The Dead End Approach to Deconstruction and Rewriting

You thought I was kidding, didn't you?

You didn't really imagine we were going to discuss all the ways to screw up a book and eventually get on the right track again.

Well, like Harry Hyena in the immortal Richard Scarry books, "You were wrong." We read a lot of Richard Scarry books when my kids were little and Harry Hyena was a favorite character -- mostly because he so often was wrong.

But I digress . . .

There is another way to go wrong -- the dead end. You can take the wrecking ball to whatever 'road construction' you've got up to that point. And, as I pointed out when writing about Charlie's book, sometimes it's justified. But it's not the option of first resort.

The 'dead end' approach is to back up slowly. This is also known in our house as "the Cornish road" approach to book writing. Anyone who has driven on Cornish roads will not need an explanation for that. They know the "I'm a pinball" feeling you get when going blindly down an extremely narrow -- and narrowing further, not to mention switching back and going uphill and down and whoops, there's a bridge -- lane with hedges higher than your head on either side. The fact that a large part of the hedge seems to be native granite doesn't encourage forays across country, either. And here comes a truck -- er, sorry, lorry -- heading your way. Or sheep. Sometimes it's sheep. Sometimes it's a lorry full of sheep or the book equivalent thereof.

So you back up. Carefully. Studying, as you go, all the possible outlets in the hedgerows, looking for glimmers of light that might lead you into a road thus far unexplored and certainly more likely to lead you into the light than the one you're on.

Sometimes you have to get out and move a few rocks. Sometimes you have to widen things a bit, put up a signpost or two, do a little paving. But very often what you need to get to the end is already in there -- the tiniest gap between two boulders. Something you didn't see earlier when you were hurtling along unawares.

That's why it's not a good idea to go directly to the wrecking ball. It's always there if you need it. But sometimes it's better to go back, painstaking and annoying though it is, to see what you might have passed up that you can use to get to The End. What little hints and directions and useful people or places or sheep or pubs along the way can you make use of in ways you might never have imagined.

It's sort of an exercise in mining your own subconscious. You write along, blithely putting stuff in because it seems to work, and then, when you have to stop because you're lost or stuck or staring into the headlights of a lorry filled with sheep, you have to back up and look for alternatives. And most of the alternatives you will end up using are already there. The subconscious part of your writing mind (which is to say, 95% of it in the case of my own) already knows you're going to be coming back and has helpfully provided pubs, dogs, cranky old ladies, boys playing catch and in my current ms -- a Brazilian property developer on the telephone saying, "Psssst. Follow me." -- to give me an out.

Who knew? Not me. But I can see potential in him.

I can see a way to get Sadie out of this scene. Even better, I can see a plot complication that Mr Brazilian could offer quite a ways down the road. This is the best part of the backing up from the dead end. It's the fork in the road I didn't see the first time through. The road not taken.

Until now.

Somebody should write a poem about that.