by Neil White
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Know your ending
My journey as a writer started on holiday in 1994, when I decided that sunbathing wasn’t my thing, and that my time would be better spent scribbling in a notebook. I wrote four pages during that holiday. I thought it was great. When I got home, I bought a typewriter and set off on the journey. It was the start of something big.
It was important to keep going, I thought, and that the story should evolve naturally, an organic experience. So I did that. Four hundred pages followed, where the plot just unfolded in front of me.
Well, I say unfolded. It just sort of tumbled out. It was rubbish. From start to finish a jumbled and confused mess, with no narrative thread. It took me three years to arrive at that realisation.
I started again, a new plot, a new idea, except that this time I planned it. I wrote a summary, which expanded into four parts, and then each part expanded into smaller segments, so I ended up with chapters, which I broke down into scenes. Most importantly, I knew what the story was about.
If you know the ending, and a few key points in between, it helps you to write the story because you know what will become important later on. You may not follow your plan, I meandered my way through mine, but you can take a detour if you know where it has to end up again. The book I planned became my third book, Last Rites.
Finish it
One of the hardest disciplines is accepting that your work is as good as it is ever going to be.
Writing your first book is filled with dreams and aspirations. Publishing deals, book tours, awards: they all lie ahead. You’ve told your friends that you are writing a book, and it sounds great for a while, except that your friends start to ask, ‘So where’s this book then?’
You can get away with delays for a while, blame it on reshapes and rewrites, but eventually it becomes clear that the great work isn’t finished because you are stuck in the rewriting loop, convinced that it needs just one more edit, some final tweaks.
I am no different. I rewrite and edit continually but I have deadlines, and so they get me out of the rewriting loop, because there comes a time when I have to attach the book to an email and send it off.
Stop avoiding the end. Give yourself a deadline. Two years. Live your life at the same time, but finish it. Believe that it will be good enough and do something with it. Editors are proud of the work they do, and so there isn’t an editor in the land who will say, ‘You know what, there is no way I can improve on that.’ And improve on them they do. Every book I have submitted has been a much rougher version of what eventually hits the shelves. Don’t expect perfection first time, and you can over-edit something so that your work loses its voice and becomes sterile, stripped of its soul.
You will get rejections, lots of them, but you have to finish it to get any chance of an acceptance. You could even publish it yourself, but you can’t do that until you have put down that final full stop and raised a glass to your finished work. Until then your great first novel will stay as a pile of paper next to your chair that always needs just one more rewrite.
About the Author
Born above a shoe shop in the mid-1960s, Neil spent most of his childhood in Wakefield in West Yorkshire as his father pursued a career in the shoe trade. This took Neil to Bridlington in his teens, where he failed all his exams and discovered that doing nothing soon turns into long-term unemployment. Re-inventing himself, Neil returned to education in his 20s, qualified as a solicitor when he was 30, and now spends his days in the courtroom and his evenings writing crime fiction.
To find out more about Neil go to www.neilwhite.net
By the same author:
Fallen Idols
Lost Souls
Last Rites
Dead Silent
Cold Kill
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.
AVON
A division of HarperCollinsPublishers
77–85 Fulham Palace Road,
London W6 8JB
www.harpercollins.co.uk
Copyright © Neil White 2012
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Source ISBN: 9781847561305
Ebook Edition © June 2012 ISBN: 9780007478378
Version 1
FIRST EDITION
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
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HarperCollins Canada
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United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
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London, W6 8JB, UK
http://www.harpercollins.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
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New York, NY 10022
http://www.harpercollins.com
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