Voyages of Discovery

The process of editing, having a second or, if you’re really lucky, a third pair of eyes scrutinising your work is a valuable experience. It picks up any extra hands; she’s already holding his hand. Do you mean his other hand? Those repetitions; could you look at the number of ‘gazes’ ? And any pesky time anomalies; Two weeks? I thought this was supposed to be the next morning? It’s also a useful reminder that you can never know enough about your characters; what they do, where they live, and, most importantly, what they want (or think they want!) – you don’t have to regurgitate all of that information, but you need those details very firmly fixed in your mind.

As Move Over Darling comes closer to publication, I’ve put the splurge that’s currently Book Three to one side to do some research. I know that two strangers are about to find themselves offshore in a small boat and I know that Little Spitmarsh, my sleepy seaside town from Turning the Tide will reappear somewhere along the way. The broad-brush strokes are there, but it’s time to fill in the details.

Following up a line of research, I took one book off my shelf that can never be replaced by an ecopy. One Summer's Grace is Libby Purves’s absorbing and frequently moving account of sailing round Britain with her husband and their two very small children. Our copy lived on Veryan, our old wooden boat, for many years. It’s survived a couple of soakings and being flung about in rough seas with only the loss of its cover.

Picking it up again, I was transported back to the past. Lily and Rose were older than the Purves children when they started sailing, but some of the challenges they faced were just as daunting. With that book in my hand, I thought about the dreadful passage back from Cherbourg, where Lily was Tom’s only crew left standing, our dinghy sinking under us at Alderney, running aground in the Beaulieu river and the time the two girls lay in their bunks laughing and pretending to be asleep whilst Tom and I had a heated discussion about the best place to berth. Those moments have been woven into the fabric of our family. They’re times we look back on and laugh about. I suspect with Lily about to get married we’ll be doing a bit of reminiscing about the past as well as looking towards the future. 

When we were very young; Rose at the tiller, Lily scanning the ocean!

And so, after several rounds of edits which have been such a useful prompt about attention to detail, I know that my new characters have their own stories and memories. Now it’s up to me to discover them.