The second half

Writing the second half of Clandestine was an extremely pleasurable experience. All of the painful things I had gone through with the first half of the novel seemed irrelevant. The words flowed out of my mind and onto the laptop with relative ease and I managed to smash my previous weekly word limit.

Once I finished writing, I saved the file (backing it up in several places), printed out a hard copy and then put it in a drawer. I then tried to forget about it. According to the books this was one of the most important writing techniques out there. The idea is that when you finally come to read your novel, you should do so as a reader, not as a writer.

After a brief outing into the normal world, I booked a couple of days off work and took Clandestine out of the drawer. I removed any possible distractions from the vicinity and started reading. As I went through I made the briefest of notes in the margin. Things like:-

B – bad sentence

S – stretch the tension

X – cut

T – thoughts

D – description

I finished the book in two days and, to my great relief, I enjoyed it. I walked around with a huge smile on my face for at least a week!

The next month whizzed by as I incorporated all of my notes from the read through, and my friend’s notes. I then went back through the book, changing minor details and polishing wherever necessary. I handed the first draft of the entire book out to my trusted group of friends and waited for their feedback. Their notes were considerably shorter than their first review!

It only took a week to incorporate these notes into Clandestine, after which I promptly issued a second draft to a smaller group of people. They went through and highlighted any spelling and grammar mistakes that I had missed. I fixed the typos and, after an entire year of working on Clandestine, it was finished.

I spent the next few days wondering what I should be doing with myself.

Alfie Gray

This short story is now available as a Kindle ebook on Amazon

Writing and rewriting

The books recommended that I set myself a realistic word limit and focus on writing as many words as possible. Then, once the book was finished, they suggested that I should go back and start reviewing, editing and rewriting. The idea was that a bad sentence was better than no sentence at all.

I initially found this approach quite difficult. Once I finished my first chapter I went back and read it and began changing things. I did the same for the second and third chapters. This desire to go back and rewrite meant that I failed to meet my word limit for the first two weeks.

I think my biggest problem was that I was daunted by the idea of sitting down and writing an entire book. I was also daunted by the concept of finishing the first draft and having to edit an entire book. I had ‘the fear’.

Despite ‘the fear’, I could see that if I carried on following this initial approach, it would take me several years to finish the book. So I decided to move the goal posts. Instead of attempting to write a complete novel, I would aim to write the first half. With a more achievable target I found that ‘the fear’ quickly disappeared and my weekly word limit became easily achievable.

After a couple of months of intense writing I finished the first half of Clandestine. I was over the moon! But the aspiring author does not have the luxury of rest. I began editing it right away. This took about a month and while the writing was pleasurable, I found the editing a bit of a slog. At times I wanted to give up, but at the end of each week I could see that I had improved my novel, and that idea spurred me on.

Up until that point I hadn’t told anyone very much about the book. I knew that I would have to send my baby out into the big, scary world at some point, but I needed to be happy with it first. When the editing was done I read through the first half of Clandestine and decided that (although it was far from perfect) it was ready. Five of my friends received a copy and I waited with baited breath as they read through my work.

Once they were finished I sat down with each of them and discussed their thoughts on the book. I asked for brutally honest feedback and that is exactly what I got. They told me there were holes in the plot, that some of the characters were under developed and that one of the scenes was unrealistic. But they had lots of positive feedback too. They loved the story, they liked the pace and they really connected with some of the characters.

I spent about a week consolidating all of their feedback into one place so that it was easily accessible and securely lodged within my brain and then started writing the second half…