Writing Journal: When She Was Gone #1

Digging in

I’m normally very introverted when I’m writing, but hey, it’s book no. 9, so I figured I’d try something different, come out of my shell, and document how I’m going. There are so many ups and downs during the writing process that it’s easy to forget how far you’ve come or what happened along the way. Creating this journal will help me to remember and reflect on the process, and I hope it will be useful and enjoyable for other writers, creatives and readers too.

My current Work-in-Progress falls across the crime/mystery/suspense genres (I’ll write more about genres in future, as there’s lots to talk about). My early elevator pitch for this book is: A young nanny, Louisa, goes missing from a remote beach in Western Australia with the two young children in her care. And her estranged mother, Rose, who happens to be a highly qualified ex-police officer with a PhD in criminal psychology, comes to find out what’s happened to her.

Back in February 2023 my aim was to put together my first draft in three months (not easy – I’ll write more on how I did that in a future post!). My family had a big camping trip coming up in June/July that we’d been planning for years, so I went hard in March, April and May, and I almost met my goal. I had a complete first draft but was only happy with the first 80%, and I don’t think it’s a good idea to hand in a damp squib of an ending. So while I was on my hols, my publisher and agent read over the 80%, and gave me lots of positive feedback.

Except...

There are always problems in the first draft, and this time I should have known what it would be. Because I kept telling everyone how much I had LOVED writing these characters, and it turns out I’d loved them so much that my main character didn’t get where she needed to be until around page 150! I’d spent so much time introducing her and describing situations where she was awesome that I had delayed the progression of the main plot.

When we discussed this over the phone, I also didn’t appreciate how much work would be involved in putting this right. So I confidently agreed that I would get the book edited and the ending re-worked within a few weeks. But then, as I got into the task at hand, I realised that by bringing forward this character’s journey (which begins with a literal journey from England to Australia), everything else behind this event was thrown off-balance. Timings didn’t work. Plot developments were in the wrong order. And most of the story so far would have to be reworked. I had to go back and renegotiate the deadline, knowing it would take me at least another month.

Thank god this isn’t my first rodeo. Watching a story begin to fall apart is awful, but every book of mine has, at some stage (often more than once), asked me to dig in. To take a deep breath, re-examine and dissect a story I’ve already read one hundred times, and recommit to it with energy and enthusiasm to make sure it only gets better and better – with the hope that by the time it’s published my readers can’t put it down.

So that’s what I’m doing at the moment. Painstakingly examining each chapter, scene and paragraph to check they work, cutting and pasting some of them into different places, pulling others out into separate documents to reinsert later, and deleting some sections altogether that just don’t work any more.  It’s hard, hard work – and it takes however long it takes, which isn’t easy with a deadline.

When you’re nine books in to a writing career, you might think the editing process gets easier. But in my experience (and I was a professional editor for ten years, so I’ve got the inside track on this from both sides of the desk), it doesn’t. Every book brings its own unique set of challenges, and is written at a different phase of life. The only way to get past this point is to accept this messy work as part of the process, and dig in. And to keep faith that when you get to the end, the book will be better for it.