Draft 6 and 7 of Helga’s Story

               

Draft 6 is all about making sure that the characters are consistent, rounded and believable. I actually didn’t find a lot to do here. I have sharpened a little the one who might be described as the antagonist.

I noticed something else as well as I worked my way through this draft. Each chapter with Helga as the main character portrays her life during the Holocaust as it relates to something that is happening in 2001. The connection wasn’t quite working in one case. She was supposed to be talking about what it was like being a single mother but she talked more about what made her sleep with Jamie’s natural grandfather in the first place. This was easy to rectify. I just had to change one of her speeches.

Draft 7 is about cause and effect and here is a real opportunity to look for any plot holes. I did find that there was one sub-plot that had no closure. This was rectified by adding a paragraph to the final chapter.

I realised that I had made the grandmother with whom Helga lived in her youth a maternal grandmother rather than a paternal one. She needed to be the paternal one. This meant rewriting one paragraph.

There was also something not properly explained in part of the back story. How did the Thomas farm stay in the family when Tom Thomas’s son, Thomas Thomas was unable to farm because of a disability?  Well, by the time someone needed to take over from Tom Thomas, the Thomases had two children who were brought up to be farmers. So they had to hire help which also helped to explain why the Thomases could never afford to buy the farm off the Müllers. Again, I needed to add a paragraph.

And so it continues.    

The Little Wartime Library by Kate Thompson

 

A library exists on an Underground station. It contributes to a whole small society that hunkers down there, with three tier bunks, a hairdresser and a theatre. It exists in the shadow of the Bethnal green Tube Station disaster, which also features in this book.

Such a library did exist though the one Kate Thompson has given us is bigger and more like an overground library in terms of opening times, the people who worked there and who visited, and the activities offered.  

Thompson has been thorough in her research and much of this was conducted during the Covid-19 pandemic. Each chapter is headed with a quote from a librarian about the value of books and libraries. The chapter reflects what was in the quote – even having protagonist Clara Button painting her only decent pair of shoes black when she goes for an important conversation with her boss. Like the lady in the quote, she finds that her shoes drip all over the floor.

This text again poses the question about how much should we and can we fictionalise what has actually happened.

Novelists are anyway professional liars who tell an awful lot of truth. Thompson does this here and can be forgiven for bending the facts a little. She captures the emotional essence of a young widow who has lost her husband in a tragic way, of the young girl who lost her sister in that terrible night in Bethnal Green and of a young man who has a secret he cannot share easily with his fiancée.

At times the characters speak rather too rationally or philosophically for them to be completely convincing.  

Nevertheless, this is a very satisfying read. Thompson also treats us to insights into her research at the end of the novel.

It is also bang up to date: the opening and closing scenes are set in 2021, with one of the main characters revisiting the site of the little library. She draws parallels between the restrictions imposed because of Covid and those imposed because of World War II. In both cases books offer an escape.          

Drafts 4 and 5 of Helga’s Story

 

Yes, I have now completed drafts 4 & 5 of Helga’s Story.

Draft 4 

This is all about time and making sure it works.  I tend to have time planned in but as the story take over this may slip a little. So, now I’ve gone back and made sure that the time is logical in each chapter.  Will they have enough time to do what I making them do?  Beware of eleven month pregnancies and do allow them to sleep and eat and perform other human functions even if you don’t go into detail. In fact, please don’t go into detail.  

Some chapters, particularly where Helga is reminiscing about the past, cover several years. By contrast Jamie’s chapters cover just one or two days, but we sometimes skip forward within a chapter.

I’ve now put the place and the date at the beginning of each chapter. Now, I need to decide whether I’m going those places and dates in. And whether to have precise dates or just a month.

I have noticed as I’ve started Draft 6 that I need to reorder a couple of chapters and if I do decide to keep the labels I’ll have to relabel.

Draft 5

This is deciding whether the text suits the reader and the market. This is a little difficult in this case. There are only a few works which show this German point of view. Yet it does contain many of the characteristics of historical fiction and in particular of novels set in the 1940s. Yet it is different again because we have the 21^st century part.  Readers and whoever published this will decide in the end.

I’m at least reasonably happy that the text is consistent with itself and speaks to the same reader throughout.

Other things I noticed

In Draft 4 I found another instance of quad bike that I have now changed to quad-bike.

A crucial sub plot is on character’s girlfriend finishing with him. I thought I’d made this happen on two separate occasions I hadn’t. I had one instance of her been disgruntled with him and then a reference later on to her ending the relationship.

In Draft 5 I say that Helga began to call Eberhard Bear, just like his sister Gisela did. However, she never does as she tells Jamie of her past. So I’ve altered this to say she sometimes called him Bear.

Two sets of holiday cottages are mentioned: one at the big farm complex where Jamie is offered a job and potential ones on the Jenkins’ farm. In both cases I had to make sure the references were logical.

I had made Helga’s mother’s hair both wavy and straight.  I settled on straight or even just “long, dark and shiny”.

 

To put in dates and places or not?

 

One year at the SCBWI conference in Winchester I “won” a critique from an agent. She read the opening of The House on Schelberg Street and the synopsis. She didn’t like the text and said that if I needed to put in dates and places the writing wasn’t clear enough.

Just a few days later the text was accepted for publication – dates and all. The editor wanted me to cut our some of the scenes, and especially some of the letters. A friend who read the book after it was published asked about the now missing scenes. He was checking that everything was logical.

Whether or not I include dates and places, I check scrupulously that time works and that the difference in setting is logical. I even use a perpetual calendar – and access weather descriptions to make sure my texts are accurate.

I tried with Face to Face with the Führer to dispense with places and times altogether in chapter headings. However, the editor has suggested putting them in – she’d thought events set in World War I were in World War II. So, a task recently has been to put the places and dates back in. However, instead of putting them at the beginning of each chapter, I’ve created sections of just the place, month and year.

Ironically I’m also on the “time” edit of Helga’s Story. I’m putting the times and dates into each chapter heading at the moment to make sure it all works. I’m not sure whether to leave them in or not. Helga remembers large chunks of time. Jamie is living through an intense few weeks though her time also stretches out longer in the end.

I’ve read a few with time and place details in chapter headings and in fact I pay little attention to them.  Only if the prose puzzles me a little do I go back and look.

The most recent book I’ve read like this is The Jane Austen Society by Natalie Jenner. This is actually set just after the end of the war.  In fact, I took absolutely no notice of the dates at all.

My first three Schellberg Novel all have time and dates as chapter headings. Should I do the same for the others?

Draft 3 Helga’s Story and editing Face to Face with the Führer

 

 I have now completed another draft of Helga’s Story. I’ve added in two more chapters which deal with a sub-plot that had been left hanging.

I found another little plot detail that needed resolving but that was just a matter of adding in another paragraph in a late chapter.

There were one or two other loose ends that I had to tighten with just a sentence here and there.

I noticed also some optional spelling anomalies and have done Find and Replace to address those.

Even at this stage I’ve noticed some overuse of certain words and phrases and again have used the Find function to identify them all and change some of them.

In this book I’ve not got dates in chapters though I am just about to do the time edit in which I will temporarily put a time identifier into chapter headings. I want to establish that time works, so I’ll also be figuring out how much time has passed in each chapter. On the whole, I don’t think the reader needs these time markers so much in this one; much of the present day narrative happens in a short space of time and then we have Helga’s reflections of the past.

I’d also taken out the time markers for my chapter headings in Face to Face with the Führer. However, the editor has suggested I should have them in.

In The House on Schellberg Street, Clara’s Story and Girl in a Smart Uniform I have very precise time markers, including the day of the month. For Face to Face with the Führer I’m just putting a place and a year for whenever time jumps forwards.

The editor has also pointed out that I have two deaths in two subsequent chapters.  I’ve decided to reorder the story a little so that there is some normal life between the two deaths.

She has also suggested an extra plot point that I am going to include. What might have happened if the protagonist had acted differently when she found herself standing opposite Hitler. And she’s given me an idea for a whole new series of books.