Well I had intended to put this up much earlier in the week but unfortunately I was laid low from Tues onwards by a bug and spent several days in bed! I’m pleased to say I am now recovered and itching to get back to the manuscript.
I did do a considerable amount of work on Monday however and have made myself all kinds of notes and a good map of the novel as you can see from the photo above. I love it when I get to this stage and I begin to feel surrounded. The room becomes the story!
I have been careful to check for continuity in the content of my story (characters with blue eyes do not suddenly become brown eyed) but more importantly continuity in time – moving the reader through time within the novel, which is something that can appear effortless but which needs attending to – I cannot stress this enough and it can be done very simply with phrases like – ‘the next morning’ or ‘ later that day, around six.’ The reader needs to know where they are and what time of day it is and you are their guide. Events within the story have to happen when predicted and at certain times. For this I created a post- it time line and found straight away that I had to make changes as some things were happening at the wrong time or in an impossible time scale!
I have also been looking at the arc of my story and the development of Danny Beck’s character from the point of view of the stages in the hero’s journey. This is the mythical pattern described by Joseph Campbell, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, in which he discusses his theory of the journey of the archetypal hero found in world mythologies.
Campbell explores the idea that important myths from around the world share a fundamental structure. In this structure the journey is a metaphor for the process that underlies all growth, learning, and self discovery. As we all know, our protagonists must grow and learn throughout our story and and ultimately be changed at the end of it, so it has been helpful to me to check my story arc (especially in a quest novel which mine is ) against the steps outlined by Campbell. One would never expect to find all the steps but I was surprised and delighted to find that Danny Beck’s journey is pretty archetypal and that one or two extra ideas sprang from the comparison.
So what next? A big piece of work editing the novel on the screen from the notes I’ve made on the page. A trip to South Shields and across the river by ferry, and then more thickening – you will be impressed to know that even on my sick bed I did some reading, mainly Henning Mankell, Swedish author of the Inspector Wallander mysteries. (I am a huge fan!) There is just so much to learn from a master craftsmen and I know that what I continue to learn from reading Mankell, will thicken out Beck’s character and improve my story telling.
Lots more thinking to do too – still not sure about the ending!
Aviril, I’m using your blog to send you a huge apology. I forgot to invite you to the writers workshop last night. It happened like this, I sent emails to everyone on Cathy’s list. Then yesterday afternoon I was thinking I hadn’t heard anything from you and it was only then that I realised you weren’t on the list and so I hadn’t contact you and i don’t have either your phone number or your email address so this is the only way I have of contacting you. The workshp went very well and everybody loved the garden, not a lot of writing got done but people talked about writing and took photos. So would you still like to come and visit it? I’m around most of the weekend and every day next week except Wednesday at the moment and I like visits from real gardeners.
Sorry Mary 01388832727
Hi Mary – please don’t worry – I had also forgotten but I’m without tranport at the moment so it might have been difficult anyway. I will ring if car situation changes – would definitely love to see your garden – glad the evening went well
Avril x
PS my e mail is amjoy@hotmail.co.uk – if anyone needs it
What a great blog about the process of these final editing stages! It makes thinking on this large scale look like real fun, but it also makes this level of editing really look like a professional fine tuning of a good novel.
i am not surprised that you find that your existing narrative meets all the criteria of a hero’s journey as such narrative skills are, I believe, part of our storytelling intuition, as old as the hills or the seas where even they came from.
These outside resources are always useful when contemplating the finished novel, However to those of you out there who use them as a kind of map for the writing of the novel, I say be cautious, The results are often mechanistic and inorganic. This is the right way round. Write, then check
wx