It's my stop on the blog tour for The Museum of You by Carys Bray. I'm delighted to welcome Carys to my blog today. The Museum of You was published by Hutchinson on 16 June 2016.
On re-writing
by Carys Bray
I am a really slow writer. I try not to look at other
people’s #amwriting word counts on Twitter because they make me feel
inadequate. If I manage 1,000 words a day I feel like I’m doing well. I edit as
I write, which can slow things down but it also means that I’m largely happy
with what exists at the end of the first draft. That’s not to say that there
isn’t a lot of trimming and rearranging of sentences and paragraphs – there is,
but at least what I have is novel-shaped.
I know how my novels will open and close before I start
writing, and I think that has helped me to avoid massive, structural edits (so
far!). In the beginning, I make notes. I find it easier to be slapdash in a
notebook. Plus, I can leave the notebook by the side of my bed for when I think
I’ve had an amazing idea in the middle of the night (mostly, the ideas aren’t
amazing and tend to be incomprehensible by morning).
In The Museum of You, 12 year old Clover Quinn likes to watch
The Great British Bake Off. Although she and her Dad, Darren, don’t do much baking,
Darren makes an attempt to join in with the programme each week. Here are some
notes I made for a scene about a biscuit showstopper:
When I transferred the scene to my laptop I filled it out a
little. Then I read it aloud. Hearing the words sometimes makes me realise that
I’ve repeated myself or expressed something in a convoluted way. A passage has
its own particular music which can be spoiled by a sentence that is overly long
or short. Reading aloud is also good for dialogue. If a section of dialogue is
hard to read aloud, perhaps it needs further work.
Here’s how the scene with Darren and the biscuits appears in
the novel:
And that’s how I write and rewrite: a rough outline, a more
detailed attempt, some reading aloud and then some trimming and rearranging.
Eventually, I end up with around 90,000 trimmed and rearranged words, and then
it’s time to go back to the beginning for more of the same.
Of course, I’ve only written two novels and I don’t know
whether I’ll necessarily be able to approach a third novel in the same way, but
that’s part of the fun and the terror of beginning again, with a blank notebook
and an empty Word document.
About Carys Bray
Carys
Bray's debut collection Sweet Home won the Scott prize and selected
stories were broadcast on BBC Radio Four Extra. Her first novel A Song for Issy Bradley was serialised on BBC Radio Four's Book
at Bedtime and was shortlisted for the Costa Book Awards,
the Association of Mormon Letters Awards, the Waverton Good Read
Award, the 15 Bytes Book Awards and the Desmond Elliott
Prize. It won the Utah Book Award and the Authors'
Club Best First Novel Award and was selected for
the 2015 Richard and Judy Summer Book Club.
Carys has
a BA in Literature from The Open University and an MA and PhD in Creative
Writing from Edge Hill University. Her second novel The Museum of You will be published in June 2016. She is working
on a third novel.
Readers can find out more about Carys on her website and Facebook page and
By Carys Bray
Published by Hutchinson (16 June 2016)
ISBN: 978-0091959609
Publisher's description
Clover
Quinn was a surprise. She used to imagine she was the good kind, now she’s not
sure. She’d like to ask Dad about it, but growing up in the saddest chapter of
someone else’s story is difficult. She tries not to skate on the thin ice of
his memories.
Darren has
done his best. He's studied his daughter like a seismologist on the lookout for
waves and surrounded her with everything she might want - everything he can
think of, at least - to be happy.
What Clover
wants is answers. This summer, she thinks she can find them in the second
bedroom, which is full of her mother's belongings. Volume isn't important, what
she is looking for is essence; the undiluted bits: a collection of things that
will tell the full story of her mother, her father and who she is going to be.
But what
you find depends on what you're searching for.
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