Cogs and levers

It's been a bad week.

I've been busy, things have happened that have knocked my duck off, as they say here in Derbyshire, but the main thing regarding my Work In Progress is that it's suddenly become overwhelming. Too big, too ambitious, too complicated, too many words. So I've backed off.

I'm waiting for some feedback from someone who's casting an experienced eye over what there is to date, and suddenly it becomes more important that I wait and see what she says before I go any further. It might be that the whole thing is a non-starter. With the new realisation that I have to address some fairly heavy issues rather than introduce an idea but then not take it anywhere I find I'm stuck. I've lost confidence, not in the story, but in my ability to tell it.

I'm stuck. It's not a writer's block kind of thing, because I'm not sitting at the keyboard waiting for words to come; it's just that the thinking has become too difficult. I find myself not even wanting to sit at the keyboard.

Do successful novelists have times like this?

It's as if this story is an elaborate structure of cogs and levers and all was going well; it was starting to whirr into life, and then I realised that I have to insert another big cog. As a result, the whole piece needs re-engineering and work has ground to a halt. The cogs and levers lie all around me, waiting to be incorporated into the new machine. It'll work better, smoother, and it'll be more satisfying, but... it's just not built yet.

The engineer is tired and confused and not feeling up to the task.

Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible, I hope. In the meantime, let's put the kettle on.

Custard cream, anyone?




Image credit: ashton_cogs1.JPG by doctor bob. Courtesy of Morguefile.com. Used with permission.

Swimming through treacle

You know what I'm finding hard with regard to writing this novel?

Most things, really. Nothing about it is very easy.

Specifically, I'm finding it hard to sort out the structure. The way the story hangs - how to tell it. How to entwine backstory and the present day, and how to weave together the main character and the supporting cast. I am very aware that I'm probably making untold mistakes in my language, my baggy dialogue and flowery description and scene-setting, but worries about such things come much later. At the moment, I need a framework. I need to order the degrees on my protractor, so to speak.

It isn't easy.

Not that I'm complaining, you understand. I can't think of anything else I want to do, which makes the days when it feels like swimming through treacle a lot easier to manage. I can take myself off to read a novel written by someone else free of any guilt by telling myself that I want to learn how they did it; how it should be done.

It doesn't help that much. Nobody seems to be telling a story like mine. This conclusion strikes me as three things:

1. Tremendously arrogant. Surely there is nothing new under the sun. There must be many stories like mine out there, it's just that I haven't found them. I am clearly not sufficiently widely read and therefore ill-equipped to attempt to create a novel of my own.

2. Very dangerous. If nobody has written a story like mine, then a publisher isn't going to have anything to compare it with, and it's hard to discern what sort of genre it might belong to. Maybe it has indeed been done before, and nobody particularly wanted to read it?

3. A bit encouraging. Maybe I have something new to say? Perhaps there's something original about it after all?

I find that I am thinking about my story so much and so often, regularly waking in the night to write down an idea for scene or a bit of dialogue, that it all seems a bit hackneyed by now. I can no longer tell whether it's even original, let alone unusual or attention-grabbing. I am so familiar with my ideas that I don't know if it's any good at all. I thought I had a good idea, but then sometimes I'm not so sure.

Well, that's one thing I'm finding difficult.  Just one.

Gazing at the mountain

The more I think about writing a book, the more enormous and impossible it seems. I feel a bit overwhelmed.

A book! A novel, 80,000 words or thereabouts, with characters who need to become real. A story where present day and back-story are interwoven, where plot is gradually revealed, shown, not told, and characters say things and do things,  make mistakes and develop. A living thing, three-dimensional, with the power to lure readers in and prevent them from leaving. To immerse them in the story and make them laugh, or cry, or gasp, or want just one more chapter before sleep.

I want it to be good.

Can I do that?  Really?

It seems so huge. Like a vast, towering mountain, so high that the air is thin at the top. I'm just trekking in towards Base Camp and already feeling horribly ill-equipped to scale the thing in front of me. I have crampons and ropes and those little clippy gadgets that dangle from climbers' belts but I don't have the first idea how to use them.

It seems so intimidatingly big. There's going to be a lot of looking at this mountain and trying to find out all I can about it before I pull on my boots and put one foot in front of the other. I don't even know which direction to set out in.

Where do I start?

Well, I'm setting up camp at the bottom of this mountain and I'm realising that I won't get to the top in one go. It's too far, and too tricky. I need to break this task down into smaller ones, and then subdivide the smaller tasks into even littler ones. That's the way to do it. Make it less overwhelming, by having smaller, attainable goals. Camp One, Camp Two....

Kind of like a protractor, with the degrees marked off one by one, in fives and tens and so on. Nought to 180 (or 360?) in a series of tiny sections. A mountain marked off in degrees.

I can't begin to get my head around a project of this size. I can't just sit down and start writing (though I know that some people do just that). I have so much going on with other stuff; family and other commitments, that I don't have that much time for writing. I'm going to need to be fairly disciplined and structured in the way I do it because I don't have the flexibility to 'go with the flow' and write as inspiration takes me; rather I'm going to find myself with the odd hour and I'll have to learn to use it as efficiently as I can.

I need to find a way to break the huge task down into smaller chunks. If I can do that, then writing it in pieces might work. If I get to know my story well enough, I hope to be able to sit down on a free morning and know that my plan for that session is to get the plot from here...to there. This is the scene where such-and-such happens. Write that scene.

From one mark on the protractor to the next.

This is my theory. I'm used to writing short blog posts, and so small pieces are familiar territory to me. 100,000 words of structured novel is totally beyond me; I have to find a way to make it manageable.

Bit by bit.  Step by step. The longest journey starts with a single step...

That must be how mountains are climbed.





Image by cohdra (cohdra_100_2045.JPG) courtesy of Morguefile.com 
Used with permission.