{"id":6536,"date":"2021-06-25T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-06-25T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/townhouse\/articles\/bears-with-muskets\/"},"modified":"2021-06-25T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2021-06-25T11:00:00","slug":"bears-with-muskets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/bears-with-muskets\/","title":{"rendered":"Bears with muskets"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here\u2019s how writing works:<\/strong><\/p>\n

You get an idea for a story (or, actually, a book of almost any kind.) You write it down.<\/p>\n

In one way, what you have is a bit rubbish (because it is a bit rubbish.) And in another way what you have is perfect, because it exists.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So then you start to edit and prune and change characters and reknot your plot points. As you do all that, you do have a general sense of craft. Economy with language is good. Plot needs to be in constant flux. Beware of creating too many viewpoint characters. And so on.<\/p>\n

In the early stages of your writing career, that craft knowledge is really important. It\u2019s a compass that prevents you skedaddling off on long journeys to the wrong place. As you get more experienced, the craft knowhow still matters; it\u2019s just that it becomes more like second-nature. You don\u2019t think about it as much.<\/p>\n

But the thing that ultimately steers your editing isn\u2019t some manual on How To Write, but it\u2019s your own sense of what feels right on the page. Take this random paragraph from a work-in-progress:<\/p>\n

The bears love any excuse to go shooting. They make long trips into the hinterland. The sound of their musketry echoes across these plains, echoing over the flat earth. This fire isn\u2019t particularly accurate \u2013 most of the carcasses have been not shot, but clawed to death \u2013 but it\u2019s an impressive haul. Four elk, three reindeer, any number of geese, some cormorants. salmon. A mangy wolf.<\/em><\/p>\n

That feels interesting, doesn\u2019t it? A book you might to read more of. But it\u2019s also, to my mind, not quite right.<\/p>\n

There are some obvious \u2013 technical-type \u2013 problems, such as the repetition of echoes \/ echoing<\/em>. But there are also some things that bother me, that might not bother somebody else. Is hinterland\u00a0<\/em>quite right here, for example? It\u2019s a geographer\u2019s term that came into use at the end of the nineteenth century, and then mostly in the contexts of industrial planning or economic geographies. The setting of this little paragraph is mid-sixteenth century and very far removed from that kind of context. To me, the word just feels wrong. It might perfectly well sound fine to you.<\/p>\n

And while I like the list of animals at the end of the paragraph, it feels underwhelming. I\u2019d want to enrich it.<\/p>\n

Also: \u201cany excuse to go shooting\u201d feels a bit pallid to me. These are actual bears with actual muskets and that sentence doesn\u2019t quite seem rich enough to honour that set-up, so I\u2019d want to find more interesting words there. Trips<\/em>, likewise, seems a bit bland.<\/p>\n

And the sort-of joke about the bears and the inaccuracy of their shooting seems a bit muffled, somehow. I\u2019d want to make more of it.<\/p>\n

Some of these feelings seem purely personal. Others seem like ones that most editors would agree with. But, either way, it doesn\u2019t really matter. What matters is the editorial judgement of you, the author. That\u2019s it. That\u2019s the whole deal.<\/p>\n

So if I were scrabbling away at this paragraph, I\u2019d end with something more like this<\/p>\n

As for the bears, they love any excuse to get out their muskets. They make long forays into the back-country. The sound of their musketry echoes across these plains, whistling over the thin earth and flat rock, a pebble skimmed over water. It\u2019s not clear how accurate this fire is \u2013 most of the carcasses that eventuate seem to have been clawed or bitten to death, not shot \u2013 but the heap of the dead is impressive nonetheless. Four handsome elk and a pair of skinny calves. Three reindeer, one of them pregnant and with two kids inside her. Any number of geese. Some cormorants. Salmon. One mangy wolf.<\/em><\/p>\n

That definitely feels better \u2013 that is, more reflective of me. If you had your hand on the same paragraph, you might have had some similar concerns but ended in a different place. (And do notice that on this occasion my edits made the paragraph longer, not shorter. There\u2019s no rule that says editing can\u2019t add text as well as subtracting it.)<\/p>\n

That\u2019s an example of editing in microcosm, but not all editing happens in microcosm. In fact, one of the most interesting aspects of the editing process is the way you learn to understand your own book.<\/p>\n

Yes, you might start a project with some broad idea of why your Big Idea has resonance. But as you edit your book into shape that broad idea will take on a ton of detail. You\u2019ll find, almost certainly, that there are more depths to your book than you had ever realised.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s how things have panned out with my current Fiona Griffiths novel, the one that\u2019s been delayed about a million years.<\/p>\n

That book is set in a secure psychiatric hospital. My character was, as a teenager, hospitalised with mental illness and she has an abiding fear of such places. OK. So far, so good. It\u2019s pretty obvious that the setting and that character make for a nice complementarity.<\/p>\n

But how exactly? I wasn\u2019t sure how to bring those two things together. In particular, the end of the book caused me real problems. I knew I needed a big climax but nothing I quite put on the page seemed to deliver. Then \u2013 duh! \u2013 I realised that my character needed to experience drug treatment at the hands of a hostile doctor. She needed to be give psychotropic drugs being given for malign reasons \u2013 and her sense of self needed to fracture under the load.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s really different from most of my endings, which are a bit more pow-biff-bam than that, but it was obviously the right one for this book.<\/p>\n

If I plot out how that understanding actually came to me, it\u2019s roughly like this:<\/p>\n