Ideas like buses

I had an idea earlier on today.  I was in the middle of writing something - I was concentrating, and then this idea sneaked up and wanted my attention. I pushed it away, fobbing it off with '...in a minute...' and it was so offended that it disappeared and hasn't been back.

I knew I should have written it down. I should have made a mental (or physical) note of what I was doing, suspended that thought process for a moment or two and scribbled down the idea before resuming task one.

Silly me.

Now I'm left with a nagging sense that it was a Great Idea. One of the best. And now it's gone.

Two ideas came at the same time, you see, and I was flummoxed. Like waiting for ages and ages at a bus stop (in the rain) and then two buses come at once. As I clamber on the first, fumbling for my bus pass, the second sails on by. I will never know what it might have been like to ride on that bus; who I might have met, what I might have seen - because I got on the first one.

That's what happened to me this morning.

Can't think why I didn't make a note. I am such a note-writer that my desk, every handbag I own, the kitchen counter and bedside drawer all house multiple notebooks. I have scraps of paper all over the place. I keep a notepad by my bed and several nights a week I attempt to capture something that comes to me in the hours of darkness; a dream, an idea, a snatch of dialogue, or some vague and random thought that I don't want to let go of.

This Notebook By The Bed technique has been met with variable degrees of success. I have tried not putting the light on, to avoid waking the husband, or indeed to avoid waking myself up too much, but this is not to be advised. You can very easily find that you've written a paragraph, but with each line overlaying the first and rendering them unintelligible. Or the first three words are on the notepad, the rest on the bedside table. Or, as a friend of mine shared, it turned out that the pen had no ink and you're left trying to decipher the indentations.

Very often my nocturnal scrawling are illegible come the clear light of day; whatever it was that was burning in my brain did not translate well to my hand. Of the messages I could read, however, I have captured some remarkable insights in my night time notebook. Consider the possibilities of the following:

'The lard in the bushes is too eggy. But THIS WILL BE ALRIGHT. It will be ALRIGHT.'

or:

'Try putting ALL of them in.' 

Alternatively, this could be a fascinating story prompt:

'He asks her, and she just stares at him. It was too late.'

No idea who he is, or who she is, or what he asked her, but the drama of those two sentences. Breaks your heart, doesn't it?

For sheer frustration value, I can't beat the following:

'THIS IS IT! THIS IS DEFINITELY IT.'

What?! What?! I really need to know..... Or then there's the terror of waking to find this written large on the notepad next to you:

"Don't do it."

On a lighter note, my husband once told me that I stirred as he came to bed after watching a late film. Without waking completely, I grasped his hand and said with some urgency:

'The blue ones. You've got to watch the blue ones.'

He wrote that one down, after he'd finished laughing.

Then there are the myriad of notes that I can't read. Excerpts include (and this is just what they look like - could be accurate, knowing my propensity to scrawl things that make no sense):

'Lemons. All of them used to be fussy lemons but now they're aggressive, unpleasant.' 

'Get your act together.'

Yes indeed.

My absolute favourite, however, is the time I awoke and reached for the notepad, and wrote the following:

'No worries.'

I even underlined it, and added a smiley face. It was clearly discernible as a smiley face, even though the eyes were slightly offset in a cubist kind of way.

'No worries. :-)' 

I like to think that one was from God.

Hard work and jigsaw puzzles

There's a definite slogging aspect to this novel writing. A sort of daily grind kind of hard work thing that you know about, but don't fully realise.

I knew that writing a book was likely to be hard work; it stands to reason. A blog post of 600-1000 words can take me anything from half an hour to a whole morning, so piling up 80,000 - 100,000 words and trying to make something out of them was going to be a challenge. What I failed to grasp was that there would be parts of the book that I couldn't wait to get my hands on, and other parts, necessary parts, that would need to be written whether I want to or not.

Some scenes are exciting (to me, at least!) and others are a bit mundane. There are parts of the story that I like better than others, to be honest. My heroine has a back-story and a present-day story, and so do the other characters, and these need to be woven together. Some parts of their stories I am longing to write - indeed often the temptation is too much and I skip around, writing scenes as they come to me, rather than telling the story in a linear manner.

It feels a little like emptying a jigsaw puzzle out of the box onto the table and looking at the pieces. Some of them you can see, and some are still blanks because they landed upside down. Some are identifiable - look! this is a picture of a greengrocer's shop, and there are some oranges! Other pieces are much more subtle - they must be parts of the background.
Not exciting, perhaps, but necessary; the picture would be incomplete without them.

So I start to order the pieces. First turning them all over so I see what I have to choose from, then organising them into sections. Finally, when it looks as if everything is there, I begin to join them together. When I do, it's easiest to start with the edge pieces, to make a frame, so to speak.

So writing a book is like doing a jigsaw. Brightly coloured areas and background. Parts that seem to come together easily - I can see the rest of the box of oranges; they stand out - and those bits that are hard to pull together.

I wonder if this will come back to bite me, this piecemeal approach. I've already joined together different segments of the book only to find that a character's name changed at some point, and so I know that I shall have to be on the ball for continuity issues, but I dread that the book will have a disjointedness about it - that it won't flow properly because I wrote it out of order, rather than sitting down and beginning at the beginning and letting events unfold.

I wonder. Surely everyone doesn't do that, do they? Surely there are many ways to write a novel? I know that JK Rowling had detailed plans of her Harry Potter books, a discovery that made me feel much better about mine. Having said that, as far as I can tell, hers was a couple of sides of A4. Mine runs to eighteen pages....

One thing I definitely need to bear in mind, though: if I'm finding a section of the book fairly dull to write, then there's a strong chance that it might turn out to be fairly dull to read. Maybe the parts that I'm putting off writing don't need to be substantial parts, more references, snippets of dialogue or indeed omitted completely.

Think. Think. And sit down and get writing.

Bird by bird, buddy

Well, it hasn't been the most productive week in the history of this project; it might be more accurate to say that it has probably been the least productive yet, in fact. The computer was only switched on once or twice and the brain less often than that.

Life kind of took over. Started with a poorly daughter and ended up with widespread poorliness and lethargy and everything put on hold.

The bright point of the week was reading Anne Lamott's wonderful book 'Bird By Bird'.

I realised that my 'protractor' idea of breaking down a huge writing project into tiny chunks to try to get your head around it was not at all original - it was her idea a long time ago.

This isn't one of those moments where I thought I'd had an original thought and then found out with crushing disappointment that it's nothing new (I've had quite a few of those); no, this is a rare and precious time when the fact that I've stumbled on a path well-trodden is a huge, whopping relief.

Listen to this:

"Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he'd had three months to write. [It] was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and unopened books on birds, immobilised by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, 'Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird." 

Wonderful.

As I said in the last post, I've been feeling overwhelmed and intimidated by the vast scale of the project and that sense of inadequacy, combined with being an ailing member of The House of Poorliness this last week has made me feel like giving up. Ms Lamott's 'Bird by Bird' has restored my faith in my story, and I will try to put on the blinkers that prevent me from looking at the whole thing, just concentrating on one small job at a time. One brick. One degree.

One bird.



Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, 1994 Anchor Books, New York.
Chapter Two, page 18-19.

The need to get it right

Oh, research. I love it.

Really, I love it. I once had a job as a researcher and I would like to boast that I know how to work a microfiche machine. I bet nobody under about thirty-five can say that. I started to try to explain to my nine year old daughter what a microfiche machine was, but soon gave up when she asked if it was a bit like Google. Not really. Still, it's a lost art, and I was a dab hand.

This book has me researching lots of things from modern farming techniques to hunting for mushrooms, train timetables to things that might go wrong with an Aga.

Way back before the children came along I was a hand therapist and I used to make splints for people with a huge range of hand injuries but my information is a decade out of date so I've written to an old friend to see if they can fill some gaps for me because a character in my book is going to need their services.

How long does the average cat live? Just your common or garden moggy?

What's the best way to break into a car if you've left your keys inside (and what model of car that would permit such an oversight in these days of central locking, might still be on the road?)

The perfect soft-boiled egg. Four minutes, or four and a half? What size egg?

Can badgers climb? Can they jump?

Mending a leaky roof? The correct way to prune roses, and when might they flower? How long does it take to milk a herd of cows?

How do you use a twin-tub washing machine?

Got to get it right. I hate it when I read a book and the author is obviously talking about something he doesn't know about, or asserts that something is so when it isn't. On the other hand, I love it when I learn about something while reading a novel; when the author clearly knows her stuff.

I want to know my stuff. If I can't find things out, or find somebody who knows, I'll find another way to tell the story.

In the meantime, I'm having a lovely time with my research.




Image credit:
Rocco_2356(11).JPG 
by Alvimann
Courtesy of Morguefile.com
Used with permission

Telling a story, and telling it well

Ok, another moan.

I've been reading more novels than usual lately, partly to inspire me, to check out what other people are doing, and (I suppose) to see what makes the grade these days; how good does something have to be to be published?

I have had a good run; since Christmas I've read eight novels. One of them I found poor, with typos a-plenty - even at one point a misspelling of one word twice in different ways on the same page - and with a predictable plot and some fairly glaring problems. However, it seems to be doing well. Another three I thought were entertaining, quick and easy and well-deserving of their place on a bookshelf.

And then, another - ah. It's so good that I find myself despairing. Why bother, when there are such skilled storytellers out there? When someone has had an idea so original, so intelligently told, with such complexity and confidence? The characters are three dimensional, beautifully brought to life and I actually care about them.

Sigh. My story looks pastel coloured and simple in contrast with the vibrancy and life of this novel. I am consumed by the story; I want to know what happens next. I've found myself tucking this book in my bag in case I have a chance to read a few pages waiting for the children outside school, rather than checking Facebook on my phone, or browsing pictures on Pinterest. It's like the old days!

With novel no 1, the poor editing pushed me right out of the story, even before the poor story did that too. I was too aware of the quotation marks that opened and never closed, the missing question marks, the misspellings, to get caught up in the story.

Some books have the same effect for a different reason - if the author tries to be too clever with the writing, using words that are too unwieldy or too high-brow, then I find myself pushed out of the world she's trying to draw me into. It can be too self-consciously intellectual.

This novel is neither of those things.

The writing is intelligent and the plot satisfyingly multi-layered, and the author does me the courtesy of assuming that I am capable of coming along for the ride without patronising me or trying to impress.

She tells a story, and tells it well. Isn't that exactly what you want from a novel?

I so want to write a book as good as this. I have no idea whatsoever whether I'm capable of it, though I rather doubt it at the moment. It just seems so hard. I know that everyone has a different voice, and I am (for the most part) content with mine, but now and again I read something that is just so good that it brings a wry smile and I wonder if there's any space for beginners at this game.

I should say that the novel I'm talking about was this lady's debut novel.

Sigh.

I would go so far as to say that I'd rather not write a book at all than write a bad one. Or even a mediocre one.

Someone asked me whether, given the choice, I would rather write a Booker Prize winner, or a bestseller (I can't have both). Of course I'd like to make a fortune from my writing. I'd like to know that someone will publish my books without the awful angst that I might be putting in all these hours and all this soul-searching for nothing but rejection slips. But a bestseller for the sake of being a bestseller? Only if it's GOOD.

The Booker Prize? In my experience those books are so intellectual and high-brow that research has been done on whether anyone actually reads them. As the owner of several Booker Prize winning novels I can attest that I have on occasion reached a point several hundred pages in and still decided that life was too short  and given up.

So, I'd like to write a book that will be read by people, and enjoyed.  That the reviewers like, and that my former English teacher likes. I would like to impress her; this hasn't changed in the last thirty years.

I want it to be a grown up novel that makes people think, but not so much that it's too heavy to read on a sun-lounger on holiday where a person has gone to relax and be entertained. Something that people put a bookmark in and anticipate getting back to. Something that makes an early night with a cuppa something to look forward to.

Can I do that? Is it possible?

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.

The master of procrastination

When I was a student facing exams, I used to make detailed revision plans that were mini works of art. Different colours, fonts, tick-boxes and so on. These were time-consuming and quite often I didn't get done anywhere near the revision that I'd intended when I made my ambitious revision timetable.

Subconsciously, maybe that was the point. Or possibly not even subconsciously.

I am a master of procrastination. I don't think that there's anyone as good at it as me.

And here I am again with a big project and I am finding endless things in the way. One of the biggest and most difficult to solve at the moment is where I should set up my computer and my pile of notebooks and sit to write.

The kitchen island unit - long my writing home, but it's a stool at a kitchen counter, and although its close proximity to the fridge and biscuit cupboard are in its favour as a venue, the stool has no back and I slouch dramatically, which causes my back to ache, and my feet are off the floor, which makes them hurt too. Moan moan.

The kitchen table - my current location. Pros include the size of it; there's room to spread out papers, there's a radiator right next to me and clothes airer behind, so I'm nice and cosy, and the kettle isn't far away. Cons: the chair is hard and the wrong height and again, I have such bad posture that my neck permanently aches. Also, the table is where we eat most of the time, and so everything needs to be cleared away for meals.

The dining-room table - works pretty well in summer, but in winter it gets a bit parky in there. There's a big table, great for lots of paperwork, but it's also the room where my daughters practice their musical instruments so there's a keyboard at one end, a cello at the other, and piles of music everywhere else. So, if I decide to set up in there, I usually find myself musically accompanied, which is nice on one level, but not conducive to thinking. We tend to eat in there at the weekends when there are more of us, so clearing away is necessary once a week. Better than the kitchen, maybe.

The sitting room/bedroom - both great for slouching and snuggling but not really what I'm looking for if I mean business longer than a blog post.

The office - where my husband sits with all his computers when he works from home like a spider in the middle of his hi-tech web. The ideal place for another desk - and indeed, before the children came along I had my own space and it was lovely. I had all my things around me; pen pots, inspiring pictures, books and drawers full of all the bits that make me feel professional. Alas, the office is full of things now like filing cabinets and sofa beds and piles of things with no other home that have been stowed away in there. No room for my old desk, which is in pieces in the loft, or the nice swivelly chair that languishes with it. Also, I think my husband is possibly one of the most untidy people in the entire world, and I'd struggle to spare a space with all his clutter.

So I am nomadic. I move around with my computer to the room with the nicest light, destined never to find a comfortable home. Ah, woe is me. This book will never get written. Circumstances are conspiring against me!

You see what I'm up against?

Maybe I ought to start exploring coffee shops and write in there with a latte and a toasted teacake. Or tidy more, or put the heating on in the dining room, or sit up a bit straighter.

And just get on with it.

Notebooks and Book books

I am a great fan of notebooks.

The ideal notebook is spiral bound, with enough room to slide a pen down in the spiral, hardback covers, narrow lined, with generous margins and preferably an elastic thingy that means that it stays shut in your handbag. Little flaps for saving notes or photographs is nice to have, but the icing on the cake is when the pages have an inspiring quotation or inscription. This makes it a Very Nice Notebook, but also increases the pressure to make sure that anything I write in it is worthy of its inclusion.

I have several notebooks on the go at any one time - journals, ideas books, handy pads to scribble down To Dos or shopping lists, and now, my Book book.

My Book book is a notebook with roses on the front, which is sort of appropriate given the subject matter of my novel and the fact that roses feature significantly in it. My youngest daughter stuck a sticker on it, which says, 'Excellent', which sounds good to me.

I so want this book to be good. Just getting it finished isn't anywhere near enough for me; I think I would genuinely rather not write one at all than write a bad book. I want it to be worthy of it's 'excellent' sticker.

I've written down every idea I've had with regard to this project in my Book book and regularly transfer all the jottings on the subject from other notebooks that were closer to hand than this one when inspiration struck. I then put them on the computer when I'm working on the scene in which they belong.

There are ideas for scenes, connections that I made while driving, in the shower, reading to the kids or just about to drop off to sleep. Even the odd scrap of dialogue or nugget of information to remember about a character. They're all jumbled up in the Book book, waiting to be scooped up and used appropriately when the story is told in full.

Sometimes it's easier to write things on a page with a pen than it is to taptaptap it out on a keyboard. I'm sure that if I'd had an efficient online filing system and started with all my ideas in virtual folders etc, they would be close at hand for transfer into the story when I wanted them instead of having to transcribe them from my scrawl, but my computer skills are basic to say the least, and my filing system non-existent. There are so many documents on this computer that are lost forever unless someone retrieves them for me.

Hence the notebook. My notes for the book. It's almost full, so it must be time to start turning ideas into scenes and chapters.

It's exciting. I am just loving this.