English: Mulgrave Castle. Castle ruins situated in Mulgrave Woods, near Sandsend on the east coast. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
At the moment, I am on a major re-write of my supernatural, Victorian novel, “Mulgrave Castle”. I am having days where I am conjuring up the atmosphere I need to re-create the book in my head and I feel truly satisfied. However, I am also having days when I will do anything before getting started and then find that I have wasted my writing time. I am beginning to wonder if this is to do with the type of writer I am.
As I see it, there are basically two types of writers. (Of course, many will be a mixture of the two.) There is the explorer who has maybe a very basic plot and outline ideas for characters and then lets the whole work evolve as she/he writes. There is also the planner who has virtually everything worked out either on paper or in their head before they start to write.
I would love to be a planner but my writing muse hates it and I have to accept that I am an explorer. Being an explorer can be tremendous fun as I sit and type and imagine and all sorts of scenes taking place which help me get to know my characters. However, it means that I have to do about seven drafts of a book and by drafts I don’t mean spellcheck. I mean doing a draft purely to re-write the plot, exploring the best point of view, then the same with character development and another one to put signposts in etc…
As I work, I have another file open which is called “Mulgrave Castle Leftovers”, this is basically the cutting room floor. Being an explorer means that I have scene after scene which is cut because there might only be one relevant sentence in it – however writing these scenes are not a waste of time as they give me an intimate insight into characters and setting. When we first begin to write, we find it difficult to cut, it is almost as if someone is threatening to cut parts of our person off. The longer we work at our craft, the more we can see what doesn’t work or what simply is clogging the arteries of the story up. I call it “boning the text” – basically, I am cutting it down to the bone. To demonstrate the severity of it, I am on page 63 of my most recent re-write and the “Mulgrave Castle Leftovers” file has 10,000 words in it already. Goodness knows how many words will be in it by the time I get to the end.
So, I’ve shared with you – now do tell, how do you write?
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