Sunday 20th January

There haven’t been any writing classes since early December and Rosie, our leader, organized a writing day.  So yesterday (today for me) we spent the whole day writing at Rosie’s house.  It actually ended up as a social event cum discussion, but there was a space for writing.  We all settled down on different sofa’s or tables in different rooms and just got on with it.  I concentrated on trying to tighten up the ending, put a bit more bite into it, maybe make it more real.

When you have written a crucial piece that you feel was just about as perfect as you could get it, it is quite hard to improve it.  You read and then re-read and give it one more read, and apart from a word here or there; shortening a sentence, putting in a semi-colon rather than a comma, it is pretty hard.

I re-worked the last few pages, but am not at all sure it is a real improvement.  At least I have saved it under a different name.  To tell the truth I am too tired, maybe too close to the thing – and actually it is quite emotional because it is the climax of the book too – to make a reasoned judgement.

I need to step back a bit, maybe leave it for a few days, and then re-read both versions and maybe decide.

That is one of the problems of writing.  I used to paint quite a lot, in oils, and one of the problems was that if you kept re-working things, retouching, trying to squeeze a bit more feeling out of the paint, you messed it up, you lost what you had so painstakingly created.  And so too with writing.  I need to step back and wait until the ink settles a bit, and see if I have gone far enough.

Knowing when the thing is complete is almost as hard as writing it in the first place.