The con­sult­ant in the fruit box

Word­count = 86,881

I did some quick sums a couple of days ago and real­ised that my final act is now sev­enty pages long, and I haven’t even got to the really excit­ing bit yet.

This gave me an excuse to do some­thing I’ve always enjoyed, which is edit­ing in widescreen. Because there’s a lot of mater­ial, and the changes I anti­cip­ated would most likely involve shuff­ling big chunks of text around, the best way to do it is to print the whole thing out, spread it out on the floor and scan it from a dis­tance to let the large-scale struc­tures reveal themselves.

Here then is what my liv­ing room floor looked like this morning:

The last act. Note large-scale struc­tures reveal­ing themselves.

Here’s the same scene as observed by my edit­or­ial consultant:

The consultant’s eye view.

Who insisted on offer­ing his ser­vices. You’ll find him in the next shot, help­fully com­ment­ing on the use of ellip­sis in Chapter Thirty by lick­ing his left shoulder:

All the tra­di­tional ele­ments of the edit­or­ial craft are gathered here: manu­script, scis­sors, edit­or­ial con­sult­ant, up-turned fruit box.

An enga­ging few hours were spent scan­ning, shuff­ling and peri­od­ic­ally climb­ing onto the top of the book­case to chase ima­gin­ary mice, until it became pain­fully aware to me that all the effort I’ve put into cun­ningly inter­weav­ing my vari­ous plots into small, punchy chapters has turned the last act into a con­fus­ing mess. If you’ve ever suc­cumbed to the tem­pata­tion to see what it would be like if you tried all three fla­vours from the Neapol­itan ice-cream tub at once and found your­self ten minutes later frown­ing at a bowl­ful of unhappy grey sludge, you will have some sense of my disappointment.

It works much bet­ter, in fact, if I just tell one story, get through a nice big scoop of plot, then move onto the straw­berry for a dozen pages or so.

That decided, my con­sult­ant and I moved on to small-scale struc­ture, with the kind of res­ult I really should have predicted:

My edit­or­ial con­sult­ant, hav­ing drooled on some unsat­is­fact­or­ily craf­ted adverbs, inserts him­self in a fruit box.

I col­lec­ted my pages and dis­creetly retired to the computer.

Hap­pily, I still like almost everything in the last act. With some re-stitching and a new begin­ning, which should take a week at the most, I’ll be ready to start writ­ing the actual finale, which may be only about 5,000 words or so (around 18 – 20 pages). Once I’ve writ­ten the whole thing through, there are some gaps which I’ve inten­tion­ally left fur­ther back which will be informed by the exact way I end the story. I’ll fill those, and at that point will have a com­plete first draft.

I think that’s likely to be about a month away. Maybe six weeks. Call me in August.