3 and 4 of Helen Dunmore's Rules of Writing

JOHN KEATS
I never wanted to read his poems
more than when I saw this drawing ;)

At least once a month, I come back to The Guardian article Ten Rules for Writing Fiction. 

This time I re-read Helen Dunmore's rules. 

1 Finish the day's writing when you still want to continue.

2 Listen to what you have written. A dud rhythm in a passage of dialogue may show that you don't yet understand the characters well enough to write in their voices.

3 Read Keats's letters.

4 Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn't work, throw it away. It's a nice feeling, and you don't want to be cluttered with the corpses of poems and stories which have everything in them except the life they need.

5 Learn poems by heart.

6 Join professional organisations which advance the collective rights of authors.

7 A problem with a piece of writing often clarifies itself if you go for a long walk.

8 If you fear that taking care of your children and household will damage your writing, think of 

This week, I narrowed them down to two things to work on. I picked something I had never done and something that was worrying me.

3 Read Keats' letters.

"The persuasion that I shall see her no more will kill me. . . . My dear Mr. Brown, I should have had her when I was in health, and I should have remained well. I can bear to die -- I cannot bear to leave her. Oh, God! God! God! Every thing I have in my trunks that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear. The silk lining she put in my travelling cap scalds my head. My imagination is horribly vivid about her -- I see her -- I hear her. There is nothing in the world of sufficient interest to divert me from her a moment.

“ 1st I think poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by a Singularity – it should strike the Reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a Remembrance. – 2nd Its touches of Beauty should never be half way thereby making the reader breathless instead of content: the rise, the progress, the setting of the imagery should be like Sun come natural too him – shine over him and set soberly . . .”

" 'Tis the most difficult thing in the world to me to write a letter. My stomach continues so bad, that I feel it worse on opening any book, - yet I am much better than I was in Quarantine. Then I am afraid to encounter the proing and conning of any thing interesting to me in England. I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence."


'The silk lining she put in my travelling cap scalds my head.'
'the proing and conning of any thing interesting to me...'


I love the realism and the layering he achieves.  

4 Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn't work, throw it away. It's a nice feeling, and you don't want to be cluttered with the corpses of poems and stories which have everything in them except the life they need.

I wrote an additional chapter for ENCOUNTERS. Necessary to balance the focus, which slips too far towards Ethan at the start of the novel, it is written from the POV of the unnamed (amnesiac) girl as she awakens from her coma. 

She is trapped inside the chemical straight-jacket the Counter agents are using to immobilise her but she is aware. No name. No identity. No movement. 

I have read and rewritten this chapter. Today, I printed it out to red-pen-physically edit it . Something is wrong with the whole chapter but I don't want to bury it.  

CHAPTER 4

LICKED

The path from the dark to the grey was slick.Time paused when it passed her by. She should want to move. Her head ached on the mattress. Meshed eyelashes clung together. Heavy limbs weighed her down. And coldness spread from the needle that pierced her arm.

Do you think Keats would have made folders inside his folders inside Word folders? Or would he have deleted the work that lacked life?