Jane Davis
asked:
Having published nine novels, can you describe your writing process? Do you find it gets easier over time?
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At the Stroke of Nine O'Clock,
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Jane Davis
I like George R R Martin’s quote: ‘I’ve always said there are two kinds of writers. There are architects and gardeners. Architects do blueprints before they drive the first nail, they design the entire house, where the pipes are running and how many rooms there are going to be, how high the roof will be. But the gardeners just dig a hole and plant the seed and see what comes up.’ Personally, I think there are more than two types of writers. I want to be Mary Anning scouring the beaches at Lyme Regis for dinosaur fossils, or Howard Carter discovering the tomb of Tutankhamun, or metal detectorist Terry Herbert digging up the Staffordshire Hoard. What I don’t want to be is a parent deciding on my child’s future, telling my son which subjects he will study, arranging my daughter’s marriage.
Once I have self-edited the manuscript to the stage where I can’t be objective, I send it out to beta readers. The importance of this stage in the process is clear. The aim is to road-test the story by giving it to people with a wide range of life experiences. It’s said that the reader finishes the book, so I’m keen to know how they react to it before finally letting it off its leash. Then come more changes, the copy edit and several rounds of proof-reading.
I’m afraid that anyone who imagines that words show up in the eventual order that they appear on the page of any novel is (in the majority of cases) mistaken. In some ways, the novel in its final form is an illusion, the rabbit pulled out of the hat.
As for whether it gets any easier, if anything, I think the reverse is true. Once you’ve established a loyal readership, whatever size that readership may be, you don’t want to let them down!
Once I have self-edited the manuscript to the stage where I can’t be objective, I send it out to beta readers. The importance of this stage in the process is clear. The aim is to road-test the story by giving it to people with a wide range of life experiences. It’s said that the reader finishes the book, so I’m keen to know how they react to it before finally letting it off its leash. Then come more changes, the copy edit and several rounds of proof-reading.
I’m afraid that anyone who imagines that words show up in the eventual order that they appear on the page of any novel is (in the majority of cases) mistaken. In some ways, the novel in its final form is an illusion, the rabbit pulled out of the hat.
As for whether it gets any easier, if anything, I think the reverse is true. Once you’ve established a loyal readership, whatever size that readership may be, you don’t want to let them down!
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