If only writing time was plentiful. With an abundance of time, one could make serious progress quickly. Sadly, for me and many other authors, there is a dearth of usable writing time. For those of us with full time 'day jobs', six or eight hours a day spent writing is a mere pipe dream. After work, I'm far too exhausted to do anything meaningful. Other people have the added burden of family responsibilities, which must, of course, take priority.
Yet writing a book is hard. Really hard. The first draft takes an age to compile and then there's the near-endless process of polishing. Once done, several redrafts will be necessary, each of which requires further polishing and near-continual reading and re-reading to make sure everything's all right. This is difficult to achieve when your writing time is reduced to weekends and, in my case, school holidays (I'm teacher by the way, not a pupil!). Writing a novel is all-consuming. It dominates your thoughts as you seek to make as much progress as possible in every writing session. The ideas and plot lines fizz in your head and you yearn to get them down on paper. Your journey to the end of the story is remorseless. One might even call it an obsession. Thus, interruptions to the writing process are far from welcome. So imagine what it's like working on TWO books at once. Why would someone do that, you ask? Answer: you receive the substantive edit of a novel you've already completed and that's waiting for publication. In my case, I am thousands of words into my second novel, White Nile, and am hoping to make substantial progress on the manuscript this summer. However, my first novel, Dreams, is currently going through various necessary steps before publication. These include the usual editorial procedures. These editorial processes are absolutely vital, and there are several different types of edit that get conducted before a book goes to print. Good professional edits are worth their weight in gold, and the one I recently received for Dreams was excellent. It, did, however, mean a lot of additional work! Largely, this involved reframing several sections and making sure the story was still how I wanted it after the editorial cuts. Naturally, many reads through of the entire manuscript are required at this point, with various tweaks needed here and there to take account of the edit. It's a huge amount of work and, with limited time, there isn't much chance to do anything else. The days fly by at a canter. So what about poor old White Nile? Well, it's going to have to wait, I'm afraid. It'll still be there when Dreams is done and dusted; it'll just take a few more weeks to complete, that's all. But when you're talking timescales a year and more to write a book, each day is precious as progress is frustratingly slow. But that's okay - the most important book is always the one that's coming out next. We authors need to 'flick the switch'. By that, I mean we need to be prepared to immediately stop work on the project we're totally immersed in and restart work on a book we've already finished when the edited manuscript comes through. It's a hard thing to do, but it's a mindset we have to have. It also means you can't be too precious and possessive when it comes to your writing, which is probably the hardest thing of all! And so I'm brought to my final point. Never mind two books; authors often have THREE books on the go at once: 1) the book they're writing 2) the book they're editing before publication 3) the book that's already out there and that they are actively promoting. Some crazy souls may even be working on four if they are researching a future one too. That would be a stretch to far for me, though!
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AuthorC. D. Fox is a novelist and educator from Oxford. You can keep on top of his latest announcements and thoughts here. Archives
May 2023
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