George Orwell had blue spots or circles tattooed on each of his knuckles.
Probably done while he lived in Burma before becoming a writer.
Possibly the tattoos are the reason he became a writer.
“Writing can hardly be more painful than getting my knucks tatted,” he thought. “Let’s have at it!”
The poor fool.
Here’s the thing:
What makes tattoos difficult is that you get only one chance to do it right.
What makes writing difficult is that you get as many chances as you like.
Unless you’re under a strict deadline, you can spend the entire rest of your life trying to get it exactly right.
Douglas Adams’ publishers resorted to locking him into hotel rooms to get him to finish anything.
The writing is easy. It’s the rewriting until the right words are on the page that gets you.
Writing should be called “rewriting.”
Anything else is false advertising.
My first draft of The Cat Wore Black clocks in at 129,326 words. That’s 50,000 words too many.
And 100,000 of them are rubbish.
So now I start rewriting it until it’s as good as I can make it.
The main difficulty being that it’s hard to keep reading something and remain objective.
Unless you know my simple trick.
I often need to flick back and forth to check what I wrote somewhere else, so I don’t contradict myself. After the first draft, there are a lot of times when I skim the required chapter and think Yeah, Yeah, Yeah.
But sometimes I start reading…
And keep reading. Long after I found the thing I needed.
Because I’m enjoying it so much.
I’ll know the story is ready when there are no more yeah-yeah-yeah bits, only bits I’m happy to read again, despite having read them twenty times already
Obviously, it can take a while.
And the strain on the old grey matter is ferocious. One day, all this rewriting is going to push me over the edge.
So, wish me luck.
Or egg me on by buying my previous brush with madness.
I spent two full years writing The Squared Circle, available here now!
Morgan
P.S. More Morgan? Get 2 of my books free here: morgandelaney.info/newsletter
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