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Progress report

Progress report

My little pep-talk of the other day seems to have done me some good. I’m getting back into Barrain, slowly, but steadily.

At present I am I am going back, rewriting earlier bits so that I can continue with the story in its new form. One of the reasons I got stuck is because we didn’t know why. We didn’t know why Kraa was after Caid, we didn’t know why Caid was so important, we didn’t know how Scott was going to get back home, or even why Kraa would be chasing him once he got there. Now we do.

Sherylyn and I talk about the novel, but this work is mine. She can’t do much until I have finished the draft.

You may think it strange that we don’t know important things like this well into the third draft of the story, but that’s how it works for us. And we’re not alone. After all, if it took M. Night Shyamalan five drafts in Sixth Sense to realise his protagonist was dead, and another five to tidy it up we’re up there with some of the best.

People who outline cannot imagine how we work. “All that extra rewriting you have to do.” But it works for us. It’s a bit like carving a piece of wood. You start off with a nice looking piece of timber (the idea), and you have a rough idea of what the end result will look like, but then you come to a knot, and have to carve around that, so your design changes, and then you see that with the changes you have made because of that knot then the design can be made better by changing it, and because you have made those changes you can see other changes, and so on. Until finally, you have your finished carving (novel) and it’s nothing like the original log of wood, or even what you first imagined it would be.

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