The Writing Process
My manuscript first started as a short story in 2020. It centred on how Mum kept me alive through her pregnancy while authorities tried to get rid of me. It was a story I wanted to know in detail but only caught the contours. Although it lay dormant, it generated incredible power within—made and shaped me. It is a story of courage I had to follow up on and write down because it is unforgettable.
I started the story as one that could be published for I knew I would put more heart and care into every word if I was going to release it into the world. As luck would have it, Melbourne based Memoria podcast offered to publish my flash memoir straight away. It was incredibly encouraging and a force that spurred me on to keep expanding, keep writing and the story grew to cover Mum’s life and mine. The story grew into a manuscript for a book.
When I had written a few chapters, excerpts of it won the Byron Writer’s Mentoring Scholarship and the Hardie Grant Spark Prize. Again, the acknowledgement strengthened my confidence and tenacity to keep going. The residency down in the Mornington Peninsula and mentorships were invaluable and inspired me to dare tread in the footsteps of great writers, an inspiration I can only try to realise through dogged determination and discipline to sit down and write no matter how strong the resistance.
I thought it would take me a year to finish, but as life would have it, it took 3. I stole large chunks of time off work to write ferociously and then stop completely until the next chance. That, I learned, was not the way to get to the end of a marathon. The secret was to keep going, often and consistently, every day if possible, for the story stayed in one’s mind and the characters grew and the energy of the story is sustained. I learned that lesson only in the last year before finishing my zero draft. Still, it wasn’t too late. The words that amassed from a few hours before work and a few hours after, day after day, astonished me.
I learned the term ‘zero draft’ from one of my many wonderful mentors Emily Maguire. It is the draft that you write out without looking back until the finish line. It is a draft not to be witnessed by anyone else, but from which the story can emerge. They say that it’s important to keep going when you are first writing a story. Leave the editing to the end. I’ve tried and yet I’ve struggled with not looking back. My natural tendency is to edit and edit and edit each day as I write. Perhaps it is just my way, or perhaps with experience I will learn to let go one day and move on.
Now, travelling through Japan, I am editing my zero draft (that has been edited a thousand times in small increments already) into a first draft that can be shared with editors and publishers. But as well as being a pantser and not a plotter, I do not have a list of editing jobs written to be ticked off. No, that would be too logical and organised for me. And I cannot read it once through without editing to simply hold my notes until the end like you’re supposed to do. I tried. I failed.
Instead, I use instinct to read and edit as I go. I’m a quarter of the way through and I can say, on reflection, that my subconscious editing techniques include:
changing chapters and paragraphs around to make clearer sense
deleting repetitions (there are a lot of them)
breaking up info dumps and expositions
swapping out nouns and noun phrases for verbs
deleting adverbs and adjectives
rewriting highly nominalised sentences into simple talk
changing narration into action and/or dialogue
deleting -ings for they are suspended in time
trim, trim, trim—less is more
And I know I’m not supposed to worry about line edits yet, but I just can’t help it. Why not do whatever stands out all at once?
The landscape outside my window as I write this piece in Magome, Japan.