I felt a huge sense of relief when I finished the first draft of Hitting the Jackpot. There was my story on screen - beginning, middle, and a pretty good ending, done. It was a nice moment, but I knew there was a lot more to do. I'd written it at pace, like the children in my primary classes write when they're really 'into' a story - '...and then he... and then she... and then, and then, and then...' There wasn't a great deal of detail or description. Being my first novel, I'd wanted to get the bulk of it, the story, done. I knew I could concentrate on 'style' later.
So that was the next stage: I reread it, and I reread it, and I reread it again. I must've reread it close to thirty times, usually the whole thing, although sometimes just a few chapters. To begin, there were the typos and the repetitions and the clunky expressions and contradictions and the repetitions. For the first time I doubted whether it was worth the bother. It was pretty disappointing. I was expecting to read an undiscovered Nick Hornby or a brand new Tony Parsons: what I found was nearer an unedited Biff and Chip adventure written by a nine-year-old. But I knew I'd spewed it out, brain working at maximum speed while my two-fingered typing hobbled behind as I tried to turn plot into novel.
Pretty soon (maybe the seventh or eighth sweep through) there were hardly any typos (that I could see), fewer repetitions, less clunk, fewer contradictions, fewer repetitions: I was getting somewhere. I could start to look beyond corrections and towards improvements. I could make the dialogue snappier, the humour wittier, the characters more engaging, or untrustworthy, whatever I wanted. It was the most creative time.
The plotting had been enjoyable, but after deletions and swapping of order it ended up being two pages of notes. This would follow that, that would be preceded by him doing this and then she would do that. The process of improving the narrative was a huge project, going through 75,000 words, which soon became 78,000 words, and then over 80,000.
All the while I could feel it getting better, especially when the characters, as if by magic, started to take over and write their own words in their own voices while my two fingers hammered along behind them trying desperately to keep up. This was a real 'out of body' experience. I could see myself from above, almost detached from the process, being guided, no led, by the characters who had come to life, taken control, shown me the way they wanted to speak and act. Like they wanted to give everything the maximum impact they could. I felt we'd become a team: Jack, Cindy, Rich, Milly, María - suddenly we were in this together, all charging in the same direction, towards the same goal, a better telling of my story, or was it now theirs...?
It was a bit like what I imagine furnishing and decorating a brand-new house would be like, after the bricks were all done and the roof was on and the internal walls were plastered. That was my first draft. What I was doing now was wandering through the rooms, accompanied by a team of skillful home-decor experts, choosing paint for the walls, carpets and parquet for the floors, choosing doors, door handles, light fittings, repainting a wall, switching a rug to a different room, hanging some pictures, swapping them, buying a sofa, then changing it when I realised (or they told me) white wouldn't work... Gradually, the changes got smaller and smaller and I got nearer to what I, we, felt was 'right'. An example...?
There's a corner shop in the story, across the road from Jack's flat. It's where he buys his lottery tickets. One of the characters pops over in an early chapter. I thought about the corner shop. What could I do to give it a certain 'something', I really didn't know what, I just felt it could 'do' more in terms of the atmosphere of Jack's street, Jack's home, his character, his surroundings. I pictured my character going across, it was nighttime, dark, they were in a bad mood. An image came to mind, something I'd seen, a picture, a painting. It was a shop, or café I think, at night, a brightly lit terrace under a dark, blue or black, starry sky. I googled 'painting, café starry night' - and there it was: a Van Gogh, Café Terrace at Night.
I couldn't remember where I'd seen it before or why I knew it. It wasn't perfect, it was a bit too bright and welcoming, I wanted something more grubby - more the Cricklewood I remembered as a child, and where I'd set my tale. My memory was better, so if I relied on my memory, and updated the Van Gogh a bit, bastardised it, made it my corner shop with just a hint of Van Gogh's café left...
"Across the street, the lights from the corner shop flood the pavement, like a version of Van Gogh's Café Terrace at Night from his Cricklewood period, complete with a battered newspaper stand and a couple of dollops of dog shit."
And I don't know if anyone reading my book will like my description of the corner shop, or they'll hate it, or if they'll even notice it. But it made me smile. I felt my corner shop was more than just a corner shop now, it had a little bit of character, and I felt very satisfied with it. And that's why I write: for the fun of turning something OK-ish into something better. That was one of the thousand and one things I did after I finished the first draft...
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