had to learn to ‘write fast when I had the time, writing stories when the spirit was with me and letting them pile up in a drawer, and then going back to look at them carefully and coldly later on, from a remove, after things had calmed down, after things had, all too regrettably, gone back to “normal” ’.
It is the cold light of day that a writer needs to be able to revise their own writing. The heat of the moment robs us of critical distance and it is the editorial side of the brain that needs to engage when revising. It’s a hard balance to strike. Too much editorial work will freeze up the flow essential to fluid writing, not enough editorial consciousness and the writing will suffer, by being uncontrolled, unwieldy.
Never be tempted to think ‘That’s good enough,’ when you know there are still mistakes to correct. The bad sentence that you just couldn’t be bothered to fix will haunt you later if the work is published, spoiling a whole paragraph, a whole page, a whole scene in the story.
Conversely, you have to know when to stop. When it is really as good as it is going to be. If you are stuck with something that just doesn’t seem right, put it away for a while and write something new.
I have a few dozen unfinished stories that I am constantly working on. Every now and then I go back and redraft them. Eventually I finish one or two. New ideas replace the finished pieces so I always have a pool of ideas to work with. Frustratingly, I can’t seem to hurry this process. The insight or inspiration I am searching for can’t be forced. I just have to sit tight and wait.
Revising is about asking yourself what you were trying to achieve in the first place. You have to trace back to the initial moment of inspiration, to the emotion that drove you to the page. I find with my stories that after a long and convoluted process of harrying and worrying over an idea, it is only ‘finished’ when it elicits the same feeling from me that I had when I was inspired to write it. A story is a moment of capture for me. Pinning down a moment, an idea, an abstract in a tangible, concrete way.
Here are ten questions to ask yourself if you think your piece of work is finished:
If the answer is yes to all these questions then it is time you found someone else to read your work.