Still struggling to get moving after being overseas. It’s not the fault of ‘overseas’ but just a lethargy that seems to have taken over after I’d recovered from jet lag and general tiredness. Did I mention that on one part of the trip I was awake for something like forty hours straight, including the 17-hour trip from Dallas to Sydney?
Anyway, yesterday I read back through some notes I made
on my previous book, the one that was published late last year. The file was
entitled: Notes on The Counterfeit Queen - if I were to start from
scratch.
That file was written in 2019, four years before the
book got published. So, if you think you’re a slow writer, you can see that I can
be a really slow writer.
Anyway, it turned out to be a more encouraging document
than I’d have guessed. It showed me that even if my method is slow, it produces
results.
In this document there’s a lot of discussion of what I’d
already written as a draft, showing the so-called First Draft wasn’t really a
draft at all but merely a framework for the real discussion with myself
that took place once I’d got some material to work with.
This is where a lot of writing instruction books fall
down, for me: they assume you can sit down and write up an idea and turn it
into an outline, with character biographies and themes and a proper ending all
set up and ready to go.
I don’t find this realistic at all. To produce a real
draft I need much more than an outline produced ‘cold.’ I need a ‘draft’ in
which things happen, in which characters appear that I didn’t know existed, in
which all sorts of clues arise as to what might happen in the story (even
though I don’t appreciate that at the time). This draft may wind up being seven
or eight or ten chapters long. By that time I know I’ve got a sort of story,
but it’s a story without its proper shape. Things may happen, but I don’t
necessarily know why. And everything may change.
By the
time I realise I need to stop and take stock in relation to this draft, I may
have done a lot of work on it. It may still regard itself as the real
First Draft.
But now that
I do have something to work on I discuss
it and discuss it with myself – driving myself crazy in the process. I attempt
to iron out all sorts of plot problems that have become apparent, and in due
course find myself writing an entirely new version. This may use elements from
the original, but may not be anything like the original.
Sometimes this whole
process may have to happen more than once, as it did with The Counterfeit
Queen. Which is daunting to contemplate.
But what I realised,
again, from that Notes on The Counterfeit Queen file, was that all sorts
of new ideas came into the picture through the discussions, and weak and
pathetic ones quietly retired. Many of these new ideas actually became part of
the final book, even though in the discussion I still hadn’t necessarily got a
handle on how they’d work - or whether they’d work.
I wondered afterwards if
the script wasn’t written in the way that many writing books suggest: get an
idea, outline the characters, the storyline, the ending, etc. Get it all off
the ground as quickly as possible.
The result is evident. Nothing
shines in this movie. In spite of it being a comedy, almost nothing is funny
apart from a couple of scenes with Lucas Bravo as an airline pilot, who after
being bitten by a snake, gets some delightful off-the-wall lines as a result of
his thinking being affected by his medication. The romantic reconciliation is
hurriedly sorted out in the last section of the movie and doesn’t feel real. It
proves yet again that even the best actors in the business do far better if
they have a literate and intelligent script to work on. One that has been
written and discussed and rewritten and discussed until it really works.
Like my book.
