Kia ora koutou, its a funny old dance, this business of writing because it never stops. You can’t sit back from a day’s work, for instance, and say ‘Well that’s good, I’ve cracked it, time to celebrate.’
You can’t do this because that cranky old witch called Experience tells you that by the glaring light of tomorrow you will see the errors, inaccuracies, infelicities, that have, in today’s heady exhilaration, escaped your usual eagle eye and tomorrow, will have to be fixed or more likely, deleted.
And every change you make, however small, has an effect on what has gone before and this has to be checked as well.
Thanks to modern technology I don’t have to go back over every page if I want to change say, a name or something, because there’s this cute little number called Find and Replace. But every change impacts on the rest and that’s not so easily traced. Awkward or badly constructed sentences need to be chased up, fixed and made friendly.
Then there’s continuity. Its no good having your hero with long fair hair on page 57 and then discover that on page 13 it was a shiny blue/black short bob.
Its a fact of a writer’s life that most of what we write goes into the bin or is removed, discarded, or changed. Its funny how one’s creativity with words only gets full play when you’re staring incredulously at a page on the screen that, at the end of yesterday, you thought was perfect and now in this moment of truth the next morning, you see is utter and total crap.
Its like getting ready for a run. You have to go through the preparation, the short and long runs, the exercising, the inevitable, ‘Well fuck this, I can’t go on, its too hard,’ moment, but the sad thing about writing is the belief which persists that at some future date, (unspecified), there will come a day when we will wake up and know it all and will never have to rewrite again. We will never have to do this again because from this date we will write perfect paragraphs full of sentences which will make editors fall on their knees with delight. When we reach this time of perfection, words will flow, one after the other with wonderful precision and this will happen in the first totally magnificent draft. Nothing we write will need editing because our words will be moving, illuminating and memorable. We will be the kind of writers who rip off a book in the morning, win a marathons in the afternoon and cook a delicious three course meal for fifty guests in the evening.
Yes well, darlings, ignore that dream. The most useful thing we learn is just to make a cup of coffee and settle down to rewrite the bloody page yet again.
In some respects, the old dream is true. There are times when, after a bit of too–ing and fro–ing the words actually jell and not only pass that relentless first, second and third inspection but stand up good and true the next and following days. Of course there’s still that one page that is rewritten forty times and even then is not quite exactly what you wanted. I’ve tried deleting the bloody thing altogether but then I have to write some sort of replica that’s going to be just as useless.
I bet if I went through Wuthering Heights or Pride and Prejudice I could find similar pages that old Emily and Jane just let go because they could not damn well come up with anything better or because, in Emily’s case, old Bramwell had been sick on the carpet again and she had to clean it up. I think both Emily and Jane were a bit, shall we say kindly, wordy? I mean, lets face it darlings, have you read every single word of WH or P&P, on subsequent reads or even the first time round?
Rome, I am ‘continuously’ or ‘continually’ (your choice) told, was not built in a day. Well maybe not darlings, but it didn’t take bloody forever either.
Here’s to the perfect sentence, the perfect paragraph, the perfect page, the absolutely perfect draft that I know are waiting for us tomorrow..
Renée
