Problem solved - clear headed, fuzzy writing.

I'm a good boy, I am. (N.B my daughter read this and told me it doesn't make sense - I'm not going to argue with her - she knows more than me, being six.) The good-boyness refers to my getting down and dirty with editing. I buried a novel for two years (Five Wires) and have started revising the manuscript. It's structural stuff with a few excursions into sharpening the characters. I can see some elements withering away and others thickening.

I've also started making the settings more vivid. This is a response to reading The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman. Angela Carter carried out her descriptions with such aplomb, it made me reassess mine. And I discovered there was too little in my manuscript for the reader to hook onto. When I was writing, it was all so obvious to me - where everything was, what settings looked like in their intricacy and geometry, even their textures - and now reading it back, it's fuzzy and indistinct. Fuzzy and distinct doesn't sit well with me. I know the reader has to fill in the blanks, but I feel a need to flex my descriptive writing muscles. To sharpen everything.

Ouch!

This is why writing is such an art. There must be enough detail for the reader to conjure a setting, yet not so much that it's like reading a list of attributes. And all this has to be done while furthering plot and character development.

This morning I've re-described a tower. First off, I had to try to recall from my previous description what I meant. Not only was my old writing woozy, it was contradictory. If someone were to build the tower, it would be wobbly and misshapen in the extreme (it would never pass building regulations). I kept some of the elements, and others, I moved. I decided to work from the ground up. A character sees it for the first time and assesses it against something else he's experienced recently. So I've replaced the picture I had in my mind because I can't recall exactly what I imagined and I can 't reconstruct that image from the description I made.

Complicated? Not really. I need to turn the writing dials to bring the picture into sharp focus.

'Is the image sharper now.... or now?' And 'Now... or now?'

I also feel the need to be very, very accurate and purposeful this time. To outline the essentials - to make the tower vivid, yet not overdo it. I must write so that if readers drew the tower from my description, when they later compared their drawings, there'd be a high chance of recognising the tower from my prose. But its not even as easy as that. The tower can't be any bog standard column. To earn its place in an imaginative book (let me flatter myself), to be worthy, it must have distinctive qualities. The danger here lies in making the pillar so outlandish, it defies believability. That would be okay in a world of magic or sci-fi, but this is a structure that should be able to exist in the real world as we know it.

And this is just one setting from the outside. There're plenty more to have a go at. I think to deliberately set aside one's mental image and try to place oneself in the mind of a general reader is the way forward. Two years is going to be too long in editing mode, but two weeks should suffice. And to go back and back and back to it, time and time again.

I'm also going to look at how other writers accomplish this task with efficiency, and draw upon their examples.

Like I said, I'm a good boy, I am.