Writing what you like, when you like it

Phil: No cake this time, instead a photo from the early days of our book writing. This is what about a third of the manuscript looked like the first time it was printed out and spread before us.

As mentioned previously, the story was written in chunks with us making it up as we went along. In fact we wrote what we wanted when the mood took us. Obviously this isn’t how you are supposed to do it, there are narrative arcs and stuff to consider if you are a real author, but I don’t think we did a bad thing. Good writing comes from the author enjoying themselves. After all, if you don’t like the words then is anyone else likely too ? Anyway, at this point it was as much about entertaining ourselves as other people. It wasn’t work, this was supposed to be fun !

So we wrote sections of story and eventually knew they had to be stitched together. A trip to Prontprint and about 7 quid saw the file containing all the text turned into paper. It was an impressive pile too which we spread all over Candice’s dining room table. Over a couple of hours each section was numbered and given a short of chapter title. From this we got an idea where the holes were and what we needed to do to fill them. The story became more defined – in the same way that a statue becomes more defined if you chip away at it with a big hammer and chisel.

And now we are looking at book 2. This time we are working properly and have a pretty good idea of the story, or at least the major moments, and so hopefully the chunks of text will be better targeted. Some of those you see in the picture needed quite a bit of editing to fit the jigsaw puzzle of plot. Of course we could consider a “DVD Extras” style fold out section in the back for all the lost text. Or we could put it online. Or sell those old pages for a vast fortune.