Book Length

Love this Cormorant braving the waves...I took this pic on yesterday's celebration walk on Lizard POint

My next book A Cornish Stranger is due to be handed in on the 31st of this month. Yesterday I typed the words THE END but in truth it is far from the end. What happens now is what will make the book shine, or I hope it will.

However I have a problem at the moment. The book is shortish. Not novella length and not novel length yet I feel in my gut that the story is complete. I think with the themes and seriousness of some of the issues I don't want to pad the story out with things that will distract...so what do I do?

Today is my day away from the story. Despite the rain I plan to go for a walk, take a long bath and read something else. I know I actually like 'shorter' reads. But I wonder how readers feel? Do they feel cheated when the book isn't a door stop? What do you think?

Knitting

I have loved knitting since my mother taught me at seven years old. It was a way I could express my creativity without covering myself with paint or flour or anything that required more work. You see I am at heart a lazy sod. Knitting suited me. It provided instant gratification to a point. A few rows and you could 'see' your work and your pattern emerging. I was always gung ho at the start. I'm a really good starter but for years I struggled with the finishing. My mother despaired that I would ever complete a darn thing.

I didn't begin to complete projects until high school and by the time uni hit I was designing my own sweaters. They were in demand by friends and acquaintances. I loved it. Along the way I became skilled at teaching other people and fixing my mistakes as well as theirs...a dropped stitch - no problem.....most of the time.

On a plain sweater a dropped stitch or two was easily fixed...but where a complicated pattern was involved like Fair Isle or Aran then fixing the problem could mean pulling it all out down to the dropped stitch. Ouch. But I'd discovered that unlike on a simple sweater on a complex one you might not have the enough of the right colour thread to fix the problem or not enough ease in the yarn. A simple fix would pull the sweater out of shape or design. To get it right there was no short cut.

I'm finding my edits at the moment the same way. Changing a name is like the simple dropped stitch, but pulling key scenes out and filling them with new ones is like dropping a stitch in an Aran sweater. The tension is all wrong and it's pulling everything out of place. So I'm having to unravel whole chunks of the story to fix the pattern and where once I'd been a whiz at knitting because I was always doing it...I'm a novice at editing and scared to death of the process...I don't wanting howling wind or drenching rain whipping through the holes I've left in the story....

Come back on Thursday to find out what's on Biddy's mind...

Why a Book is Like a Suitcase

Well, they're both rectangular prisms, I suppose, but it goes deeper than that. I've been packing today for my trip to Los Angeles, and in the course of my folding and rolling and stuffing I realized my books — or at least my first drafts — are like suitcases, really.

Some of the things I'll put in, I won't need. And some of the things that I'll need, I'll forget to put in.

In all my years of travelling (and writing) I have never yet perfected this. I've tried, believe me. I've refined my packing technique so I can usually fit what I need in one carry-on, but even then there will always be one shirt or one pair of pants that I could have left home, just as in every first draft I've written there's always been one scene (at least) simply taking up space.

Which is nothing, of course, when compared to the bother of getting to the end of the first draft and realizing I need to add a whole new scene or subplot (the equivalent of having left my hairdryer at home, instead of packing it).

In my latest book, The Rose Garden, I wrote a lovely scene in which my heroine and one of the past characters sat talking on a hillside on a quiet Sunday morning, and another scene in which she met two ramblers on the coast path. Good scenes, both of them, but totally unnecessary to the plot, and so although I packed them into that first suitcase they were never used.

On the other hand, I found I had forgotten to put something in the middle of the story that was necessary, so I had to add it in.

It seems no matter how I try to learn from past experience, this always happens. Even though I've laid my clothes out carefully and taken half away, the way I've learned to do, I know there will be something that will languish in the suitcase all this week and not get worn. And in my current work-in-progress I know I'm creating scenes that won't be in the final draft.

Maybe one day I'll be able to spot them straight off, and save time. Anybody out there have some tips to offer?

(Come back Thursday, when the lovely Julie will be posting.)