Rick Goldsmith

THIRD DRAFT. My partner and I had been planning some time off after completing a five-year community media and heritage project. It had been very well-received but we both of us felt exhausted. I talked about kick-starting the novel again. My wife thought about doing an art course. But then Covid hit and a good portion of the world joined us by staying in as well. I warmed up by writing short stories and a radio play and then plunged into novel-writing. This time I would finish it I told myself. I was all impostor syndrome and fluster until I started getting good feedback on a National Centre For Writing online course (highly recommend these folks). It was the first time I’d shown my prose to strangers and was a boost I needed.

I merged the two earlier drafts, cherry picking the best bits of both. A terrible idea, but what did I know? That’s the point: my first attempt at writing a novel was like learning to design and build a table by getting various bits of mis-matched wood and old screws and just setting about doing it and learning as I went. Madness. Initially, the third draft was a bit of a Frankenstein monster, a mosaic of all my favourite ideas or pieces of prose from the previous drafts. It screamed out for a major structural edit (not that I knew that was what it was called at that point) but it was getting somewhere. I could feel it. I liked the first draft’s pace, and some internal monologues from the second so I set about some major re-drafting, pulling characters into sharper focus, reconfiguring the timelines of the plot, changing tenses, reworking dialogue – challenging myself to see the book for what it was and what it could be.

When I say third draft, I really should clarify that in my folder there were 16 sub-drafts of my third draft – some of which had relatively minor changes while others had major ones. I made a new version before doing anything too drastic in case I had to double-back.

One breakthrough I vividly remember happened when I was re-reading Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend ( a book I adored). I had a whole stack of books close at hand, trawling through them all to see how authors had dealt with the first person and present or past tense ( I also did this to see how they dealt with shifts in time or flashbacks). When I read ‘you’ on page 2 of The Friend I felt as if I’d just cracked a secret code. So much of this would have been easier for a more technically proficient or experienced writer but for me this was all hard work. Also I’d been running my own business for 27 years and had gotten used to being at least nominally competent, but here I was: a newbie, a neophyte, a novel-writing novice, and it wasn’t easy.

In between flying high with my writing there were times when I was supremely unconfident. I reached my nadir after proudly submitting what I took to be the finished version of my manuscript to C.D. Rose, who was my mentor (courtesy of the Arts Council grant I’d been awarded) and to my wife, Julia. Feeling pounds lighter, I trotted off to a 5-day Arvon residential course with Claire Fuller and Jarred McGinnis (again, thanks to the Arts Council).

After nursing my novel for so long I was utterly unprepared and ill-equipped for what happened next. At the advanced writing course with Arvon, I found being among so many budding writers and published authors overwhelming. Many of the writers were very good but we were all struggling to find the right string of words, the elusive agent or publisher and we all had a huge task ahead of us. I felt gobsmackingly daunted. When I returned home, the feedback from CD Rose and Julia was waiting for me and it hit me hard. In retrospect, it was all reasonable but at the time I felt as if any notion of writerly ability had been forcibly ejected from me and was replaced by a galloping hollowness.