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.

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.

Adding a layer

I've just had one of those moments where I realise that the story isn't going to go the way I thought it would.

This is a remarkable moment, and one which I'm commemorating with a blog post, since I never thought it would happen to me.  Not that it's particularly inspiring that it has happened, since it means a whole lot more thinking and a greater challenge than I had anticipated. For something that already felt like climbing a huge mountain, making it harder isn't something I was after.

It's not one of those moments where a character does something that I didn't expect him/her to do, partly because I haven't actually written enough sequential scenes for the story to be moving along like that. I am planning in great detail, because I am that sort of person. Not for me the sensation of being swept away on a story-wave and seeing which beach I get washed up on - no, I am still holding fast to my protractor theory, and I have just realised that there are several more degrees than I first thought.

Lucky for me that my story-plan protractor needn't have 180 degrees, or even 270 or 360. It can have 192, if I want. Or 214. I call the shots. So there.

I realised I'd left a whole dangling area of the story; something happens to the protagonist, Julia, early in the novel that I hadn't addressed sufficiently in the later parts of the story. I'd left it alone as it's tricky to handle and somewhat controversial, and I suspect if I'm honest I was more inclined to leave it out than commit myself to managing the consequences of her actions. More comfortable, less trouble that way. I imagine Julia would agree with me; but it's not to be. I realise that without tackling it, the story is more lightweight than I want it to be. Less realistic. Also, writing in the event, but not providing something to counterbalance it feels wrong. As well as feeling like a cop-out, it feels as if the story doesn't sit as it should.

So, back to the drawing board - or at least that part of it. Several new scenes need to be inserted. I need to work out how some of my characters might respond to this new twist in the plot. I'm sure there'll be repercussions.

Things suddenly got exponentially more complex, on several levels. Complicated simply because the plot is slightly less straightforward, now, and one of my characters is going to get a huge shock, and he is already, by his very nature, unpredictable. What will he do?  (Seriously, what will he do? I don't know, yet! ) Also, the story now has another layer. It's a bit like an angel cake; I've just slapped another one on top and I've got to make sure that they all fit together without squishing out all the buttercream.

Can I do it?

Needing to decompress

I had a good day today.

Not many words down on the page; in fact I think the net result might be a negative word count because I got rid of so many superfluous passages. I'm trying to work on my 'showing, not telling' and I realise how often I narrate, rather than paint a picture. However, in a waste-not-want-not kind of way, I've squirrelled away all the extraneous bits into a file marked, 'CUTTINGS' so that I might get inspiration there in future.

I did my usual messing about on Facebook and my browse of the BBC news, which now, sadly, has to be done on the computer since they upgraded the phone app so that I can't find anything at all. I surfed for a little while before tricking myself into opening the Word documents and working out where I left off. Before I knew it the clock said almost midday and time for scrambled egg.

It was like swimming up to the surface from somewhere deep below.

I was deeply embedded in my story; making notes of scenes that I already have, scenes yet to be written and trying to link up the back story arc with the main, present day story. It takes a while to get to the place where I'm thinking of the characters, how they interact with each other and how I might go about showing the reader what I want them to see without it being so clumsy that they know what I'm doing and lose interest. When I get there I find that I don't want to leave.

So, swimming up to the surface. I've realised that there's a long transition between my imaginary world and the real one; a bit like a diver having to use a decompression chamber as he comes up from the sea bed.

I emerge, blinking,  from a place in the countryside where birds are singing and a soft breeze blows; where my heroine goes for long walks in her new wellies to my kitchen where the washing machine is beeping to prompt me to empty it and the family is asking 'What's for tea?'

What's for tea? I have absolutely no idea.

Time for some deep breaths.




Image credit: 
PIC1079990928.jpg by rupertjefferies
From Morguefile.com
Used with permission