Tag: writing process

Week-end: red plush seat season

kathleenjowitt2 Comments
Ornate theatre auditorium with a lot of gilt and red plush, seen from high up in the gallery

The good

A serenely joyful Monday. Visiting friends. A night at the opera. Red and yellow trees. Ripe pears. There have been some lovely moments this week. And there is encouraging progress on the Bicycles and Broomsticks Kickstarter.

The mixed

You know, I really could enjoy autumn if only I didn’t have to do so much. And by ‘have to’ I mean ‘want to’, ‘feel obliged to’, and ‘be contractually obliged to’. As it is, I find myself simultaneously getting irritated by the memes about the joy of crunchy leaves and pumpkin spiced lattes, while enjoying the crunchy leaves. (I have never tried a pumpkin spiced latte. I have never tried a plain latte, not being overly fond of milk.)

And! I finally finally finally got up to date with my accounts (I use You Need A Budget). It took an awful lot of coffee, but I did it, and nothing is telling me reproachfully that it was last reconciled nine months ago.

The difficult and perplexing

I’m boring myself here, but I’m tired. I’m beginning to wonder, actually, whether I’m not so far over Covid as I thought I was. But it may still be the time of year, combined with the nasty shock of things actually happening.

What’s working

High drama, sequins, lounging on the sofa, hot baths, soap made with coffee grounds.

Reading

I progressed a little further with The Master and Margarita. The Master has now shown up. In The Fellowship of the Ring we have reached the Old Forest and Tom Bombadil has shown up. In non-fiction, I read the introductory sections of Philip’s Guide To The Night Sky (see Acquisitions) and very much enjoyed the general Sir Patrick Mooreness of the writing. I will return to the seasonal specifics later.

Writing

Some editing on Book Bus Stories. Some connections in Starcrossers, which continues to head north towards ten thousand words. I’m going to finish joining it all up and then see what I can cut. Or throw myself on the editor’s mercy. Maybe both.

Mending

I’ve been having a lot of fun with the darning loom this week. I’ve darned a pyjama top (it’s very obvious that I mostly sleep on my right side), a pair of walking socks, a pair of ordinary socks, two pairs of jeggings, and one of Tony’s merino T-shirts.

Watching

Tosca (English National Opera, London Coliseum). I’d never actually seen Tosca and felt it was about time, and really, when you can get tickets for a tenner and I’m in London anyway, why not? So I did. It was an enjoyable show, very trad production (bicorne hats and all), good singing, understudy (?) Scarpia acquitted himself very well, Tosca herself was great, though I think Caravadossi ran away with it. My formative Tosca is Agatha Christie’s short story Swan Song, so (without spoilers) I’m always slightly surprised when the opera keeps on going for another forty minutes after Vissi d’arte (or Love and Music in this case, as ENO do everything in English). I am glad I did not accidentally leave at the interval.

Although I will say that the ten pound seats are proportionately tiny, front to back, and I was glad it wasn’t a full house and there was space for us to spread out.

Another three episodes of Heartstopper with my friend N, with popcorn and everything. It’s very charming, but my overwhelming reaction is relief that I never have to go to school ever again.

Also, what I need to get me through the dark evenings is a bucketload of sequins, unconvincing musical cuts, and dodgy scoring, and since figure skating doesn’t hit Eurosport until this coming Friday I’ve been watching Strictly Come Dancing.

Cooking

Bubble and squeak (accompanied by fierce debate as to whether you can really call it that when it isn’t made with leftovers); upside down chocolate pear pudding (experimenting this time with adding ground almonds and more milk than I’d meant to). I’ve just peeled and chopped up all the time-limited apples for apple sauce. I filled a saucepan with apples, resulting in half a saucepan of apple sauce, and there is still most of a bowl of (more durable-looking) apples left.

Eating

Pears. Some of them have been divine. The trouble with pears is that they so often go straight from rock-hard to rotten. I had one on Sunday that was both at once. I cut the rotten end off and sliced up the sharp remainder and ate it with Comté cheese. Very good.

I had a very nice paneer kebab at Le Maison Bab in Covent Garden before the opera. And a cocktail called a Paloma Pomegranate to go with it. Very nice. Very pink.

Playing

Ticket to Ride with N and M (not the Agatha Christie ones), followed by Labyrinth and Funny Bunny with M.

Noticing

How quickly the leaves are changing. And they really are lovely this year.

In the garden

As you might have guessed, apples and pears.

Appreciating

Pure distilled emotion. Lie-ins.

Acquisitions

It is always great fun to explore the charity shops of a town you don’t live in. I did very well, and came away with a knitted top, a Friedrich Hollaender/Marlene Dietrich songbook, the vocal score for Cowardy Custard (never heard of it, but it is a way to acquire a lot of Coward music all at once), Consider Phlebas, Philip’s Guide to the Night Sky as mentioned above, The Woman Who Stole My Life (I do like Marian Keyes), By Royal Command (Charlie Higson made a very entertaining interviewer; I’m interested to see what the Young Bond books are like), The Star of Kazan (to replace an copy with a snot stain – not mine), and all five acts of Mireille. Which I think I have only ever encountered on a pianola roll before now.

Hankering

Well, I was looking at a couple of leather jackets, but neither of them fitted well enough to convince me. This reminded me of my intermittent desire for a proper bomber jacket with a sheepskin or knitted collar. And I was very tempted by a darning loom with twenty-one hooks and a long board (the hooks more than the board, if I’m honest). Plus things I’ve mentioned in previous weeks and may buy now I’ve sorted out my money and payday has arrived.

Line of the week

In the Old Forest:

In the midst of it there wound lazily a dark river of brown water, bordered with ancient willows, arched over with willows, blocked by fallen willows, and flecked with thousands of faded willow-leaves.

Saturday snippet

A currently load-bearing bit of Starcrossers:

She used a word I didn’t know. “I suppose you’d call it a guess, though it’s more than that. You’re obviously from the Containment, you enjoy a certain level of rank, though perhaps enjoy isn’t the word, and none of the other Heir’s heirs have a reputation for venturing into Crew territory.” For the first time, she smiled. “And yes, they do also show me the news pieces.”

This coming week

A relatively quiet one at work. I think. I’d like to get the first draft of Starcrossers done and maybe even move on to working out what can come out. A Cursillo event on Saturday, which I am hoping will come together. And there’ll be some figure skating to watch.

Anything you’d like to share from this week? Any hopes for next week? Share them here!

Notes to self

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Green apples growing on a tree

I think I’ve mentioned before that the project I’ve been calling ‘the Romeo and Juliet thing’ is my first attempt at a full-length historical novel. I’m rather enjoying it. Apart from digging around to find out things like how many staff a typical upper-middle class household would have and how many of them would be addressed by their surnames, and what all the relevant railway companies were called, there’s the deeper task of getting into the mindset of a different age. It’s fascinating. (It’s also an excuse to reread a whole load of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers mysteries.)

I am well used to writing characters who are simultaneously stuck in their own heads and detached from their own emotions, whether by shame, depression, or the closet, but this is another level: a whole population that just isn’t talking about anything. My hero is slightly more articulate than the type described by George Mikes in How To Be An Alien:

If he wants to marry a girl, he says:

“I say… would you?…”

If he wants to make an indecent proposal:

“I say… what about…”

But not very much more so. It is 1919, after all.

All this sort of thing is surprisingly fun to write, but it leaves a lot to be done by the narration. If the characters aren’t talking, I have to talk for them. If they can’t talk about feelings, I have to show that those feelings exist – because they do, they’re powerful, maybe even dangerous, and perhaps even more so because they’re not fully expressed. I’m using third person omniscient, though it’s pretending to be third person limited most of the time. (That is, I know everything, but I don’t tell it all, and most of the time I restrict myself to what’s going on inside a particular person’s head.)

Anyway, the proposal does happen in actual words. But in a moment of writing cowardice I chickened out of writing the first kiss – which prompts the proposal – and instead left myself a note in square brackets:

[this has to be really hot]

Helpful, no? As the old Nicorette adverts used to say, don’t tell me, tell me how. Of course I rolled my eyes at myself on every subsequent readthrough until eventually I wrote the damn thing and, yes, made it really hot. The current readthrough, however, has prompted the uncomfortable reflection that it hasn’t really been earned. Not yet. If the kiss needs to be really hot, so does everything leading up to it, otherwise it doesn’t work any more than the proposal, and then the decision to accept doesn’t make any sense either. And then the remainder of the book – about four fifths of it, I’d guess – don’t work at all.

And I think I also need to bring in my second point of view earlier, and do more from her perspective. It’s feeling a bit one-sided at the moment, and it’s vital that both parties are seen to be invested.

Time to write myself some more notes.

[this bit also needs to be really hot]

and

[this bit too]

I’m sure I’ll thank myself for it later.

Regrouping, rethinking, reprioritising

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a full-blown red rose peeping out from between concrete fence posts

I’ve been writing. I’ve filled eight and a half pages of my current exercise book since Thursday morning. Granted, one of those is taken up with an extremely sketchy sketch map, but the rest are all writing.

And on Thursday, or it might have been Friday, I had one of those lovely moments where a whole chunk of book suddenly makes sense. It’s not finding a missing jigsaw piece, because I am a long way away from knowing how many pieces this puzzle has, let alone that there’s one specific one lurking under the sofa. It’s more like finding that the grey-beige piece you thought was part of a building is actually the sunlit bit of tree and now you can join this bit you’ve already done to that bit and suddenly you understand what’s going on with that weird clump of maroon.

I thought I was writing about sending my heroine away to school. I was writing about sending my heroine away to school. But it turned out that I was also writing about her relationship with her parents, and their relationship with the gap which used to be her brother, and how family solidarity means that she can’t talk about any of that with her new husband.

This accounts for one and a third of those eight pages. Not much, in the grand scheme of things. Maybe about 300 words. But it’s made all four of them (I’m not counting the brother; he gets his moments elsewhere, but the really important thing in this part is that he isn’t there) jump out from the page; it’s made the connections between them make sense.

It was a relief, I can tell you. Nothing like that had happened this year and, while I’ve been grimly plugging away, it was all feeling more and more hopeless. Back at the beginning of April, when I was still having to take a nap after a few hours of doing anything remotely interesting, I wrote:

And as it goes on I feel like less and less of a writer. It’s as if I’m no longer the person who has written and self-published three novels, that was someone else, I don’t know how to do it any more, and really what is the point anyway, only five people are going to like it and I will have to find five different people from last time because yet again I am doing something weird and it won’t sell. Possibly Speak Its Name set my expectations unreasonably high.

By the end of April, I was getting away with fewer naps, but I still had no enthusiasm. There were days when I really did think this was it. I thought I’d had my time as a writer. I’d done my three novels, I’d got on a couple of shortlists, the last one was a bit of a flop anyway, and there wasn’t anything more coming.

I didn’t say so. Not over here. For a start, that would have involved writing. I didn’t have the energy for a big flounce, nor yet to explain myself decently. So I just slipped quietly off the radar for a while. And look, it turns out that I was wrong.

Several things have been going on here. In no particular order…

A grim first third of the year

They usually talk about quarters, don’t they? But between bereavement and lingering Covid, things were horrible all the way through to the end of April. I managed to slog on with a sentence per day on everything through the first three months of it, but Covid did for my physical capacity. And, while it was useful to know there was a good reason for my complete and utter lack of energy and motivation, that didn’t go very far to replace it.

Too many projects on the go

At once point I was working actively on:

  • the Ruritanian thing
  • the Romeo and Juliet thing
  • a non-fiction, how-to, workbook sort of thing about writing a book while doing a job
  • Book Bus Stories
  • a collection of historical sapphic short stories (my mind keeps trying to call this historical sapphical, a genre that Hamlet’s players didn’t quite get around to…)

Not to mention things for work and other occupations, things that might have come out without my name on, but which none the less took up mental energy.

It made sense for a long time. The Ruritanian thing was terribly coy and rarely wanted to be the main act. The how-to thing quite often wrote large chunks of itself without my really noticing. And I’ve always found that the best way to stay invested in a project is to keep working on it. After all, it wasn’t much more difficult to add one sentence each to five projects than it was to add five sentences to one, and some days it was easier.

I’m not sure when it stopped making sense. Probably with Covid. I’d realised I needed to focus more by the beginning of April, which tracks. And really, before then I was too ill for it to be of any benefit anyway.

Your regularly scheduled mid-book slump

This happens every time. Every single time.

It was particularly derailing with Speak Its Name because, this being my first time, I didn’t know that this was a thing that happened. Moreover I hadn’t yet proved to myself that I could finish a book.

This time, though, it really threw me. I’d had two significant life events, one of which knocked me emotionally, and the other physically. Intellectually, too. I had the brain fog, and it is not an asset in writing anything at all. Once again I was in unknown territory, and I had no way of knowing whether I’d be able to find my way back from either of them.

This time I actually have given up on a book

Temporarily, at least. I’ve put the Ruritanian thing on the back burner, and maybe I’ll turn off the gas altogether. We’ll see.

The thing with several of these projects was that they weren’t serving their original purpose. The Ruritanian thing, for example, was meant to be light-hearted fun which I would, eventually, be able to share with my father. Well. And then another person I’d have loved to read it, A. J. Hall, died last month. I’m one of many people who can’t quite believe she’s gone, and, though I didn’t know her nearly so well as some of my friends, there’s a big hole in my reading and writing life. If I ever do finish this wretched book it won’t be as good as A. J. Hall would have made it – nobody had quite the same knack for seeing what I needed to cut and telling me so – and it’ll be dedicated to two people. I don’t know. Maybe it’ll be something that I’ll need to finish one day. But it’s certainly stopped being light-hearted fun.

The sapphical historical anthology, meanwhile, was meant to be an easy way to get a book out this year, as the idea was that the greater part of it was already written. Which is true; the only problem is that the rest of it turned out to be ridiculously hard and I can’t be bothered. I have two concepts for additional stories, but I don’t have the plots to go with them. I could make them happen with pure elbow grease, but not at the same time as everything else. It has not turned out to be easy and I’m not going to get a book out this year.

The non-fiction work about how to write your book alongside doing your day job… Well, I was having significant difficulty doing my day job at all, let alone anything else. At some point I’ll add a chapter with the message that sometimes life sucks and you just can’t write; don’t beat yourself up. That can wait, though.

So this time I really have ditched everything except the Romeo and Juliet thing, which, as described at the top of this post, is coming up roses (by that or any other name. Note to self: anything doing with Roses of Picardy?) and made that the main event. And it’s repaying me generously for my undivided attention.

As for Book Bus Stories, well, it’s probably about three quarters done. And I suspect that when I return to the Book Bus it’ll start writing itself again. It usually does. It seems to be perfectly happy looking after itself.

Emerging from the fog

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Half-open tulip streaked red and yellow

I think I’m getting better. I cycled up the hill to the post office this lunchtime. Granted, I also had to have a nap at the end of the working day, but it’s still encouraging. What’s particularly encouraging is the fact that both the bike ride and the nap left me feeling more cheerful. And optimistic.

I’ve been having ideas. I’ve been thinking how remiss it is of spy thriller writers who set their books in 1960s Paris to fail to include a Paris bus. That might be another one for the Book Bus stories. I’ve been thinking what a lovely meet-cute I gave my B couple in A Spoke In The Wheel and wondering if I might write a spin-off. That’s another two ideas to add to ‘something inspired by Saints Felicity and Perpetua’ and ‘something in Victorian Stancester’ for the sapphical-historical anthology I was talking about last time. (I added up all the existing stories that could go in there, by the way. 25,000 words, so I’d want to write at least as much again.)

Ideas are great, but they’re only the beginning. Where I’m having difficulty is developing them into something that’s sturdy enough to support a narrative. That’s the kind of thing that I’d usually work out with myself over the course of a walk, and I haven’t been up to walking. Usually I’d be saying to myself, So, this spy, why is he on this bus? Is he meeting someone? Going somewhere? Half an hour into a walk, I’d have an answer, and with the answer I’d have a plot. But that circuit just isn’t running at the moment.

And ideas aren’t even necessarily terribly useful, since there’s at least one school of thought that says that I’d be best off returning to the Romeo and Juliet thing. And I will do that, just as soon as I’ve finished this blog post. But my goodness, it’s nice to have something going on in my head.

I remember that this time last year I was talking about reading St Augustine over Easter. I’m not sure that I’d have managed it even without taking into account a complicated and tiring, though ultimately very enjoyable, family event. The best-laid schemes and all that… But even so, it is spring, and the tulips are out, and so is the apple blossom, and today I saw two goldfinches at the bird feeder, and I have ideas.

Lost and found

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Two books, 'Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Ireland', 'Floral Patterns of India', and a white ceramic coaster with a gold letter K, on a padded envelope with 'KAFJ BIRTHDAY 26 JUL 21' written on it in red ballpoint pen

Every time I spoke to Pa over the last few months of his life, he said to me, ‘I still haven’t found your birthday present’. Found, that is, in the room that he used as half study, half bedroom, half model railway layout, and indeed, good luck finding anything in there. He’d given me a hideous charity shop coaster as a sort of joke present on the day itself, but my actual present was lost.

I assumed we’d never find it. Or, rather, I assumed we’d find it and we wouldn’t know. That it would be loose among his own things, indistinguishable from them.

But there it was: a padded envelope, with my initials and the date of my birthday. I cried a bit. Inside: a book of birds, and a book of stickers. Yes. Something I’d like, but something that might have been his own.

We found all sorts of things. There was another envelope, a much older one. Inside was a scarf. The writing on the envelope told us that the scarf was made by my great-grandmother for my grandfather, and it was in remarkably good condition one hundred and twenty years later. Other things were not so well documented. In the same box as the scarf we found several lovely early twentieth century Christmas cards, with no clue as to who sent them, or to whom. Somebody must have kept them for some reason, but I shouldn’t think we’ll ever know now.

We fill our homes with things – because we like them, because somebody important gave them to us, because we don’t get round to getting rid of them. We know what the reasons are; the people who come after us probably won’t, unless we tell them. I can see myself hanging onto that padded envelope; if so, I can see my children, if I have any, chucking it. And we will both be right.

Every item in a house is there for a reason. Some of those reasons are not particularly good ones.

‘Every word on that page is there for a reason,’ my A-level English teacher told me. It was quite possibly the most significant thing I learned at school. Every word represents a choice. Saying it this way, not any of the other ways one might have said it. Keeping it there when you come to reread. Deciding that it needed to be said in the first place.

Pa was an expansive, digressive, eclectic writer. He wrote about all sorts of things, though the nominal subject was usually mass transit. Most of his readers were quite happy to come along for the ride. And I think that his reason for most of the words, like most of the items, was, quite simply, that he liked them.

Here’s something that’s in my house for a reason, a birthday present I most definitely knew about. This was what Pa made me for my fifth birthday. It says so on the back.

A large wooden dolls' house in a cluttered room

Daily Decoration: cumulative icicles

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The top portion of a Christmas tree, hung with decorations made from beads threaded on wire and representing icicles

There’s nothing particularly special about these icicles. There are six of them. They always go around the top branches of the tree: their length fills in the gap and they pick up the lights and sparkle pleasingly. They’re made from plastic beads threaded on wire, and they were yet another charity shop find in the penniless Guildford days. The beginning of the collection, if you like. That’s rather appropriate, given the way real icicles form: a drop freezing, another drop running over it and freezing onto it, over and over until it’s an elegant spike. It’s rather appropriate given the way that these were obviously made: a bead after a bead after a bead.

2021 was very much a year to be got through one day at a time. While 2020 is, in my head, a timeless, expansive, almost gentle, stretch of enforced freedom, 2021 seemed to call for gritted teeth and the continual effort of putting one foot in front of the other in front of the other in front of the other…

Early on in the year, someone I follow on the internet mentioned that they were aiming to add one sentence to their work in progress every day. I liked the sound of this. As mentioned elsewhere, I have more than one work in progress, and I thought this seemed like a good way of keeping faith with all of them. It has been. I’ve written short stories, fanfic, an essay, one sentence at a time. I’ve written twenty-six thousand words of one novel. I can’t remember the starting wordcount on the other one, but I do know it’s longer than it was. One sentence, one sentence, one sentence. Maybe two if they seem to come as a pair. Maybe more. Even when I didn’t know what I was doing at all, there’s been something to add. A line of description. A line of dialogue. After a while the thing gathers enough momentum to unspool itself into whole paragraphs, chapters, and I can sit down with it for a couple of hours and finish it off. Or else it runs down again, and once again I add another sentence. Just one today. Just one more tomorrow. Open the document. Add a sentence. Save the document. Close the document.

I decided that I wanted to read more poetry. I have loads of poetry books but the imagined sunny afternoons with a glass of white wine and an hour to dip in didn’t materialise nearly often enough. I started to work my way along the bookcase. The next book along. One poem. Tomorrow, the book after that. Today, Amy Clampitt. Yesterday, Kate Spencer. Tomorrow, Omar Khayyam (translated by Edward Fitzgerald) and the day after, Mary Oliver.

Last year one of my brothers gave me a book called My Year In Small Drawings. I can’t really draw but with a space that’s maybe two inches by three inches it doesn’t really matter. Yesterday I drew a man using a laptop from a stock photo. Today I will draw a picture of a picture. I still can’t really draw but that stops being important.

Duolingo. I can tell you that the boy is eating an apple in Polish, Italian, Spanish, French, and German. (Il ragazzo mangia una mela.) I can tell the cat that she is a cat. (She might not know. It’s best to be sure. Jestesz kotem.) Well, I had an A level in French already (le chat mange une pomme) so that doesn’t really count, but as far as the rest of them go I’m building on, at most, a couple of terms of formal learning plus a couple of months in the country in question. Well, there’s a pandemic on, but I can sort out my verb endings while I make my coffee (le chat ne mange pas des pommes; le chat préfère la nourriture sèche).

Teaching myself the piano. A twenty minute timer, and Michael Aaron’s Adult Piano Method. I have yet to master Home On The Range, but I’m getting there faster than I would if I were doing nothing.

Filling in my diary. I use an ordinary engagement diary, A5, week to view, and it’s part scrapbook, part commonplace book, part record of days. That way I can look back and see when was the last time I gathered the compost and when was the last time my right eye did its funny loss of vision thing and when it was I started reading the book I’ve just finished. And I can write down the quotation I want to remember, and I can stick in the pretty oddment that would otherwise be floating around my desk forever.

It hasn’t been every day. Of course it hasn’t. At present everything to the right of middle C is blocked off by the Christmas tree. Some days I’m too tired to write. Some days it is raining and I do not wish to go out to draw strangers using their phones. Some days I forget to read a poem. The diary tends to get updated all at once in front of whatever’s on Eurosport on a Saturday afternoon. It doesn’t matter. If I miss a day, if I miss a week, a month – no guilt. Any day is a good day to do it again.

A poem.

A phrase.

A drawing.

A sentence.

A drop.

The third dimension: when a book comes to life

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A cardboard cut-out character from a toy theatre in front of a backdrop from same

I love the moment when it turns out that the book I’m working on is, in fact, going to turn out to be a book.

The first time this happened to me was with Speak Its Name. That was my first book and I didn’t really know what I was doing. I had the backdrop (student politics) and I had the characters (students) moving in front of it, occasionally affected by it, but never affecting it. It was flat. Boring.

Then I realised that what I needed to do was to get my most political character involved in the politics.

It sounds so simple. Perhaps it was. All I can say is, it took me a very long time to realise, and it changed the whole book for the better. It turned it from two dimensions into three, like inflating a bouncy castle, or sewing a pair of trousers together. It wasn’t just that my characters were now joined to the background at the point where one of them decided to involve the Students’ Union. It joined all sorts of other bits together, and it made the whole thing neater, more coherent. More interesting. It made the whole book work.

A Spoke in the Wheel and The Real World were, so far as I can remember, better behaved. Oh, getting The Real World nailed down was rather like wrestling an octopus that was also Tam Lin, but it always felt like something, well, real, if I could only get a handle on it. And with A Spoke In The Wheel both characters and plot landed more or less fully formed, bar a giant hole in the middle that I had to work out how to fill.

This time it happened at about the 50,000 word mark. No, I’m not doing NaNoWriMo, but I decided to take advantage of the general #AmWriting mood to make some progress on the Ruritanian thing. This is the project that I’ve been working on, off and on, for the last three years if not more. It seems to prefer being a side project. It modestly shuffled out of the way to let me concentrate on The Real World. It refused to be written at all earlier this year, and only started cooperating when I got swept off my feet by the historical thing. Nine months further on – nine months in which I’ve been trying to add a sentence to each project each day – it’s suddenly taking itself seriously.

Now this, being a Ruritanian thing, requires plot. It requires plot on a level that I’ve never contemplated before. There are double-crosses and Chekhov’s guns and timetables. The action of the last book happens over the course of a year. The action of this book takes place over the course of five days. I discovered the other day that I had my main character drinking five coffees between midnight on Saturday and Sunday lunchtime. I’m counting the espresso martini here, but still.

Of course, that’s easily fixable. I’ve already turned one of those coffees into a slice of cake. The real challenge has been getting the characters to do the things that are needed for the plot to happen in ways that make sense for them. Because if the characters don’t work, then the plot doesn’t work.

When I’m stuck on a book, one thing that helps me is writing down why I’m stuck. Sometimes I like to make an occasion of this. This time, I was just on the train. (Not that taking the train isn’t an exciting novelty these days.) I wrote down the things I needed to invent or research. Then I wrote down the thing that was bothering me, the thing I knew I’d have to fix sooner or later:

George shouldn’t be involving his untrained relations and he knows that.

Or, as paraphrased for Twitter,

Bringing Milly back makes George looks like a callous dimwit.

And yet Milly has to come back (she’s the narrator!) and George has to be both decent and competent. That’s the whole point of his being in this book at all.

So I kept writing.

He doesn’t have a choice with Amelia. But he needs a damn good reason for Milly to come back… There’s got to be more to it than ‘it might come in useful’.

I went down a couple of dead ends. Something that Amelia tells George that Milly doesn’t know about? Something that brings in a couple of other characters? My brain was working faster than I could write, so it wasn’t coming out as great prose.

Milly is the only person who has seen several key players by sight, so it makes sense to keep her on the spot. But that’s what’s putting her in danger. Sending her home is for her own safety.

I kept writing. Half a page later, it hit me.

Hang on. What if they do get Milly to share – and then don’t act on that? Yes. Milly spills the beans and thinks it’s all cleared up. George arrives, wants to find out more. Milly is the obvious candidate to find out more.

Bingo.

That adjusts the stakes just enough to make everyone’s actions plausible. It makes sense for Milly to come back. It makes sense for George to let her.

A (really encouraging) bonus: I now have a much better idea of at least one of the villains. And the [plot goes here] bit in the antepenultimate (there’s a good word) chapter.

Of course it’s going to demand a whole lot more changes – because most of the 54,000 words I had down were written on the assumption that Milly didn’t share – but I don’t care about that. It makes the whole thing work.

I love that moment.

Time is cyclical

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I’ve been feeling quite ill these last few days (not COVID – I got the test results back this morning) and was looking back through my locked journal to see how long it took me to get over it the last time I was feeling this awful. Quite a while, it turns out – the thing kept coming back – but it reminded me that I was feeling much worse then than I am now, so on the whole I found cause for hope. What I also found was the following, which amused me rather, given the fact that I didn’t properly get going on the, er, sequel to Speak Its Name until September 2018. And it didn’t have a title until September 2019. Or so I thought. Just have a look at that last line. Apparently there was some little part of me that knew all along.

Jan 28 2017, 12:58pm

A Spoke in the Wheel

65K; first draft finished. I read it through this morning, having been avoiding it all January, and discovered that it’s neither as bad nor as miserable as I’d though it was. There is, as always with my first drafts, too much talk and not enough action; there’s a break that doesn’t need to exist between the middle and final thirds; but there’s nothing that isn’t fixable.

I’d got very hung up on the fact that it’s not going to be as good as Speak Its Name (whatever that means); and probably it isn’t, but that’s not really the point. It’s definitely going to be different.

Sequel to Speak Its Name

About a thousand words worth of oddments. Real-world developments in the Church of England are depressing, and look like they’re going to settle down into a sort of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell stalemate. I can work with that, plot-wise – in fact, it means that I could continue bimbling along in the vague non-timeline that I was using in the original, though having thought about it I’m not sure that I do want to do that any more – but you know, given the choice, I’d rather the real world sorted itself out.

Small patchwork quilt of hexagons in primary colours
No particular reason for this picture, beyond the fact that it’s cheerful and also dates from January 2017.

Fragment (consider revising)

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Seedlings in small pots of composts

Jack Kerouac famously stuck hundreds of sheets of paper to make one long roll so that he could write On The Road all in one go. This is not an approach that would have worked for me.

As I’ve remarked before, I’ve never been one to start at the beginning of a story, and go on until I get to the end, and then stop. And it seems that over the last year I’ve become even less inclined to do that. At the moment I have six documents open:

  • an experimental anthology that may or may not be going somewhere (4,532 words since summer 2019)
  • the Ruritanian thing (30,642 words since summer 2018)
  • the historical novel (13,659 words since this February)
  • a how-to-write-your-book-while-holding-down-a-job workbook (7,886 words since summer 2020)
  • and two short stories (6,851 words and 631 words respectively)

Not to mention, of course, this post.

My current approach is, every day except Sundays, to open up everything I’m working on and add a sentence to each of them. Depending on where we are in the month and how knackered I am, I might then keep going on whichever one or ones of them take my fancy.

Sometimes I manage whole paragraphs; very rarely, whole scenes. Sometimes I come back from a walk with the next scene in my head. Sometimes I write it. More often it was my morning walk and I have to do my day job, and so I write myself a note at the breakfast table:

Cherry Ripe – the garden at the Beaumont house – resolves the Parry question

crisis: factory brawl, domestic brawl

Ben & Mack could go to Paris?

Which gives me something to start from later in the day.

(Please do not suggest that I get up earlier. Getting up earlier does not work for me.)

I do not always add complete sentences. I have a feeling that I used to add complete sentences, but lately I’ve found it easier just to write the words that are in my head and come back to the other ones later.

Blame pandemic brain, or else the fact that I’m doing all my writing on the laptop at the moment and can get away with this sort of approach. Either way, it results in a lot of my writing looking something like this:

[He leaves]

Did I feel weird about sleeping in Amelia’s pyjamas in Amelia’s bed? Not remotely. I was far too tired to have scruples about something like that. I slipped between those smooth, white, hotel sheets,

It would have been nice if it had been a dreamless, untroubled, refreshing sleep. I thought I deserved some peace and quiet. I didn’t get it.

[nightmare]

[phone ringing]

All except the alarm, which turned out to be the phone. Automatically, I reached for the receiver.

There’s a lot that isn’t there yet, and what is there isn’t exactly inspired. It leaves me a lot to sort out later, of course. But, weirdly enough, that turns out to be an advantage. When I open up my six (or however many) documents it’s quite handy to find a pair of square brackets that I can fill in, or half a sentence that I suddenly know how finish off. And sometimes I keep on going.

It probably isn’t the most efficient way to write a novel. (Or, in this case, two novels, an anthology, two short stories, a workbook, and a blog post.) I’ve no idea when or if I’m going to finish any of them (except the blog post). But at the moment it seems to be the only way that I’m writing anything at all. And it adds up. And it keeps the pilot light on. So let’s go with it.

Limerance

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A straight-edged patch of sunlight falls across snowy grass and illuminates a couple of metres of a bare hedge with golden light

That fizzy, smiling-to-yourself, energy that you get when you have a new crush, and you can’t stop thinking about them, and when you’re with them everything is bright and when you’re not with them you’re thinking about the next time you will be with them, or just thinking about them. That.

I said a month ago that I was between books.

Now I’m not.

This is what happened. That post was 12 January. On 18 January I had an idea. A very hypothetical sort of idea, not the sort that demands to be written. Just a ‘if I were writing this story, this is how I’d do it’ sort of idea. A ‘But even assuming it did work, what was meant to happen next?’ kind of idea. I didn’t do anything about it.

On 2 February (Candlemas, and also the fifth anniversary of the publication of Speak Its Name), some time in the morning, I wrote:

Still not feeling like writing anything [fictional], and feeling OK about that. If something marches in demanding to be written, then I expect I’ll write it, but at the moment it just doesn’t feel particularly relevant.

At about eight o’clock in the evening I was mopping the kitchen floor, and found myself thinking quite seriously about an idea I’ve had floating around in my head for years. Another ‘If I were writing this story, this is how I’d do it’ idea, but one that’s been around for quite a lot longer. It’s an intimidating idea: a historical novel; it would take a lot of research, and I have no idea what the plot would be. Still, there I was, thinking about it.

I had the next three days off, and I think this is important. I’d taken those three days off because I was struggling at work, struggling to get anything done, struggling not to snap, struggling not to cry. I hadn’t expected to ‘get anything done’ during them, because, as I say, I wasn’t writing anything. I was intending to nap, and read, and get my head around who I am this year, and maybe unclog the washbasin in the downstairs loo.

Anyway, I was sitting on the floor sometime in the morning of 4 February, writing in my diary or colouring something in or something like that, and I looked up, and there in my line of sight were all the books – no, a lot of the books; I’d need more – that I’d need to read if I were going to write that intimidating historical idea.

And what seemed immediately apparent was that the Ruritanian novel does not like being my main project. It likes to trundle along in the background while I’m working on the serious project.

Well, fine, I thought. That makes sense. And it seemed to be happy for ‘reading all those books’ to count as ‘working on the serious project’. We can do this.

(Mm. So I’m no longer never writing anything again?)

(You know you never were. But you needed to be in that place in order to rest and recover properly from the last one.)

Then something else happened. That evening, the idea from 18 January came back. Boy, did it come back. It brought with it a setting – not an obvious one, but one that made perfect sense given the themes it would have to work with.

It came in with a fluttering retinue of associated ideas. You could do this. You could do that. And this is how you make this work. And this is how you make that work. She’s called Helen. His cousin lost an arm in the War. It kept prodding me for hours after I’d gone to bed.

On 5 February I had things to do, but I got all those points down. On 6 February I started writing. (I also spent a lot of time cursing and refreshing in order to get Speak Its Name onto Smashwords, so it is now available from more ebook stores.) And the ideas keep unspooling, unfurling. I go for a walk and when I come back a whole new scene has written itself in my head. I get a few lines of that down before it evaporates, or I get distracted by another new scene. I look up at the bookcase and realise that of course his name is Julian. But won’t that be confusing? Oh, but then I could slide in Cherry Ripe, and at least one other person would see why. It’s expanding in all directions, and I’d be scared that I couldn’t keep up with it if I didn’t trust that I’ll be able to catch it all later.

I’d forgotten how much fun this stage of a project can be. I know it’ll get more difficult later, when the initial flow dries up and I have to fill in the gaps. I know that whole chunks of this easy wordery will turn out not to fit and have to come out again. Maybe he can’t be called Julian. Maybe I’ll have to ditch the Cherry Ripe allusion. At this stage, I really don’t care. While it lasts, I’ll enjoy it.

I’m very amused by the timing. I’ve known for a while that I’m a seasonal being, but I hadn’t expected a whole new project to come in with a whoosh immediately after the first day of spring. (I’m aware that much of the country is swathed in snow – just frost here, now – but it seems the increasing daylight has more to do with it than the temperature.) I’m amused, too, by the way that making a deliberate decision to step back, to give myself a break, to spend all January watching the skiing and not beat myself up about it, has resulted in this sudden profusion of new words.

Now I’m taking another break. This does not mean that I am any less smitten with this new beautiful project, just that I have a routine and I’m not going to break it. I may be smiling to myself like a teenager, but I’m thirty-five and I have a better idea of how to keep things going. (So we’ll go no more a-roving/So late into the night.) This is, as they say, a marathon and not a sprint. I could show you my browser history from the last couple of days, and you’d see: the songs, the searches, the Wikipedia pages. Even if I’m not putting words on paper (or in pixels, as the case may be) I’m still reading, listening, watching, around the project, chasing clues, following rabbit-holes, finding a thousand things that remind me of the lovely new thing I’m working on.