Take a pebble

Pieces of writing are pebbles pulled from the sea of your mind. They look like jewels, all fresh and glistening. Then you return to them a little while later. Oh, horror. What has happened? My sparkling stones are now lumps of drab rock. What evil alchemy is this?

But wait. Over there, on the promenade, a man is selling little string bags of pebbles that look just as bright and twinkling as my own pebbles once were. Yet they are dry. How did he do that? I polished them, the stallholder explains. I tumbled them with sand and gravel and grit, for hours and hours, until they wore totally smooth. And now they look as fresh as when they were first picked from the sea.

That must be hard work.

Oh yes, it is.

But aren’t you changing them by polishing them? I ask.

No, he says. I’m putting them back the way they’re meant to be.

How do you like these apples?

The never-ending process of revising a book…

I’m not a gardener, but this fact interests me: when you have a fruit tree that starts to bud with fruit, it’s good practice to pluck off all the smaller ones before they are ripe, so that the most promising ones can grow even bigger and better.

That’s what I’m trying to do with the draft of my latest book. It’s a fruit tree. Ergo: leave only the most promising apples and prune off all the lesser ones that would sap their strength.

The oboe practice strategy

I’m currently revising my latest book, and I’m doing it a curious way around. Many years ago someone taught me a trick which is turning out to be very useful.

Now, I used to play the oboe. I still can play the oboe, sort of, but I’m ashamed to admit I hardly ever do these days. (Sorry, Delia, if you’re reading). I had a wonderful teacher (the Delia of the previous sentence) who showed me a trick to help me practise a particularly difficult piece. You play it backwards.

I’ll explain. The oboe is a bit like ballet: it’s harder than it looks. It sounds light and airy. Playing it can be like hauling bricks. If you’re out of practice, a single hour can be exhausting. Trying blowing up balloons through two splinters of bamboo and you’ll get some idea of what it does to your mouth.

The result of this is that when I practiced an oboe piece, I got really good at the first few bars. By the last few bars I was always knackered, so I played them atrociously. Delia’s solution was simple: practice the last bar first, then the penultimate bar, then the one before that, so that each ends up flowing into the next. The genius of this was that the bar coming up was always one I’d played before, so I didn’t have that sense of sliding into the unknown. To put it another way, the more tired I got, the more familiar the landscape underfoot. It turned from an outward journey into a journey home, and we all know those are less stressful.

Where does writing novels come into this? Well, I noticed that, just as my early bars were well-practised, so my early chapters benefited from much more work than my later ones. By doing my revision back-to-front, I find that I can concentrate on making each chapter the best it can be, without being distracted by wondering “What comes next?” This makes the whole process a bit like watching “Memento” (the film starring Guy Pearce), but it seems to be working.

Maybe when I finally finish I’ll get the oboe out of the cupboard and try a C Major scale or something. I probably owe Delia that much.