scis­sors and paste

Word­count = 94,768

The new ban­ner image for this web­site indic­ates that it’s scissors-and-paste time — the edit­ing of The Last Monk has begun.

There’s a kind of archae­ology in the edit­ing pro­cess. Hav­ing fin­ished a rough first draft of The Last Monk about three weeks ago, I’ve spent much of the inter­ven­ing time read­ing and re-reading the entire manu­script, pick­ing out everything from typos and bad gram­mar, through inel­eg­ant sen­tence struc­ture to the high-end nar­rat­ive and char­ac­ter lines which should drive the book.

Because The Last Monk has taken five years to write, the first few chapters say a lot about what kind of writer I was and what I thought my book was about five years ago. Strangely, I have returned to and redraf­ted every chapter in the book, except Chapter One, which is mostly unchanged from the time, prob­ably in late 2000, when I first wrote it.

Not sur­pris­ingly, it doesn’t fit any more. Any­one who has had to write a long essay or thesis learns that you write the intro­duc­tion at the end, and the same the­ory applies to The Last Monk. The only chapter I need to sub­stan­tially rewrite is Chapter One.

Thank­fully, I’m happy with Chapter Two (you can read it in two parts, here and here), and Chapters Three and Four are even bet­ter. The novel com­prises thirty-six chapters, of which seven require major work. By ‘major work’ I mean rethink­ing the struc­ture of the chapter and/or the style and/or the length and/or the pos­i­tion of the chapter within the book and/or chuck­ing the thing out altogether.

It sounds more drastic than it is. The fact that I’m broadly happy with twenty-nine chapters which have gone through not much more than one draft plus pol­ish is a good sign, a sign with which I attempt to com­fort myself as I dive into major revi­sions. Wish me luck.