A number of reasons for the deafening silence recently. The main reason is that I’ve been going like gangbusters on my new novel, Sharpe Practice. I had to rewrite the ending to take account of the Lehman’s crash, as well as eliminate a fictional disastrous earthquake which (thank God) has yet to occur, and I’ve been putting it off. Typically, I hate going over old work and rewriting it.
But this time has been different. Of course, you’re always meant to lock your novel away in a drawer and come back to it after a few months before rushing it to the publisher. But in this case, it was over a year since I touched the story, and I seem to have matured as a writer since publishing Beneath Gray Skies. So for once I am actually enjoying the rewrite process. There’s more to all of this than just changing the plot.
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For example, one critic of the manuscript found my main protagonist a little too wishy-washy, and complained that he didn’t really care what happened to him. So I’ve given Kenneth Sharpe a little more “edge” and returned to earlier parts of the book and backfilled to make his character consistent. I’ve also learned a little more about building suspense into the sentence structure, I think, and I’m being slightly less explicit in some of the descriptions of characters, their speech and their actions, leaving readers to fill in a few more gaps for themselves.
This isn’t going to be the last revision, by any manner of means. I am sure when I have finished, there will be more to do, papering over the obvious cracks that will appear between the older and newer parts etc.
But one of the main reasons why I have been going so fast on this is the use of a new (to me) program called Scrivener. It’s Mac-only, and it’s replacing my previous creative writing tools, as it allows me to write far more easily than my previous fiction-based writing tools (which are good, but miss a few little points): StoryMill and Jer’s Novel Writer. For me, Scrivener works better for me than either of these two, but it’s very hard to put my finger on exactly why this might be. I’ve now used all three for lengthy projects, and Scrivener is definitely what fits my fingers and way of working best – for example, I love the Snapshot feature that allows me to create and store different versions of the same section of the document. The scene splitting and manipulation are much better for me than the corresponding functions in the other two programs.
There are all kinds of linking tools, and reference binders, etc. to help you organize non-fiction projects, or to keep track of the fictional world you’re creating. Right now, though, I’m too busy writing words to get a feel for all these features in Scrivener, but I’m going to start using it for non-fiction when I write my next industry report, as a tool to assemble sources and put the information from them together into one document. Yes, there are other ways to do these things, but right now, this is my weapon of choice. Note that I am not saying absolutely that this is the best software out there for writing – just that it is the one that suits me best.
Now back to wrap up the story and tie up loose ends…
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