Mulling about The Novel

Good meeting with my Novel Group last week. We get together around once a month. Mail out our work a week beforehand (ideally! - mine went out three days beforehand, but the others were very patient and managed to find time to read it). Then give each person between half an hour and an hour of discussion time. The theory is that the person whose work is being discussed doesn't say anything but just listens and sifts through what is being said by their 'readers'. We don't manage to hold to that rule very well, but we do seem to manage to avoid the position where the writer passionately defends their work from 'criticism'.

There was some very interesting discussion around the work of a member of the group who has just started a new novel. We were all very excited and intrigued, and immediately began to weigh in with suggestions and feedback. Then our wise old bird said 'don't listen to any of this, just keep writing and enjoy yourself. Finish your first draft and work out what you want to do and then test it out against what other people suggest'. Good advice about an early idea. So much better to play, experiment, write and write, until the idea has formed itself, rather than presenting the embryo to the crows!

In this meeting we had a lot of discussion about structure too. The need for the novel to progress not though 'brilliant' writing but through a shape and logic that is apparent to the reader. I find it hard to hold a sense of that as I write, which is why I always start in longhand. It seems to be easier to be critical of sprawling pages of green ink, and edit and streamline them, than to do the same with neatly typed pages on the screen that the computer has laid out and made sense of in all its digitally pre-programmed ways. And of course having a group of faithful readers in the Novel Group who are willing to say - 'this is a digression, this doesn't make sense, I didn't understand what you were trying to do here......'

Read/writ/er

they are very entwined
it is a great excitement to play the interactions and complexities that connect them

Members of the group are: Alan McDonald,http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/writers/mcdonald/ ,Brighid Rose, Katie Jukes, Terry Simpson, Gail Bolland, Mandy Sutter http://www.mandysutter.com/
Char March http://www.commapress.co.uk/?section=authors&page=marchpage