Category: writing

This book and the last book: a tale of two timescales

kathleenjowitt1 Comment
No particular reason for this photo, except that I took it in July 2013
No particular reason for this photo, except that I took it in July 2013

I’m a little awed by how fast this book has happened. Speak Its Name took me just over eight years. A Spoke In The Wheel is at eight months, and counting.

Speak Its Name went like this:

July-October 2007: planning. I fill a whole notebook with maps, family trees, and diagrams of what all my main characters – who, at the time, were the original six living at Alma Road – thought of each other.

November 2007: writing. 54,000 words. A very few of those are still extant: some of the chapter headings are extracts from a guide to running AngthMURC written by Peter, and most of those come from this first draft.

April 2008: writing again. Beginning a second draft. I didn’t get very far with this. It was in a much nicer typeface, but it was very self-consciously and archly Barchester, and I gave up after about 3500 words. Even less of this survives, though there are a few fossils in the chapter headings.

2011: another draft, incorporating sections of the previous two. The point of view is increasingly assigned to Peter and Colette.

November 2011: writing something completely different, I have a stoopid epiphany about how to plot.

I am at this moment bewildered and delighted by the way that two original characters have not only developed their own inevitable characters by means of nature and nurture, but have dragged their own plot in with them, because when A is the child of Y and Z, and B is the child of W and X, of course it follows that they will do F, G and H, because this is who they are, and this is the world they live in. And this is just as well for me, because goodness knows I can’t do plot.

November 2012: the House of Laity blocks women bishops. I am furious. I write a scene from Lydia’s point of view. I keep writing. I discover that Becky needs to be one of the movers and shakers in the political plot strand.

Two bits of plot joined themselves up in my mind, and suddenly the whole second half of the story has some actual structure and things are happening because of who the characters are. It’s like watching a bouncy castle get inflated, or making a pair of trousers, or something – all these shapeless pieces begin to fit together and make something that has three dimensions, and bits of which attach to other bits that you hadn’t expected.

July 2013: I discover that Lydia needs to be the hero of the story, and that more of it needs to come from her point of view. This is intimidating, because in the original concept she doesn’t come out until half way through, and now I have to spend the first half in her head? Thanks, story. However, it also becomes clear that if I do this it will be easier to incorporate the other side of the political story. I start writing more scenes from Lydia’s point of view. I blast through 40,000 words – and this is counting from November 2012, not any of the previous drafts. I make a timeline out of six sheets of A3 paper and of A4, and crawl around on the floor filling it in. I blast through 50,000 words. Then 60,000 words. I salvage some words from the 2011 draft.

August 2013: I spend a week on choir tour. When I’m not singing I’m writing. In the evenings, back in the dormitory, I’m cutting up the manuscript with a pair of scissors, rearranging the plot into a workable structure. I also take a trip to Ilchester, to get a feel for the geography of the place.

September 2013: I keep writing, though my pace has slowed a little. By the end of October I’ve hit 74,000 words.

November 2013: I start looking for holes – not necessarily plot holes, but bits where I’ve written [plot goes here] – and filling them. By the end of the month, it’s basically done. Or so I think.

December 2013: at an office Christmas party, somebody asks me, ‘But how did you get involved in all the church politics?’ I realise that the answer is too boring for words. Later, I realise that therefore I need to cut all the committee scenes. So why don’t I just take out everything that isn’t from Lydia’s point of view, and then see what’s missing?

May 2014: I come up with a title. I write a blurb.

June 2014: I edit.

July 2014: I start sending excerpts and synopses to agents.

This goes on for well over a year. Eventually –

September 2015: I decide to self-publish

November 2015: editors edit; nitpickers nitpick

December 2015: I set a publication date

January 2016: proofreaders proofread. I order ISBNs. I finalise the cover. I format the text.

February 2016: Speak Its Name goes live

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And a picture from August 2015

By contrast, A Spoke in the Wheel has gone more like this:

August 2015: we are watching the Vuelta a España, and my husband makes a throwaway comment about how endurance athletes would be among the few people who would understand the spoon analogy of chronic illness.

After that, of course, I’m busy, until:

January 2016: I discover that that athleticism/chronic illness idea is developing a story around itself.

April 2016: I start writing and get to 8000 words.

June 2016: I hit 16,000 words and think it’s dreadful. I recognise that thinking it’s dreadful is probably a temporary state of affairs and keep on going.

July 2016: I devise and patch in a massive subplot

October 2016: I hit 50,000 words and think it’s dreadful. I recognise that thinking it’s dreadful is probably a temporary state of affairs and keep on going. I print out what I’ve got so far and attack it with a red pen.

November 2016: I think of a title

It has taken me ten months to get as far with A Spoke in the Wheel as I got with Speak Its Name in eight years. Of course, it’s arguable that I should start the clock in late November 2012, because very little of the final version of Speak Its Name was written before that. July 2013 was where the real action was. Then there’s the time I spent playing the waiting game with agents and publishers.

The other thing that strikes me, writing all this out, is how much of Speak Its Name happened in 2013, which was a difficult year in many other respects. My husband was finishing up his PhD, and I was supporting both of us. He was job-hunting, and I knew that, even if he was successful, the chances were that we’d have to move and I’d have to get another job myself (we did, and I did). And yet I wrote most of the book that year.

And it may yet be that A Spoke In The Wheel has some surprises for me, and I’ll have to do some serious redrafting before I’m done. All the same, I think the really serious lessons were the ones I learned last time round: how to plot; how to make the characters drive the plot; how to let characters make really terrible decisions even when I didn’t want them to.

I’m hoping to release A Spoke In The Wheel some time next summer, ideally during one of the Grand Tours, when the world has cycling on the brain. Looking at this, it feels as if this is perhaps going to be manageable.

Art, time and change

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dscf0324

Tomorrow evening my church choir will be singing Maurice Duruflé’s Requiem. It’s an oddly appropriate choice for Remembrance Sunday, and it feels even more so given recent events: it was commissioned by the Vichy government in 1941, but Duruflé only finished it in 1947, after the war was over and the world was picking up the pieces.

Part of that, I suspect, is because Duruflé had a tendency to drag his feet on things he didn’t want to do. Only one of his works, the Notre Père, is not based on Gregorian chant, and that is because he only finished it after his wife had started writing it for him, having been requested repeatedly to set the Lord’s Prayer in the vernacular.

But part of it is the simple fact that art takes time. To create, to perform, to consume art, absorbs our attention for long enough to give us a new perspective. The six years that it took Duruflé to write the Requiem, the forty minutes that it takes to sing or to listen to it – that time makes space for things to change, for us to change.

For a couple of years I had a habit of picking up The Count of Monte Cristo in about October, when the days were getting shorter and my mood was getting lower. It’s about 1100 pages long; by the time I got to the end, something would have shifted.

One of the greatest gifts of art is the way that it takes us out of what we think is our own timeline; shows us – sometimes quite literally – the bigger picture; allows us to step back from the overwhelming emotion. Sometimes that feels like a betrayal: how can we possibly feel any less angry, any less hurt, any less scared, than we do at the moment? Surely this devastating news deserves nothing less than everything we have?

The last news story that made me cry was the murder of Jo Cox MP, just before the referendum in which the UK voted to leave the European Union. After that, nothing has really surprised me. Disappointed me, yes, but not surprised me.

The one before that was the General Synod decision in 2012, the one that voted against the appointment of women bishops. That was a November vote, too.

From where I am now, I am thinking, gosh, was that all I had to cry about in 2012? But it only seems trivial now because I know what happened next. When I’d cried about it, I wrote a blog post. Having written the blog post, I found that I was still hurt and angry, still feeling rejected because of a fundamental part of my own identity, and the only thing I could think of to do with that was write fiction.

Lydia choked, rolled onto her side, and sat up. ‘I never realised,’ she said wonderingly, ‘how much it was going to hurt. It goes right into the heart. They don’t want me. They were OK with the person they thought I was, so long as she stayed in her place, and was happy to teach the approved version of events and not rock the boat, but they don’t want the person I really am. I always knew, in theory, that I was only there on sufferance, that as soon as anyone worked out who I really was I’d be out on my ear, but it didn’t hit me until today how terrible it was, when you understand the reality that nobody wants you.’

That was where I began with the final draft. It went on from there: a year of writing; a year of editing; a year of becoming brave enough to put it out under my own name. I burned up the anger that had first fuelled it; I put it all into the text.

By the time I published Speak Its Name on 2 February 2016, six women had been consecrated as bishops in the Church of England. While I was writing, things had changed.

I’m not saying that things will magically become better if we can only wait it out. For some people it is, indeed, already too late. I am not saying that art can fix everything. There are some things that are just wrong. Nevertheless, it is the best tool that I have to make something good, something useful, perhaps even something beautiful, out of emotions that, left unchecked or harnessed for ill, will destroy the world.

A post with several titles

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dscf1267Coming up with a title is my least favourite part of writing a book. I think it’s the weight of expectation. My usual method is to pick a working title, usually one word, and pray for something better to turn up.

I was really pleased when Speak Its Name occurred to me: the association with same-sex love, combined with the overarching theme of saying things the way they are, made it pretty much perfect.

Anyway, I think I might finally have one for the book that I’m currently working on, which I’ve been calling Wheels for want of anything better. I had been wondering if I could pun on spoke/speak, getting sidetracked by West Side Story (wire-spoke wheel in America!), and scouring If for lines to appropriate or undermine. However, for the moment I have settled on (drumroll, please!):

A Spoke in the Wheel

Or I might drop the indefinite article:

Spoke in the Wheel

Or maybe make it plural:

Spoke in the Wheels

Or wake up tomorrow and wonder what on earth I was thinking. We’ll see. But at the moment it feels like I’m on the right track.

Fair winds and a prosperous voyage

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Good luck to everybody preparing to set sail on the good ship NaNoWriMo!

I won’t be taking part, having found several years ago that such a gigantic wordcount was incompatible with a full-time job, at least for me. Besides, I hit fifty thousand words half-way through September (well, I did start in March…) I remember it being tremendous fun, though, and the combination of low stakes, an ambitious target, and a community of enthusiastic people, was a potent mixture.

If you’re writing a novel this November I hope you have a fabulous time.

Crossing the meseta, a rant that isn’t really a rant, and a status update

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The meseta
The meseta

The film The Way follows a baby boomer dentist, played by Martin Sheen, and some acquaintances he picks up along the way, along the Camino Francés to Santiago de Compostela.

I am the worst person with whom to watch it – well, me and every other returned pilgrim, I suppose – because I find it difficult to restrain myself from giving a running commentary on every building and geographical feature I recognise. And, at a little more than half way through, screaming, ‘Where’s the meseta gone?’

The meseta is the plain that takes up a lot of Castile and a significant distance of the Camino – nearly two weeks, at the speed we went. It is day after day of flat, grinding, almost featureless, path. It’s either hot and dusty, as it was when we walked it, or bitingly cold, as it will be when my brother cycles it in November. There is an awful lot of it, and it goes on, and on, and on.

You wouldn’t know this from The Way. Oh, there are some shots of cornfields and what have you, but they come nowhere near conveying the sheer thirsty tedium of the meseta. In The Way, you get the mountains at the beginning and the hills at the end, but you don’t get the long, long plain in the middle. It’s like one of those greetings cards that pulls out from both sides to reveal as much again in the middle. It’s an oddly truncated pilgrimage.

Of course, a hundred kilometres of nothing would have made The Way a very different film. Havi Brooks talks about the slow motion montage, how practice (or any repetitive activity, really) feels like you’re not getting anywhere, and how in a film it would be over in a flash, except you’d still have the sense of time passing.

In terms of the current book, I am in the middle of the slow motion montage, half-way across the meseta. Slogging away. Cranking out another hundred words, another page, another five hundred words. Catching sight of a snippet, and thinking it’s terrible. Re-reading a page, and thinking perhaps it isn’t so bad. Re-reading a chapter, and counting the holes in the fabric.

Filling the holes.

Another hundred words. Another fifty words. Another sentence.

I am beginning to see a line of hills in the distance.

What it’s like at the moment

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It’s been an exhausting autumn for me. September is always difficult, October takes me further into the darkness (until that blessed moment when the clocks go back and I’m getting up in the light again) and this year it’s been further complicated by my having begun a new job just over a month ago.

I’m enjoying the job, but it takes up a lot of my brain capacity, and by the time I get home I’m good for nothing but a cup of tea and an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Nor are my (usually infallible) train journeys working. Part of it is where I’ve got to with the book: I’ve reached the point of diminishing returns, where the majority of the plot is down on the page, and I don’t have any big scenes left to throw myself into. It’s detailed work now, filling in little gaps, writing perhaps a sentence at a time. Those magic summer evenings when the words were dropping off my pen feel like a very long time ago.

I’ve been taking things easier. For the first time since I started this project, I’ve modified my goal and entertained the possibility of writing less than eight thousand words in a month. I’ve hit the fifty thousand word mark, and from here on in it’s as important to take out unnecessary words as it is to put new ones in.

The traditional storm of doubt has swept in. It feels as if it’s never going to be finished, and that I am going to offend all my friends, and nobody will ever speak to me again, and also it’s not worth bothering with. The infuriating thing about this round is that I now know that this is a temporary state of affairs, so I might as well just push on through. I can’t really allow myself the luxury of a good sulk, because it would feel ever so fake.

There are two things that are encouraging optimism, however:

  1. The majority of the plot is, as I say, down on the page. I’m using the red pen more than the black pen, and I really enjoy editing.
  2. November is just around the corner, and that means that my secret online writing group will be firing up for another month of cheerleading.

 

Talk of the Town

 

Morning people, morning pages (I’m not one and I don’t do them)

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Season of bike lights
Season of bike lights

Last week I bought two things – well, I bought several things, but among them were:

I’d flicked through the book in the shop, as you do, but it was only when I’d brought it home and started at the beginning that the irony struck me.

I remembered the problem – my problem, I should say – with Julia Cameron.

Morning pages. Or, rather, her insistence that morning pages are essential, that, before you do anything else, you should dump the contents of your head into a notebook, and that if you have to get up early to do it, then that’s what you should do.

I understand the theory, and I am perfectly willing to admit that dumping the contents of my head into a notebook has been very useful to me on more than one occasion. I just can’t do it every day, and I definitely can’t do it first thing in the morning.

I am not a morning person. I am particularly not a morning person when it’s dark when I have to get up. And I have to get up at six thirty as it is. September hits me like a steamroller, every year, when the morning retreats that little bit further and whatever it is in my head that gets me out of bed stops working. If I were to set the alarm for 6.10am, I would spend the twenty minutes between it going off and my having to start getting ready for work lying in bed hating myself. I’ve tried it.

In fact, I was very happy to realise this morning that it’s now October and therefore not too depressing to look forward to the clocks going back.

And so morning pages are not an option for me. I am not even tempted. At this time of year, any sort of ritual that asks me to get up earlier than strictly necessary is not an option for me. So I’m not doing them.

I will, however, read the rest of the book with interest and an open mind.

It is not exactly news to me that some techniques work for some people and don’t work for others. What’s changed is my reaction to discovering that this is one that didn’t work for me. In past years I’d have given up on the whole thing in disgust. Now I’m prepared to pick and mix.

What I am working on at the moment is retaining the baby – in this case, Julia Cameron’s otherwise humane, compassionate and patient approach to the artistic process – while ditching the bathwater. She runs the bath too hot for me.