Category: writing

Unlikely writing techniques 5: write whatever the hell you like

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This is not exactly a new idea. I have heard it expressed thus:

Write drunk. Edit sober.

Google tells me that Hemingway didn’t say that. I don’t write drunk myself, because if I’m drunk I’m either in company or about to fall asleep. None the less, it points towards a helpful concept.

Or – which perhaps gets closer to the point that Hemingway might have been trying to make, assuming he’d said anything like, Write drunk, edit sober:

Begin by putting in everything you like. Finish by taking out everything you can.

I don’t know who said that, but I owe them a lot. Do you know? Google’s no help at all; it’s just sending me to sanctimonious anti-procrastination blogs.

Here are some important principles:

  1. Nothing is going to be perfect on a first attempt.
  2. If something is not fun, people are less likely to do it.
  3. There is nothing wrong with making it fun.

There is a lot of suspicion about this kind of thinking. Received wisdom says If It’s Not Difficult, It’s Not Worthwhile, and No Pain, No Gain, and other upright, joyless maxims.

To all of which I say, well, maybe. But I feel very strongly that the reverse does not hold true. The fact that a writer made themselves absolutely miserable during the writing process does not automatically make the finished project readable. In fact, it makes it very likely that there will never be a finished project.

What writing whatever the hell you like looks like will vary. Here are some examples.

Skipping the difficult bits

I’ll say more about this another day, because I suspect it’s of limited application, but I am living proof that there are more ways to approach writing than –

Begin at the beginning, and go on until you get to the end, and then stop.

If what’s in my head at the moment is the climactic battle scene, then I write the climactic battle scene and trust that the rest will follow. Personally, I find it very useful to have something to aim at.

You might not want to skip straight to the climactic battle scene, but if you’re having trouble working out how your antagonists meet in the first place, it’s worth beginning with the very vivid picture that you’ve had in your head for weeks, with one of them hiding up a tree and the other eating a picnic underneath it. Or whatever it is.

But really, when the entire internet is banging on about how important it is to nail the first line, is it surprising that many writers never get to the second line? Skip the first line. It’ll come in its own good time.

Writing ‘unpopular’ themes

Anyone who’s interested in being published conventionally by somebody else should probably skip this section, because I’m writing this from a place where I don’t give a damn about pleasing anybody else, and I’ve never worked out how to please a publisher.

Nobody this side of the Pond wants to publish a book about an evangelical Christian lesbian at university, with bonus internecine student politics. But I wanted to write it, and it turned out that a fair few other people wanted to read it. And it may sound like a statement of the obvious, but if I hadn’t been writing what I wanted, I doubt I’d have been able to finish it.

If all of us stuck to writing what publishers thought would sell, fiction would be very pale, male and stale. The #WeNeedDiverseBooks hashtag exists for a reason, and if you have more patience than me and are prepared to persuade a  mainstream publisher to pick up a story that looks a bit different from everything else on the shelves then I wish you the very best of luck.

And, not to seem too serious, if you want to write about Romans when conventional wisdom says it’s going to be Vikings for the next five years, then go with the Romans.

Writing ‘unnecessary’ things

I also put in all sorts of self-indulgent in-jokes, trying-too-hard symbolism, author filibusters, and mots d’escalier, because it amuses me to do so. Sometimes ‘what I’d have said to Mrs Smith about my missing homework if only I’d thought of it in time’ becomes a piece of sparkling dialogue. Once, writing under a different name, I gave the heroine a Cousin Teresa in a nod to the Saki story, and Cousin Teresa ended up a very important character. There’s a bit in Speak Its Name that got there purely because I’d been dealing with too many standing orders committees and wanted to relieve my feelings by writing a truly incompetent motion.

Sometimes… Well, that’s where we get to:

The second half

You will have noticed that I’ve talked a lot about the ‘putting in’, the ‘drunk writing’, and not much about the ‘sober editing’, the ‘taking out’. That’s partly because you may end up taking out less than you expect of what you put in when you were writing what the hell you felt like. Or you may not. I don’t know. Rory’s dreadful motion to the Students’ Union stayed in; Peter’s thoughts on Bristol VRs didn’t. Nor did quite a lot of stuff that seemed very necessary and worthy when I wrote it.

But it’s mostly because my main point today is about having fun, and giving oneself permission to have fun. I might talk more about editing another time, but in the meantime I’m going to refer you to Joanne Harris, who talks more sense about writing than pretty much anyone else on Twitter.

None of which is to say that editing cannot be fun, or at the very least satisfying. I rather enjoy it, myself (and don’t think I don’t know about cutting huge chunks that I really loved writing); I understand that for others it can feel like cutting off one’s own arm. In which case, changing the metaphor may help.

I try to think of it like this: collecting a hundred thousand words was like quarrying a block of marble out of a hillside, and the editing is removing everything that doesn’t look like a story.

 

Talk of the Town

 

Unlikely writing techniques 4: pick your pen up…

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genuine work in progress
genuine work in progress

… that’s it.

I do most of my writing on the train. My daily rail journey is fifty-five miles each way; it takes about as many minutes. Once I’ve read the office and put my make-up on, I have about forty minutes left. It’s a regular, predictable slot of time, with reliably unreliable internet access, that I can devote to writing. I write all the way from Royston to King’s Cross.

Well, that’s the theory. In reality, of course, it’s earlier in the morning than I’d like it to be, I’m sleepy, I’d rather be in bed, I am wondering why the hell I commute into London anyway, and I am not feeling in the least inspired. I might have thought of what to write next as I cycled to the station, but I equally well might have not done so.

If I’m in that sort of mood, I make a bargain with myself. I do not have to write anything. All I have to do is get out my notebook and my pen, and find the last thing that I wrote, the next blank page.

And then I wait.

Sometimes it works instantaneously. I catch sight of the last thing I wrote the previous day, and I remember what was going to happen next. Suddenly the train’s passing Stevenage and I’m most of the way down a page.

Sometimes – less often, actually – it doesn’t. In which case I accept that it probably isn’t going to happen, read something instead, and try again on the way home.

Barbara Sher and Havi Brooks would call this an example of a CWU. Officially this stands for Complete Willingness Unit, but Havi is a great advocate of renaming boring initials, and I’m a trade unionist, so in my head there is a bunch of grumpy postmen saying, ‘Our members are prepared to take the lids off their pens, but that is as far as they will go.’

Sometimes I make it Cockatrices and Wyverns Union. But they still have postbags.

Talk of the Town

 

August Reviews

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Reading Twitter this evening, I’ve become aware of an initiative called #AugustReviews, which encourages readers to go to Amazon and leave one review on one book that they’ve read. This post by Terry Tyler gives a comprehensive explanation of the why and wherefore (and this post by Rosie Amber gives a very thorough description of the how, and the how it doesn’t have to be as intimidating as one might think).

I’m ambivalent about Amazon myself. As a good trade unionist I try to avoid buying things on there (I live in Cambridge, not far from Heffers and a huge quantity of charity shops; I own a Kobo; generally this is fairly easy for me) but it’s an ill wind, etc, and Amazon has been very good for independent authors. Me included. And yes, we like reviews, and no, the book didn’t have to come from Amazon in the first place.

Mine is here (UK) and here (US) if you’re suddenly feeling the urge to leave a review of it. But I think I’d be behind this idea even if I didn’t have a horse in the race, and I’d encourage you to review any book you’ve enjoyed. At the very least it’ll cheer an author up.

Review at the Cosy Dragon

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A four-star review for Speak Its Name over at the Cosy Dragon, who says:

I think it offers a unique entry into being queer in a Christian community, and I think it can help many people in their journey towards being comfortable with themselves

She questions whether it’s realistic for so few of my student characters to have jobs – and yes, it is indeed a UK thing. Of course, UK things have gone tits-up of late, with tuition fees heading north and interest rates on student loans stratospheric, and if I were starting from scratch today I would probably give a few more of my characters part-time work during term time. In fact:

Peter – probably, but he still has to find time to be a sacristan. What I might do would be to give Tanya an administrative assistant as well as a pastoral assistant, and make that Peter.

Georgia – definitely, though it’s possible that she’s also getting some paid music gigs – soloist for Stancester Choral Society oratorios, etc.

Will – no, still too rich to need a job.

Olly – yeah, why not?

Colette – no, when you’re doing a science you don’t have time to do much else.

Becky – yes, though where she finds the energy I don’t know.

But:

Lydia – no, she’s always been discouraged from doing it at home, and has assumed that the rules for university are the same.

So there you go. What they do in the holidays is, of course, another matter – even Will probably does an internship or two – and the only one who definitely doesn’t have a summer job is Lydia.

 

 

Unlikely writing techniques 3: put your pen down…

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… or turn your computer off, whatever.

If I’m feeling a bit stuck, I try to get out of doors and do something that makes writing completely impractical. I go for a walk; I ride my bike; I go swimming. Sometimes I combine it with the technique described last week and walk four miles downstream to The Bridge (that’s the name of the pub) where I buy a pint of something interesting looking and sit down to talk to the book for an hour.

Quite often, I find that turning away from the blank page and the blinking cursor is enough to unstick whatever’s stuck. Words are perverse things: they hide in odd corners of my mind when I think I ‘should’ be writing, and come out when they think I can’t catch them. Sometimes whole sentences will form as I walk, or an important fact will make itself known. I don’t think I stopped dead in the middle of the path and exclaimed, ‘Oh! Gianna’s a silversmith!’ but it’s possible. It felt like sufficiently major breakthrough to justify that.

And at the very worst, even if I’m no further ahead with the current book, I tend to have realised that there is, in fact, more to life than the current book.

Talk of the Town

Unlikely writing techniques 2: take the book for a drink

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The practice of buying your project a beer, like many others I’ve come to use regularly, comes from Havi Brooks’ The Fluent Self. Thoroughly recommended for feeling less like a giant disaster.

Raspberries in cream soda
What a cool drink might look like. This is not sour cherry lemonade, obviously; it’s actually cream soda with frozen raspberries in it. I didn’t take a picture of the sour cherry lemonade because my phone had run out of battery, and also I had other things on my mind.

A couple of Tuesdays ago, opening my notebook after a fortnight’s hiatus, I was conscious of a nasty suspicion of impending stuckness. I’ve written before about how stuckness scares me much less than it used to, but I was still a bit scared by this one. Apart from anything else, the idea behind the deliberate hiatus was to pre-empt the stuckness.

I was hanging around in London for an hour after work before catching the train home. I’d thought that I’d sit somewhere and have a cup of coffee and do some writing. After all, the stuckness hadn’t quite landed. Yet. I thought I had another few hundred words that I could squeeze out.

I went to a bar that came in just below my ‘not for the likes of us’ cut-off, and I sat outside under a parasol, and I ordered a sour cherry lemonade. Across the square, people were watching a big screen with the Williams sisters playing the Wimbledon doubles. I got my notebook and pen out of my handbag.

I’d meant to just work on the book itself, but instead I wrote:

The problem is, I feel I haven’t really got a handle on Polly.

I kept writing, and new possibilities emerged:

This may not actually be a problem if Ben hasn’t got a handle on her either.

Do I need to write something from Polly’s POV and be prepared to junk it?

Do I need to keep ploughing on with Ben and trust that Polly will come through his self-absorption for me as well as the reader?

Then I wrote the thing that was at the root of the stuckness:

I am afraid of running out of plot before I get anywhere near the target word count.

But I had an answer to that, too:

Does Ben have any sort of love life aside from Polly? Has he ever had one? If so, it’s going to have been a mess.

The answer, it seemed, was yes. But it only raised further questions. I knew some of the answers, but not all of them:

(Mélanie, soigneur, tracks him down – but how, why, has she left the team or something – parents tell her where he lives hoping she’ll get him back into the sport. OK, so what happens, is this before or after the middle of the book, it’s got to be after the CC debacle or it’ll anticipate the blackmail aspect, what do Polly and Vicki make of it?)

Then I ordered a vegetarian scotch egg. And very tasty it was too.

I kept writing:

So Polly’s just beginning to fall for Ben, no, not even fall for, look kindly on, and then Mélanie turns up WHILE VICKI’S AWAY WITH GIANNA. Ben neglects Polly, she gets back together with Michael

Why don’t Ben and Mélanie work?

Because the thing that they have in common is misery.

How does it end?

Ben realises that he’s happier 9-5ing than he ever was cycling, even with a team he liked

and Mélanie doesn’t get his responsibilities

nothing awful happens to Polly – in fact, Michael happened to look round so she was fine – but Ben feels awful about it – maybe a burglary?

(what is it? doesn’t go back to organise a meal? ends up staying out all night?

Mélanie doesn’t see Polly as a sexual threat. Ben finds this perversely irritating.

he’s pleased to see her – cross with his parents – painful memories

Polly’s cautiously pleased

Vicki doesn’t approve at all, thinks he should move on or at least make his mind up

maybe Mélanie secretly wants to expose Grande Fino and is looking for other

Bang. I wrote 863 words on the theme of ‘Mélanie secretly wants to expose Grande Fino and is looking for other people to help’ on the train home. By the end of those 863 words most of the rest of the braindump was out of date (Vicki wasn’t away, Polly and Michael were already an item…) but I had the makings of a creditable subplot.

I still don’t have a handle on Polly, but I expect she’ll make herself known in time. I might go out and get a drink and see if she turns up.

Talk of the Town

Unlikely writing techniques 1: not writing

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DSCF1353

I’ve participated in a lot of month-long writing events in my time. NaNoWriMo, to start with, and later a lower-pressure imitation where we set our own goals – where ‘goal’ could legitimately equal ‘something, anything at all’. This is one of the kindest, most encouraging communities I’ve ever been part of, and the absence of pressure is, perhaps counter-intuitively, a great motivator. A couple of years ago it moved from running in November only to also having sessions in June and July, and I was very happy indeed.

The more months I devoted to writing, however, the more I noticed that month-long sessions didn’t work for me. The first few days were always brilliant: I dived in and swam around in a glorious sea of words, surfing an exhilarating wave. I’d write on the train, I’d write in cafés, I’d type up what I’d written longhand, editing as I went, and find that I’d doubled it in the process.

After the first few days the ocean would become a stream. I didn’t have that sense of boundless potential any more, but I could tell that there were words queuing up, waiting to be written.

After a couple of weeks the stream would dry up. I could squeeze a hundred words or so out of the dry ground, but they were forced, and looked it. I’d still show up at the daily check-in posts. I’d still have encouraging things to say about other people’s work, but my own had hit a wall.

Last year I decided to see what would happen if I stopped fighting this pattern, and just let it play out instead. For two weeks of every month, I told myself, I wouldn’t even try to write. I wouldn’t think about the book at all. I’d read, or go swimming, or play the piano, or play Animal Crossing, or make patchwork, or read some more, the theory being that by the end of that fortnight I’d have replenished the stocks of whatever resources I’d depleted, and would be ready to move into the next stint of writing.Was it realistic, after all, to expect my mind and my body to sustain a daily writing habit on top of a full-time job? Probably not, and could I blame my writing mind for shutting off when it had had enough?

Is it working? It seems to be. I’m only eight months into it (and the first few weren’t representative, as I was preparing to launch Speak Its Name, and not actually writing) but the indications so far point to it being a sustainable way of work. At the very least, it’s working at least as well as the previous pattern, and it’s stopped me feeling guilty about the times when I’m not writing.

Would I recommend it to you? Not necessarily. You’re welcome to try it – it’s not as if I have copyright on the idea of Deliberately Not Doing Stuff – but don’t feel that you have to persevere with it if it doesn’t work for you. This works for me because it’s what my mind wants to do anyway, and I’ve no idea whether anyone else operates on the same schedule as me. I’d recommend that you look at your own existing patterns and see if you can find a way to make them work better for you. Or a way to stop feeling bad about the fact that they exist. They’ve probably got your best interests in mind.

Bodywork and Soul: a tragedy

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Clive was looking infuriatingly pleased with himself. ‘Isn’t she beautiful?’

‘It’s a wreck,’ Helen said flatly. She surveyed the camper van in dismay. Rust-fringed panels, flaking paint, a missing window. ‘Does it even start?’

He shuffled his feet. ‘She will. Just have a little faith, Hel.’

Against her better judgement, Helen took a step closer and peered through the windscreen. The interior seemed to be in even worse condition than the outside, the upholstery cracked and faded, the curtains spotted with mould. ‘Of all the things to do with your bonus… I thought we were going to Turkey.’

‘When I’ve got this beauty up and running, we will,’ he said. ‘We’ll drive there.’

‘And when will that be, exactly?’ Helen demanded. She didn’t bother to wait for the answer.

 

Clive started with the engine. All that spring he worked on it, spending his weekends in the garage, tinkering and cursing, and his evenings scouring eBay for parts. Helen admitted, grudgingly, that he was at least putting the effort in. And when, on a cool, clear afternoon in late April, the thirsty, spluttering, sigh that she had got so used to hearing from the van was suddenly replaced by a full-throated roar, she couldn’t help running outside to hug Clive, and, feeling a little silly, pat the camper on one of its protuberant headlights.

That evening, they took their dinner out to the van, and ate with plates balanced precariously on their knees. Clive opened a bottle of Chianti, to celebrate. Helen had lit a scented candle to cover the smell of mould. The nostalgic fragrance of sandalwood filled the saloon, and the light flickered gently, disguising the signs of ageing on all three of them.

‘Do you know who it belonged to?’ Helen asked. ‘Where it’s been?’ She imagined long-haired girls wearing flowers and caftans, youths with flared trousers and beards; peace and love and all the idealism of their generation. Suddenly Turkey didn’t seem so far away. They could drive to Morocco, to India, all round the world.

Clive shook his head. ‘The bloke I bought her off rescued her from a scrapyard. Wanted to restore her but never got round to it. I don’t know who had her before.’

‘You’re already doing better than him,’ Helen said, thinking to herself that she was being dangerously optimistic. That would be the Chianti.

 

The bodywork was worse than the engine. Clive was always on the phone to panel beaters or VW specialists. Empty tins of Hammerite and primer collected in the corner of the garage. Then the top coat, shiny and flawless. Helen wondered, disloyally, if Clive was overdoing it a bit.

She bought an atlas. Perhaps India was a bit ambitious for a first trip. They could go from Land’s End to John O’Groats, something like that. Then Turkey, the next year. Laughing at herself, she lit a patchouli-scented candle for the next celebration dinner.

‘I’ve been in contact with the Owners’ Club,’ Clive said. ‘There’s a rally next month. Interested?’

‘You’re taking the camper?’ She was embarrassingly excited by the prospect of seeing the dratted thing on the road.

Clive frowned. ‘I doubt she’ll be ready for MOT by then. But I might pick up some useful tips. Next year.’

‘I thought we were going to Turkey next year,’ Helen said, lightly.

‘Yes,’ Clive said. He sounded doubtful.

 

He enlisted Helen’s help with the upholstery, ordering reproduction fabric in authentic patterns, and standing over her and the sewing machine until she shouted at him. ‘How can you possibly expect me to make a decent job of this when you’re breathing down my neck?’

He muttered an apology and stomped off to the garage. When she came out, to apologise and to show him the curtains she had just finished, he was repainting one of the panels.

‘What was wrong with it?’ she asked.

He frowned up at her. ‘I’m redoing the whole lot. This is a much better match – what she’d have looked like originally.’

Helen thought of the roads the camper had travelled, the adventures they would never know about. ‘But don’t you want her to look a little bit lived-in?’

Clive winced.

It was the end of November when Clive admitted that even he couldn’t think of anything left to do. ‘She’s finished,’ he said. ‘She’s perfect.’

Helen smiled. ‘So are you going to book an MOT?’ Even now, with darkness falling at five and the gales blowing in, she found the thought of the open road exhilarating.

Was she imagining his evasive look? ‘Not until the spring,’ he said. ‘There’s no point wasting three months when we won’t be driving.’

 

‘So,’ she said in April, ‘when are you going to take her for her MOT?’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘yes. That’s the thing. Er. That is. I’ve been thinking. After all the work I’ve put in. I don’t want to spoil it, taking it on the road. You never know what might happen… Oh, love, don’t cry. I’ll ring around the travel agents tomorrow. See about that holiday to Turkey, eh?’

 

What you think the project is, and what the project really is

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Minor spoilers for Speak Its Name in this, including an extract from a chapter very near the end.

Visibility charm
Visibility charm

I mentioned last time that my main purveyor of author tracts (warning: that’s a link to TV Tropes, and if you follow it you may lose the rest of the day) in Speak Its Name was Peter. Which is not really surprising, when you consider that the book started out as a story of how getting too interested in student and/or Christian politics can play havoc with what you thought was a vocation to ordained ministry. That’s pretty much where I was when I started writing it, after all, so it made sense to bestow some of my own opinions upon the character who was dealing with that.

The other one was Abby, who is Lydia’s cousin, and who is in some ways much closer to an author avatar (TV Tropes again), or at least an author caricature. (‘A self-insert who turns up at the end to pontificate,’ was how I put it to one of my editors.) I am not blonde, or pregnant, or given to wearing pink, but at the time of writing I was very aware that I looked a lot like the Perfect Christian Woman. And – aside from the fact that my family is much less of a clusterfuck than the Hawkins – this was very much what my experience looked like.

‘What I wanted to say,’ Abby said, ‘was that I know that our family is not at all helpful when it comes to relationships that happen in anything like the real world, and that I know that your parents are if anything less helpful than my parents and that – if you wanted me to – I would come out.’

Lydia choked on her prosecco. ‘What?’

Abby told Colette, in a stage whisper, ‘I said it wasn’t a helpful family.’ Then, in more serious tones. ‘I’m bi.’

Lydia could think of nothing to say. Colette, clearly amused, said, ‘She looked less shocked when I told her I had a crush on her.’

Abby smiled, though it looked like an effort. ‘I wasn’t ever going to tell anyone. Not in the family, at least. It never occurred to me that I might not be the only one.’

‘Same,’ Lydia just managed to squeak. ‘Does Paul know?’

‘Of course – I wouldn’t have married him if I couldn’t tell him that.’

‘People must do,’ Lydia said. ‘Oh, God, this must happen all the time.’

Abby nodded. ‘I know four or five – happily married, most of us, still in love, still Christian, still trying to find a way to be truthful, always knowing how bloody lucky we are: that we could so easily have gone the other way, fallen for someone we couldn’t take to church with us…’

Except… when I was reading it through, on the second to last editing pass, I was struck by the horrifying thought, Good grief, that sounds miserable.

And then I remembered that was me, that the last paragraph there describes precisely the way I thought about myself and my faith and my bisexuality at the time I was writing. I might as well have put it in there so that I could say to anyone who asked, ‘You know the bit with Abby at the end? That’s basically where I am.’

Not any more. Somewhere in the writing process I’d moved far beyond where Abby was. I was mostly out, as opposed to being mostly closeted. I’d stopped thinking that the only appropriate way for me to be bisexual was quietly. I’d realised what a mess I’d made of myself by trying to do that. I’d started speaking up, and out.

The project is never what you think it is. I thought Speak Its Name was about vocation, and politics, and faith, and sexual orientation, and it is, but it is mostly about being OK with who I am, and I had to learn more about that before I could finish it. Writing a book changed the book, and changed me.

I suspect that writing Wheels will have something to teach me about working too hard and physical capacity and the importance of not doing things. I asked to learn more about that, after all.

I suspect that I do not currently have the breadth of understanding to imagine what it’s going to teach me. I suspect that it’s going to go far beyond juggling my working patterns and keeping every other weekend free. I suspect that it’s going to take me apart and put me back together again, and maybe I’ll notice while it’s actually happening, and maybe I won’t. Maybe, like last time, I’ll just happen to glance back over my shoulder and think, Good grief, is that where I was? What a very long way I’ve come.