Of Carrot Cake, Clocks and Stripping Down Engines.

I lied in my penultimate post, the one about the machete. Well not lied exactly. Machete conjures up images of wanton destruction, lack of thought, not to mention a nasty whiff of malice. I did it to catch your attention. It was a hook. And every piece of writing needs a hook...

Where was I?

Oh yes. What I’ve learned over the years of writing and thinking about writing is that far too many writers shy away from the hard truth fact that editing is a not a question of fiddling and faffing. Editing, proper editing, is not for the faint-hearted or the dabbler. It must be strong-willed and aggressive—at least to start with. All the other stuff, the tweaking, the re-arranging of sentences, the exorcising of adverbs, the close attention to every word, full stop and comma has to be done. Of course it has. But it can all wait.

What follows is what I do. It isn’t what you must do. It might help you. It might not.

You can't make a carrot cake without at least one carrot. But the carrot is not the carrot cake. The carrot is the basis on which the cake is made. Otherwise it couldn’t call itself a carrot cake. Your first draft is your carrot. The final manuscript you submit on a wing and prayer is the cake.

So to return to your first draft and yet another change of metaphor. Never mind if your fist draft, now completed, is total and utter bilgewater: just write it and get it done. And then when you’ve left it for as long as your itchy fingers can stand, read it through quickly from start to finish. Put that red pen away! Just read it through and don’t stop until you reach the end. No notes, no question marks, no arrows, no crossing-outs, no nothing.

And then take it to pieces and put it back together again.

Something wrong with your car? You can tinker with this gasket and fiddler with that thingummy-pipe but if you have no idea where the problem lies, the only way is to strip the engine down, give the choked-up bits a good clean, replace that shredded bit over there and then put it all back together again. (You can tell I'm a writer, not a car mechanic.) These days we take it to Jim’s Garage round the corner but when it comes to your manuscript there’s only one person who can do it. You.

Your precious antique clock no longer ticks (I’m taking real clocks here not digital) to a master clockmaker and he’ll take it all apart and give it a thorough overhaul and it’ll tick away merrily for another hundred years.

Get the picture?

You see, when I read an unpublished manuscript that is supposed to be of submission standard it's always obvious when this vital first stage has been skimmed or omitted. It's obvious from the first paragraph. It’s like taking the back off the wretched clock, giving the innards a quick blow or a whisk with a grubby hanky and putting the back on again. It may work for five minutes, or even a week but before too long it’ll stop. These days—thanks to computers and their wizard word-processing packages most manuscripts I read are clean of typos and spelling errors. They look good. The writers have done all the tinkering without that vital strip down. To use yet another metaphor: if you just stick pretty wallpaper over a damp wall, sooner or later the damp will not only show through, it will ruin your expensive new paper.

Inevitably, this process takes a lot of time. It’s so much easier to take a deep breath and package it all up, do a spell-check and bung it off with your fingers crossed.  99% of all manuscripts I read are like this although I am sure their writers will tell me they've 'spent ages' tearing their hair out editing. Editing should be calm, clinical. Don't be totally unemotional. I'm a great believer in gut-instinct. Listen to it. But never forget you are also a craftsman (or craftsperson, if the former offends.) Don’t worry about the springs, screws and other miscellaneous bits left lying all over your desk. There is method in my madness.

So after that all-important read through, you pick up your tools and you set to work. Editing is where the real fun starts. That first draft is pure slog. That's not to say it's easy but it is engrossing. especially when each change improves the mix.


There are various stages to this process. Don't be daunted. You tackle one at a time.

And the very first thing you do is make absolutely sure you have the right ingredients in the right proportions. No point leaving out the sugar because you’re on a diet or adding extra carrots to deepen the colour. Believe me. It ain’t gonna work. You’ll end up with a cake all right. But your family won't eat it and it won't win any prize in the village show.


The main ingredients are more or less: character, plot, pace, sub-plot (if any), theme and voice. 

But you need a method. And that's your manuscript's overall structure and shape.

And that’s what I’ll natter on about in a later post in and amongst the usual this, that and the other.