BY CHRIS MANNERS

Good writing is good reading.

It’s not enough to toil away before dawn or late at night, pen scratching over the paper – or, these days, fingers pounding the laptop.

When thou hast done, thou hast not done, as the poet John Donne used to say, and he was a body in a position to know something about it.

After the writing, there’s the re-writing: chewing over sentences until they say what you want them to say in just the way you want it said.

Some aim for prose so clear it’s invisible and the reader sees straight through into the story; no distractions. Others – and among these I confess my sympathies lie – prefer a paragraph to have more tricks up its sleeve than Derren Brown in a baggy jumper! Either way, the finished version refines the first one.

Successful writers usually recruit early readers to help them assess and improve a manuscript: publishers, literary agents, friends and family. It can be a bruising process, but as Dorothy L Sayers put it in one of her mysteries, what does that matter so long as it makes a good book?

Writers’ Circles help. You can unfurl some crumpled sheets of manuscript, clear your throat nervously, say, “dunno if this is any good, but it’s something I’m working on”, and read it out. Usually, your mouth is dry while you do it and your tongue feels too big; it’s never altogether easy. But in return, other writers listen carefully and tell you what they think.

The October meeting of the Airedale Writers’ Circle was a manuscript night like this. Contributions included a fragment of autobiography, a short story about dog-napping, the blurb to advertise a children’s book soon to be published on Kindle, and a chapter from a forthcoming crime thriller by Lesley Horton.

Here is what a good early reader can do. Mine was a scene set in a station buffet just after the Second World War, when a young soldier comes home feeling like a hero in his demob suit and suntan. He’s brought back to earth with a bump by rationing, winter weather and a grumpy woman behind the counter.

“The rock buns,” I wrote, “looked only fit for stoning sinners.” Nice little joke about stale cakes, along with others about weak tea, flabby sandwiches and British Rail catering of days gone by, as though nobody had ever thought of mocking them before (see what I mean about first drafts needing a polish?).

“Don’t like that,” someone said. “It’s too violent.” She was right. I want a gormless young man and a war-weary tea lady, not something that hammers out danger. It’s a bad line, out of keeping, and it needs to go. How about: “He fancied a rock bun but hadn’t seen a dentist in years?” Perhaps, or perhaps I’ll come up with something completely different. Either way, it still needs work.

A good, critical reader helps to make a better writer. And the bruises soon fade.