Dabs with the Language Sander

Revisions on my Tudor novel are almost done. I mention this because I've been blogging mainly about poetry in recent months, yet I seem to have spent most of that time writing - or fiddling about with - prose.

It's always been a secret thought with me that prose rhythms are akin to poetry, or ought to be. Certainly I take my time over sentences that don't sound 'right' to me in their context, whatever that may be.

A good sentence should flow, should be both elegant and fit for purpose - by which I mean it should communicate whatever the writer needed it to communicate, which might be nothing or everything, or any point in between.

Clumsy writing is the last thing I want to find when looking back over what I've written.

Unfortunately, it's almost unavoidable in early drafts.

This is how it happens. You need to present a thought or a situation or a mood, and the words don't want to come, but you don't have time to coax them. You're a professional writer, you have deadlines, you have bills to pay. So you bodge it. You write what is needful and make a mental note to return later - preferably after dark when no one but the night watchman's cat is there to witness your shame - and rewrite the damn thing so that it says what is needful without leaving mental splinters in your reader's head.

That's one part of the revision process. Sanding off the rough edges.

A less pleasurable part of revision is having to rejig characters who now have beards, or no longer have beards, or whose motivation is entirely changed, or who must now swim the moat instead of swinging across it with the help of trailing creepers.

I'm joking, of course. But when you change even one detail, you quickly realise that nothing happens in isolation. Everything in the novel is interconnected. This is where we get our word 'text' from, a marvellously hard-working word which is related to 'textile' and the idea of weaving.

So once you decide, at the revision stage, that a minor change needs to happen, you also need to find places where a knock-on effect will occur following that change, and to make sure everything remains consistent within the world of your novel. Once you have six or seven 'minor' changes like this to make, the process of scouring the book for places where further changes need to happen becomes quite time-consuming and fiddly.

And meanwhile, you can't help little dabs with the language sander ...

But the hardest work is more or less over. I have one key scene to entirely rewrite, and maybe a short chapter to add early on, and the rest is about style.

Then I have the next book to begin.

More Mslexia Workshops now available

Interested in Writing as Genetics?

Or redrafting your poems as Building a Family Tree?

My third short article based around the theme of Creative Redrafting is now up on the Mslexia site.

Get it while it's hot!

 

Always start with the second stanza, he said

At one time, one of the poetry books most likely to be found on - or sometimes under - my coffee table was Ian McMillan's marvellous Dad, the Donkey's on Fire. A highly recommended poetry collection, not least because much of it is side-splittingly hilarious. My husband and I still quote 'The Continuity Girl is Dead' to each other when spotting editing mistakes in films. And the short-short story about the commuter absentmindedly putting his unlidded takeaway coffee into his briefcase before boarding the train ... well, I used to cry with laughter on reading that, even after I'd read it so many times I could practically recite it from memory.

Sadly, I can't quote from it more fully, for fear of making mistakes, as I no longer own Dad, the Donkey's On Fire (so if anyone wants to buy it for me for Christmas, I'd be very grateful). A friend who shall remain nameless 'borrowed' my copy a few years ago, and never returned it.

But, in case you were wondering, there is an excellent reason why I've mentioned it here today. And that is Ian McMillan's very funny and insightful poem 'Stone, I presume', where he discusses always starting poems with the second stanza.

You see, I'm off on my annual writing retreat at the end of next week, armed with a partial manuscript of my novel and an assortment of useful books. And today, trying desperately to muddle through the chaos I left my novel in after last time, I remembered, in a sudden flash, Ian McMillan's incisive line: 'always start with the second stanza'.

And I threw away the first chapter. Just like that.

So now chapter two is the new chapter one, and everything else moves up. And the whole book is so much tighter now, I could almost kiss Ian McMillan. Except he wouldn't understand and would probably write a poem about it later in which I figured as some sort of mad bag-lady, attacking him in the street after a poetry reading and attempting to plant a wet one on his cheek.

So what's good for donkeys is good for poets. Or rather, what's good for poems is good for novels too. And if anyone has 'Stone, I presume' to hand, please do quote the relevant lines in the Comments box below.

Writing 'Fifth': the creative process

‘Fifth’, which was written over several months in 2004 and published in my last collection, Boudicca & Co (Salt, 2006), is a poem of special significance for me because it represents my first tentative attempt at writing a poem after more than three years of complete writer's block.

The poem is about my last and fifth pregnancy, hence the title. The title itself alternated early on between ‘Fifth’, the more prosaic ‘Number Five’, and ‘Indigo’, my daughter’s name. ‘Indigo’ was too personal (I feel it’s a mistake to use names in poems, or too many personal details, if only because some distance between a poem and the poet’s reality needs to be maintained for artistic reasons) and ‘Number Five’ felt too clumsy, so ‘Fifth’ it was.

The early on-screen draft which follows - I used to revise my first few drafts on screen, a practice I later abandoned for the hands-on feel of pen and paper - shows how the poem shifts and shortens before reaching its final published form. Though some stanzas were lost and others moved about, it does retain its basic form, i.e. the quatrain structure.

At one stage, beginning to lose confidence in ever finding the best close to this poem, I did experiment with longer stanzas. But, as with so many decisions made in the intense chill of editing, it did not take and I slipped, with some relief, back to quatrains.

First, here's an early draft of ‘Fifth’:

I meant to stop at two, then three,
then a fourth appeared.
Perhaps I could try hiding
under the covers, or not washing.

Three days since the blood failed,
and the test turns blue,
a miniature sea between my hands,
nine months to the far horizon.

The midwives press down hard
into my flesh: two fingers higher
than before. The cold rim
of a fetal trumpet listens for a beat.

This must be a girl again, I’m sick
as a drunk all morning
and the world tilts when I walk
like a ship sliding in a bottle.

Twelve weeks and my waist begins
to thicken. I still can’t hold
anything down, and the boys
are too heavy to carry upstairs.

Five months on, it feels
like a fish tickling, this tiny hand
or foot, dredged up
against my diaphragm.

At full term plus ten, my waters
are broken. Maybe an hour
goes past with me crouched there,
moaning and rocking.

At last her body slithers, long
and wet, from the depths,
eyes screwed up tight
and her mouth hauled open.


This draft is a reasonable narrative poem, but not what I wanted. In search of a more solid ‘out’ to the poem - and thinking a joke might provide a neat conclusion - I shunted the first stanza here down to become the final stanza.

Luckily something better occurred to me later and back it came, returning as stanza 2. Following that change, the original second stanza, ‘Three days since the blood failed’, moved up to pole position as the new opening.

That’s quite unusual for me; even when I really mess about with the guts of a poem, the first few lines rarely change, as though they have set the tone and changing them would wreck the whole poem. Here though, the edit worked.

Stanza 3 got the chop altogether. My instinct was to keep the poem’s focus on me and my unborn baby, and the presence of a midwife felt like an intrusion. Stanzas 3, 4 and 5 then moved up, with 5 undergoing extensive revisions as the end of the poem loomed and I pushed for a new, stronger conclusion. With this in mind, 7 and 8 were also jettisoned in favour of a tighter final stanza.

These revisions meant rethinking my original intentions. In this early draft, you can see how I was trying to follow the pregnancy from a postive test result right through to the labour ward. But when I removed the midwife and shifted the poem’s focus to my relationship with the unborn baby, the actual birth became irrelevant. The title and general tone implied a happy outcome anyway, so reinforcing that was unnecessary.

Unfortunately, this left me with one of the toughest dilemmas of all, i.e. how best to close the poem?

Here, I laid the poem aside for a few months. I returned to it periodically during that time, making minor changes - there’s always one more comma to be pruned - but found no conclusive solution.

Eventually it struck me that there’s something mystical about a woman’s relationship with her invisible - yet omnipresent - unborn baby, a mysticism which was not reflected by this early draft. With hindsight, I think this was for two reasons: first, the poem’s neat quatrain structure had dictated a commonsense tone, and second, my lack of confidence had prevented me from manipulating and adapting that form to my own purposes.

You have to remember that I hadn’t written a poem for over three years when ‘Fifth’ suddenly came to me, out of the blue. In such reduced circumstances any poem is miraculous. So I was reluctant to mess too much with those early drafts, however pedestrian, in case I jinxed my return to poetry.

These days I might say ‘let’s see what happens with couplets’ or ‘let’s turn the poem on its head, see whether that works.’ But at this stage I wasn’t interested in being adventurous; I was just struggling to produce something workmanlike and possibly even publishable.

To achieve that, I looked at the images and motifs of the original draft, hunting for ways to expand and develop them into a stronger ending. The most obvious motif was dictated both by the proto-title, ‘Indigo’, and the initial blue of the pregnancy test, giving me: ‘sea’, ‘blue’, ‘horizon’, ‘ship’, (sea-)‘sick’, ‘fish’, ‘waters’, ‘rocking’, ‘wet’, ‘depths’ and even ‘hauled’.

It was only a short leap from there to ‘pearl’, which then suggested ‘shell’, both of which worked in the context of a pregnancy. ‘Pearl’ was also useful for both its sacred and its parental connotations (I’m thinking here of early Christian imagery, and the poignant medieval poem ‘Pearl’). And every child knows that a shell is a mystical object; once the home of long vanished sea-creatures, you can hold a shell to your ear to hear the whisper of invisible seas.

With such resonances in place, shaping the elusive final stanzas became easier.

So here’s ‘Fifth’, as it appeared in my second collection, ‘Boudicca & Co’ (Salt, 2006):

Three days since the blood failed,
and the test turns blue,
a miniature sea between my hands,
nine months to the far horizon.

This must be a girl again, I’m sick
as a drunk all morning
and the world tilts when I walk
like a ship sliding in a bottle.

Twelve weeks and my waist begins
to thicken. I can’t hold
anything down, and the boys
are too heavy to carry upstairs.

I meant to stop at two, then three,
then a fourth appeared.
Perhaps I could try hiding
under the covers, or not washing.

This stubborn foot wedged high
under my diaphragm is
more than a fish by thirty weeks:
it’s a rich pearl pushing

against an opalescent shell, a poem,
a number, sonic reality;
refusing to be got rid of, cleaving
like a shadow, part of me.


As you can see, the order of the stanzas has been rearranged yet again and the poem is now only six quatrains long (the earliest drafts had nine). And although the quatrains had been more or less unrhymed throughout, suddenly a strong rhyme has appeared, instinctively, to close the poem by coupling ‘reality’ with ‘part of me’.

But the most interesting result of these revisions is that ‘Fifth’ now feels like two poems in one. The first is light-hearted in tone and mainly concerned with the dragging changes of a pregnant woman’s body. The second later poem feels more complex, an introspective on ‘what is hidden’ and how an unborn child can inhabit and even swamp a woman’s psyche.

At the end, I even hint at the growing impossibility of termination - tests had wrongly told us the baby would be Down’s Syndrome, making this pregnancy a particularly emotional one. So the choice of an archaic word like ‘cleave’ feels very deliberate, suggesting for me an unbreakable bond of flesh and blood, the ancient concept of kinship as something which takes precedence over all other considerations, including disability. And these two poems have been welded together by the revision process into one - more or less - organic whole.

It’s possible, then, to trace in these changes not only the path of a single poem but also the progress of a returning poet. If the early stanzas feel a little crude and closed, they are just workmanlike enough to withstand the necessary bashes and collisons of the revision process. And the closing stanzas, written after my first clumsy enthusiasm had faded, are reaching towards a more open and suggestive poetry, the sort of work the poet could only dimly - alas! - remember at that stage.

So the finished poem has a title, a definable shape, a satisfactory opening and conclusion, and has survived the dangerous throes of revision. Not brilliant, but an auspicious birth nonetheless!

In Dark Places - the revised draft

Click to enlarge

Now that we're well into January, I can no longer put off posting up my own effort at the Dark Places writing and revision exercise. You've probably all forgotten the original poem, and who can blame you, but there's a scribbled-on draft above and it can also be found on Raw Light here if you want a quick refresher.

The poem's earliest genesis
I began writing this poem by copying out a few lines from Ezra Pound, then attempting to continue in the same 'voice' and style but on a different theme. Cheating? Probably, but not something I'm too worried about. If a particular technique kickstarts a draft, why not use it?

It's not something I do very often, though I did write a poem called 'Thanatos' - published in PNR, and in my second collection - using this technique. I chose an incredibly powerful, almost raw poem by Ted Hughes as a template on that occasion, addressed to Sylvia Plath and entitled 'You Hated Spain'.

The Ezra Pound I used was a snippet of some ten or so lines from the middle of Canto II. It begins 'And, out of nothing, a breathing/hot breath on my ankles'. It's an extract that focuses on the senses above all: smell, taste, touch, sight and hearing. And this emphasis on physicality reminded me of a visit I'd made to the Pont Du Gard, some ten or twelve years ago, with a lover in tow whose star was about to dim for me.

I wanted to keep faith with Pound's use of the senses. So I used 'fish-scaled' and 'urine', thought about how the 'light' inside the aqueduct was blocked by people stepping across the openings above or coming towards us down the narrow tunnel. I remembered the 'rough' walls under our fingertips, the need to stoop. Plus the blinding heat and dust that struck me as I left the cool interior of the aqueduct itself at the far end.

It's the top level of the Pont Du Gard you walk through, which you always used to reach via a short scramble up a dusty hillside and a series of narrow and torturously steep steps. You can climb out onto the very top at intervals - a hazardous decision on a windy day, with no barriers between you and the sheer drop - and stare down at the river below, a marbled greenish-blue dotted with swimmers.

Letting my own voice out
By about the 10th line, I was finding it impossible to sustain that eliptical Poundian style for much longer. So I gave up and just let my mind wander wherever it wished. As you can see from the sudden expansion of the lines, the poem begins to change and develop at that point. Most importantly, the unexpected word 'we' makes an appearance, along with a past tense, both elucidating the narrative voice and giving the poem an emotional context it had originally resisted.

At about that stage, I deleted the lines from Pound that I'd used as a springboard, and gave the poem its own title, Pont Du Gard.

Technical Problems
Why are the 'hands' in line 13 'well-worn'? Surely the stone is worn, rather than the hands. Or was I transferring the epithet unconsciously, thinking of a 'well-worn' relationship, maybe one just about to snap? A clever enough answer, but I'm writing a poem here, not a dissertation.

I played with the line, and cut the too-obvious hands, throwing the primary beat backwards to make 'stone well-worn,/blackened with water'. This tightening of the metre also brings it into line with the earlier part of the poem. But at a later stage of the draft, I found this didn't work and had to change it again, as you can see.

My other basic revisions followed that tendency - i.e. to shorten the line and tighten the metre, removing elements in the second half of the poem which negate the mysterious and abrupt sense-explosions of the first ten or so lines.

I also considered eradicating the later references to 'we' on the same grounds.

Initially, the appearance of 'we' felt like a strong and useful progession to the specific from the general, but that may not be the case if the poem is the weaker for it. Perhaps the human presence, as I write in my marginal notes on the poem itself, anchors this rather ephemeral poem to reality. But it may also ruin it, by destroying its opening atmosphere of other-worldliness and making this feel too much like a 'holiday' poem.

But is it worth saving from the wastepaper bin?
I like this poem. Some of the phrases tug at me pleasingly. But I need to know more about its purpose before I can push on with more rigorous revisions or think about it as a finished piece.

Poems without purpose are like roses without a fragrance. They may look great in magazines, and even poetry collections, but no one remembers them as especially important, including the poet. And if we are at all serious about poetry, we want our poems to have purpose and to be remembered.

Purpose need not be overt in a poem; overt purpose is usually awkward and embarrassing, rather like going about naked in public or wearing too ostentatious an outfit for the occasion. The best sort of purpose is often secret, its deepest levels hidden even from the poet. But it must exist, and we must sense its existence as we read.

So what purpose does this poem have? Answers on a postcard.

The revised draft
Here's one possible redraft, but 'Pont Du Gard' needs far more work if it's to achieve any sort of poetic conviction:

Pont Du Gard
Stone hall for the shrunken,
black pit interior
fish-scaled with urine.
Grim shadows of men
blocking the light up ahead.
Broad squares of sun-flash,
rectangular access
to blind air and buffet.
Swimmers below
pale fins burning in water.
Sink back into darkness
at the next space, worn stone
blackened with water,
the rough runnels of history.
Filigree depths
where the heart struggles to rise.
Pinioned to single file
in the low-roofed
night haul of the Roman:
troll-trod, dwarf dominion.
Afterwards, hot dust and olives,
a dazzle of strangers
on the long road backwards.

A Dark Place: Sorlil's revised draft

*

A Dark Place

Gravelled highway manned by poplars.
In the far distance memorials rise up:

Russian Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant.
So many children, a school excursion.

A sea of slabs, rectangles like plant beds
but instead outlines of barrack bunks.

The camp guide offers to take
my photo at the gate. It’s smaller than I

imagined. I think logistics:
how did they all fit?

I dreamt of the chimneys in black and white.
And now a daughter of a survivor can’t stop

talking, a town in Bavaria can’t stand
the connotations and you flinch when I say

“I caught the bus from Dachau”.


Sorlil
Poetry in Progress
*
Sorlil's comments on the revision process

"I've not changed a great deal, mostly just the format. I can't say I'm particularly happy with it, it feels rather bland and screams of being exactly what it is - an exercise poem!

Interesting exercise nonetheless. I tend to work more methodically even on first drafts and perhaps I need to practice 'loosening up' to allow the poem room to grow before constraining it with a critical eye."

You can read the first draft of this poem here.

Sea Cave: some thoughts on the revision process

Firstly, many thanks to Julie for following this exercise and then bravely sending her two drafts in.

APOLOGIES. THIS POST HAS NOW BEEN EDITED TO REMOVE WORK REQUIRED FOR PUBLICATION.

I gave a few reactions to Julie's first draft in the Comment box below the First Drafts post and, since she asked for some clues, suggested how she might go about revising it. So you might want to look at that too.

Working with First Drafts
As Julie points out, this is not so much a first draft as a collection of sensory responses to an idea or vision she had after reading my initial post.

So a workable first draft needs more than a collection of single notes to support it, otherwise it's likely to run into problems during the redrafting process.

Better to keep such running drafts in your head rather than putting them down on paper before they are properly 'formed'. These proto-drafts can be played with mentally whilst doing something slightly mechanical like driving long distances, walking, doing the washing-up, or making love (only kidding!), where your subconscious can work behind the scenes on finding the best shape for them - a shape which will eventually become your first draft.

Second Draft Behaviour
The second draft of Julie's poem is an excellent example of what happens when revision pulls in on itself - probably due to this lack of structure in the initial draft - and sucks the movement out of the poem, or shifts it 'away from epic narrative', as Julie says in her accompanying note.

Quite rightly searching for a structure for this poem, since one didn't exist in her first draft, Julie has imposed a structure on the poem which doesn't fit her original vision. For this, she has chosen a default structure, if you like, based on the tight metrics of a two-beat rhyming couplet.

The original draft was free and loose, and displayed such traditional traits only in its dying moments; a last minute shift, by the way, which is classic first draft behaviour, rather like a lifelong atheist suddenly professing a belief in God on his or her deathbed - just in case!

If that happened in my own work, my first instinct would be to mistrust an impulse which led me to start rhyming and formalising a previously free piece of writing. Julie has done the opposite - not necessarily the wrong thing, in every case - and jettisoned the free writing to concentrate on the more formal part of her first draft, seen emerging in the last few lines.

My instinct here would be to unpick the stitches by returning to the initial draft and beginning a second 'second' draft, i.e. putting the first 'second' aside, and reserving the right to return to it later. This third draft would probably shift to the opposite extreme, looking to expand rather than contract the poem.

Postscript
Again, many thanks to Julie for allowing me to use her poem as a pincushion. Whether you agree or disagree, please feel free to add your own observations below.

Remember, it's never a good idea to believe someone's advice if it goes against your own instincts as a writer. It can go against your pride, your ego, even your sense of identity, but never your instincts.

This post has been about under-writing as much as anything else; see David Morley's blog for some well-expressed thoughts on the opposite problem of over-writing.

Weird fiction, writing methods, and radio plays

The novelist China Miéville has just joined the Creative Writing faculty team at Warwick University and was reading from some work-in-progress tonight at Warwick Arts Centre.

I went along to hear him with my husband, who's a big CM fan and massively well-read in the fields of sci-fi, fantasy and weird fiction. Which is more than I am, unfortunately. I have my compulsive favourites from which I rarely deviate, like most people who read fiction of those kinds, but my general understanding of 'fantastic' fiction is nowhere near comprehensive. So it was good to have him along with me, to answer my occasional whispered questions and to fill me in on China's background and development as a writer.

Yet even though China Miéville isn't the kind of writer whose work I would normally read, I did find the extract from his current ms draft interesting and challenging, and the Q&A at the end particularly useful to me as a writer.

I asked about his basic writing methods during the Q&A. CM explained that he doesn't follow any set pattern or routine as a writer. During some novels, he may write 1000 words a day; with others, as much as 4-5000. And that daily word tally doesn't seem to have any discernible connection with quality. Often, he told us, the steaming 5000 word session has produced excellent writing, whilst the slower 1000 word effort has ended up being scrapped!

Apparently, his methods of revision are equally changeable from novel to novel. Some books have been revised only after finishing the first draft. With others, revisions have been necessary during the initial writing. With some of his earlier books he resisted the advice of editors; later on, he learnt to accept the editorial process and now feels it can be a good thing for writers.

He later revealed that he works with a flow-chart of the novel, preferring to plot his books down to the last detail. The chart is pinned up on the wall beside him as he writes, and if he deviates from the scheme in any way, he marks the deviation on the chart and re-jigs the whole schema to make sure he still knows how the book is going to end.

But the only certain thing he could say about the actual writing of a novel - for the benefit of those in the room who might be struggling with first novels in draft - was that every word you manage to write is one less that has to be written.

So it was a fascinating Q&A session, during which he also spoke at length about the increased focus on politics in children's writing in general, and the background to the writing of several of his novels. He also said that 'Iron Council' was his personal favourite amongst his books to date.

As I didn't take notes verbatim, I hope I haven't misrepresented China Miéville's views and comments here.

I took great heart from his description of varying writing methods, knowing how impossible it is for me to stick to any one way of writing anything. I've always considered it one of my great weaknesses as a writer, but if I can just keep pushing the words out, I suppose it doesn't need to be.

I also met someone who works in radio script development for the BBC, over drinks in the bar afterwards, and spoke to her briefly about a radio play of mine that has been languishing for several years on my - rather over-crowded! - back burner of ongoing projects. It would be good to work on that again, hard graft though it was; a particularly demanding medium, radio, coming close to poetry in its need for accuracy and a fearless grasp of the 'less is more' school of writing.

Plenty of work to keep me busy this winter, then. So much choice, so little time. But as China Miéville said, every word you write ...