Getting into gear

I was following a thread on a Facebook page for authors the other day and the discussion was about daily word count. Several people aim for a number of words each day - 1000 seems a popular number. Others don't count words at all but aim to write for an hour. One day this might produce a paragraph, other days a chapter.  When they've done their allocated word count, or time, they might carry on to exceed it, or do something else, but it's a measurable, organised way of ensuring that forward progress is made regularly.

I like organised. I like forward progress as well.

What's my method? What do I do?

Hmm.

I need to do some thinking about this, especially as I have such limited time to write. I have two days a week that I try to protect for writing, and that's just the hours between school runs, say, 9.30am until 2.30pm.  Some days I find that I can get down to things straight away and manage a blog post, a couple of scenes from the book, and still have time to surf Facebook and check out the headlines. These days are rare.

More common are the days where I start with the surfing (bad idea), try to appease the irritable Blog Monster and then find that I can't get my story into my head at all. I am distracted, and distracted by the most ridiculous things, like the need to clean windows, or check whether I should put out the black bin or the green one for the bin-men in the morning. I make endless cups of coffee before deciding that there is insufficient time left for actually...ahem...writing. Too late.

Then I sit in the car waiting outside school berating myself for wasting such wonderful empty hours with trivia when I want to get this thing written.

I'm told this is not uncommon, but I need to get over it. It's not going to write itself, and I am determined that I'm not going to give up on it. I need to be more disciplined. Maybe the 1000 words a day would do. One thousand words each day and I'd have a 90,000 word first draft in three months.

May, June, July. In time for the summer holiday, I'd have a draft to begin working on.

Except that there's no way of writing every day. There simply isn't time, or peace. I so envy those people with lots of space and time to spend on their work in progress, but at this point in my life I have school runs and a husband who is only home at weekends and more than enough swimming practices to deliver my children to every weekday evening and Saturday and Sunday too.

One thousand words twice a week when I do have the opportunity, and it'll take the best part of a year.

What I do know is that when I get in the right frame of mind, in the zone, I can write 3,000 words in a couple of hours. So I have hope.

Well, it's like this. I'm revving in neutral. I'm not getting anywhere. Time to get into gear.

Who was in the foyer?

Oh, here's a new one.

As I still haven't really sorted out a structure for this novel, my writing has jumped around a bit. I've allowed myself to pick and choose which scenes I write, and they're by no means in the right order at the moment. I'm quite certain that some will end up being discarded (ouch - really?) and there'll definitely be an awful lot of joining up and jiggling around to do at a later date.

I'm starting to think that the later date had better not be too much later, actually. The reason being that I revisited a scene I wrote quite a while ago and realised that since I wrote it, one of the character names has changed even as she sat in her armchair, doing nothing. A key part of my heroine's backstory had altered beyond recognition, and I don't even remember changing my mind about it.

Another part has my main character arriving to visit her grandmother in a residential home just as lunch was being cleared away in the dining room. Later on, it's half past eight in the morning. That'll be breakfast, then. A time warp.

Not good.

And then there's the scene where a character sits in his conservatory and watches the sun set over the hills. Then, later in the story, he's unable to sleep and watching the sun rise from the same chair... eep.

Name changes are easily sorted, and continuity problems  in terms of 'It was eight years since...' vs 'It was fourteen years since...' can be put right without any problems, but I need to watch out for more serious flaws that affect other decisions that the characters make, or how they speak, or act.

For the sunrise/sunset problem I had to draw a diagram to work out which way the building had better face. I want him to watch the sunrise, I think (or maybe the sunset) so, if that's the case, can the lady who lives across the road see the sun from her kitchen, or her bedroom?

Was it Agnes in the foyer on that occasion, or Maisie?

It matters.

So, another little dimension to keep an eye on. This is multifaceted to the nth degree; so much more complex than a blog post or a short story!

Can I juggle all the strands that I need to juggle? How many balls in the air can I manage before something comes crashing down?

We shall see.

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.

I am writing a book. Yes, me.

I'm going to write a book.

I think it's taken me several years to work up the courage to say that, and I haven't actually worked up the courage properly just yet because this blog is unlikely to be read by anyone, as I have no intention of promoting it anywhere. This is called 'security by obscurity', apparently.

Even if it's a whisper in the dark, however, I'm saying it. I'm going to write a book. Me. Yep.

I have no idea why it's so difficult to say that I'm a writer. It somehow seems arrogant to me to make such a claim, and risks someone reading the stuff I write and rejecting it as not good enough. What I write comes from the deepest and most vulnerable part of me and for someone to laugh and say, 'You think you're a writer? What makes you think you can write a book?' makes me cringe with self consciousness.

Of course, saying 'I am a writer' also begs the response, 'Have you had anything published?' And then, of course, apart from my own little orange Blogger 'Publish' button, no, nothing published. I have yet to be validated by someone who holds the keys to a publishing contract.

This works differently if you're an artist, it seems to me. If you paint, you're an artist. Just because you don't have work in a gallery doesn't mean you're not. Likewise, a musician is a musician even without a recording contract, but somehow people apply the rules differently if you write.

So I'm breaking the rules (an uncomfortable thing for me, a very law-abiding soul) and not only am I claiming that I am a writer, I am stating that I am writing a book. And books are big.

I'm aiming for 80,000 - 100,000 words, and I want them to be well-chosen, and fit together to make something good. I had an idea for a novel several years ago and events in the last few months have inspired me to find the idea, dust it off and look at it again. The idea grew and grew and linked up with some other ideas and I started to write them down.

I've got all I need. I have a faithful little laptop, a plethora of notebooks and a couple of good pens, if the children don't disappear with them. My 'E' key is a little worn, and I suspect it might disappear completely if I get this whole thing written, but that's ok. Only Real Writers have worn vowels.                          

I'm writing a book. I am so excited and I'm finding it hard to think about anything else. I feel alive and expectant and full of anticipation and hope. I know that it won't be plain sailing and there'll be times when I feel like giving up, but for now, I feel positive.

I'm going to do this.

Who knows what might happen?