‘Yes, but Claire Keegan makes every word count,’ the Waterstones assistant assured us.
We had been browsing for fresh reading material and the assistant, knowing Jack was a fan, had helpfully pointed out Keegan’s latest publication, another novella, priced at £8.99. I had remarked that I thought it was overpriced for something I would read in an afternoon.
‘But doesn’t every good author make every word count?’ I responded. The assistant agreed. We didn’t buy the book, deciding to get it on Kindle instead. I’m not inferring Claire Keegan is ripping readers off, it’s the publishers who set the price.
Both these books cost £9.99
As we drove home, it occurred to me that writing was a bit like being an enthusiastic gardener but only having a very small garden. Everything in that garden must earn its place. In writing, every word you publish must do the same. And undeniably, Claire Keegan is a master at that.
The benefit of hindsight
Having taken back control of the publishing rights to The Banana Road, I began to read through the opening pages to ensure that the layout all looked okay, and I found myself completely engrossed in the story. Had I not personally known the author and found myself describing the book to a friend, I would have said it was very well written.
Lest you consider (justifiably) that I’m being unbelievably narcissistic, I have also recently re-read an earlier piece of work and thought: how on earth did I consider that was good enough? So many times, over the course of my writing career, I’ve gone back to something I wrote earlier and considered it way better than I did when I wrote it, or else wished I could now re-write it. And I’m not alone. Jack has had the exact same experience with his writing and I’m willing to bet most authors have.
In his excellent ‘On Writing’, Stephen King advocates waiting six weeks before going back to edit. That’s fine if you also follow the Stephen King method of free flow writing which allows your imagination to move at its own pace, unedited. That’s not my writing methodology. I edit as I go along and by the time I’ve finished my first draft, I have a relatively polished version.
That’s not to say there aren’t a thousand ways to improve it, and I still go back and edit, edit, edit because every word counts. I wrote The Banana Road during lockdown while living in Portugal. We weren’t working, couldn’t travel, and could barely leave the quinta so I had all the time in the world to edit endlessly.
Making every word count
Writing of any sort, from blogs for your own website and features for magazines, to full-blown books requires strict discipline. Discipline to sit down at the keyboard and write, whether you feel inspired or not. Discipline to set and maintain a sharp focus on what it is you want to say and want your readers to buy into. Discipline to not cut corners but to invest as much time as it takes to research details, craft believable worlds, and create characters that readers can engage with.
But most of all, and the one that many authors slip up on, the discipline to not include anything superfluous to the focus, even though you want to show off about how much you know or how much you experienced or because you think the reader deserves to enjoy that wonderful, irrelevant, 500 words you spent hours crafting.
Which is why going back and rereading things we wrote a long time ago is a perfect litmus for our writing. If it now seems well written, it means you invested heavily at the time in ensuring you made every word count. And if it doesn’t…
