Rewriting is like emergency surgery: you lay the mangled body out and prod it, limb by limb, trying to decide what can be salvaged and what needs to be amputated...
Spare parts
Tag: rewrites
L’esprit de l’escalier
So you’ve been at this party and some wiseacre has made a smart remark at your expense, but it’s not until you’re out the door and halfway down the stairs that you think of the snappy comeback that would’ve floored the bastard… if only you’d thought of it in time.
Another teenage wizard!
I’m a slow, messy writer. Ideas get jammed into the narrative, then hacked bloodily out. But Mortal does at least deal with the most important question left hanging over by the previous books: how, at the tender age of five, Frank came to kill his father…
By any means necessary
I've tried all sorts of approaches to composing a novel; but it invariably ends up in a chaotic mess...
The crap first draft
The end of the first draft is just an excuse to make yourself a cup of tea and treat yourself to a biscuit
The crap read
It’s the read-through where you realise that this book is a complete and utter disaster and nobody in their right mind could possibly get even to the bottom of the first page…
A monster rewrite
Like Frankenstein’s monster, it will shamble to its feet and start to move in a sinister fashion… until it falls over a chair
Donald Hounam 