GESTATION

Right, I’m back with the next riveting episode of The Making Of INVINCIBLE…

Armed with the first draft, I set about typing out the second, editing madly as I went. By the time that was done I had a reasonably polished thing which, in my humble opinion, was eminently readable. I decided at this point to seek the services of a professional editor, and a spot of googling brought me to the wonderful Satima Flavell, who took a look at the first chapter and decided yes, here was someone she could work with. (Helpful hint for other first time writers: you MUST have an editor. Satima is a very good one. Don't say I didn't tell you.)

There commenced a long, long process of editing and polishing the manuscript. 150,000 words became 109,000. A cull of almost every third word. Entire subplots were excised. Characters were killed off, or simply expunged, never again to see the light of the page. Urged on by the ever-industrious Satima, I was brutal. Compared to me, George R.R. Martin is a pussycat.

No adjective escaped my scrutiny. And don't get me started on adverbs.

Then came the re-naming of all the main characters. Our hero, Jack, started out as Zack. His lady love was not always a Zoe. And the arch-villain was not always named Aldan. Even Z/Jack's dad was given a whole new handle. I'm not sure why, but I agonised at great length over character names.

I think editing and polishing the draft took me about 18 months or so. I found that for the most part I enjoyed this stage of the job, even as I wished it would move along at a faster pace. It was a relentless process, conducted in chunks of five to ten pages, night after night. We paid particular attention to Chapter 1. The work of genius you now see in the final published book is version fifteen.

Then came the hard part: the truly epic Saga of the Title. More on this in my next post.