After
last year when two of my novels made the finals for William Faulkner-William
Wisdom Creative Writing Competition and a third was a short-list finalist, I
decided to outdo myself and really push these novels to see if this year I can
finally breakthrough, not just with a win, but gaining the interest of both an agent
and a publisher, preferably in a two-book deal.
This is my stated intention, my goal for 2013.
In
other words, I’m going for it. I plotted
this the moment I returned from the US last August following my father’s funeral. Having failed to publish a novel before he
passed away and tired of making excuses or glancing away whenever someone asks
about my writing or my “job”, I decided enough is enough.
What
I love about novel contests are their deadlines. It gives me something to shoot for. This time around, I didn’t just want a quick
run through each novel as I’ve often done in the past for one novel or another,
sometimes three novels back to back . . . . No, this time I gave myself plenty
of time, nearly eight months. I started
with A Perfect Day for an Expat Exit,
a thoroughly revamped novel in 2012, though I went too far in changing it to
third person, which I did for last year’s contest. Although it made the finals, it wasn’t working
as effectively as I knew it could. I wanted
to change it back to first person, but using past tense instead (previously it
was in the present tense as I mentioned in an earlier blog, inspired by
rereading The Great Gatsby). I had actually started to revise the novel before the 2012 results, before my
father passed away.
Often
I read my novels out loud inside my own head, but I now and then I’d catch
myself on automatic, glossing over sections. This time around I vowed to read the novel out
loud, really out loud, wanting to hear the cadence of each word, all 88,000 of
them. Not one time, but read each
chapter aloud three times, editing as I go along. It was a painfully slow process and required
drinking a ton of water (and a lot of toilet breaks), but I was determined to
make this novel the best that I could make it.
I found myself making lots of changes and catching stuff that didn’t get
caught in previous edits. Then I read
the novel aloud once more in January, in February, and again in April (that’s
six times!) before sending it to Faulkner-Wisdom.
Next
up was An Unexpected Gift from a Growling
Fool, which was a short-list finalist for Faulkner-Wisdom in 2009 under a
different title. Outraged by the first
graders being shot in the Newtown school shooting just before Christmas, I was
determined that this novel, which also involves a shooting by a child, needed
to be in the on-going and future dialogues about guns and children, so I wanted
to revamp it. I changed the title,
changed the name of the town, introduced a new opening including an anecdote as
to how the town got its name, Growling.
Again, determined to raise the writing to a higher level, I read out loud
each chapter three times, all 103,000 words.
I then read it out loud again twice more in February (separated by two
weeks), and again in April.
In
March, I was happy that the April 1st deadline for the Faulkner-Wisdom contest
got pushed back to May 1st (and again to May 15th), so I could wrap up the rewrite
of first 50 pages of The Girl in the Bathtub
for their the novel-in-progress category, a 2012 finalist; The Act of Theft, my 12,300 word novella entry; and move onto my
third full novel The Lonely Affair (previously
titled The Resurrection of Jonathan Brady),
short-list finalist 2012 & 2011
Faulkner-Wisdom and a quarter-finalist
in the 2012 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. Now
I had the time to do the same treatment of reading each chapter out loud three
times (98,550 words), then again in April and twice more in May, and sending it
off with my blessing last night.
So
right now I’m feeling pretty tired, but pretty good, too, knowing that I gave the three
novels—all five entries—their best shot.
I’m also pretty excited about picking up where I left off with The Girl in the Bathtub, (around the
200-page mark) with one hundred and fifty pages of notes to guide the way. If I can complete this by using the same discipline
that I’ve been using since I got back from my father’s funeral (and reading it
out loud, too), then 2013 will be a pivotal year for me and bear fruits for
years to come. And if I can sell one of
those novels this year, even better!
As
they say talent and persistence always win out (talent, without persistence, gets
you nowhere) and reading your work out loud is the perfect way to take your
writing to a higher level (as long as you do the hard work and make those
corrections!) even for those expat writers based in the far-flung corners of
the world, like me here in Borneo.
Here are links to some
of my author-to-author interviews of first novelists:
Ivy
Ngeow author of Cry
of the Flying Rhino, winner
of the 2016 Proverse Prize.
Plus:
Beheaded on
Road to Nationhood: Sarawak Reclaimed—Part
I
