Somebody asked me this week if I read other people’s work while editing my own, and if so, did I feel an urge to correct their writing too? The answer is yes; and yes, indeedy!

This kind of close attention to every word and punctuation mark requires total concentration, and the story mustn’t suck you along or you lose focus, so I find it useful to take periodic breaks, coming back to the job with a clearer eye and harder heart. Reading other authors qualifies.

I’d been cutting adverbs and adjectives to the bone in Saving Sebastian for a few hours, when I took time out with Gabriel García Márquez’s, Love in the Time of Cholera, and came across this. Dr Juvenal Urbino and his virgin bride are getting to know each other on their honeymoon cruise.

‘Then he knew that they had rounded the cape of good hope, and he took her large, soft hand again and covered it with forlorn little kisses, first the hard metacarpus, the long, discerning fingers, the diaphanous nails, and then the hieroglyphics of her destiny on her perspiring palm.’

My editor would have a fit! There’d be a red line gouged through the whole paragraph, not just the offending adjectives – three or four slashes, I shouldn’t wonder. This is just one example; I won’t bore you with others. But I seriously wondered what I was doing pfaffing about with far less offensive over-writing.

And yet … this book is famous, positively weighed down with accolades. And it was selected for World Book Night: one of just 25 titles chosen (although I confess, it wouldn’t have been my choice). 40,000 copies of it were distributed, created specially not to be bought or sold, but to be given and shared. DJ was given this one. He passed it to me. I’m passing it on.

Furthermore Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982, three years before Cholera was published.

Eh dear. What does that say about excessive adjectives?! Sigh, that’s what I mean about goalposts. Who sets them? Do they even exist? It’s all so subjective.

Oh, but to be positive, I also came across:
‘A man should have two wives: one to love and one to sew on his buttons.’
‘Always remember that the most important thing in a good marriage is not happiness, but stability’ And all was forgiven – well, almost!

One major advantage of all that reading and re-reading was that I noticed repetitive words and phrases. ‘Flounced‘ and ‘shuddered‘ loomed larger than life. Descriptive passages demanded cuts. However, the chief culprit by a long way was the word ‘just’ – scattered throughout with gay abandon. How could I not have noticed before? But that’s the advantage of putting the work on one side for a while and coming back to it with fresher eyes. This time around my red pen went crazy.

I’m now recovering from the trauma of consigning all that hard-won text to oblivion by reading other people’s work – and critically appraising that instead. Marilynne Robinson was recommended to me so I’ve been reading a couple of her books (Gilead and Home). Gentle, reflective, sad stories. And I can’t help feeling that, for all their cluster of awards, my own editor would say, ‘Cut them by at least a half.’ ‘Remove the repetitive phrases.’ ‘Look at some of the peripheral characters: are they really needed?’ Oh yes, she’d call for a radical edit for sure!

So there was I, cruising along with Pulitzer Prize winning Gilead, thinking these heretical thoughts, when this passage jumped out at me. (The narrator is an elderly pastor writing a letter to his son, conceived in his late sixties, whom he will not see reach adulthood.)

I notice the care it costs me not to use certain words more than I ought to. I am thinking about the word ‘just.’ I almost wish that I could have written that the sun just shone and the tree just glistened, and the water just poured out of it and the girl just laughed – when it’s used that way it does indicate a stress on the word that follows it, and also a particular pitch of the voice. People talk that way when they want to call attention to a thing existing in excess of itself, so to speak, a sort of purity or lavishness, at any rate something ordinary in kind but exceptional in degree. So it seems to me at the moment. There is something real signified by that word ‘just’ that proper language won’t acknowledge. It’s a little like the German ge–. I regret that I must deprive myself of it. It takes half the point out of telling the story.

I warmed to the old gentleman. And I was sorely tempted to reinstate my own murdered ‘just’s! They do serve a function. They really do! Well, OK, they just do.

Then another phrase resonated:

This habit of writing is so deep in me…

Well, indeedy. I know exactly how he feels. It won’t be denied. Even at 4 in the morning. In the Reverend’s case he has fifty years worth of sermons in his attic as well as the book-length letter to his son.

Ahah! Speaking of sermons … the Reverend Ames has an unusual angle on several points relating to matters religious, too. This one appealed to me:

In the matter of belief, I have always found that defenses have the same irrelevance about them as the criticisms they are meant to answer. I think the attempt to defend belief can unsettle it, in fact, because there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things…
So my advice is this – don’t look for proofs. Don’t bother with them at all. They are never sufficient to the question, and they’re always a little impertinent, I think, because they claim for God a place within our conceptual grasp.

He has a heart problem and knows he hasn’t long to live. But as he becomes increasingly frail, he resents people rushing to his aid.

I’d rather drop dead doing for myself than add a day to my life by acting helpless.

Oh yes! I see and hear this attitude again and again amongst my elderly friends. If only ‘health and safety’ would allow them to. Sigh.

With all this reassurance and empathy I’m recovering rapidly. I reckon I’ll be getting stuck back into my new novel on organ transplantation any day soon.

Working from home
I guess it comes down to three things: discipline, persistence and obsession. My second names. One of my obsessions is that I need peace in order to write, mental peace as well as physical. So first I have to tidy up my mind as well as my environment.

This week that clearing process included finishing the book I was reading, Whatever you Love by Louise Doughty. A disappointing read, sadly. I rather enjoyed the author’s weekly column A Novel in a Year, so I had high hopes. And WYL began well. But it failed to live up to its early promise. Too slow paced and altogether too improbable. I can deal with not liking the main characters, but really! Would a newly bereaved mother deliberately entice the man who killed her little girl to her home to have sex with him? Would you marry a man who held you over a cliff edge to terrify you? No, it wasn’t for me.

Once that and all the other extraneous tasks are dealt with, I’m free mentally to get on with the creative writing.

I love working from home – not sitting in traffic, not being jostled by tired commuters, not having to brave the elements, not tiptoeing around moody colleagues. In fact, there’s only one downside I can think of: getting other people to respect my working hours. I’m too available.

What my week looks like
Every week is different. Depends on which bit of the work I’m preoccupied with.

If I’m dreaming up a plot I might be cleaning windows, or driving through the country, or whipping up a feast. All with notebook and pen at the ready, of course.

If I’m in full creative flow with a new book I’m locked in the study working all hours of the day and night, disengaged from real life.

This particular week has been dominated – day and night – by editing. Shorter sharper bursts of activity so that I’m not lulled by the narrative into missing those extraneous phrases and repetitive sounds. I have to be slightly detached from the characters for this phase but they still haunt me wherever I am.

Saving Sebastian is due out in July and my editor wants two changes. A shorter book, and less distinctive accents. Oh, and lose a few adverbs!

I have a number of supporting characters with regional or foreign accents in the story – Arthur (a florist’s delivery man), Aurora (a Nigerian grandmother), Desiree (a Glaswegian girl who’s having IVF) – and I’m trying to convey qualities about them by their speech patterns. It’s a fine judgement deciding how authentic to be in written form. Jennie felt in places their dialogue was holding up the flow, so I’ve been smoothing it out.

I’ve managed to lose about 10,000 words so far. Sobering thought, eh? Labouring over the creation of 10,000 words, only to take them all out again. It’s a crazy life! Oh, and in all this detailed scrutiny I’ve noticed that I use the word ‘just’ far too liberally, so I’ve been searching for each occurrence and stamping on it as often as possible. I wonder if I use it to excess in my everyday speech.

Most of the week, then, I’ve been closeted in the study, staring at the computer, going over and over the text, tightening it up. But I did sneak out for my eldest granddaughter’s birthday, and to visit elderly friends. I’m not a complete troglodyte. Although I must confess, it felt like truanting, and I worked most of Saturday to compensate. Like I said, obssession is my middle name.

Temperatures up here have sunk to minus thirteen – minus sixteen a bit further north. It’s snowed every day except one for three weeks now. We’ve slipped and slithered to a few events – the ones that weren’t cancelled – but the roads have been deadly.

But it’s stunningly beautiful. I keep reaching for the camera …
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… with due care, of course. Don’t want to fall and break that expensive lens … or both my arms … and end up totally helpless … like someone in the advanced stages of dementia … like my character, Doris Mannering, in Remember Remember … Fanciful? Yes. But then aren’t all creative writers? Imagining yourself into a person or place is what it’s all about.

And I’ve been doing a lot of imagining this week. It’s the big edit. ‘Be severe,’ said my editor. And ‘kill the baby’ (which in common parlance means, erase the bits you love best). I’ve been severe all right! Twenty-eight thousand words have been cut. That’s more words than many a dissertation. And every one of those twenty-eight thousand words has been thought up, written down, read several times and now deleted. For ever. Weird way of filling your time, huh? But fortunately for me I’m sufficiently distant from the original draft for it not to be too painful. There’s something to be said for publishers’ delays after all!

I finished this mammoth stint at 10.30 last night and sent it off to my editor. But then, in the night … you know about my subconscious mind … I had an idea … As the saying on my old computer had it: Perfection is always one more draft away. And because we’re never satisfied, we go on … and write another novel … and another … always hoping … this time …