I’ve been back re-editing The Radiant City since the end of August, picking up where I left off in April after getting three-quarters of the way through, only to get derailed by a run of application rejections which put me into panic mode and meant there was no time for the luxury of being literary for several months.
The version I’m working on is Draft 4. Draft 1 was the draft I handwrote over 31 non-consecutive days between January and March 2023. Draft 2, I think, was completed by Autumn 2023; but I’m not entirely sure about that now. That’s the draft I shared with some beta readers, who all gave me very generous feedback, which I then used to produce Draft 3 by the end of August 2024.
It’s taken until now to get Draft 4 moving (due in no small part to the small matter of attempting to write a second novel, Obsolete Constellations, at the end of 2024, and some of you will already know how THAT panned out…)
I’m going to use Draft 4 as the thing I approach prospective agents with. I’ve procrastinated and made excuses for long enough about this. I have to overcome, or at least manage, my fear of rejection and humiliation enough to get the ball rolling. Who knows? Maybe there’s an agent out there who’ll like what they see. Miracles do happen.
The alternative to sending Draft 4 out, of course, is NOT to send it out this year, but to keep tinkering with it, maybe forever, and to tell myself it’ll be ready to send out EVENTUALLY, just not right now. But that alternative, of course, is a load of bollocks.
I saw/heard Matt Haig on Instagram recently, in discussion with David Perell, where he says:
“It’s an interesting art, editing, because you have to go in knowing there’s no such thing as perfection. You have to go in knowing there’s no perfect novel that you can reach. And also understanding that there comes a point that, each draft you’re improving things, could start to make it worse. Like, there’s a diminishing returns that happens. With me, it’s like the fourth or fifth round. After that, you’re getting so far away from the thing you started with that it’s getting worse. And you see it in the film industry all the time, when things have just been too meddled with.”
And down in the comments — I know, I know, that’s somewhere we should never go, because as I read elsewhere on IG, underneath a post on Mary Beard discussing Christopher Nolan’s version of The Odyssey, “Comments sections are where intellect goes to set itself on fire”, or as someone added underneath that, “or turn itself into a pig” — the writer Dalton Lyle added this wonderful anecdote:
“There is a Chinese idiom called ‘painting feet on a snake’. There was a snake-painting contest in which a guy finished his snake first and, while waiting for the others to catch up, decided to paint feet on the snake to add something extra nice to it. Turns out it was a stupid idea and he lost the contest for that reason. It’s used in Mandarin to express overdoing things to a fault.”
I’m working hard to reduce the word count with this redraft as I know big books make life even harder for debut novelists. So far, I’ve removed nearly 30,000 words from a manuscript that was about 152,000 words before I started. I’m not just cutting for cutting’s sake, I promise, but I am trying my best to turn the heat up under this book so that it becomes more intense in flavour, concentrated, like syrup, or like a really delicious gravy.
Ahead of me lies the awfulness of having to write my agent approach letter. I can’t even bear thinking about that just yet. For now, I’m going to focus on producing a draft that I’ll feel happy to send out to The Powers That Be, doing all I can to avoid the temptation to stick a few feet on my story’s serpentine body… and the rest will just have to wait.
