Trisha Ashley, the author of Chocolate Shoes and Wedding Blues, The Magic Of Christmas and Wedding Tiers takes over our blog and tells us about her process between the first draft and finished manuscript.....

I write directly onto the computer, touch-typing, though I need to see my words in print on paper before the world I am writing about becomes real to me, so I print everything out.  This can also be useful if your computer loses the chapter and you forgot to back up onto a memory stick or whatever.

      My first drafts are usually somewhere between eighty and a hundred thousand words long and written in the stream-of-consciousness style made popular by James Joyce, since I just pour the words out onto the page and don’t always bother with the punctuation or typos.  If I’m too tired to think creatively in the afternoon, though, I will often go back and tidy up the work I did in the morning.

      I rewrite the second draft from the start, and this is the moment when it all pulls together and takes wing.  It also expands radically, as I write out in full the events that have only been mentioned as having happened, vital conversations that have taken place off the page, making whole scenes or even chapters out of brief mentions.  This is classic ‘showing not telling’.  If I have some interesting fresh research on a subject thread then I will also wind that information through the novel from the beginning, since it often throws up new ideas and directions, or the main protagonists react to it in an unexpected way, so that the last third of the book especially becomes very different to the way it was in the first draft.

     Before printing out the second draft I do a ‘search and replace’ for any characters name changes and that sort of thing, in case I’ve missed any, and also a spellcheck.  By this stage the novel will generally be somewhere between a hundred and fifteen and a hundred and twenty-five thousand words long.

      I read through the print out carefully, marking any changes needed and checking the events against the timeline, put in the corrections….and then press the button, and off it goes to my editor!

    It is an odd moment, because the world of the novel will by that stage be more real than the one about me, which will appear leached of colour and a bit drab in comparison. 

    By the time the new novel has been further changed after the edits, it will often be approaching a hundred and thirty thousand words, which I think is a decent length for a good, meaty read, though I still get complaints that my books stop too soon.

Follow Trisha on Twitter - @trishaashley 

Visit her website.

To read our review of Trisha's latest novel Chocolate Shoes and Wedding Blues, click here.