The printer toner cartridge as been filled, the ream of paper has been bought, and my novel has been compiled into a PDF. The day has finally arrived when I’ve printed out a full copy of Somewhere In Between – my beloved work in progress novel.
Now, I can hold it. Now, I can touch it. Now, it exists.
It lives.
I’ve just completed the eighth draft of my novel, and I’ve done as much as I can for now, so it’s time to hand over the completed book to my wife for its first full beta read – hence the print out. Some drafts have been a struggle (fifth draft – I’m looking at you) but this one was a pleasure; the characters are finalised, the story beats are hit, and the scenes have their arc, so I could burrow down to the sentence level and craft the smallest units of my book into something delightful. Revisiting phrases that have been hanging around for nearly a year and really tightening them up felt great.
And this was the draft that ‘show, don’t tell’ really clicked – tell when summarising, but show in the moment. The passages where the characters just feel frustrated or perhaps angry have been replaced by the white heat of injustice and pain radiating from their lower back – much better. And the scenes still read through smoothly (in my polluted opinion). The clunkiness of showing every single thing has been leavened by telling at the top of the scenes.
It’s not all good news though. I left the hard copy draft in my daughter’s bedroom, by mistake. She read the first page then declared that the second sentence was rubbish, asked if the target audience were boomers, then announced that she wouldn’t read any more unless it was published by Penguin. We’ve fallen out.
