A cornucopia of rewrites…

In the folder on my computer that contains everything to do with Falling – from the first paragraph of the first draft to the blog posts for this website and everything in between, there’s a folder with rewrite versions.

I’ve talked before about the LMR, which you’ll know if you’re a devoted follower (which you won’t know because nobody’s even reading this blog – much like the book itself) stands for Last Major Rewrite, the intensive reworking process I set myself between about 2013 and 2016 which resulted in the copy you can hold in your hands and/or buy from this very website today.

The LMR has its own folder. In ‘_NOTES’ is another folder called ‘_DONE’ (the underscores are there to move them to the top of the alphabetical list of other folders in the containing folder – something I do to ensure the most important resources are easy to spot because they’re always at the top).

_DONE is where I moved documents (and folders of documents) after I’d finished with or actioned them during the LMR, and there are 72 items in it; more folders, documents full of notes about specific characters, chapters, set pieces, plot ideas, timelines, text-based storyboards or outlines, documents to track the appearances of certain monsters or phenomena, things I had to include, things I had to exclude, sequences I was considering cutting, mission statements of a sort encapsulating the entire premise of the book and more.

But that was only the LMR. After starting the first draft in 1991, rewriting it two or three times in its entirety since then, sharing it with at least two people for their critiques, preparing to self publish it several times over but never quite getting there, pre- and post-spell and copy checking, there are also 15 folders in the _OLD MANUSCRIPT folder containing various historical versions.

When I consider the number of words I’ve scrawled and typed in pursuit of perfecting Falling, they could probably fill a series of encyclopaedias. The ratio of words I’ve used to make it what it is versus words that actually appear in the text is probably around 15:1, maybe 20:1.

It’s the very model of the axiom that rewriting is the real writing.