Discovering the cost and benefits of my way of writing.

I always write my novels - and, indeed, often short stories - in the same way. I hand write the first draft in the good, old-fashioned way. The photo heading up this blog post is my current WIP, Three Brothers, the first of a trilogy covering the lives of my central characters from 1910 to 1940.

I work this way because I've found that it works best for my style of writing. Primarily, I find that I think better if I have the organic connection between pen and paper. The slow, physical development of the story allows me to plot more intricately and develop the story and characters properly.

There is a second, connected, reason why this is important. If you look at the photo you will see very few crossings out, no big blocks being removed (and this is a genuine and pretty typical first draft for me) and there's a good reason for that. It's not that I'm that good it's because of the fact it hurts so much to have to cross something out and go back, or restructure something to the degree that a block has to be removed and placed somewhere else in the text! I hate this so much I make damned sure I know what I'm going to write before I do so that this rarely happens.

Yes, it would be quicker to produce an electronic version first, and yes, editing would be so much easier if I did. But I think I'd, literally, lose the plot if I did this. I invariably finish first drafts of novels - I've started something like twenty-two over the years and finished twenty-one of them - and I'm sure it's because I work this way. It pushes me to know my story and how it ends and it certainly works for me.

It may not for everyone though, I accept that.

It also means that when I do type it up that first electronic draft is effectively a second draft. I can do an edit as I work, meaning that it will be closer to the finished product than I'd achieve otherwise. It actually saves me time.

There are other drawbacks though, as I've found this week.

Three Brothers was written in 2016-17. It's around 110,000 words in length and, ideally, I'd like to see it a bit shorter. As a result I have been looking at passages and thinking 'I don't need those' and leaving them out.

But I'd forgotten about the careful plotting and characterisation. In the 3-4 year gap since I first wrote those passages I'd forgotten as to exactly why I'd included them.

Yesterday, I cut out a bit from my main female characters POV that seemed unnecessary introspective. Today I had to put it back again as I got to the next section and realised just why I'd included it and how important it was to the story! It also made me think about a part I'd excluded 10,000 words before that seemed to be inconsequential but now I suspect might also be critical...

Sigh.

Just a lesson, I suppose that every mode of writing has costs and benefits.

I'd be interested to hear the opinions of other writers on this. What are the costs and benefits of YOUR method?