Your life, the way you tell it, is all about the people, the encounters, the events. But because you’re so familiar with each of them, it can sometimes just seem like a series of unconnected dots, not part of a pattern, and not the work of art and feat of resilience it really is.
How do you know that you’ll keep your reader engaged? It’s impossible to guarantee, but you can at least be fairly sure that if you’re interested in the subject and engaged by it, then you’re fairly likely to take your readers on a journey with you, and not lose them along the way.
Remember – my aim is for you to share what you’ve got as widely as possible. And for that, you need to be 100% happy with it. Only then will I also be 100% satisfied.
The piece is nowhere near finished after that first draft. And this is where the spiralling process comes in. It needs revisiting on several occasions before it can move on, and just like you can’t jump from step 1 to step 5 on a staircase, you can’t move from stage 1 to stage 5 in the writing. Sometimes you realise you’re both moving on up and going round in circles.
As a fan of detective series, I’ve always been fascinated by what are known as “evidence boards” – the panels covered in pictures, clippings, maps, and words which sleuths use to display all the clues they’ve amassed. But how does that apply to writing?
We’ve come a long way in terms of technology. Interviewers before my time had to be excellent note takers, perhaps in shorthand. And of course interviews had to be conducted face to face in the same room, or perhaps down the telephone.