Day 66

Brevity, without losing meaning or context

…

We’re back to our old friend, writing concisely, and making the point in as few words as possible. Most of Alistair MacLean’s earlier books were just that, an economy of words that were a joy to read.

And, believe me, I have aspired to be like him, and most of the time failed.

Writing in such a way takes practice, but who has the time to practise when all you want to do is get words on paper?

But there is more than one way to set a scene or describe a person, for instance,

It was a dark and stormy night

It assumes that we all know what a dark and story night is, but then there’s that problem that everyone has their own definition of what a dark and stormy night is to them. And, of course, we have to refrain from using idioms and allegories.

So…

Fred woke to the sound of rain pattering on the lush foilage outside his window. He had left it slightly ajar to get the last whisps of the late evening breeze, and the cooling air when the storm finally arrived. A flask of lightning lit the room for a brief moment, enough time to see the curtains push back before a long rumble of thunder filled the air. Darkness returned, the sound of the rain soothing, Fred closed his eyes and went back to sleep.

While it may be a bit wordy, it paints a picture in our minds, more so if we have had the experience, and can leave us wondering if something good or something awful is about to happen.

The last word: don’t sacrifice words for the sake of sacrificing words.

Day 65

Writing well

…

I guess this means don’t write badly, but whether your writing is bad or not subjective.

But there is such a thing as bad writing. There are rules, and as long as you try not to break any, or more than a few, and then everything’s OK.

Of course, there’s always the fallback, sending the manuscript to an editor and paying for them to iron out all the spelling, grammatical and other errors. It will cost you but it is worth it.

The last thing you want to do is offend the reader charged with deciding whether the publishing house will publish your novel or not.

Then there’s that other problem, especially if you do not have a comprehensive time scale, and extensive character definitions, such as family trees with dates that make sense, and continuity.

I am guilty of that, starting a character with one name and ending with another, forgetting the names of other characters, getting plot points out of order, having things happen before they’re supposed to, and even worse, weaving an actual event into the story and get it wrong.

Even very expensive Hollywood productions sometimes get things wrong, and the research on what’s available, like a 1920s Rolls Royce Phantom, a particular watch, or a certain item of clothing.

There’s no substitute for meticulous research.

Day 65

Writing well

…

I guess this means don’t write badly, but whether your writing is bad or not subjective.

But there is such a thing as bad writing. There are rules, and as long as you try not to break any, or more than a few, and then everything’s OK.

Of course, there’s always the fallback, sending the manuscript to an editor and paying for them to iron out all the spelling, grammatical and other errors. It will cost you but it is worth it.

The last thing you want to do is offend the reader charged with deciding whether the publishing house will publish your novel or not.

Then there’s that other problem, especially if you do not have a comprehensive time scale, and extensive character definitions, such as family trees with dates that make sense, and continuity.

I am guilty of that, starting a character with one name and ending with another, forgetting the names of other characters, getting plot points out of order, having things happen before they’re supposed to, and even worse, weaving an actual event into the story and get it wrong.

Even very expensive Hollywood productions sometimes get things wrong, and the research on what’s available, like a 1920s Rolls Royce Phantom, a particular watch, or a certain item of clothing.

There’s no substitute for meticulous research.

Day 64

Writers must read, or perhaps it should be, writers should read.

Why?

Well, it is said that you cannot become a quarterback if you have not seen what a quarterback does during a game of gridiron.

And whilst a writer can be good at writing, it helps to have read the sort of books that you intend to write to get some idea of what publishers are looking for.

Certainly, if you are writing nonfiction, there’s definitely going to be a great deal of reading in store.

I actually have a library of books, about three thousand of them, not all of the genre that I choose to write, but certainly, a good cross-section to lay the groundwork of the structure of the stories and how they will play out.

There is a formula behind writing a Mills and Boon romance book.

Of course, I’ve tried to write one, but my usual tendency to drift into thriller land gets me in the end, and I have a romance for half the book, and then all the thriller trimmings to bring it home.

I also have a penchant for writing spy stories, and my shelves are filled with the usual suspects, Charles Cummins, John LeCarre, and Led Deighton just to name a few. I particularly like those of Len Deighton.

And everyone can see the influence James Patterson and Clive Cussler have had on my writing. If only I was half as good as they are…

Day 64

Writers must read, or perhaps it should be, writers should read.

Why?

Well, it is said that you cannot become a quarterback if you have not seen what a quarterback does during a game of gridiron.

And whilst a writer can be good at writing, it helps to have read the sort of books that you intend to write to get some idea of what publishers are looking for.

Certainly, if you are writing nonfiction, there’s definitely going to be a great deal of reading in store.

I actually have a library of books, about three thousand of them, not all of the genre that I choose to write, but certainly, a good cross-section to lay the groundwork of the structure of the stories and how they will play out.

There is a formula behind writing a Mills and Boon romance book.

Of course, I’ve tried to write one, but my usual tendency to drift into thriller land gets me in the end, and I have a romance for half the book, and then all the thriller trimmings to bring it home.

I also have a penchant for writing spy stories, and my shelves are filled with the usual suspects, Charles Cummins, John LeCarre, and Led Deighton just to name a few. I particularly like those of Len Deighton.

And everyone can see the influence James Patterson and Clive Cussler have had on my writing. If only I was half as good as they are…

Day 63

A writing exercise

…

She was so ruthless in her pursuit that soon she forgot why she had started.

It was the only way I could describe the actions of Evelyn Johnson, a mild-mannered young lady who at first sight seemed to be the type of person who anyone would give a second glance; totally out of character.

i remembered that day well because it shook up the working environment that had taken our section head nearly a year to get settled. The right staff with the right qualifications, with the right amount of experience, and able to do their designated jobs.

It was a rare place indeed.

And then the department head arrived one morning and told Kendra, the section head, that there was a new officer starting and she was to be shown all of the processes in turn. That new officer, Evelyn Johnson, recently from Chicago, a big city girl moving to small-town America, in the Midwest. It was the proverbial doubly whammy.

No explanation was given, but the Department Head did have a curious expression on his face when he introduced her. Kendra just shook her head.

This was not the first time it happened. Jeffrey Quirke, the Department Head, had introduced three other young ladies into our department with varying consequences. What we learned afterwards, they were his ‘special projects’, and they didn’t last too long.

Evelyn seemed different, and to me, she looked vaguely familiar, in stature and manner.

Jeffrey Quirke’s expression remained the same, and so we assumed she was going to be another transient ‘special project’.

….

A month later, it was my turn to spend a week introducing her to my specialisation, filing and cataloguing. We used computers, everything passed through a system and was stored in particular places, with a cross index so that there were often four or five categories in the index for a single document.

Before submitting their files for storage the authors had to use several keywords. Of course, most of them didn’t, not because they couldn’t but more they were lazy and knew we would do it for them.

By the time Evelyn got to me, the others had made up their minds about her, she was not who she said she was, certainly she had never been to university, or if she had, not taken anything in, and that she did;t seem to understand the concept of work. She was always late, and had extended lunch hours and disappeared before the official going home time.

She did not attend any of our staff gatherings and didn’t come to the Friday night drinks, our way of winding down so that we could enjoy the weekend. Kendra said she was going to give her the lecture, despite the fact she might go straight to Quirke, but I said I would talk to her first.

“I don’t think you are her type, Joshua,” she said, and she was probably right.

Any time I had tried to talk to her, she simply ignored me. Except if it was work-related. It was going to be a challenge.

Once again she was late, this time an improvement, only ten minutes, and I watched her hasten from the door to the staff room, then emerge a minute or two later and head straight for my desk. she brought herself, and her cell phone. She didn’t take notes. It was not possible she could remember everything we had told her.

After she said, there was no apology, and the smile was thin and annoying.

“You seem to have a problem with time.”

“I’m sorry? What business is it of yours.”

“We all make the effort to get here on time. The section’s performance is measured and a report is compiled, and we were the best in the building, and no we’re not. You may not care, but that performance report is the basis for our productivity bonus. You might ask what business it is of mine, it is very much our business when you are letting the team down.”

“It’s not deliberate.”

“I think it is. You could take an earlier train or bus, or get whoever it is who brings you to leave earlier or find some other way. Unless, of course, you think you are more privileged than we are, or you hail from very rich parents who indulge your every whim and you don’t need the mon ey like everyone else here.”

OK, I think I’d finally stepped over the line, but, if I had, we would find out very soon who she really was.

“You don’t know anything about me.”

“Then enlighten me so I can understand.”

She sighed. “Just show me what you have to show me and I’ll be out of your hair soon enough.”

“Why are you here, anyway?”

“To learn about the systems and the processes.”

“You don’t take notes.”

“Photographic memory. Don’t need to.”

I shook my head. “I don’t believe you.”

She frowned, the took me through the system, from the specifications of the computer server system, the workstations, the filing system, the operating system, the administrative role and tasks, the whole box and dice. The last time I read about the system, before I sat down with it, was reading the system manually, which was 2,000 pages long. My bailiwick was only 150 pages or so.

She concluded about thirty-three minutes later. “So far, collectively between you, you have misquoted the system procedures forty-seven times. My report will make interesting reading for someone…”

There was no mistaking who that someone was in her supercilious tone.

I guess she had proverbially put me in my place.

….

Friday couldn’t come soon enough, and I had managed to get through my part of the system without, I believed, making too many mistakes. The system had varied a little from the manual in places, but by and large, we were still dependent on the manual for guidance.

This Friday was odd, Evelyn was still at work long after she usually left, and it was just after the last employee left, telling me that she would see me at the bar, and not to be too long. The company did not pay overtime and any extra time we spent there was on us. Routinely the only people still in the building after knock-off time was management.

I wondered if she was waiting for Quirke, and they would be on their way to dinner and… I tried not to go there in my mind. Quirke was not what I would call an attractive proposition.

I had gone to the breakout area to put my coffee cup in the dishwasher while she was processing a sample files, and indexing it. When I came back, she had a list of files on the screen. There should only be the one she had just filed.

“What are you doing?” I had to ask, because bringing up files, any files in the system, left an imprint of your login and the date.

Just before she cleared the screen I did see one name of interest, Jocelyn Trent. It was a name I hadn’t heard or seen in at least five years, and quite oddly, one of the first of Quirke’s so-called ‘special projects’.

“I created a few cross-indexes and filed it, and when I did, it brought up all these other files, obviously with the same index keywords. I had no idea that would happen. I didn’t mean for it to.”

Her excuse seemed just a little too pat for my liking. Someone would have to know those keywords to get those files, and there was no way they could be randomly guessed. And now that I thought about it, I had seen her scanning lists of available keywords to use, as if she was looking for something.”

“Who are you really? We all think you’re Quirke’s special project, but I’m beginning to think you’re something else entirely. How do you know Jocelyn Trent?”

“Who?” She tried to look innocent, but I wasn’t buying it.

“don;t play dumb. To get those files you needed to know the secret code.”

“How do you know there’s a secret code?”

“I work in filing and cataloguing. It’d be a bit strange if I didn’t know the system inside out for when the idiots out there forget where they put their documents. But you, you haven;t been here long enough, and those codes are not in any manual. Again, who are you?”

There were two choices here, she was a spy from another company trying to see how we’d improved the system, or she was from the company that supplied the software, a company that was displeased with us because we were locked in a battle over the latest round of licencing fees, after an update that we had all but financed. Then there was how she got past Quirke, though that needed very little imagination.

It just surprised me that she would.

“I’m not sure I like the tone when you call me a special project.”

“You obviously are in tight with Quirke.”

“You are prone to making the wildest of assumptions, aren’t you?”

“Either that and you’re a spy, in which case I will have to call security. And they are not the most pleasant of fellows.

They were not. We all thought they were ex-mercenaries, and then people were escorted from the building we all believed they would never be seen again. I had personally seen Jocelyn Trent escorted from the building, and she was never seen again. Kendra said she heard a rumour she got pregnant with Quirke’s child and he sent her to the other side of the country. A rational explanation rather than the rumour mill conspiracy theory. I preferred the latter.

“I’m no one, Joshua, believe me. Certainly not a spy, and definitely not Quirke’s whore.”

Well, that was pretty definitive, and when she pronounced Quirke’s name there was a very dangerous undertone to it. She hated him.

Then, in the light, daylight giving over to the overhead lighting the way she moved her head, the profile, was exactly the same as Jocelyn Trent. The hair would have been the same if it had been much longer and several shades darker. This girl was much thinner, but if I was to hazard a guess, she was either her twin or younger sister though by only a year.

I tried to remember the conversation Jocelyn and I had about her family. She had been as tight-lipped at this one. We had been friends until something happened, and then I saw her escorted from the building. I tried to find out but there was nothing, and she couldn’t be found.

I’d also tried to find the documents that Evelyn had just brought up and hadn’t because I didn’t know the special code. It was obvious Evelyn did.

“You’re not Evelyn, your real name is Whilomena Trent, isn’t it, Willie for short. Jocelyn said, once, she had a younger sister who hated her name and used her second name which I can’t remember for the moment, but looking at you, I believe you are her twin, and in that younger boy a few minutes.”

She had that look that said she was going to deny it, but then she shrugged. She looked around but there was no one else in the room.

“She liked you Josh.”

Josh was her special name for me. When we were friends.

“She said if I was ever here that I should look you up, but when she left and didn’t come home, I sort of forgot about this place, and everyone in it.”

“Why are you here?”

“I believe she was murdered.”

“By Quirke?”

“He got her pregnant.”

“You know that for sure?”

“That was the last thing she told me while being escorted out of the building. She said she had to clear her things at the apartment and she would be coming home. It was what she told me from the apartment that night. The next day her stuff, phone, everything, was found scattered all over the apartment, apparently tossed by someone who didn’t find what they were looking for. There was a police search for her that lasted a month. Then we got a postcard from her, telling us she had moved to California, and they arrived every few months. It was her writing, and her manner, and she told us she would be home soon, she just had to work through some stuff. I figured she was going to have the baby, adopt it out, then come home. Then she wrote a letter, she’d found a nice Englishman and moved to England, and when she was settled she would send us invites to come and see her. Three months ago, when she was living in California, a man walking his dog came across some bones. Those bones were identified as Jocelyn’s. The police there are trying to piece together her movements, but so much time has passed, they may never solve the crime.”

“And you think there are answers here?”

“I know the answers are here.” She pulled an envelope out of her handbag and gave it to me.

It was addressed to Willie Trent. I took out the single sheet and unfolded it. There was a single line witten in capital letters, “Jeffrey Quirke killed Jocelyn Trent. I saw him do it.”

…

©  Charles Heath  2025

Day 63

A writing exercise

…

She was so ruthless in her pursuit that soon she forgot why she had started.

It was the only way I could describe the actions of Evelyn Johnson, a mild-mannered young lady who at first sight seemed to be the type of person who anyone would give a second glance; totally out of character.

i remembered that day well because it shook up the working environment that had taken our section head nearly a year to get settled. The right staff with the right qualifications, with the right amount of experience, and able to do their designated jobs.

It was a rare place indeed.

And then the department head arrived one morning and told Kendra, the section head, that there was a new officer starting and she was to be shown all of the processes in turn. That new officer, Evelyn Johnson, recently from Chicago, a big city girl moving to small-town America, in the Midwest. It was the proverbial doubly whammy.

No explanation was given, but the Department Head did have a curious expression on his face when he introduced her. Kendra just shook her head.

This was not the first time it happened. Jeffrey Quirke, the Department Head, had introduced three other young ladies into our department with varying consequences. What we learned afterwards, they were his ‘special projects’, and they didn’t last too long.

Evelyn seemed different, and to me, she looked vaguely familiar, in stature and manner.

Jeffrey Quirke’s expression remained the same, and so we assumed she was going to be another transient ‘special project’.

….

A month later, it was my turn to spend a week introducing her to my specialisation, filing and cataloguing. We used computers, everything passed through a system and was stored in particular places, with a cross index so that there were often four or five categories in the index for a single document.

Before submitting their files for storage the authors had to use several keywords. Of course, most of them didn’t, not because they couldn’t but more they were lazy and knew we would do it for them.

By the time Evelyn got to me, the others had made up their minds about her, she was not who she said she was, certainly she had never been to university, or if she had, not taken anything in, and that she did;t seem to understand the concept of work. She was always late, and had extended lunch hours and disappeared before the official going home time.

She did not attend any of our staff gatherings and didn’t come to the Friday night drinks, our way of winding down so that we could enjoy the weekend. Kendra said she was going to give her the lecture, despite the fact she might go straight to Quirke, but I said I would talk to her first.

“I don’t think you are her type, Joshua,” she said, and she was probably right.

Any time I had tried to talk to her, she simply ignored me. Except if it was work-related. It was going to be a challenge.

Once again she was late, this time an improvement, only ten minutes, and I watched her hasten from the door to the staff room, then emerge a minute or two later and head straight for my desk. she brought herself, and her cell phone. She didn’t take notes. It was not possible she could remember everything we had told her.

After she said, there was no apology, and the smile was thin and annoying.

“You seem to have a problem with time.”

“I’m sorry? What business is it of yours.”

“We all make the effort to get here on time. The section’s performance is measured and a report is compiled, and we were the best in the building, and no we’re not. You may not care, but that performance report is the basis for our productivity bonus. You might ask what business it is of mine, it is very much our business when you are letting the team down.”

“It’s not deliberate.”

“I think it is. You could take an earlier train or bus, or get whoever it is who brings you to leave earlier or find some other way. Unless, of course, you think you are more privileged than we are, or you hail from very rich parents who indulge your every whim and you don’t need the mon ey like everyone else here.”

OK, I think I’d finally stepped over the line, but, if I had, we would find out very soon who she really was.

“You don’t know anything about me.”

“Then enlighten me so I can understand.”

She sighed. “Just show me what you have to show me and I’ll be out of your hair soon enough.”

“Why are you here, anyway?”

“To learn about the systems and the processes.”

“You don’t take notes.”

“Photographic memory. Don’t need to.”

I shook my head. “I don’t believe you.”

She frowned, the took me through the system, from the specifications of the computer server system, the workstations, the filing system, the operating system, the administrative role and tasks, the whole box and dice. The last time I read about the system, before I sat down with it, was reading the system manually, which was 2,000 pages long. My bailiwick was only 150 pages or so.

She concluded about thirty-three minutes later. “So far, collectively between you, you have misquoted the system procedures forty-seven times. My report will make interesting reading for someone…”

There was no mistaking who that someone was in her supercilious tone.

I guess she had proverbially put me in my place.

….

Friday couldn’t come soon enough, and I had managed to get through my part of the system without, I believed, making too many mistakes. The system had varied a little from the manual in places, but by and large, we were still dependent on the manual for guidance.

This Friday was odd, Evelyn was still at work long after she usually left, and it was just after the last employee left, telling me that she would see me at the bar, and not to be too long. The company did not pay overtime and any extra time we spent there was on us. Routinely the only people still in the building after knock-off time was management.

I wondered if she was waiting for Quirke, and they would be on their way to dinner and… I tried not to go there in my mind. Quirke was not what I would call an attractive proposition.

I had gone to the breakout area to put my coffee cup in the dishwasher while she was processing a sample files, and indexing it. When I came back, she had a list of files on the screen. There should only be the one she had just filed.

“What are you doing?” I had to ask, because bringing up files, any files in the system, left an imprint of your login and the date.

Just before she cleared the screen I did see one name of interest, Jocelyn Trent. It was a name I hadn’t heard or seen in at least five years, and quite oddly, one of the first of Quirke’s so-called ‘special projects’.

“I created a few cross-indexes and filed it, and when I did, it brought up all these other files, obviously with the same index keywords. I had no idea that would happen. I didn’t mean for it to.”

Her excuse seemed just a little too pat for my liking. Someone would have to know those keywords to get those files, and there was no way they could be randomly guessed. And now that I thought about it, I had seen her scanning lists of available keywords to use, as if she was looking for something.”

“Who are you really? We all think you’re Quirke’s special project, but I’m beginning to think you’re something else entirely. How do you know Jocelyn Trent?”

“Who?” She tried to look innocent, but I wasn’t buying it.

“don;t play dumb. To get those files you needed to know the secret code.”

“How do you know there’s a secret code?”

“I work in filing and cataloguing. It’d be a bit strange if I didn’t know the system inside out for when the idiots out there forget where they put their documents. But you, you haven;t been here long enough, and those codes are not in any manual. Again, who are you?”

There were two choices here, she was a spy from another company trying to see how we’d improved the system, or she was from the company that supplied the software, a company that was displeased with us because we were locked in a battle over the latest round of licencing fees, after an update that we had all but financed. Then there was how she got past Quirke, though that needed very little imagination.

It just surprised me that she would.

“I’m not sure I like the tone when you call me a special project.”

“You obviously are in tight with Quirke.”

“You are prone to making the wildest of assumptions, aren’t you?”

“Either that and you’re a spy, in which case I will have to call security. And they are not the most pleasant of fellows.

They were not. We all thought they were ex-mercenaries, and then people were escorted from the building we all believed they would never be seen again. I had personally seen Jocelyn Trent escorted from the building, and she was never seen again. Kendra said she heard a rumour she got pregnant with Quirke’s child and he sent her to the other side of the country. A rational explanation rather than the rumour mill conspiracy theory. I preferred the latter.

“I’m no one, Joshua, believe me. Certainly not a spy, and definitely not Quirke’s whore.”

Well, that was pretty definitive, and when she pronounced Quirke’s name there was a very dangerous undertone to it. She hated him.

Then, in the light, daylight giving over to the overhead lighting the way she moved her head, the profile, was exactly the same as Jocelyn Trent. The hair would have been the same if it had been much longer and several shades darker. This girl was much thinner, but if I was to hazard a guess, she was either her twin or younger sister though by only a year.

I tried to remember the conversation Jocelyn and I had about her family. She had been as tight-lipped at this one. We had been friends until something happened, and then I saw her escorted from the building. I tried to find out but there was nothing, and she couldn’t be found.

I’d also tried to find the documents that Evelyn had just brought up and hadn’t because I didn’t know the special code. It was obvious Evelyn did.

“You’re not Evelyn, your real name is Whilomena Trent, isn’t it, Willie for short. Jocelyn said, once, she had a younger sister who hated her name and used her second name which I can’t remember for the moment, but looking at you, I believe you are her twin, and in that younger boy a few minutes.”

She had that look that said she was going to deny it, but then she shrugged. She looked around but there was no one else in the room.

“She liked you Josh.”

Josh was her special name for me. When we were friends.

“She said if I was ever here that I should look you up, but when she left and didn’t come home, I sort of forgot about this place, and everyone in it.”

“Why are you here?”

“I believe she was murdered.”

“By Quirke?”

“He got her pregnant.”

“You know that for sure?”

“That was the last thing she told me while being escorted out of the building. She said she had to clear her things at the apartment and she would be coming home. It was what she told me from the apartment that night. The next day her stuff, phone, everything, was found scattered all over the apartment, apparently tossed by someone who didn’t find what they were looking for. There was a police search for her that lasted a month. Then we got a postcard from her, telling us she had moved to California, and they arrived every few months. It was her writing, and her manner, and she told us she would be home soon, she just had to work through some stuff. I figured she was going to have the baby, adopt it out, then come home. Then she wrote a letter, she’d found a nice Englishman and moved to England, and when she was settled she would send us invites to come and see her. Three months ago, when she was living in California, a man walking his dog came across some bones. Those bones were identified as Jocelyn’s. The police there are trying to piece together her movements, but so much time has passed, they may never solve the crime.”

“And you think there are answers here?”

“I know the answers are here.” She pulled an envelope out of her handbag and gave it to me.

It was addressed to Willie Trent. I took out the single sheet and unfolded it. There was a single line witten in capital letters, “Jeffrey Quirke killed Jocelyn Trent. I saw him do it.”

…

©  Charles Heath  2025

Day 62

Editing – 1

The message I’m getting from the inspirational piece is quite bluntly telling you, the author, to be ruthless.

But, is it as much about cutting words, as it is rearranging those you have better?

There are writers who write chapters instead of paragraphs, paragraphs instead of sentences, and end up with a book the size of War and Peace. That is not to say Tolstoy should have taken a blue pencil to his work and made it 250 pages. It would not have made sense.

A friend of mine once told me that Harold Robbins was one of those writers who needed to be concise rather than verbose. I didn’t agree with him. I read all of Robbins’ books and loved them.

But…

It is always suggested that first, you write the story. Just get it all down of paper, or in a file on your computer. However long it takes to get it there. One of mine came in at 85,000 words. At the time, I was told the optimum size was around 50 to 60,000 words.

So, it came time for the first edit. I reduced it to around 45,000 words by tasking out what I first deemed unnecessary verbosity. Then I sent it to the editor who told me there were gaps, gaps that ruined the continuity. He then asked for the missing pages.

I then made the second edit and it came back at 78,000 words.

Three visits to the editor and four rewrites, the story now has 85,000 words again, but it reads much, much better. It was in fact a story I wrote originally about 50 years ago, at a time when love was new to me, and I didn’t understand girls or the myriad of mistakes you could make, and I think what I did back then was chronicle the path I took.

If I was hoping it would make it easier I was wrong. It was not a revelation to discover that all women are different.

But I digress…

Editing can be about ruthless cutting, but it can also be about adding for clarity and continuity or to make a part of the story clearer by using context or backstory.

Day 62

Editing – 1

The message I’m getting from the inspirational piece is quite bluntly telling you, the author, to be ruthless.

But, is it as much about cutting words, as it is rearranging those you have better?

There are writers who write chapters instead of paragraphs, paragraphs instead of sentences, and end up with a book the size of War and Peace. That is not to say Tolstoy should have taken a blue pencil to his work and made it 250 pages. It would not have made sense.

A friend of mine once told me that Harold Robbins was one of those writers who needed to be concise rather than verbose. I didn’t agree with him. I read all of Robbins’ books and loved them.

But…

It is always suggested that first, you write the story. Just get it all down of paper, or in a file on your computer. However long it takes to get it there. One of mine came in at 85,000 words. At the time, I was told the optimum size was around 50 to 60,000 words.

So, it came time for the first edit. I reduced it to around 45,000 words by tasking out what I first deemed unnecessary verbosity. Then I sent it to the editor who told me there were gaps, gaps that ruined the continuity. He then asked for the missing pages.

I then made the second edit and it came back at 78,000 words.

Three visits to the editor and four rewrites, the story now has 85,000 words again, but it reads much, much better. It was in fact a story I wrote originally about 50 years ago, at a time when love was new to me, and I didn’t understand girls or the myriad of mistakes you could make, and I think what I did back then was chronicle the path I took.

If I was hoping it would make it easier I was wrong. It was not a revelation to discover that all women are different.

But I digress…

Editing can be about ruthless cutting, but it can also be about adding for clarity and continuity or to make a part of the story clearer by using context or backstory.

Days 60 and 61

Research to make your writing authentic

Whenever I’m writing about a place or about something I’m not familiar with, Google steps in as my aid of choice.

Google to search for the vague stuff.

Google Maps to check out the locations.

Google Street View to get a close look at the locations.

Via Michelin to calculate travel times between cities and what there is to be seen along the way.

Any number of airline sites for travel between cities and countries.

That’s what I can do after visiting the actual places. Yes, my vacations often are to places overseas where I keep a journal noting everything I see, and take lots of photos so that I am across any location I use in my stories.

These typically live in either London and surrounds, or New York and surrounds, because I have been to both many times. Just as frequent are the cities of Paris, Rome, Florence, Venice, and a large part of Tuscany.

That includes riding on trains, the London Underground, the New York Subway, and the Chicago ELL and familiarising myself with buses, cabs, and other modes of transport.

Then there’s the subject matter, and several I’m working on currently,

An interest in space, the planets, and what it’s like to travel into outer space.

Kings and Queens, medieval times, and the people that lived during that time. Ordinary people, feasting and banquets, dancing, and social structures.

Amateur Astronomy, and just plain stargazing.

The various stages of schooling in England and America. I have an interest in their proms, and reunions.

The police and detective rank in the police forces in England and America, including the sheriffs.

I always wanted to fly a plane – and can, in my story.

I’m sure you will have a million other things you would like to know about, and the internet is always on hand.