Restructuring on the fly

As The Mortality Code enters its denouement 96k words in, I’ve spent my morning scribbling furiously (if you can scribble on a keyboard), and restructuring these final elements of the story almost while I’m writing them. It does slow down the writing and necessitates frequent breaks (because the brain does need to catch breath), some of which I’ve used to write poetry and think about a spoken word project I’ve been working on for 7 months.

I always counsel people not to edit anything they write until they’ve got a first draft down, and I stick with that, except for right now, here, in the last max 10k words of this book, I need to make sure I keep the pace of the narrative up, as much for my sake as that of the readers. If it loses momentum, I will lose momentum in my writing of it, and it will meander or peter out, and then I’ll have to start from scratch all over again (the last third of the book, anyway).

I’ve also been thinking about excisions I can usefully make earlier on in the text to pare it back a bit, to move it on better (saggy middles are a perennial problem in novels, although I think most novelists actually have the urge, once they have an idea, just to get to the ending as soon as possible so they can move on to the next idea).

This novel has already been 3 years and almost 3 months in the making. Granted, I got distracted by Aggie’s Art Of Happiness, while I had foolishly thought I could write two very different novels at the same time (it didn’t work for me), and now I’m impatient to get it done, although part of me believes it’s been taking so long to write because I can’t really contemplate allowing the characters to leave my head and my life until I write the next one. Having said that, I do constantly think of Aggie, especially when I’m anywhere near Norwich Cathedral.

One last word - I’m loving the heat. It helps my writing. That’s why I want to get this done while I am able to revel in the heat, and in the sweat that the physical effort of writing generates.