altariel | Don't look back

This week I’ve been revising a story. I read somewhere once that revision is one of the chief pleasures of writing and this time round I really got what that was all about. It was enormous fun. One piece of advice I had in mind all week was something David Almond says on his website about revision: “Go through your printed pages with a pen. Cross out the things that you think don't work. Put in new and better things.” I think this is a great piece of advice, so no-nonsense. When I finished the first draft, I thought my story was without doubt the best thing ever to emerge from a keyboard. When I went back to revise it, it was: “Oh, that’s manifestly crap, this’ll be much better.” Because I always secretly know when something is a bit shit, I’m just in denial about it, thanks to massive insecurity about the first draft. Obviously it is much more pleasurable to be putting down things that are good and work rather than things which are a bit rubbish.

The other piece of advice I kept in mind was something

emeraldsedai once said to me: “It’s not excess words so much as excess thoughts.” I think this really gets to the heart of a real pleasure of the revision process, to do with sifting through all the ideas I have in mind, and deciding which are the ones worth picking up and therefore threading throughout the narrative. Crafting in an idea, finding different ways to communicate it, either through a certain image, or the way a scene is set up, or just simply through choosing a particular word with the right connotations, is one of my favourite things about writing. With this particular piece I had all this stuff in my head about one of the character’s relationship to his father. It all became attached to a particular image (Plato’s cave, for what it’s worth), so I had to start setting that up too, but the more of it went in, the more it started to deform the whole. So – heave ho. It’s all there in my head, anyway, and I imagine there might be residual trace elements. Hopefully the texture of the backstory will remain, at least. So, sometimes you’re cutting not just to put in new and better things, you’re also cutting things that you like and think are good ideas, only there isn’t a place for them here. I’m sure I’ll find a use for this image and associated ideas in one form or another one day.

In other news:

kradical has just posted the table of contents for Big Finish's May 2008 Doctor Who: Short Trips anthology The Quality of Leadership. This contains my short story The Slave War: a Second Doctor (Patrick Troughton) story with Ben, Jamie and Polly; one of the leaders in question is Spartacus.

In other other news: my short story Sea Change, first published in Foundation 100, has been selected to appear in Gardner Dozois’s Year’s Best Science Fiction, Vol. 25. I’m really quite pleased.