Why I love research—Tricia McGill

Find all my books here on my Author page at BWL

A week or so ago I went by ferry along the Yarra River from Docklands in

Melbourne to Williamstown just down the coast a bit. The ferry chugged along at roughly the speed I would imagine was taken by the early settlers. I love my city despite its ever-growing concrete and glass towers. The story goes that John Batman wrote in his journal on 8th  June 1835 two days after sailing up the Yarra River, "So the boat went up the large river, and I am glad to state about six miles up found the river had all good water and very deep. This will be the place for a village."

That last sentence later became famous as the "founding charter" of Melbourne.

Batman signed a so-called treaty with 8 Wurundjeri Aborigine elders to gain 600,000 acres of land around Port Philip, or Melbourne as it would become, and another 100,000 acres around what is now Geelong on the other side of Port Philip Bay. For some time Batman's Treaty, as it came to be called, was assumed by some historians to be a forgery.

By 1838, just 2½ years after John Batman’s announcement that “This will be the Place for a Village“, Melbourne’s population and infrastructure had already grown. By then Melbourne had 3 churches, 13 hotels, 28 business places, and 64 dwelling houses.   On October 27, 1839, the ship David Clark arrived from Scotland in what was then called Hobson’s Bay with 166 adults and 63 children—a voyage of more than four months. The new arrivals were taken ashore in the ship’s boats at the beach opposite Williamstown, and walked overland two miles to the banks of the Yarra River, where 50 tents were pitched in three parallel lines, each numbered to avoid confusion. The newcomers could only reach Melbourne via a punt on the Yarra. What began as a collection of tents and huts on the banks of the Yarra River that was used for bathing and drinking water, by 1850 become so polluted it was the cause of an epidemic of typhoid fever resulting in many deaths.

 
So as you can guess my imagination worked overtime that February 2020 day as the small ferry chugged peacefully along the Yarra River, where towering buildings now reach skywards in splendour, as I try to picture what it must have been like for those early settlers working their way in their vessels along the river where it is likely kangaroos, or emus sat and stared at the intruders. Or possibly natives who were conned by Batman out of the land that had been solely theirs for thousands of years.

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Revisiting and Revising by Prscilla Brown

From its first incarnation, this contemporary romance was ruthlessly reworked; 

the character on the cover received a new name and personality.

http://books2read.com/Class-Act

  

I've been involved in a textile arts exhibition showcasing items which the artist has revisited, upcycled, recycled, remodelled, or transformed in some way.  Think jeans cut off above the knee, rebirthed as shorts and decorated with bright fabric, or, with appropriate stitching, reappear

as a bag again embellished.A floral skirt way out of fashion is reconstructed into a shade for a table lamp; several kinds of textiles, fabrics, knitting, crochet, in pieces of carious sizes and colours, are hand-stitched together covering all surfaces of a second-hand wooden dining chair.

 

As I chopped up boring old scarves into sections and reassembled them onto a length of fabric, the new cloth to metamorphose into a wrap, I thought about how I use the rethinking terms for this kind of creativity in my fiction writing.

With all my novels, having reached what I initially consider to be the final draft, I print them out and put them aside for an indefinite time. I do enjoy editing and prefer to edit this "final version" on hard copy.

Write without fear. Edit without mercy. 

(Quotation found on Internet, source unknown.) 

For me, returning to a manuscript always reveals assorted plot holes, inconsistencies, repetitions,

weak characters and other glitches. Class Act (not its original name) remained in the drawer for the

longest period, four or five years. When I revisited it, I was shocked. Is this the best you can do?  Too long. Too much detailed backstory. Too many secondary characters. Extraneous events and trivia. Unbelievable female protagonist (insufficient qualifications and experience for the job she's appointed to). I wrote this while I was working in the same environment as the story is set, and this version now read as if I'd wanted to include several incidents which did happen but which were entirely out of place in the novel.

A major revision was required.

The prologue had to go, all 4000 words of it. Necessary information was salvaged and worked where appropriate into the first and second chapters, which also better defined the personalities of the protagonists. Realising I was making more changes to her than to him and to some of the scenes together, I severely chopped up and altered her backstory, reassembling the pieces into a shorter and more credible version (her one-time Mexican lover was not necessary), and stitching bits into the story where relevant.

 

A number of secondary characters lost their places (she did not need to have a childhood nanny with whom she keeps in touch). I found several scenes which did not move the story along. Some were beyond redemption and permanently discarded (whyever did they go to the zoo?); those I had fun writing and wanted to keep received remodelling so that they did provide forward momentum (adding a thunderstorm while they were eating outside at a restaurant nudged their growing attraction up several notches); others could be reconstructed and their timewise position in the story relocated. These and many other repairs, including a re-vamped ending, in this extensive revision transformed both the energy and the length of Class Act, sending about 30 000 words to the bin.

And now, it's time to take out another manuscript from its incubation in the drawer. I'm wondering how much editing will be required for this one!

Enjoy your reading. Priscilla.

http://bwlpublishing.ca

 

https://bookswelove/net/authors/brown-priscilla-romance 

https://priscillabrownauthor.com