Cut the Crap!

Girl, Woman, Other

Voila! Here is a very rough early draft of my Booker-winning novel, Girl, Woman, Other (GWO) - focussing on Carole’s chapter - which was how I began the novel. I’ve attached three pages of the initial draft alongside three pages of the final, published version.

So - what you see here is ruthless self-editing whereby I went on a cutting spree in order to get rid of the crap - and there was a lot of it, actually; there usually is with me. Nobody can ever accuse me of creative constipation. I let it all out and then embark on the challenging but rewarding job of revision, until I feel the writing project is working. My aim in showing you this early draft is to dismantle any misconceptions you might have about my process and to use it as a teaching tool.

I’m always envious of those writers who have a more methodical approach to writing novels, and who write from a place of mental clarity, sometimes plotting the whole book before they’ve written a word and then writing maybe one draft or two before publishing it - without having produced the chaos you see in this early version from c2014.

I spent about a year writing Carole’s chapter until I moved on to the other eleven characters. Why? Because she took up all of my creative oxygen by insisting I refine her chapter to within a inch of my life until I gave anyone else my attention. I knew I needed to move on, but she sucked me in. My god, she was so demanding!

Overall, while revising, I am aiming to improve 'the flow' - and by that I mean I ask myself if the story flowing as it should with various things to consider, which I’ll write about in the future.

In the final version, Carole is actually the fourth character, not the first. Spending so long on writing her chapter gave me the foundation to build the novel, but when I arranged the final order of the novel, it made sense to put her fourth. I’ll explain why in a future post where I’ll return to these early drafts in order to tease out some of the decisions I made in order to produce the final book many years later. Yes, it’s a marathon and I’ve run many of them - except they take 1000s of hours to run! My next subscriber post will reveal more.