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.