All About Revision with Joanna Nell & Pamela Cook

Jo Nell Revision audio_only

Pam: [00:00:00] Hi everyone. Welcome to the February craft episode of rights for women. I hope you've been enjoying all the episodes so far. We've had Desney King on the Heart of Writing episode. The very first episode for 2021.

[00:02:14] We've had Penelope Janu talking about starting from scratch and answering for curly questions. And today we have  Joanna Nell on the convo couch  about revision and our respective processes. So it's going to be a really interesting chat where we just sort of shoot the breeze about how we both revise our writing.

[00:02:34] But before we start, I just want to do a massive shout out to those people who are supporting the podcast on Patreon. If you're not aware, Patreon is a subscriber option for the podcast. The podcast goes out every week for free on all the major platforms and on the website. But if you want to get something a little extra with the podcast, if you want to just show you support, there's a range of options you can take.

[00:02:57] And that just pays for my time in planning, preparing, researching, recording, editing and releasing the podcast. So I'm really trying to make the podcast this year really helpful for women writers and just a resource that you can come to when you want to a little bit of extra inspiration or some writing wisdom, writing tips on the business craft and heart of writing, as well as finding out about some new authors who are coming on.

[00:03:23] So thanks to the people who are currently supporting on Patreon. And I just want to give a shout out to those individuals and in no particular order, thank you to Desney King, Sophie Masson, Vicki Holstein, Lynette Lounsbury, Cheryl Rosario, Chrissy Mios and Rachel Johns.

[00:03:41] Thanks guys. I really appreciate your support and I hope that you're enjoying the podcast.

[00:03:46]  I just want to now launch straight into introducing today's guest. Joanna Nell is a Sydney based writer and GP, and she's an advocate for positive ageing, which anybody who has read Jo's books would be very familiar with. The characters in her books are all older characters and Jo is a really great proponent for aging gracefully and with respect and treating elderly people in general as human beings and not necessarily just numbers in a system.

[00:04:19] So I really loved that about Jo and about her, writing. Her best-selling debut novel The Single Ladies of the Jacaranda Retirement Village was published in 2018, the rights sold internationally, and I know that that has sold over 50,000 copies. So that's a great coup for Jo who  way back a few years ago,  when I first met her she'd just received The Valerie Parv Award at the RWA and her career has just skyrocketed from there. T

[00:04:45] Her second novel was The Last Voyage of Mrs. Henry Parker, published in 2019.  And her  latest novel is The Great Escape from Woodlands Nursing Home, and it's currently flying off the shelves !

[00:04:58] I will say that Jo and I are members of the same writing group, The Inkwell , which is what's prompted me to bring her into this chat today on the revision process, because I know that we've both fairly recently finished revising novels.

[00:05:10] And we're going to talk about our respective processes and how we both go about that task of revision, which some people love and some people hate. And we're going to find out where Jo sits on that spectrum today.

[00:05:23] So Jo, welcome back to the convo couch.

Joanna: [00:05:27] Thank you, Pam. It's wonderful to be here. Thanks for inviting me .

Pam: [00:05:30] I thought that that would be a good opportunity for us just to have a general chat about revision and how we each approach that. But first of all, could you tell us about your latest release, which is sitting on the shelf up there behind you? The Great Escape From Woodland's Nursing Home.

Joanna: [00:05:46] Yeah, sure.

[00:05:46] So this is my third novel with Hachette and it's continuing with my obsession or my interest, or my passion for writing stories about evolving older characters. And for this book, The Great Escape From Woodland's Nursing Home, we actually go inside a nursing home. And the story is told from the point of view of two equally reluctant residents or inmates as they call themselves.

[00:06:10] Hattie Bloom, who's a retired ornithologist and professor, but it's two people who ends up in the nursing home after all, after she's trying to save a nest of endangered owls in her tree. And she's in a hurry to get home to her owls and her birds. And in the room next door Walter Clements, who is a gregarious dad joker, or would be comedian who is also in a hurry to get home.

[00:06:35] But the indignity for him as a retired driving instructor is that he must first pass a driving test for his electric mobility scooter. And at first the two appear to have very little in common until they meet at a clandestine social club run by the home's night nurse, Sister Bronwyn.

[00:06:56] And very slowly a friendship forms and when Sister Bronwyn is dismissed over her rather unconventional approach to aged care, Hattie and Walter must put aside their differences and hatch a plan with a couple of fellow "inmates " to have sister Bronwyn reinstated. So that's basically it. We are inside the nursing home.

[00:07:17] And, you know, although it doesn't shy away from many of the challenges of aged care - I wanted to be very realistic about that - hopefully it's lifting, optimistic and ultimately a hopeful story about old age.

Pam: [00:07:34] It's such a beautiful story, Jo, having read it some time ago now, and I think it's doing pretty well. Are you happy with how everything's going and the sort of feedback you're getting for the book?

Joanna: [00:07:44] Oh, yes, I am actually. Look, there were initial reviews and things which were really wonderful, but I've had some fantastic feedback actually from people who work in nursing homes, in fact, a couple of real live Woodlands nursing homes that I didn't realize existed - one in New Zealand and one in South Africa as well.

[00:08:03]But no, the most sort of heartwarming thing for me is that I've actually been receiving messages from people who either had relatives or have worked themselves in the aged care industry, you know, sort of telling me what the story had meant to them and how they'd related to it.

[00:08:19] So I've been really happy with the feedback I've got.

Pam: [00:08:23] Oh, that's brilliant! Well, if anyone out there hasn't read it, I can vouch for it. It's a fantastic read. And it's one where you actually find yourself laughing out loud one minute and then grabbing the tissues the next. So it's my favourite kind of book.

[00:08:38] But Jo , since that's been released, you've finished the draft and a revised version of another book, which will be coming out later this year. That's correct. Isn't it?

Joanna: [00:08:47] That's right. So we work a year behind. So the book that I've been writing in 2020, which let's face, it, hasn't been an ordinary year for writers.  I've got to the state where I submitted that to my publisher.

[00:09:03] I was a little bit behind on my deadline actually, because so many things happened last year. I was working through that and there were some family things as well, with my children, my daughter was going through HSC, numerous things were going on. And I sort of missed my initial deadline for submission in October, which is something I've never done before. My publisher was just amazing about that.

[00:09:26] I finally submitted that manuscript about two or three weeks ago, and I'm waiting for what will probably be the first of several structural edits or further edits. So I would say there's a year almost of writing and then at least six months to a year of editing, which I'm sure we'll go into. So a book a year actually doesn't mean a year. It means, you know, there are actually two years to produce the book. I'm in that lovely hiatus at the moment where I have nothing on my desk and just waiting for that next round of edits to come through.

[00:10:01] I've just finished your book All We Dream. It was just gorgeous! I just love that book and I'm sure you're going to talk about your experience of revisions on that too.

Pam: [00:10:11] Aw, thanks Jo. And for everyone out there, this is purely coincidental that Jo has just finished that book when we are actually talking today about revision! But I guess the first thing that we should probably do if we're going to talk about revision is just give an overall view of how you go about writing in general.

[00:10:30] What's your overall process, Jo? You know, I guess plotter or pantser, and then just a little bit about how you generally approach your writing and revision.

]Joanna: [00:10:39] So I think I'm still developing the process. I've completed five novels now, one of which is not, or never will be, published; three that are published; and one that is in the process of being published. But as for the actual process, I think you start to find something that works for you.

[00:10:57] You take the experience of what has worked with previous novels and what didn't work so well, and you hopefully apply that to the new work. So over the years I suppose I've fallen into the pattern really that the initial stages, when I discussed with my agent and my publisher about a proposal, and I often give them two or three ideas, I'll get them a little mini proposal or mini sketch or synopsis.

[00:11:22] Because I think there are many ideas. I think, you know, writers are having ideas, they're coming from all over aren't they. But a lot of the ideas won't actually be enough to make a novel or perhaps won't sort of fit with what the publisher is looking for.

[00:11:34] So I try and give a few options. And when we've agreed, which of those ideas we're going to go ahead with it needs a little while to settle with me, it's like sort of percolating the coffee. I need to think about it for a little while, let the ideas come. And, and that could be a couple of months while I'm thinking about that and sort of starting to hear the characters' voices and getting a bit of an outline. Then I suppose in a way I am a planner in that I like to have an outline, but I would say it's a loose outline.

[00:12:08] I'll do an initial sort of sketch of where I know each of the plot points is, what the basic arc of that sort of three-act structure will be. And I'll actually print that out on a piece of a paper and I'll put in  the major points,  and then I'll actually hone that by using my scene cards.

[00:12:30] There are 13 of these scene cards. Initially I got the idea from Ebony McKenna who uses scene cards to write a novel. But I think also using these same sort of plot points, or turning points, or prompts, if you like, and they've been used by a lot of different books on craft. Save The Cat Writes A Novel , they use  something similar. So you could call them beats if you like.

[00:12:53] I'll often look at these, there'll be the opening image and then in the corner, I'll have the word counts. So, in a 90,000 word novel, I'll know around the 9,000 mark we'll move from the opening image, which is the normal world to whatever the disturbance is, the inciting image, and so on.

[00:13:13] I start in Scrivener. I know you're a big script and a fan of that Pam and you probably know your way around it far better than I do. But then I actually divide my Scrivener novel up into intersections, according to each of these.

[00:13:30] And then I write each of the chapters, which is basically usually one scene, sometimes two scenes. And I'll use that for my first draft so I know that roughly I'm getting the right number of scenes. I can see visually where it sort of needs a few more scenes, or whether it's too many. So I've roughly got that spaced out.

[00:13:52] Once I've finished the first draft; once I've played around with perhaps moving the scenes around ; I move that into a Word document and I print that out and this is what it looks like. I go to Officeworks and I print it.  And then yes, I will read through as a reader, just pretending I know nothing about it.  Then we move on to subsequent drafts, and from then on I'm working on a Word document. So that first draft would probably take me about three or four months.

[00:14:29] It's got a bit quicker, I think, as I sort of have a little bit more of a map in my mind about where the story's going or, you know, where the different beats are. But that usually takes about three or four months. And then really the hard work begins after that.

Pam: [00:14:45] Do you have much of a gap between that first draft and when you start the revision process?

Joanna: [00:14:52] I try to, I think it's best if you can have that distance from it and the longer the better, really. It's very tempting as soon as you finish and you print the end to go back to the beginning, but for me, I think it's all about momentum in that first draft. And I'm sort of clocking up all these sort of mental notes all the way through thinking "I ain't going to change that. That's not going to stay the same. That name is going to change."

[00:15:15] So while I have to get through on that momentum and when I finished that first draft, if I can leave it for two weeks, four weeks, that's good. I think ideally you'd leave it for several months. But I think none of us, particularly those who have a contract, have that luxury.

[00:15:31] Even leaving it for a week or 10 days before coming back to it is good. Obviously with your book, I think you talk about All We Dream, you actually had an interval of several years, really, from the very first burst or version of that book to the revised version.

[00:15:49] So I'd be interested to hear how you felt that that benefited you, Pam.

Pam: [00:15:55] Well it really did. And with that very first experience, I guess, of publishing that, which was in 2013, it was probably of all my novels, the novel that I had rushed the most because I had a really tight deadline. So ,my first novel Blackwater Lake came out in December 2012.  And then I was basking in the glow of my debut novel being out, you know?

[00:16:22] And I think in February, my publisher Vanessa said to me, "Oh, so what else have you got?" And I just went, "Ah...", 'cause I'm not someone who just sort of stockpiled writing. I had a literary-style novel, you know, like that one, you talked about that's never going to see the light of day. It just wasn't my natural voice, but I learned a lot from it.

[00:16:43] But yeah, I had a few fragments. I had a fragment about a younger woman and I had a fragment about an older woman and I thought, "What if I put them together and just see what happens?" And then, anyway, the story did come together. Miraculously.

[00:16:56] It's amazing when you put yourself under pressure, what you can come up with. And I did write that draft in a few months, but I think so that was February. I think I probably started writing in the March. I had to have the finished, or, you know, as, as clean a version as I could get to the publisher by the end of June.

[00:17:14] And it was published in the December. So there was that revision time I had with the publisher in between, which was only about a month or two, really. But it was always a book that I loved the storyline of. I love the characters 

[00:17:27] I never read my books once they're in print because I just can't stand the thought of, after you've revised them over and over the thought of looking at them again in print is just like, "Ugh, no, not going to happen." So I knew in my head, I guess, that it was out there and it did okay at the time. I think I, you know, I've had some lovely feedback on the original and people did really enjoy the characters.

[00:17:49] And I found that the voice of the older character in particular really flowed well for me. Even that character when she was young; it's sort of got a historical thread and the younger character of Esther, who was Essie when she was younger, her diaries that I wrote just seemed to roll. You know, when you magically get on a roll and they come out almost as they appear in the book type thing. But I always had in my head that I'd rushed the ending and I would've liked to have devoted more time to that; to the younger character and to her situation in the story. So, when I did get the opportunity to get my rights back for a book, that was the one that I luckily received. After it had been published, seven years later, I had the opportunity to revise it again.

[00:18:36] So as you say, that was a really interesting process. It was quite confronting because I was reading what that I'd written, you know, seven years ago and had been out in the world already. And there was a lot of cringing going on for me!

Joanna: [00:18:50] There are definitely things which are cringe-worthy when you go back, but there's sometimes bits of absolute gold and you think "Actually this really worked and I don't even remember writing this!" And it's almost a sign that you're in that flow in that sort of subconscious, that beautiful transcendental state where it just does flow. And then of course there'll be another bit, which is cringe-worthy. But no, I hope that you, did find some bits that you were still in love with after that time.

Pam: [00:19:20] I did. And look, the essence, as I said, of the story was still there and I loved that.

[00:19:24]And, as mentioned, the elder character; when I revised it this time around the, the older character of Essie the scenes with her in particular, I hardly hardly touched, you know, my instinct was right there. They had gotten out pretty well. So it was really just a matter of adding scenes to make the story, you know, more complete towards the end  and things I did around the other character, which we can talk about as we go on.

[00:19:51]But Jo , we've talked about that whole idea of revising at the end of the draft. Do you do any revision as you're going?

[00:19:59] I know Penn Janu who is one of our colleagues in The Inkwell,  Penn's a great one for really writing the scene in the morning and revising that same scene at night, then moving on type of thing.

[00:20:09] Do you do that sort of thing or do you just write all the way through?

[00:20:13] Joanna: [00:20:13] Look, I wish I could. And I'm very envious of writers like Penn who can do that. And I think that's probably her lawyer background. She's very meticulous and she probably produced something that's very close to a final, final draft.

[00:20:25]I can't do that.  I even call it call it my V draft, a sort of vomit draft almost. I let it go. I just have to let the ideas and the thought process flow, but I'm making mental notes as I go along. Sometimes I'll actually write those down, like, Oh, okay.

[00:20:45] You know, "You need to research this here" or "This is not going to work", and kind of go back. But I find that if I go back, I get stuck on the words. I get stuck on making the sentence right and changing that paragraph, whatever. In fact, what can happen is that you can get to the end and that whole scene will go, you know, and the paragraph or the sentence I've spent hours making so beautiful or perfect, it's probably just not right for the story. Once I got to the end, I just let it go.

[00:21:13] I like that freedom. I like that to keep that momentum. And it's often not 'til I get to the end of the first draft that I even know what the story is about. You know, what are the themes in this? And so I heard Neil Gaiman talk about this and he said in the first draft you don't know what the story is about until you get to the end of that. The second draft is making that novel look as though you knew what it was about all the time.

[00:21:38] And I think once you get to the end; for me, I can keep that in my head. And I can make all those changes as I go through the second draft. So I wouldn't show my first draft to anybody at all.  By the end of the second draft, which there may be some bits from the first draft that I keep.

[00:21:56] A lot of it is thrown out,  or I would rather say put in a separate folder because I think it's a shame to ever throw that away. Or you can sort of con yourself and think, "well, I'll just put it here. I'll put it in a separate folder for now and I'll use it somewhere else." And often it doesn't get used. And that's one way of sort of letting yourself down gently if you like. But it has to make sense to the whole story.  I don't know that until I get to the end of the first draft.

[00:22:22] So the answer is no, I don't, I just keep going and often have people changing names halfway through; the setting, the timeline, is all over the place. And in fact, one thing I've done recently is learned that timelines are the thing that I get wrong and the editors, it drives them insane! Well, this was Tuesday afternoon. Now we're on Saturday morning and you know, where did the time go? I actually, at the beginning of each chapter now, write the timeline at the beginning; this is Monday morning, or this is Tuesday afternoon, or this is the following week or whatever. And I found that that's quite good, that's just a tip that I've learned between books.

[00:23:01] What about you?

Pam: [00:23:05] I tweak a little bit here and there, but like you, I think the best thing is to go all the way through as fast as you can, as you say. I love the idea of having those plot points and I have become more of a plotter.

[00:23:16] You know, I'm a, pantser at heart, but I've become more of a plotter over the years, I guess. Because when you are published traditionally , as you are, and as I have been, you have to give a synopsis usually, or some sort of idea to the publisher. So you do have to have some idea of the story in your head before you start. Like with my first book, Blackwattle Lake, I just had an image in my head and sat down and as  you say vomited it onto the page and somehow miraculously a story came about. But you know, I think I have become a little bit more of a plotter. And  I think if you can push through that first draft as quickly as you can stay in the flow of the writing.

[00:23:52] And I totally agree, you don't know the story until you get to the end and there's going to be things that you then go back and change;  major things that you go back and change and the story can end up being quite different to what you first envisaged, or the emphasis of the story or whatever.

[00:24:07] I read a nice quote in a book I've got somewhere here. That revision is "re-visioning" your story, seeing it in a new light. That's the first thing you should be doing when you revise. And I really liked that idea.

Joanna: [00:24:22] Yeah, I don't think that comes down to this sort of, "are you a plotter or a pantser?"  I think people have a little bit of both really, and I have to know roughly where I'm going.

[00:24:34] It's like setting the satnav on the car when you're going on a journey; you know roughly where you're going, and where you want to end up. Although I must admit the ending is the bit that I changed the most. I often have several different endings before I'm happy with one. But you know roughly the direction you're going and roughly how long it's gonna take.

[00:24:51] But there may be things that look more interesting over here or there's roadworks or a dead end there or something happens.  I know there are writers like James Patterson who produce really detailed, several tens of thousands of words, of an outline before they start writing. And I haven't quite got to that point yet. That's something I would aspire to do. SO I have a rough outline, but I think giving yourself the freedom to change your mind if it's not working and to explore other things, that's where the creativity comes.

Pam: [00:25:26] Yeah, for sure.

[00:25:28] So what's your first step, Jo?  When you do give it that break for a couple of weeks or a month, if you have that luxury, and you come back and you think "right, it's time for revision"; What's the first thing you would do then after having read through it and made a few mental notes?

Joanna: Well, they love me down at Officeworks. I turn up with my USB and each time they get me to sign a form saying this is my own work and I'm not stealing it. So, I will read through that, not making any marks at all on that. I will read through purely as a reader to try and clear my head of any previous ideas of what I had and, and to see where the pace is; how it flows; whether the characters are distinct enough; and just whether there's any enjoyment in it.  I think as a writer, what you learn is, you know what's good writing or what's bad writing, you know what's working and you know also what's not working instinctively when you get there. And so I'll read through again a second time and this time I will make notes.

[00:26:29] It'll often mean crossing out whole sections. There are certain traps that I tend to find myself in or diversions that I end up taking. Sometimes I'm overexplaining things, or getting on my high horse about issues or something. And if it starts to veer off in exposition, you know, as I'm on my soap box about - Penn goes through that - sometimes it's obvious where I'm trying to milk something for the humor of it, and I need to let the story flow rather than trying to focus too much on that. Again, that's got to go.

[00:27:05] There'll be scenes, which seem to have energy and you'll feel that as you're reading them and then there'll be scenes that feel really sluggish. So it's like a sense of where the pace is and where you need to pick up the pace. At the end of that second draft, it's really about getting the overall structure for me, the overall arc of that: are the scenes in the right the right order? Are we getting a buildup of tension as we go through? Are the beats coming at the right point towards that climax? And the ending can sometimes change several times, but are we building up to that in the right way?

[00:27:43] It's rather like looking through a microscope,. You start off with looking through a magnifying glass at it, but then you start to get down to the microscope and increase magnification for big picture stuff.  This is the stage where you decide whether, you know, is the tense right? Is the point of view right?  Is the right character telling the story?  Have you got the right narrator? Have you got the right voice, the right setting?  

[00:28:09] Pam: [00:28:09] And have you ever had the situation yet where you've read through that draft and made your notes and there's been a major element where you've just gone, "No, this is not working. I've got to make a big change there."?

[00:28:22] Joanna: [00:28:22] Well, absolutely. On my second book, the Last Voyage of Mrs. Henry Parker, I actually got to the end of the second draft. So I had an 80,000 word manuscript and I just knew it wasn't working. I knew the whole thing really wasn't working very well because I felt as though the wrong character was telling the story. I threw out the whole lot. And I told it from the point of view of a single character who was Mrs. Henry Parker. And that was like a light bulb moment for me.

[00:28:52] And I haven't done that before. That's heartbreaking as an author, but it's also very exciting when you do know that something is not working and you don't feel that energy. You don't feel that tingle of excitement deep in there in the gut that "Oh I've got to go back, and this is the story" But it's rather an "Oh gosh", you know, plodding through. And I got that back once I changed that. That was a really fundamental thing, a sort of a literary diagnostics.

[00:29:18] I think it's something that you and I talk about quite a bit. It's a really big picture, fundamental thing. You don't want to get to the end of a fifth draft and work out you've got the wrong character. But I think that's okay. That's what these early drafts are for and trusting your instincts on there.

Pam: [00:29:36] Do you have a sort of number of drafts that you usually are going through? So you've done the big picture, the structural thing, and then is it a matter of going back and doing a chapter by chapter or scene by scene  and as you say, honing?  

] Joanna: [00:29:49] I think the first draft is the vomit draft. The second draft is the getting everything in the right order and those big picture things. And then the following draft I'll go back, I will print it out again, go back exact to the same one, read through as a reader. And then one read through with the red pen again. On this one, I'm thinking I'm looking more at the characters here: are the characters distinct enough?  Are they interesting enough? Have I got too much backstory? Have I got not enough back story here? And so this is much more of a character issue, and then you can start looking at  scene by scene or chapter by chapter. This is where I think, having written a lot of short stories as well, that's been  really useful . I know that you've written short stories too. And it's a really useful discipline in cutting out of a lot of the extraneous stuff

[00:30:47] I try and remember  this quote it's in Strunk, isn't it, the elements of style. Something like: a sentence should contain no unnecessary words; a paragraph, no unnecessary sentences. The same reason that a drawing should contain no unnecessary lines; and a machine, no unnecessary parts. So it's basically cutting out a lot of that stuff at each scene.

[00:31:08] And it's not too late to cut. This is where you're seeing things that you don't need. You know, things that slow the story down, big chunks of exposition or backstory, which need to be moved out, which could be turned into dialogue. So, you're starting to get down to a character base and a style base at that stage.

[00:31:27] I feel like I'm smoothing out the lumps. I'm sort of adding bits where it looks a bit lean, cutting back where it seems to be dragging a little bit. So my third draft will be much more of a stylistic thing. And look, you know, how many drafts does it take? It takes us like as long as I've got, really  and I think if there's a deadline that really just helped to hone and I think somebody once said like a novelist is never finished it's merely abandoned.

[00:31:59] I basically keep redrafting until the deadline and just honing in on the smaller and smaller details. I've been traditionally published with a contract, and I know that you've had the experience of being traditionally published and also with self-publishing. So I wondered if you noticed those self-imposed deadlines, and  whether that changes your drafting process or not?

[Pam Yeah, well I've always been great with a deadline and it's really hard not to have an external deadline for me. I'm not someone who's a super organized person by nature and I'm not a big planner with my time, although I'm learning to do that more.

]Joanna: [00:32:41] You look very much from the outside as though you are, you look very organized!

Pam: [00:32:47] Thank you. But yeah, that is a hard part of the self-publishing thing for me is having that deadline and just always moving it. For instance, by the 14th of this month, I was supposed to have printed my draft of my current novel and read through and made some notes. Well it's still on the computer hasn't been printed. So, I'm pretty sure that's not going to happen in a week.

[00:33:09] And in my head I'm like, "Oh, well, no one's waiting on it so I'll just push it back a little bit," you know? So that is, for me, a hard part of doing it yourself; having no body,ringing and saying, "Is it ready yet? What are you sending it to me?"  I do miss that side of traditional publishing for sure. On the other hand, it does give you the luxury of being able to spend more time. Like I know I spent a lot more time revising Essie's Way, turning it into All We Dream.

[00:33:38]   I mean, you do have things like I did have it booked in with an editor to do a line edit on it. So you still do have some of those deadlines, for sure, if you're indie publishing. And they're great, you know, once you can lock in some of those things and once you get your cover back from your cover designer and things start to get pulled together, you know that you need to ramp up the process a bit.

Joanna: [00:34:00] I mean it's hard because the more drafts you do, the better the book is going to be. And I think that the writers that are successful are the ones who are prepared to put in the time and keep redrafting and redrafting. A Redraft doesn't have to be a complete rewrite; it can be a small change in something, or a redraft looking for specific things.  But I must admit that sometimes you can come across a little nugget of gold, even quite later in the drafts.

[00:34:30] I did that with the very first book for The Single ladies of Jacaranda Retirement Village and my main character, Peggy Smart, one of her main characteristics is her use of malapropisms, which is where she tends to get her words delightfully mixed up. And that didn't come until quite a late draft. It was almost like once I knew that character really well, she sort of let down her guard and this slipped out.

[00:34:57] So there's always that feeling that, "Oh, if I keep going a little bit longer, something wonderful is actually going to materialize." But you know, often it doesn't and  you have to work  to a deadline.

Pam: [00:35:08] And of course there's always the danger, I think, of over-editing. Would you agree?

Joanna: [00:35:14] Yeah, I think so.  I think  artists , would know this phenomenon; that  it looks pretty perfect, but then you start to do a few bits  and you can spoil it. You can over paint a painting, you can over edit a book. Sometimes the best writing is that sort of raw stuff that you produce in the first draft. Yes, it needs tidying up, but you can edit out that magic sometimes, and that's  the danger of letting too many people into that edit and getting too many opinions as well, means that you can lose that sometimes.

[00:35:46] You have to develop an instinct, I think, to keep that real core of the story there, the real essence of the story and not lose sight of that. So look, editing  is great.It's something that I have learned to embrace. I think it's a little bit confronting for first time writers, when suddenly you have what seems to be pages and pages of criticism  and  sometimes helpful suggestions, but often just pointing out where things are not working.

Pam: [00:36:13]

[00:36:13] I always remember the story of Tim Winton. I think it was with Dirt Music. He'd spent seven years or something writing the book and  had obviously pushed a few deadlines and was due to take it down the next day to his publisher. In those days, it was printed out on paper and he packaged it up,  and he was actually riding down to his publisher's office on a push bike. I could be telling this wrong, but I've got to support the nuggets of it, right!

[00:36:37] But he just knew that there was something not right about it. And it turned out it was the voice in the story,  I think he actually got up that night, opened it, put it aside and started the whole thing from scratch and  wrote the whole complete novel in something like 56 days. He obviously had the whole story in his head and the characters and everything, and knew them intimately after seven years. But yeah, that's an interesting way of tackling it.  

[00:37:04] Sometimes if you are just really stuck and feel like you're getting to the point where you're over revising and you're not making any progress, you know the story, put it aside and just start the whole thing again. Just  to keep that voice flowing. I mean, I've never done that particular process, but I can imagine that it could work. 

Joanna: Because there is so much in your mind, particularly if you're going from this little bit in chapter one, and then you're in chapter 13 and, and you're in chapter 56. It's like the whole thing is in your head, all the relationships between the characters and the setting and the timing and things. But you can lose that whole sense of the whole story once you're down to the nitty gritty and you're down to the line level. Having said that I'm still sometimes making changes, I don't know about you, when I get the proofs from  the publisher.

[00:37:53] And I think my editors, I must drive them absolutely bonkers because I'm often sending email like, "Could we change this?!" Or it could be, I've noticed it. And in fact, on the Mrs. Henry Parker book as well, I noticed something very close to publication, which was where she'd set sail on a four week journey. She'd left London in February and arrived in August shivering into the satin lining of her winter coat. She'd actually arrived in March and it was sweltering hot in Sydney, but you just do something like this at the very last minute. So there's a fine line between editing out the beauty and the magic of the story to getting those last little bits right, and picking up those last few blunders.

Pam: [00:38:41] And it's amazing that example you gave, how many eyes had been on it. I mean yours multiple times, but also your editor, your publisher. And nobody picked it up!

Joanna: [00:38:50] I'm sure somebody would have I'm sure there would have been an email from somebody.

Pam: [00:38:54] Yes definitely. So Jo, when you're getting down to the nitty gritty, those really fine line edits, I think you've got a little bit of an example to share with us about the sorts of things that you're changing.

Joanna: [00:39:07] Yeah, sure. So I've been very lucky this time with this manuscript we'll call it The Kiosk, that won't be the final title. With The Kiosk I had feedback from three beta readers, which were enormously helpful. And, you know, that's a whole conversation about beta readers on its own. And so I did make quite a few changes to my opening chapter; that's the one that I will share. 

[00:39:37] This is the opening chapter, and it's two sisters driving in a very unroadworthy car called the "blue bomb" and they're off to hospital for an appointment. So we're introducing two characters here. And it comes back to the short story thing. You like to start in the middle of the action, sort of arrive late and leave early into that. So I'm arriving in a scene with quite a bit of action, but what the beta reader has said is that one of my habits bearing off into backstory too soon.

[00:40:09] So we're just getting the action. We're just opening it and it's forward movement. And then we're in backstory, so we get a bit of a paragraph of what's gone on before. Backstory at the beginning will slow down the action. It will take the reader out of that. So it's about how I could sort of set up the situation; why these two women were in the car together; why there is obviously tension and conflict between the two; why is it that neither of them is really happy to be there, without giving a big dump of backstory . And the beta reader had suggested, which was very helpful actually, to move some of that backstory to later chapters, which is what I did, but to turn some of it into dialogue as well because it's amazing what you can do with dialogue.

[00:40:55] If you have a big chunk of what seems to be prose or exposition which is a bit weighty and not really going anywhere, turn it into a bit of a backward-forward dialogue. And that's really what I've done and turned up the tension. I was sort of explaining things in that first chapter that it didn't need to be explained.

[00:41:14] I think what I needed was more of a hint at what the situation was, why they were there, but not explaining it. So more of a show don't, don't tell , and leaving little hints there, which I could then explain and reveal through the story. So I'm happy to put up both versions of that, where  I've made the changes.

Pam: [00:41:35] Yes. We'll put them up on the website.

Joanna: [00:41:36] Just for an example. So a lot of the initial stuff, it won't have changed from the first draft, you know, I would've tidied up the sentences and change the grammar and it's about knowing where to start, because that first chapter that's the hook. And I think that's my most important chapter. That's probably the one I write other than the ending the most times until I'm happy with that. So in fact, this chapter wasn't even in the first draft, but from the second draft onwards.  And what about you, if you've got an example as well?

Pam: [00:42:08] Yeah, I thought it might be interesting to show you this. So this is in Scrivener and you can see on the side with the color, I don't know if it's right or left for people looking at it, the side with the lines and things here.

This was the original version, but the colored bits are the changes that have been made. The things that have been deleted, crossed out and the additions in blue. So the big thing that I was doing with Essie's Way turning it into All We Dream was really deepening the point of view, that was a really major thing for me.

[00:42:47] I do like to write now in quite deep point of view, which I'd done in Cross My Heart, my previous book, particularly with Miranda the younger character was to really go further into her character and into her perspective. So again, I'll put examples of this up on the website. I'll put a blog post up, which includes all this, but there's a couple of things here. Like, if you see this sentence this one here So the original would have been, "The previous meeting had taken place in the office, but Father Donnelley liked to see his couples in the church itself."

[00:43:18] You can see all the words that I've crossed out there. I won't read through the whole thing, but that became "Father Donnelly's assertion that meeting in the church itself would help them feel more comfortable with the church environment was not holding up."

[00:43:29] So I'm more in the character's head and telling the story  from her thought perspective. And that's probably what I did the most of as I went through revising  particularly as I said, Miranda's character.  So this is what I love about Scrivener too, because it is quite interesting to go back and you can see what you've changed. You can take snapshots of your original version, which I intended to do with every scene, but  I did it for probably the first half. And then as I went through, I forgot about that because I just got involved with the revision. But  it was interesting, and it has been interesting. I've used this a little bit in teaching to just show about  tightening up the writing, because in the original version, even though it was published, I did have a different writing style a different voice. I wasn't writing particularly in deep point of view. So I really wanted to go through and take out all the things like "she thought, reflected, wondered, remembered , said". I really tried to reduce the "said"s and make that more of an, an action, you know, put an action beat with whatever the character was saying.

[00:44:29] So that sort of thing was really what I was working at. And as I said, it did take a lot longer than I anticipated to actually do all that.

Joanna: [00:44:38] But well worth it. But it's interesting how  we tend to think we have a writing voice very early on, but even somebody like you, who's an experienced writer,  your voice is still sort of evolving and that  you can make those changes and  make that much more true to your natural voice even at that stage.

 Pam: [00:44:56] As you would know, Jo, each novel that you get, you improve your craft. We're always learning things about the writing process. It's not like you write your first novel and that's your style and it's set in stone forever. We're always evolving. Our stories are evolving and the way we tell them. So that's why it's been great for me to have that opportunity  and I probably wouldn't do it with every book, but as I say, this particular one  was a little bit of  a tight deadline for me. And it was great to have that opportunity to see  just what I could do with it in terms of my style now. So it's been great.

Joanna: [00:45:29] Isn't it wonderful to think that writing is the one thing that you get better as you get older at doing. But you know, you can start at any age and the older you get, the better you get at it. And the more you do the better, the better you better it is.

Pam: [00:45:44] That's very true. Jo, you mentioned beta readers, do you always use beta readers? You know, when you get to that stage, you've had a couple of revisions and then you want some feedback on it before you send it to your editor and your publisher.

] Joanna: [00:45:58] Yes. Look, I have used beta readers with some novels and not others. Certainly my first novel, The Single Ladies, which was under a different title, I did actually pay for a manuscript assessment of that actually was not very flattering at that stage.  I was really this close to throwing the whole thing out.  It wasn't working at all. And I then workshopped it with the likes of Kate Forsyth, I did her story doctor workshop, which was absolutely fantastic.  I learned a lot from Kate but one of the useful things I took away and I've used since then, is that she gave us an exercise where we had to give each chapter a name or a title, if you like, which is like a bit of a description to explain what purpose that scene has. And it really has to have at least one or more than one. In fact, I kept the chapter titles in that book, which were really quite quirky and I really liked them. And luckily, so did the publisher. 

[00:46:56] So the next two novels, I think my agent was my beta reader, and then I went straight through to my publisher and the editors at Hachette, which was wonderful. There was quite a bit of work to do on both of those. And on this latest novel that I've recently submitted, I did get three beta readers;  one of whom is in our group; one is a sort of a friend that I've met at various functions; and one is quite an established author.

[00:47:23] It was fantastic to have those now beta readers, I think getting the right one is the key to this. And if you give it to your best friend or your spouse or your grandmother or whatever, the chances are they're going to come back and say, "this is wonderful!" And even people who are other writers who you may be very close to sometimes can give very good feedback. But I think sometimes there is a reticence about giving really frank feedback when things are not working. And I think you have to have a level of maturity as both a beta reader and a writer to accept that. So having somebody who's experienced, but a little bit removed is probably a really good way of doing that. And you don't have to accept everything that a beta reader suggests or sees is wrong.

[00:48:12] They'll often say the same things and you'll know that they're all saying this. "For me, it didn't work. This section is dragging a little bit. This work, this is great. This voice is okay. No, this ending didn't work." And they all agreed on certain things. You know where the bodies are hidden really, don't you, as a writer? And you submit things and you think actually, nobody's going to notice that little inconsistency there, or that I've rushed through that scene or skipped over that. And then no, there it comes back. "I think this needs more explanation. I think we need more backstory on this."

[00:48:44] So, you know, in your heart of hearts where these things are going to be, but sometimes it's a surprise and I know that there are some writers who don't like suggestions of how to fix things. And, and my beta readers came up with some fantastic ideas that I did try and I deleted some scenes and I wrote some new ones and something at the ending I completely changed. And for me, this experience has been very positive actually. I will be thanking them in the acknowledgements for that.

[00:49:14] So I've done both; some books with beta readers , some without. How about you?

Pam: [00:49:19] Some people say, "Oh, yeah my mum's my first reader." Or your beta reader, and for some people that does seem to work. In general, I think having other writers look at it for you because they've got that radar tuned on, they know what they're looking for, they know to see where the gaps are and the plot holes and things like that.  And we do have the luxury of having a reasonable number in our writing group. So it's great. If we want to give the whole manuscript or certain scenes, we can give them to a couple of people to start with.  Because once you've read it once, it's probably not good to then use the same person for the next version or three versions down because you know, they're going to be coming to it with that prior knowledge. It's nice to be able to spread around at different stages to use different beta readers. So yes, I do have people in our writing group, obviously as beta readers. Penny and I have, for the novel that I'm yet to complete, we did do a thing for a while where we swapped scenes once a week and we'd give each other feedback.

But I also have a good friend  who's a reader. She doesn't write, but she's a voracious reader. She loves reading the style of books that I write.  I've had to sort of massage her into giving me really honest feedback because she's just so lovely. She wants to tell me how wonderful it is. But of course that's not what you want. 

Joanna: [00:50:36] You want to hear it, but it's not very helpful, really!   Ideally you want really another writer and then maybe just one writer who you know, you're perhaps at the same level doesn't have to necessarily be the same genre. I think you can swap work and be fairly honest about things and not to take that to heart because feedback is there just to try and  improve things. There's no novel that's perfect. I can't remember who said a novel is just a long piece of writing; there's something wrong with it, and there's always going to be something wrong. Someone who shares your vision perhaps, but you know, it can help you look at things in a different way.

Pam: And have you got any particular [sort of diagnostic tools, Jo? If you have got a scene that you just think it's just not working, but I don't know why, how would you approach that?

Joanna: [00:51:25] I don't think I've got anything hard and fast. I would like to be able to point you to one particular craft book or one particular checklist. I think I've developed my own checklist, which I probably have in my head. And that's something that you gain, with experience  writing again and again and again, and I can't often say why it is, but I'll know something isn't working. And so I'll look at my usual thing, which will be the preachy thing; the overexplaining some things and under explaining others; too much backstory early on and too much exposition; not enough dialogue   too little dialogue; overusing words. Now this is an interesting one isn't it? 

[00:52:10] I will sometimes do a search for those overused words. These are sort of getting towards the sharp end that sort of high focus thing.   You should be cutting words rather then adding them. I think I searched for the word "just", and I found something like 400 in my last manuscript. So, no, I think I've developed more of a mental tick list than  anything systematic I have to say.

[00:52:36] You're probably far more logical about it than that.

Pam: [00:52:39] No, not really.

Joanna: [00:52:41] Are there any books or anything that you think do this well?

Pam: [00:52:45] No, but I am a big a fan of the Margie Lawson  highlighting technique.   I have done it with whole manuscripts in the past, gone through and used a different coloured highlighter for  setting, dialogue, dialogue tags, underlining all the action in red pen.

[00:53:01] And again,  I'll put up  in that blog post set that we're going to do an example of this, because I find that a really useful tool. So if you end up with a scene, that three quarters of it is green, which is disruption and three lines of underlined action, then you know that you've probably got to switch things up and maybe there's no dialogue in there and depending on the kind of scenators, but I find that really helpful if I'm really on a scene that I'm totally stuck on, and I just can't think of where to go with it. So,  that's a good tool, I think.

Joanna: [00:53:32] Another tool that I've used,  is something I learned from Valerie Parv.  If you're stuck up against something and it's not working, you're not quite sure how to add a character out of a situation or whatever it is, whatever the situation is, is to write down one to 20 on a piece of paper I didn't know how a novel ended. I wrote down 20 possible endings, I mean the most bizarre, the most outlandish things and the more outlandish the better really. And one of those will be the right answer, but sometimes just brainstorming that.

[00:54:04] The other thing is sometimes just to turn it 180, just to do the exact opposite of what you've got there. So something is happening - something doesn't happen: they don't get there in time, a bomb goes off or something. Just to see what would happen if you completely turn it on its head and give it a twist. That's sometimes how I write my way out of where it gets a bit bogged down or boring and it's not working; just completely shake it up, make things worse. 

Pam: [00:54:33] I love that. And sometimes, like you say, with a particular character issue, if you think "I'm just not getting to the bottom of this." I like to sometimes go back to a great craft book like this one The Emotional Craft of Fiction by Donald Mass, which is my most recent favorite. And there's some great exercises in there where you can really hone in on a particular aspect of your character if you know that that's not working.

[00:54:55] Or even writing a letter to your character and asking them, "what's going on here? What's the problem? Or what am I not seeing?" and then writing the response back from the character.

Joanna: [00:55:04] That's a great thing to do.

]Pam: [00:55:06] Yeah, it is. It's gotten me out of a couple of little issues that one.

[00:55:12] We're almost probably at the end, Jo, but I'm just double checking to see if there's anything that we've missed. Is there anything that you think we haven't covered?

Joanna: [00:55:20] Well, I was thinking about sort of preparing for this interview. I went back and watched a lot of the Masterclass videos the online masterclass and listened to various writers that are quite well known and successful writers talk about their editing and rewriting process. So, I think there was Dan Brown, Neil Gaiman, James Patterson, Margaret Atwood, David Baldacci. And it's actually interesting how similar their approaches, where the emphasis that they do put on rewriting, and editing. And although they may have slightly different ways that they do it, the general feeling I think is that were all doing the same sort of thing.

] But one of the things that Margaret Atwood was saying is that often  it's getting over completion fear, because once you say this is complete and you send it, there is no more tweaking. There is no more editing. Because I think that's the hardest thing is to know when you've done enough and when to stop.

[00:56:15] Sometimes I think  it's overcoming  that fear and saying no enough.

Pam: It's a little bit like letting a child go out there into the big wide world.

Joanna: [00:56:24] That's right.

Pam: [00:56:25] Hoping that you've done everything you can, you know?  That's great advice. I love that. And they're fabulous videos, aren't they? The Masterclass ones.  And there's loads of stuff on YouTube too, that people can access.  They don't have to necessarily pay for Masterclass and things.

[00:56:39] Are there any craft books that you would recommend for revision Jo? You know, if people are looking for them.

Joanna: [00:56:46] I don't think there's one that I can recommend. I think that you're  the craft book queen.  I've taken bits from everywhere. I've taken bits from interviews, from what I've read other writers, what I hear other writers do, and I'm holding it all up here.

[00:57:01] So yeah, maybe I'll have to write a sort of checklist one day.

Pam: [00:57:06] Yeah. Sounds good. Well, there's that one that I mentioned, which isn't particularly about revision, but it is great for the emotional side of developing your character. And that's something too that I guess, particularly in this revision with Essie that I really looked at that emotional side more and how I was showing those emotions and just making sure that I was showing them.

[00:57:26] This is a really old one that I pulled off my shelf, Manuscrip Makeover by Elizabeth Lyon. And it's one that I find I just keep going back to every now and then. So it's a great one. I'd recommend for people. I think you could probably still get it. I've had that for twenty years, but you can see it's well used.

[00:57:44] And the other one is this one by James Scott Bell, Revision and Self-Editing.  It's got some of those great checklists and things to double-check on. So that's one I'd recommend to people.

[00:57:55] So your next step, Jo, is to get The Kiosk back and dive into the structural edits and things along those lines?

Joanna: [00:58:03] Yes, I think I'd taken that manuscript as far as I could. And I think when  you know it's still not quite right, but  you can't see the wood for the trees anymore. So I'm actually really looking forward to getting that back and hearing my editor's thoughts on that.  Luckily I had a couple of weeks off to give my brain a little bit of a rest and I'll come back to it, hopefully with fresh eyes.

[00:58:24] And what about you? What are you up to?

Pam: [00:58:27] Well, I am going to print off those pages and start that process of reading through 75,000 words in this one. So I know it needs probably another 25 or 30. And then it'll be, , back and forth with the adding and cutting. But I've made the mistake of writing it over a long period of time. So I'm at the point now where I'm three quarters of the way through, I know where it's going to end. But there's things that I can't even remember have happened at the beginning. And in fact, I don't even know where the beginning is, so it's really a jumble of hotchpotch scenes at the moment. I haven't been very good at the whole plotting and planning thing with this one. So I'm just going to print it out, read it, see what I've got, add in  what I need to, and then go through that whole process we've discussed.

Joanna: [00:59:11] I'm sure you'll be very pleasantly surprised.

Pam: [00:59:13] Oh, fingers crossed. When can we expect The Kiosk out Jo?

Joanna: [00:59:19] This will be out hopefully later in 2021, perhaps around October. I'm not quite sure if the publication date yet, everything got a little bit bumped back last year. And so we'll have to see if the schedules caught up, but late 2021 with a new title. It's set in a hospital, in a volunteer-run tea room kiosk in a hospital. So some of those words in some form will end up in the title.

Pam: [00:59:49] Oh, we look forward to it. And of course ,The Great Escape From Woodlands Nursing Home is still out there, and if people haven't read it, where would you recommend they find it? And where can they find you online?

Joanna: [01:00:01] Well, I always send people to their local independent bookshop. I'm a huge believer that we should support our local bookshops and if we don't, they will disappear. But for those who can't get to a bookshop it'll be online at Dymocks and  Booktopia and it's available in eBook at all platforms and in audiobook as well.

Pam: [01:00:24] Fantastic. Thanks so much, Jo, for spending this time. It's been a really lovely chat and all the best with The Kiosk and the next part of the revision!

Joanna: [01:00:34] And thanks very much  for having me on I've enjoyed our chat.

[01:00:37] Thanks Jo!

Pam: [01:00:40]

[01:00:40] Thanks for listening toWrites4Women. I hope you've enjoyed my chat with this week's guest. If you did, I'd love it. If you could add a quick rating or review wherever you get your podcasts, so others can more easily find the episodes. Don't forget to check out the back list on the rights for women website so much great writing advice in the library.

[01:01:06] There. And you can also find the transcript of today's chat on the website, too. And you can connect with me through the website writes4women.com on Instagram and Twitter at @w4wpodcast, the Facebook page Writes4Women.

And you can find me at pamelacook.com.au

Thanks for listening. Have a great week.

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