A day with words in

I had a good day with the writing, the other day.

Here's how it goes.

I am busy. I have only so much time, and lots of demands on that time. Family things, household things, life things. School runs, chauffeuring the children to swimming practice, shopping, cleaning, cooking - that kind of thing. The stuff that makes up the bulk of each day.

Generally speaking, I like my life; all the component parts of it. I've got to middle age and found that the things left in my life by this point are pretty much the things that I want there, and yet there are times when I wish it would all go away and leave me free to do this thing that I want to do more than anything else. I dream of a remote cottage lined with bookshelves, with a log fire, comfy sofas, coffee and custard creams. And WiFi.

And then, I have a day with no interruptions. If I close my eyes, I could be there in my wilderness cottage, in blissful solitude, nothing to do but work on my bestseller. I have a whole (albeit school-length - about five hours, allowing for the school runs) day to myself. Then what happens?

A whole host of things happen, ranging from excessive time spent on Facebook, to rearranging the cutlery drawer, from repotting aloe vera plants to taking a nap.

The precious time ticks away. I cannot fathom why I do this thing, but I do.

That's normal behaviour for me. Round about half past one in the afternoon, inspiration might strike, and I'll be deep in another world when it's time to extricate myself and dash off for my daughters.

Not this day! I managed almost 4,000 words, and then another 800 the following day to complete the scene. It's not at the beginning of the book; it doesn't follow in any sequence from anything else I've written so far, but it starts in one place and takes my character to another place, and I like it. I'm quite sure that it needs substantial editing, but there it is.

It was a good day. A good day words-wise, and also a good day because I proved to myself that I can do it. It is possible to make good use of time. I can sit with my fingers on the keys and arrange words on a page to tell a story.

I want to do more of that.



Image credit:
Christmas_in_Houston_079.jpg by beat0092
From 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?

Nocturnal scufflings

I'm feeling sleepy today.

Lots of things going on in life at the moment; my eldest daughter, a talented swimmer, has been moved up to the next squad at the swimming club and has started training a couple of days a week at 5.30am. Five-thirty-in-the-morning, in other words, and so requires her chariot to be available at about five fifteen and her alarm clock, breakfast-provider, chauffeur and cheerleader to be ready for duty at 5am. This has had knock-on effects on the rest of my life.

Sleepiness. I think this may be the year where I am forced to learn how to push on despite wanting my bed with a longing previously unknown to mankind.

So, here I am taptaptapping with strong coffee.

There's another reason that sleep is at a premium at the moment, and it's rather wonderful. I'm finding that as I settle down to sleep at night, my brain kicks in. While this has never been a positive before, I'm finding that as I let go of rational thought, so to speak, ideas are occurring to me. Little scenes, snatches of dialogue, quirky things to weave into my plot; they're coming to me in the drowsing stages of sleep.

I'm not sure how keen my husband is on this new development, as I am given to sudden lunges for the bedside lamp and then a series of scufflings and rustlings as I find the page in my bedside notebook and scramble for a pen that works (I once wrote down a long and involved dream that somehow seemed vitally important only to find in the morning that the pen I used had no ink in it). No sooner do I empty my brain onto paper and switch out the light than it happens all over again.

So this routine can happen several times in a night until some sleep hormone takes over and washes like a tide over the creative centre in my drowsy brain, sweeping all ideas before it.

This sometimes works in reverse, as well. This is not so good.

The other night I woke up abruptly in the small hours suddenly alarmed that there was a large and ominous plot hole in my book and unless I could find a way to fill it and smooth it over the whole premise of the novel was rendered useless. With this revelation came a rush of adrenalin which meant it was a good half an hour before I started to feel sleepy again, and so for that time I lay there in the wreckage of my embryonic novel trying to work out how to plug the gap.

When I woke up in the morning I realised it was quite straightforward, and a word of explanation early in the story meant it was all alright.

Some night-time moments of inspiration are to be heeded and others are to be disregarded. Unfortunately there's no way to tell which is which until morning comes.

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.

Chippers and builders, planners and pantsers

I know that there are as many ways to write a book as there are authors - it stands to reason that everyone goes about it in a different way, but I've also heard that largely speaking (enormous generalisation here) there are two main techniques to writing: the planner, and the fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants-er. I've heard this second category of writer referred to as a 'pantser'.

I am definitely not a pantser.

I don't know why I thought I might be, to be honest, since in every other area of my life I am a careful planner who requires advance warning of everything, who struggles to adapt to change and who loves routine and familiarity. I don't do surprises very well, and so clearly I am unlikely to be one of the writers who sits down one day with a vague idea of how to start a novel, and just starts writing, with no idea where the story might take them.

Goes with the flow, so to speak.

Nope. I have my 'protractor' idea and I am breaking my detailed synopsis down into chapters and scenes and attempting to make myself a plan for writing the scenes that I haven't got yet.

Another interesting way of describing the work of an author is to decide how you create your work in terms of sculpting a masterpiece: whether you start with nothing and slowly add pieces until your sculpture is complete, (a builder) or whether you start with a huge shapeless lump of stone and slowly chip away at it until the shape within is revealed, (a chipper).

Michaelangelo did this with the famous statue, 'David'. David was buried inside a block of marble until a master-craftsman found him in there and released him with a chisel, leaving all the unnecessary stone-chips on the floor around him.

I always thought I'd be a lump of stone-type writer. I am notoriously wordy and find that my writing needs a lot of editing down to get rid of all the bits that I don't need. When I was writing my dissertation at university I found myself with nearly double the word count and had to go through it again pruning off the excess. My dissertation slowly got smaller and smaller.

So, this is how I imagine myself as a writer.

However, sitting here writing this (and surfing pictures of statues and sculptures) to put off actually doing any proper writing on the project in hand, I find myself wondering whether it's possible to be a planner and a chipper at the same time?

Maybe with my detailed plan, my scene-by-scene guide, I am a builder after all? Or maybe a builder who will later turn into a chipper because she's created something vast and unwieldy?

Or maybe it doesn't matter even remotely and I should get on and put some words down and see what happens?

That sounds a little bit pantsy to me.

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.

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?