Monday 11th November

I had been looking forward to the weekend for ages, even when we were still in France.  The idea of a few days, well at least two, just set aside for writing.  An exciting and also a daunting anticipation.  Daunting, because writing is a form of work, or at least you have to work at it.  It isn’t quite as you might imagine from watching some TV drama.  The empty page, the expensive Parker pen, and the copperplate handwritten words appear on the page as if by magic.  No, this is more down to earth.  At one time I used to write on paper, but more and more I now use the laptop.  One big fear is of losing your work, so every so often I send the latest version to myself by e-mail.  You don’t have to open it, but you know that even if the laptop gets stolen, you can access your stuff on a new machine.

But also with the laptop you don’t have to drag around a pile of paper.  I start by re-reading my last edited piece, and getting myself back into the story.  Sometimes I re-re-edit bits of that too.  You are coming at it fresh again, and so see ‘glaring’ errors or just the slight repetition of a word you missed last time.  Each paragraph is read, trying not to edit as I go along.  I am trying to look at the structure of the sentences, the placing of the commas, and semi-colons.  I have a tendency to write too long a sentence.  So I hack back and replace commas with full stops.  I also look at the tense, I write too much in the past tense.  Using the present tense makes it more immediate.  I look for repetition, starting too many sentences with the word I, that sort of thing.  Sometimes I also expand it a bit, widen out the action.

The mantra at writing class is “Show, not Tell” and I know I am guilty of telling a story rather than letting the reader see it for themselves.   Then I re-read the corrected sentence again and see how it flows.

It can be tedious work, but hopefully I am improving the thing, not messing it up further.  There is something about the immediacy of first writing that often gets lost with too much revision.   I sometimes re-read a whole section, and even go back and undo some changes.  It is impossible to really know when it is perfect, finished.  And maybe it never is.