First draft - cutting a path through the forest

It took five months to write the first draft of Instructions for the Working Day. I edited constantly to keep the manuscript reasonably tidy. If I leave gaps to fill in later, or scenes left unfinished, or notes-to-self, I can’t look at it again.

I don’t mean it was perfect in terms of plotting, pacing, character development or narrative tension. Far from it. I knew there would be plenty of issues to confront.

I printed out and read this first draft in a few sittings without making ANY alterations to the text or annotations in the margins.

At this stage, it wasn’t about fiddling with sentences. It was all about feeling the rhythm and pacing, the throbbing heart of the story. Tweaking a single word here and there would have led to other small distractions and the point of this first draft readthrough would have been lost. I wouldn't have detected large-scale plot problems or major issues with character development.

All I did was jot down the odd note on a separate piece of paper. These notes were brief and intimidating, such as: whole chapter horribly overwritten.

After this readthrough, the next stage for the first draft was CUTTING. Cutting all the unnecessary words, every bloated paragraph and inconsequential scene. The best advice I can give is CUT AND FORGET. You won’t regret it.

As well as the obvious horrors, I also removed some sentences I really liked. If they were not serving the novel, or were causing narrative clutter, or simply there to sound nice, rather than actually earning their keep within the story, they had to go.

Here is an invented example of how I might cut a paragraph:

‘John walked all the way down the grassy slope to the neglected pond at the end of the long, terraced garden. The surface of the water was clogged with old autumn leaves. The white plastic chair he’d bought in the sale at the garden centre and sat on all last summer had fallen on its side. It must have been blown over by the strong winds they’d had in November. Susan had left her russet cardigan down here in late August, which was the very last time she came. Now it was floating about on the water, almost indistinguishable from the leaves clustering round it. She always wore autumn colours; bronze, copper, burgundy, orange. It was drifting here and there with its sleeves stretched out in supplication, or as if it had finally given up waiting to be rescued.’

I might have changed this to:

‘John walked down the slope to the pond, its surface clogged with old leaves. The plastic chair he’d sat on last summer lay on its side, blown over by the wind. Susan had left her cardigan here the last time she came. Now it floated among the leaves, sleeves stretched out in supplication, or surrender.’

This paragraph is now half the length and has a more striking rhythm. I have shed the narrative clutter, which was guilty of diluting the melancholy atmosphere of John’s loneliness without Susan. The mood is is in starker relief now, which enhances the slightly disturbing image of the floating cardigan. Cutting has—hopefully—given the paragraph more tension and pace, greater clarity and vigour.

There is something satisfying about cutting. It’s a way of sharpening individual scenes and, most importantly, re-establishing the theme, or big picture, which can easily become muddied during construction of the first draft. The cutting process clarifies the way ahead, like clearing a path through a forest.

Where do ideas come from?

I am sometimes asked where I find ideas for my writing: where do they come from and how are they accessed?I would say that I don’t really have ideas for stories. There isn’t a particular reality which I choose to write about. But I do have feelings, or a sensitivity to suffering; in Instructions for the Working Day, for example, my characters experience the persistent pain of the past and the burden of guilt.

From these feelings, the characters gradually emerge. I may well have a setting in mind by this stage, but the storyline is always rooted in emotions.

So where do these feelings come from? There are two sources for me and the first is memory. I can never be sure how accurate these memories are, but it doesn’t matter. It only matters that they keep surfacing. They don’t need to be recollections of major events. They can be scraps and splinters, residual moments, casualties of a long-forgotten time. Insignificant then, but valuable now. I take notice of them, mulling them over constantly, sometimes for years. There has to be a reason why they stayed.

For this novel, one of the childhood memories was from 1972, on a car trip in Austria, when my father gave a lift to a desperate man in a Tyrolean hat. He said he had left his wife up a mountain. He was loud and constantly gesticulating. My mother squeezed into the back with my brother and me, while he sat in the front and gave frantic directions. His presence filled the car. He suddenly recognised the mountain and my father had to brake hard. We never knew his full story, but what has remained is the sense of our day shifting, our quiet car-world now invaded, our horror at my father’s impulsiveness, the hot squash of our bodies in the sun-baked back seat, the fear of strangers.

The other source is reading: fiction, non-fiction, articles, interviews, messages. I read very closely and carefully. It takes a long time. I re-read anything which particularly holds my attention, whether it’s a phrase, sentence, paragraph or whole page. Sometimes I re-read it multiple times to discover why it appeals to me, why it has captured my attention. Usually, the reason is behind the words. Something isn’t being said. Something is loose and drifting.

Often, it is the final page of a story which inspires me the most. For example, the novel which made me want to become a writer is The Prevailing Wind by Joan Lingard. I borrowed it from the library in 1973 and, shamefully, have never taken it back. At the end, a postcard of Paris is sent from one friend to another with an ambiguous message, a pinprick puncturing the top of the Eiffel Tower and the beautiful line: I am journeying slowly eastwards.

I still wonder whether the ambiguity is there because the character is enigmatic throughout the book and the author is staying faithful to the puzzle of him, or because the author trusts the reader to decide the outcome for themselves. And the great thing is that a decision never has to be made. There is no need for finality. Only possibilities.

And infinite possibilities are where ideas really come from. They come when you loosen your mind from the finite and the expected. This is why reading helps: because of all that is unexplained, all that is drifting, all that is waiting for a writer to catch it.

Cover Reveal

When I saw the cover image for the first time, I was captivated by the silhouette of the main character, Neil Fischer. It was so good to see him.

With the blind-dark foreground, the softly filtered moonlight, the blue hues of dusk and the distant grain silo—both watchful and a little menacing—I couldn’t love this cover more for the way it captures both the mood and atmosphere of the novel.

It is fascinating to be shown a visual interpretation of your book, to recognise the character you have only imagined, to take in the landscape you have invented. It’s one of the moments that remind you why you write: to make connections with others.

Grateful thanks, to Fairlight Books and designer, Jack Smyth