The rest of life has intervened over the last few weeks. The
Sound of the Sea has been put to one side for the moment, in favour of the day
job and trying to get a few more short stories off for magazines. I was also at
an excellent summer writing school, which, as always, provided much food for
thought.
On a more populist note, I was watching the Jack Reacher film, an adaptation of one
of Lee Child’s novels starring Tom Cruise as Child’s Lone Wolf type hero. What
interested me was the interview with Child afterwards, where he talked about
the ‘honesty’ of the first draft. And how, when an editor says to him: “Well,
it would make more sense if X came before Y”, he argues that things aren’t
perfect in real life so why should they be perfect on the page? (I’m
paraphrasing here. It was a Saturday night with friends and I wasn’t sitting
there taking Teeline shorthand notes).
I’ve been thinking about Child’s remarks a lot lately. The
current trend in writing (in creative writing handbooks etc) seems to favour
endless re-drafting and editing, moving things around, ditching characters who
aren’t working to say nothing of the ruthless cutting of the adverbs (a debate
for another blog post, to be sure).
Certainly, I re-draft and edit a lot, especially for the
magazine short stories, where every word has to work hard. However, I’m
wondering how much of this endless re-drafting and editing is tied in with the advent
of the PC? I remember typing up stories on a Rexel electric typewriter in the
early 1990s and re-drafting was something you had to do by hand so you had to
think very carefully before you started typing, as any changes had to be done
with Tippex papers or simply starting all over again.
I wonder too what effect going back to a typewriter (not
that I ever would - how I bless electronic “cut and paste”) would have. Would
it make me think more analytically about my story and characters before
plunging in?
ends
