Little things, big things

The kids are off school. Yesterday was – complicated. And right now, I have seven kids in the house with me as the only (vaguely) capable adult.

So –

A short email today, but one with a useful moral.

On Wednesday night, I did (for our beloved Premium Members) a LIVE EDIT session, in which I took four short pieces of work and started to edit them much as I would if they were my pieces of text.

When I do these things, I don’t pre-plan my edits: the point really is to offer a stream-of-consciousness view into how I approach things. And each time I start one of these webinars, I always wonder if I’ll actually have anything useful to say.

I mean, I can always find trivia – this word repeated, an over-focus on bodily movements or sensations, a tiny muddle as to just how quiet a particular location is. At the outset, those things always seem to offer rather slim pickings. Good to correct, maybe, but perhaps not worth a webinar.

Except – and Wednesday evening was no exception – these little things normally lead to something bigger. So here, for example, is the first paragraph from one of the passages we looked at:

Aside from the weather and the hooting of an owl in the distance, it’s deathly quiet. Exactly what I wanted. But if that’s true then why do I ache for the comforting buzz of Jon’s Bar? Knowing he was asleep upstairs made me feel safe somehow, like I was alone but not really. Now there’s nobody, just me and the forest. Rain beats the roof above me in place of Jon’s footsteps on old floorboards, wind the only other breath for miles.

Now, this was from a really quite good passage and the key emotional transition which followed was well and movingly handled. The author, Rian, stands a decent chance, I think, of writing something which agents will need to give serious consideration to in time.

But? Well, the bit that niggled at me first was that damn owl.

The first sentence here says, “it’s deathly quiet,” albeit that the place isn’t totally quiet because of some (undefined) weather and a distant owl.

Only then, the last sentence says “Rain beats the roof above me.” It doesn’t say “patters lightly and almost without sound”. It says “beats”.

So which is it? Beating rain or deathly silent? It can’t be both.

And then, Jon’s bar is bamboozling too. Is the soundscape of that bar:

a) A comforting buzz?

b) Silent, because Jon is asleep upstairs?

c) Nothing from the bar below, but footsteps from Jon walking around above, presumably after the bar has closed for the night?

The answer seems to be all of the above.

Now, these niggles are – I accept it – utterly trivial. The first sentence said “Aside from the weather,” so it did, if we’re being strict, make some allowance for the rain. And the thing about Jon’s bar? Well, obviously, the soundscape of that bar varied with time of day, but the woman is perfectly capable of remembering each bit of it. We as readers are also capable of figuring these things out.

But these niggles lead to another. The structure of the piece at the moment is this:

1. Deathly quiet here
2. Comforting buzz of bar (past)
3. Me and the forest
4. Jon’s footsteps on floorboards (past again)
5. Wind the only breath

So we loop back twice to Jon, in the space of eighty words. That means that none of these soundscapes can be properly described or absorbed – we’re just shuttling to and fro too often. And what’s the emotional movement here? It’s got a bit lost in the shuttling.

So, on Wednesday, we took these niggles and arrived at this:

It’s quiet here. There’s the sound of rain on the roof, and dripping off trees, and somewhere an owl, hooting unseen. Otherwise, nothing – a forestful of silence.

Exactly what I wanted. But if that’s true then why do I ache for the comforting buzz of Jon’s Bar? Knowing he was there, either serving beers or, after hours, moving around on the old floorboards upstairs, made me feel safe somehow. Like I was alone but not really. Now there’s nobody, just me and the forest. Me, the trees, the owl and the rain.

That’s ten words longer, but clears up the niggles around what exact sounds we’re dealing with. More important, it cleans up the structure: we start with the forest, then we feel a pang for the buzz of the place left behind, then we consider again our solitary state here with the trees and the owls.

In bringing a bit of order to these smaller points, we also get greater emotional clarity. The new passage now shows a flow from external observation (“it’s quiet here!”) to an emotional one (“Wow! I’m really alone here.) That movement – a deepening – goes via a contrast (in terms of sound, and aloneness) with the world the character has just left.

This matters! The character is about to plunge into a howl of pain over her lost baby. The paragraph before that happens needs to set that up just right.

The new passage does just that. It gives us silence – nostalgia – oh crikey, I’m on my own … The whole paragraph is now getting us ready for what follows.

That, roughly, is how editing almost always works.

You start with a fairly low-level worry – in my case it was beating rain vs deathly quiet.

In solving that worry, we found others (was Jon’s bar buzzing or silent or footsteppy?).

And in solving all those things, we got to something that:

a) No longer suffered from those minor niggles, but also

b) Gave us a powerful and emotionally compelling route into the howl of pain which is about to come.

Little things lead to big things. That’s how editing works. That’s why jumping on trivia is almost always important: it opens doors to things that you might not otherwise have sensed and found.

For me, the activity has a free-form quality. Sometimes, I enter my text with a mission. (Turn character A from male to female. Improve setting B. Solve the plot conundrum in chapter X.) Often, though, I just read the text and respond to it.

I find a niggle and tease away at it.

Little things lead to big ones.

The text improves.

Next week, I want to do something a bit similar in terms of plotting. I want to look at how very basic plot summaries can give us important clues about the entire novel. If you’re doing our How To Write in 6 Weeks course, you’ll know just what exercise I’m talking about and (I hope) how illuminating it is.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY: How to Write a Novel / Module #4 / Prose

Watch the lesson here (available to Premium Members)

Do your assignment:

Take a scene. Cut it brutally. Layer it up the way we did in the video. Then present your before and after efforts. (The “after” version should be a max of 250 words, please.)

Upload the result to Townhouse here. 

I’ll be very keen to see the results of both the cutting and the layering up. I’m expecting beauty and wondrousness here, folks. Oh yes, and we’re at the one year anniversary of our Feedback Friday sessions. I’ve loved them. Thanks for participating.

Til soon.

Harry.