Making Stories

I'm reading this: Making Stories (actually, the correct title is Making Stories: How Ten Australian Novels Were Written.) In this book, Woolfe and Grenville explore how particular works of fiction 'came about'. What's interesting about this, apart from the obvious, is that what they started out to do isn't what they ended up doing. Listen to this: 'At the beginning, our attention centred on how writers revised - revision, we believe, is at the centre of a work of art. We wanted to show revision happening on the page. Writing is an invisible art: once a phrase or line or a novel feels right, it seems inevitable...As soon as we began work on the book, however, our assumptions were tested. We thought most writers probably revised in a conscious, coherent fashion...[but] another shift in our thinking was needed - that we should be looking not only at the revising process, but at the entire evolution of the work from its gestation onwards.' (p.xi-xii) They realised they were investigating an entire process 'as far as the creator can apprehend the process' (p.xii) and that it wasn't possible to distinguish between 'writing the book' and 'revising'. (p.xii). They decided that the writing of a novel was 'unpredictable' (p.xii) and so spoke to contributors using the word 'versions' rather than 'drafts'.

You'll notice I'm taking long quotes from them - and from the introduction, which is pertinent to my own thinking process in writing this novel. They refer to work 'undergoing major transformations' (p.xiii) and briefly refer to conversations they had with writers, acknowledging that they allowed writers to change their minds when explaining their process as 'we had asked them to recall, on the spur of the moment, activities of mind that had engaged them some time ago...Second thoughts are sometimes more focused and pertinent than first ones.' (p.xiii).

I think, even at this early stage of my reading of this exploration, I'm struck by the complex nature of it, and of my own processes, naturally. My own current novel is, to put it in Woolfe & Grenville's terms, undergoing major transformations, indeed, I'm not writing it in a linear way, I'm back-stitching - that is to say returning to previous scenes so as to stitch together the plot. As a process, this is something of a revelation to me, a bit like the norovirus, it comes upon me fast and has to come out. That sounds dramatic, but if I don't write down, quickly, what I'm thinking, oh dear... and, because I'm currently on 45000 words, I can see I haven't much further to go, not with this version at any rate.