Killing your darlings...
…or your entire
manuscript?
I recently had an email
from a writer who I very much admire telling me that she had thrown
aside a book she had been working on for too long and started a new
one. My stomach went into
spasms of disbelief. There is, in my opinion, nothing this woman
could write that wouldn’t be superb. How could she throw away a
story? Why would I never get to read it? WHY? WHY???!!!!
And then this horror
happened…
I remembered an entire
manuscript that I had worked on for over six years and then thrown out as
rubbish in a sealed and heavily tied metaphorical bin-bag. Somehow,
escapologist that it is, the story released itself from said metaphorical
bag and knocked on the door of my brain.
‘Hiya,’ it
whispered. ‘You thought I was dead, didn’t you? Well, guess what?
I’m still very much alive and I have a feeling that if you spend
just maybe another six days… months… years on me I will be the
BEST BOOK THE WORLD HAS EVER KNOWN. Or at least passable.’ (Cue evil
laugh.)
And there it is,
ticking away at the back of my mind again. I run through the plethora
of wonderful fictional works I’ve read and it is in no way as good
as those… but then I’ve also read a few disasters in my time too
and it’s not that bad, is it? IS IT??!!
By the way – it is!The characters had been
yoga-d into positions that are in no way credible. The situations
have been manipulated to the point of snapping. The plot has holes
that could be used to strain pasta if they weren’t so big that the
pasta might fall straight through.
And here I am again,
the Adrian Mole of my own work, marking my submission to the BBC as
Urgent. Thinking again of writing the fictional equivalent of
the Father Ted Eurovision entry ‘My Lovely Horse’. Ready and
willing to squander even more of my life on that last dying breath of
a hollow and pointless manuscript.
How do I stop myself
from taking this route? There is no map to show me the way out. I
have no-one to ask for advice other than my husband who would no
doubt tell me that my writing is brilliant whilst plugging in his
headphones and painting open eyes on the lenses of his spectacles.
Usually I end my blog
pieces with some vague stab at wisdom but not this time I’m afraid.
I don’t know what to
do.
I don’t know how to
stop myself from wasting another six years working on a story that
has flatlined.
I need advice and I
need it ever so quickly.
Maybe before I begin to type…?
By Eloise Williams
