At last!
Yesterday I published The Perilous City to Amazon, 2nd February 2016. Halleluiah.
It has been a long time coming. Not so much the writing of it - although that took longer than I thought, but the editing.
I had hoped to write the book in a year. In the end it took nearer sixteen months. But once I had it written it was too big. I had planned 6 sections each of 6 chapters, maybe 150,000 words. I ended up with 5 sections each of 12 chapters, and over 250,000 words. So I set myself the task of editing that down to 200,000. Not by cutting content, but by pruning the writing itself, making it less florid, more sparse.
That turned out to be a long, grinding job, going through every one of 60 chapters, trying to reduce each by a fifth. I ground away at it and ground away at it and finally, by the end of January this year, I had it done.
And do you know what? I'm really pleased with the result. I love this book anyway, I think it is the best thing I have written so far. For me it is much more character-driven than the previous two, much less dependent on big effects and dramatic scenes, and much more deeply involved in the lives of its characters. In turn I think the sparer style of writing that I've achieved through scrupulous, painful editing suits the dark interior life that the book deals with. And really I have removed little or no content, other than some small episodes, little grace-notes which were flourishes anyway, and not central to the story.
It makes me think now that this is the style I need to go for, that I have to prune away the excess in the future books. After all, if I can remove 50,000 words and lose nothing major to the story then that was perhaps just so much spare flesh in the first place. Of course the things I took out may have been stylistic flourishes or details of observation which added to the story-telling, and I have now lost those. I think one or two fell into that category, but not necessarily many. And I think I have left in enough flourishes. It's good, I think, to have sentences which stand above the heads of everything around them, which are bright jewels in a plain setting. In that way they command more attention. I don't want everything to be flat and functional after all. But here I think I've done the right thing.
Let's wait and see - two more books to come in this series yet, The Beleaguered City and The Besieged City. Perhaps the new style will suit them, perhaps it won't. I'm still learning after all.
But phew, it's good to have stopped editing. Now I can begin writing again. Onwards and upwards.
