Of Scissors and Sellotape
When I was younger, I could write without thinking about it. I filled up pages and pages of poorly written stories – first, handwritten notebooks in my scrawling script and, later, hesitantly typed up documents on my dad’s hand-me-down laptop that eventually stopped working when it got accidentally stepped on. Somewhere in my parents’ house, there are still a handful of floppy discs that probably contain some of those earliest meandering tales – stories about nothing and everything, stories that were more a collection of thoughts and words strung together than they were stories at all.
Sometimes, I long for that lack of inhibition to return. To not think beyond the words currently coming forth and just to see what takes root. To some extent, that is probably still how I wrote my first full-length books. To some extent, that’s what brought me to this point. This winter, as I rewrite my fifth novel for what feels like the dozenth time, in the most brutal and taxing way I have ever done, I think to myself: you couldn’t have just made it make sense the first time, could you?
The first draft – a lifetime and many story iterations ago.
Writing used to be the difficult part. Editing was something I more or less ignored until it came to it; and, even then, barely did. I got lucky, at first – my first published novel took very little editing to get it to the book it is today, sitting dogeared on my shelf. But as the projects I started to write grew in complexity, so, too, did the editing challenges.
Now, most of the time, writing comes as pure joy. It is the closest I come to feeling as I did as a child in those early stages of throwing ideas on a page, knowing that they don’t have to be perfect yet. That they don’t have to entirely make sense yet because the time will inevitably come when it’s just me and a sharp pair of (metaphorical) scissors, hacking the thing to bits again.
Oddly, writing also came to feel less like a solitary practice. In part, because my friends began to be curious about the things I was working on and would let me discuss my characters and stories with them at length, bringing them beyond just myself and the page and out into the world. In larger part, however, it stopped feeling like a solitary practice because at a certain point in writing, the characters would become real to me.
It’s hard to know quite when it will happen. Sometimes, they’re pulling up a chair beside me before I’ve even typed the first words because they’ve been formulating and developing in my mind for so long already. Sometimes, it takes a few chapters before they spring forward, ready to voice their opinions in my ear with a stubborn guiding hand. They stop being just my stories – they become theirs. I could as well have a handful of people standing behind me making comments while I write as I could be in a room by myself.
“No,” one of my characters said to me last night, pointing over my shoulder. “I wouldn’t say that. I don’t know about that yet, remember?”
“All right,” I concede. “But it would really be more useful for me if you could just know about that. Otherwise I have to deal with it later.” I could practically feel his stare burning a hole through the side of my head. “Fine. You’re right. I’ll deal with it later.”
But if writing has become the time of play and exploration, editing has stepped in to become my worst enemy. The sluggish, gruelling part of the writing process where I stare at my screen and wonder why someone else can’t just take it over from here.
No edit has felt quite as brutally difficult as this one has – and still is. Perhaps, it’s that the stakes are different; I’m not editing for myself, as it were, so much as to a request. I have expectations I am trying to meet – expectations that are arbitrary to me. Perhaps, it’s that I have never hacked into a book quite like I’m hacking into this one.
She thought she’d finished a book (she really hadn’t).
Every day, I pick up a new chunk and slice into it, sellotaping chunks back together with gaping holes in between that I need to fill in. There is no room to be precious about what story I might lose from the draft I once loved. There is only taking it apart, piece by piece, and finding what gemstones are left within to craft something new.
I worried I might never be able to put it back together again. I worried I might lose what I had in the first place by trying; the thing that had made it worthwhile in the first place. I worried I might not be able to find my characters within the fragments, that they would not come back to speak to me again as I tried to work in new material between the old.
They returned slowly. As I sat in a pile of scraps, picking out the ones I needed most, my boys drifted back in to help. They sat down beside me and pointed out the things I’d missed. They made me remember why I loved their story. They made me remember why I owed it not just to them, but to myself, to fix it. To make it better.
Points of inspiration returned slowly to this project.
Despite the stress and the early morning alarms to get this project done around my regular working hours, I think I made myself better in the process, too. Coming off a rough few wintery weeks, I found myself within the pages and took solace in them.
Someone recently asked me how I keep myself motivated to write. “It seems like a lot of work,” she commented. “And, usually, there’s no one asking or expecting you to do it.”
I considered this for a moment. “Because I feel the most myself when I’m writing,” I replied. “Not just actively writing, but in the midst of a project. It’s just who I am.”
Climbers are always warned that getting to the summit of a mountain is only half the challenge. I think I might be at the top of the mountain now, more or less, in this rewrite. Unfortunately, no matter how exhausted I am, there is still a steep slope on the other side that I need to traverse my way down. I’ve got the ropes, I’ve got the boots – and the only thing to do is to keep going.
So, I keep going.
