The Wonder of Fresh Eyes

My novel is on hold because I've found out about a short story anthology that wants sci-fi stories with female protagonists, and I thought my story Meet the Veals would be perfect for it. I thought Veals was edited to death: I submitted it for a short story competition last May and must have read it dozens of times before that, eventually making it so unrecognisable from the original that only the basic story remained, all the words were changed. But now, nine months later, my pen was out straight away crossing out line after line and making innumerable changes. It's amazing what a fresh pair of eyes does to a story: no matter how close to perfect you think something is, putting it away for a few months will always leave you with a ton of changes you can't believe you didn't see all those edits ago. I just hope one day I can actually finish something and read it back a year later without cringing and covering it in red pen.

Inside the Labyrinth of The Sound and the Fury

To say that William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury is a difficult novel is something of an understatement: when you've ploughed the first sixty pages and have no clue what's going on it's very tempting to give up, and when the first part ends and instead of a breather you're presented with something even more difficult it's almost painful to keep going, but to reach the end of the book is a beautiful experience, and well worth the headache. Fury was written in the 1920s, when stream-of-consciousness writing was all the rage, and guys like Joyce and gals like Woolf were fiendishly trying to make their books as impenetrable as possible, in the hope that a hundred years later people would think they were great novelists but run screaming at the thought of having to read their books. This plan worked well. Faulkner was a similar kind of chap from the USA, and wrote his masterpiece chronicling the disintegration and decay of a formerly well-to-do Southern family in four parts: the first written by a mentally disabled man-child who flits back and forth and back again through numerous time periods whenever any tiny detail catches his memory's attention, and the only thing to help the reader is a line in italics when the focus shifts to a different time period. The first part is set over thirty years and features around fifteen different time lines, and if that's not hard enough two of the characters have the same name. Apparently, Faulkner intended originally for the different time periods to be printed in different ink colours to make things easier to follow, but they didn't have the technology to do this.

After a few pages of trying to follow the action, I realised the best way to read was to just go for it, let the scenes slide past me and head for the finish line, and hopefully eventually all would become clear. And by the time I got to part three, hard shapes started to appear out of the misty background, and I saw just how remarkable a piece of writing this is. In a similar way to the stream-of-consciousness employed at the beginning of the novel, my mind is jogged to realise that in fact I did understand certain things from the first parts of the novel, I just didn't know I understood them until they were placed in context. Although it seems that nothing going on makes sense and none of it is going into your brain, it really is, and you just have to enjoy the ride and get towards the end and some clarity. The entire thing is a complex metaphor for the mind, thoughts and memories swirling around and catching when a couple fit together. On finishing it, my first thought was that I'm really looking forward to reading the book again in a few months when the dust has settled in my brain, in a similar way to how a mind-boggling film like Donnie Darko begs a second viewing. In fact, I think I could read Fury again and again, each time fitting more pieces into the jigsaw, but because of its fragmentary style, never quite completing the puzzle. The Sound and the Fury is truly an amazing book.

Annoying Habits In My Writing (One Edit Down)

I've been through my novel once on paper and made tons of changes, so I'm just on the typed version deleting, adding in, and correcting everything before my second edit, which will involve a lot more new things going in and restructuring of the story and the way it's told. The first edit has helped me to identify a lot of terrible habits I have in my writing, that hopefully in the future I'll be able to cut out at the first draft. The biggest culprit is my gross overuse of the word "that": I must have deleted over a hundred "that" 's out of my 50,000 words, so many that every time I use the word now (like just then) I start worrying it's completely redundant and shouldn't be there. Very occasionally, "that" needs to be in a sentence but I've used it badly so many times I can't work out when it has a justifiable place in a sentence.

Another very common thing I do to clunk up my writing is use the word "would" or variations of it all the time, for instance saying "Ethan would tell us..." rather than "Ethan told us...". It's just adding in words for the sake of it, but my novel is littered with it, killing its impact. I think I just got a bit confused with tenses as I wrote the thing so fast. Even with a lot of stuff added in, I've already cut a thousand words and I'm only half way through the edit, so the whole thing must be becoming much more readable every day. I wish I had a little barometer like I did when my word count was going up each day as I initially wrote the story. With taking words out it's difficult to see exactly how much good you're doing, and I'll never be able to read it fresh and see the difference, as in my head the perfect version is already done, I just need to get it on the page.

Right now, I'm shocked that anyone can ever complete a novel, sit in front of a manuscript and say, yes, this is done, I'm not going to make any more changes to this. I'm a long way off that golden moment right now, but even when I get there I'm worried I'm not going to be able to let my novel go, that I'm going to want to skim it for "that" 's one last time. For now, that dilemma is way off in the future though, I've got a lot of work to do, a lot of unnecessary words to cut, and a lot of exciting new writing to add in.

The Perks of Imagining a Book Character as an Actor

Last year I saw the film adaptation of The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and when I recently read the book it was impossible not to imagine the characters as the actors who played them in the film. It's so annoying that my imagination isn't able to override actors and actresses, no matter how hard I try. Even when I've read the book first it still gets me, although quite often I have trouble picturing characters in books anyway: my brain automatically switches off when a person's looks are described, and when I'm reading characters are usually just vague outlines. Even worse is when they get mixed up between films, so Sam from Wallflower and Hermione from Harry Potter now both look identical, and somewhere deep in my mind I'm sure I link the two characters together, despite the fact that they have nothing in common. It's sad that once it's gone I can never get back the innocence of a character with a blurry face, who just looks however I want them to look that day.

There are parts of Wallflower that wouldn't work as well without the film to complement them; when you have two mediums of a story that have different advantages in storytelling a lot of the blanks are filled in. For example, in the book it seems a bit stretched that Charlie, the main character, easily makes a group of friends, given how painfully shy and awkward he is, but in the film this is shown a lot more naturally. If you've seen the film first then problem solved, if you'd read the book first it might seem to fall into place  for him a little too easily. Since I had to read Dangerous Liaisons at university (one of the most boring experiences of my life) I've been a bit wary of epistolary fiction, but Stephen Chbosky uses it to really get deep into the character of Charlie and his confessions of being a horribly troubled teen. But I'll still never know how much of my empathy for the character would still exist if I couldn't picture the puppy-dog face of actor Logan Lerman when I was reading about Charlie's heartbreaking troubles. I suppose this is film messing with my ability to interpret the book as an individual work, but my brain just doesn't have the power to take on the might of Hollywood and its wicked ways. I loved the book, I loved the film, and I loved all of the characters, even if in my head one of them has magic powers and is friends with house elves and owls.