Reworking
A big part of my creative time is going into radically re-working a book. This is unusual behaviour for me. Often when I’m creating something I feel more like a midwife than anything else. I’m not inventing, I’m bringing something into the world that was already fully formed and ready to go. That makes taking bits of it apart about as weird a thought as re-knitting a recently arrived baby.
The trouble is that the things I make do not all arrive fully formed, perfect and ready to go. Many of my word-babies are sorely miss-shapen and missing vital bits of themselves such that I ought to drop the baby metaphor before this becomes a bit icky.
I expect to go through at least three drafts on any given creative piece – the initial writing down, the serious tidy up, the final polish. Some books turn out to need far more.
Then there’s the issue that I’m not just making these things to amuse myself. I’m aiming to unleash them upon the world and have them be read by others. They have to fit somewhere, and that can inform the shape. Or in this case, the re-shape.
Up until fairly recently I had a pen name and a not very secret double life writing smut. There’s a pretty good internet market for smut books, which pre-dated all the enthusiasm for 50 Shades of Gray. Which by the standards of the people I was hanging out with, was, I have been told, a rather lightweight, unkinky sort of book. It’s a genre in which I’ve done a lot of editing, too. Sadly, my main house for that work, has folded, leaving me with some serious rethinking to do.
I have to say that much of my smut was lightweight and disposable fiction, and that most of it I can let go. There are a couple of stories that barely had enough smut to enable them to fit – two longer works that are innately mournful, gothic and deeply Pagan. These, I’m reworking with a view to self-publishing. It’s a funny process because for the greater part I’ve been un-writing scenes. There will still be an erotic element, but nothing you couldn’t find in, say, a Clive Barker.
At no point did I set out to be a Y.A. author. It was one of those interesting accidents. What will now be book 3 of Hopeless Maine was originally book one, with the first 2 instalments, the child narratives, being prequels written much later because Tom saw the appeal of mixing up gothic and cute. But now I’m the proud owner of a book the Young Adult Library Services Association (in America) recommends as a great graphic novel for teens. While I’m not going to restrict myself henceforth to the Y.A. market, I do feel a degree of responsibility not to put out stuff in the same name that is wholly inappropriate. So I’m toning down and unwriting, focusing on the dialogue, emotions and psychological content rather than who put what where.
In a lot of other creative forms, it’s possible to grow and change something in a gentler, more fluid way. Songs and spoken stories can be tweaked every time they go out. Messing with a novel is a much more involved affair, but, I’d like to offer something that won’t scare off more readers than it attracts. And I’m back to the curious issue that violence is far more acceptable than sex, in terms of what we depict for each other’s amusement. On the whole I find I prefer the sex, but, at the same time, getting away from the details and the mechanics seems to fit my overall style better.
Right, back to it, carefully skipping over any innuendos about being hard at work… because we all know how much Druids hate anything suggestive… (see previous post about Naked Men).
