A Snapshot From the Writing Life by Katherine Webb

A somewhat more personal blog than normal from me this month as I find myself in that slightly bewildered, exhausted/exhilarated state that comes about when the second (and hopefully final) draft of a book has been handed in. Mostly, there's a tremendous sense of relief! And I know it's definitely done this time because I have stopped waking up in the middle of the night thinking of tiny, tiny changes to make to the script - literally swapping one word for another on page 342, for example. I'm free!

As somebody who cannot plan a story before starting it, writing a novel is always a leap of faith. Will I still be able to do I? Will ability kick in where faith is failing, and let me produce something worth reading? I know where I want the book to start and finish, and I know who my players are, but will I be able to steer them through a complex narrative? And, given that I can't plan, a book with a twisty plot - like my fourth novel, 'The Misbegotten', and like this one I have just finished - always cause me headaches. I knew when I handed this script in for the first time back in June that there was work to be done - and I was looking forward to getting my agent's and editor's eagle eyes on it. Often, I am far too close to the woods to see the trees by the time I reach the end of the story. It's all there in my head, but has it made it onto the page?

I am often asked by aspiring writers how I deal with the editorial process, and the general feeling is that it must be awfully hard. Well, it is - but not necessarily for the reasons people might think. I imagine that if you'd turned in what you thought was the perfect novel, hearing that your publisher would like changes made to it must be very hard. The key is never to assume it's perfect! I've done this enough times now to know that I have strengths and weaknesses, and every first draft I write will have strengths and weaknesses. Having a skilled editor to point out the weaknesses is a GOOD thing. I've also been asked whether a book still feels like my book once I've redrafted it. My goodness, YES. If it doesn't, something is very seriously wrong. An editor might point out a problem; it is up to the author to find the solution to that problem. Or to argue convincingly that there isn't a problem. Or to sidestep the problem by rewriting other parts of the novel in a certain way. It remains, absolutely, all my own work.

My entirely shambolic work book, which helps me keep tabs on what I've changed and what this is doing to other parts of the book, and what still needs to be added/removed/rewritten...

Another thing I also do at this stage of the writing process is to go back through all my research notes for little gems of historical detail I've missed, which I can drop in to add authenticity to my settings. This time around, that meant rural Wiltshire life in the 1920s, which has been a joy to learn about and to write. Equally, you have to leave some things behind, if they're not needed. However interesting I found the highly-skilled process of constructing a Wiltshire hoop-raved wagon...it brought nothing to the plot. I've weeded out every bit of too-modern sounding dialogue, written in unthinking full-flow, as I can find; I've checked which wild flowers would have been blooming in the months I've set my story, and I've agonised over whether a character would be 'fascinated with' or 'fascinated by' her lover's body. I have, in short, driven myself quite batty.

A Wiltshire hoop-raved wagon. Would often have been painted bright blue, with the wheels and details picked out in scarlet; and would have lasted donkey's years.

The sudden loss of this soul focus of my attention is a strange feeling. I've only been half in the room for the past six weeks, as I worked on the redraft. Time to call up some friends, and apologise for being glassy-eyed company of late... I feel relieved, as I said, and also a little bereft. I find myself wondering whether I should have found a way to work in the details of the hoop-raved wagon after all... But, once I've hit send I am strict about doing nothing else to the script until I hear back from my editor. And now, a few days on, real life is slowly returning to mind!

The book is due for publication in the UK next June. The script now goes off to a copy editor, who will fact-check it and pick out any glaring continuity errors (always a danger when some sections have been rewritten); after that it'll go to be type-set and then proof read, both by me and by a professional proof reader. And I must turn my attention to the next book... Normally, by this stage, I'll have had an idea about what I want to write next. This time, I haven't an inkling. This latest book has taken up a huge amount of my energy and brain-space for the past nine months - perhaps more than any of my other novels to date. I am - tentatively - extremely proud of it, and I think I need a few weeks to recover from it!

I'll leave you with a few fantastic facts about rural Wiltshire a century ago that I wasn't able to work into the narrative:

Wiltshire folk were superstitious about elder trees and wouldn't cut them down, as it was said that Judas hanged himself from an elder tree.

Vertical stones set on top of a wall around a well, and designed to keep children out, were called 'cock-ups'.

A treat for the children when the butcher's wagon came around was a lump of suet to gnaw on. Yuk!

Obby was short for Albert.

When it came to making wagon wheels, only heart of elm would do for the hubs; only ash for the shafts, and only oak for the spokes.

Folks would say that spring had come when you could step on nine daisies at once.

Killing your darlings (then resurrecting one) by Imogen Robertson

Marie Bashkirtseff - In the Studio

The Paris Winter is out in paperback this week, so while I’m copy-editing my next book, part of me is also wandering the boulevards, peering in at the shop-windows and watching the young women climbing the stairs to their studio to continue their training as artists. It is one of the great pleasures of writing for a living that you get to swoop mentally across a city, checking the waters rising, being a ghost at Maxim's or Bal Taberin or examining diamonds in the jeweller’s shops on rue Royale. You start watching your characters and as they and the plot develop you start noticing something like a novel taking shape. It can be very exciting. There are also moments though, when rather than wafting around the world you’ve created, you find yourself slamming into a brick wall.

Writing a novel involves any number of highs and lows, and normally at least twice in the process I feel like throwing the laptop out of the window and finding something more sensible to do for a living. Then I remember I’m not trained for anything else, and being self-employed for this long has turned me too feral for office work so I have to sit back down and get on with it. There were some real highs writing Paris Winter, there were some brick wall moments too.

The helpful cat

When I first delivered the manuscript to Headline, and to my editor there, Flora Rees, it had a modern narrative running through it. There were bits of it I was very pleased with, but after getting my notes back from my Flora (and getting married - though I’m not sure that had anything to so with it), and re-reading the manuscript I had to admit that it just wasn’t working. I was on my extended honeymoon in Portugal at the time and I remember the sinking feeling in my stomach as I skyped Flora, my mother-in-law’s cat curled up next to the keyboard, to say I thought it all needed to come out. Flora had, I think, come to the same conclusion some time ago and was gently hinting me in that direction, so I suspect she wasn’t surprised. I also remember she seemed a lot less worried than I was about throwing away a third of the book. The next few days involved a real slaughter of the darlings, as scenes and characters melted away and left no trace behind them in the manuscript. Once that painful decision was made though, the novel blossomed. Suddenly there was room for the story to breathe and I’m afraid I began to forget all about my modern characters and their stories. Playing with the cat helped. Also having an understanding husband and a shop down the road that sold a decent white wine for one euro a bottle turned out to be very important. 

The understanding husband

I entirely rewrote the book in a month and it was incredibly satisfying. In the general slaughter though, I also killed one of Flora’s darlings. It was a scene towards the end of the novel, a key one, and I entirely rewrote it so it was seen from a different character’s perspective, and took place in a different part of the city. Flora, while of course understanding my reasoning, was sorry to see it go. Which brings me back to the paperback. As well as having a lovely quote on it from Manda Scott and a banner announcing it was short-listed for the CWA Historical Dagger, it also has a bonus track. We have put in that missing scene as an extra at the end of the novel. Has anyone else every done anything like that? And if you had the chance to resurrect a lost scene like this, adding to the end of the novel as an sort of ‘alternative reality’ for your readers, would you? And as readers, would you be interested is discovering bits of what might have been? 

The Paris Winter (with bonus track) is available from Thursday.

A FEW MESSY THOUGHTS ON PERFECTION by H.M. Castor

Odysseus loses a few sailors to Scylla (the six-headed
monster) while steering clear of Charybdis (the whirlpool)

There's one question that other writers frequently get asked that isn't (in my experience, at any rate) put to historical novelists - and it's this: "Is your work autobiographical?"

In interviews and at events connected with VIII - my novel told from the viewpoint of Henry VIII - I've been asked about research, about my enthusiasm for Tudor history and about putting words into the mouth of this famous king, but no one has yet asked me if I've written this novel about myself. (Don't get me wrong - I can see why not!)

Still, in a recent interview at the London Book Fair, Patrick Ness commented that every book is emotionally autobiographical - every book is about its writer (it's a great interview, and you can see it here). It's a subtle point - making the distinction between what you might call straightforwardly autobiographical and emotionally autobiographical - and I reckon he's absolutely right. The version of Henry I've created is, necessarily, the product of my imagination, my interests, my own psyche. As part of my research, I read psychological studies to help me unpick Henry's story, and what I took from them must have been what struck a chord with me, consciously or subconsciously - how could it be otherwise? 

With my current work in progress - a novel about Henry's elder daughter Mary - a similar process is unfolding. I am doing heaps of research and being as objective as I can, but - like every other writer of fiction or non-fiction who has approached the subject - I am conjuring my Mary, just as VIII was my Henry.

In both Mary's case & Henry's I've been thinking a great deal about idealism and perfectionism. Exploring the idea that Mary was trained to be an ambitious perfectionist is leading me to all sorts of interesting thoughts about her life... but also - precisely because the subject is of interest to me - a whole number of my own bells of recognition are also clanging! This week I've been reading a wonderful book by Canadian analyst Marion Woodman called Addiction to Perfection (Inner City Books, 1982). It is largely about eating disorders, but in the preface, Woodman writes about another kind of addiction to perfection that reared its head in her own writing process:

This book… has been hewn out of the hard rock of an addiction to perfection. Repeatedly, I have done battle with the black crow sitting on my left shoulder croaking, “It isn’t good enough. You haven’t anything new to say. You don’t say it well enough.” Repeatedly, I have had to stop trying to perfect a sentence here, a paragraph there, while the rest of the book remained unwritten. Fortunately there were deadlines to be met, or I would never have struck this book out of the rock in which it was buried. And the crow croaks, “Just as well.” …Thus I have steered my course through the Scylla and Charybdis of rigid scholarly methods and a whirlpool of material and landed my creation, rough-hewn, as delicately as possible without falling into my own addiction.”

Set aside Mary for one moment, as a writer sitting at my desk, this passage made me cheer. Whirlpool of material? Yes - just look at the tottering piles of books around my feet. Rigid scholarly methods? How I fear making some terrible historical blunder! And I know that crow - how does Marion Woodman know that crow? It's my crow!

Is it just me, or is there not a temptation for writers to focus on the end-product too soon, to try to get things too right on the first draft, and to that end to read just one more research book... oh, and that one... oh, and that one too...

...and to WORRY so much about whether the darn thing's going to work and hang together and do what you wanted it to that, should anyone ask you how it's coming along, you're in danger of developing a twitch rather along the lines of Herbert Lom playing Chief Inspector Dreyfus, boss of Inspector Closeau...

...not to mention forgetting, in the rush to the finished 'perfected' work, that the creative process has absolutely zilch to do with getting it 'right' and being 'good enough' and a whole lot more to do with that wonderful thing they do in nurseries called 'messy play'... Try out that crazy idea. Make a splurge. Play. Enjoy. Dare. Don't be neat. Leave those ends hanging out.

Of course the tidying up needs to happen. It can come later. Editors are great at helping with it.

I have a suspicion I'm writing this simply as a note-to-self, and that you, dear reader, have no such problem when you put pen to paper or finger to keypad. Try to make it 'good' too early? Worry about the faults before you've filled that blank page? Nah, you say, that'd be crazy! In which case, forgive me. But, doubling back in a structurally imperfect way, let me ask you: if you write, are your books about you in some way? And if you don't write but read novels, why do you think you are drawn to some subjects and not others?

I will leave you with those questions... oh, and with a postscript on the subject of perfection.

A very good place to get addicted to the pursuit of perfection is at ballet school. I went to one. And I was so desperately far off even the lowest foothills of Mount Perfect that I gave ballet up altogether (with a large dollop of self-disgust) at the age of 15. However, in my late twenties I worked at The Royal Ballet for a few years with dancers who had reached the higher slopes. Some of them, in fact, were as close to the summit as it is humanly possible to be. The very best dancers in the world are, quite simply, astonishing. Here are two very different short film clips as demonstration of that fact (and I must add, with deepest regret, that I did not work with either of these men).

First, please ignore the poor quality of the film and the fact that he's wearing a strange 1970s tiara; concentrate instead on Mikhail Baryshnikov's flawless virtuosity:

Mikhail Baryshnikov - Le Corsaire

Secondly, here is Fred Astaire. All right, so his singing perhaps isn't entirely sublime - but the dancing, for me, puts him right at the top of that mountain (the dance proper starts at 1 min 30 secs):

Fred Astaire - Puttin' On the Ritz

H.M. Castor's novel VIII - a new take on the life of Henry VIII - is published by Templar in the UK and by Penguin in Australia. It is now available in paperback, hardback & ebook format.

H.M. Castor's website is here.