Tag: writing process

The next book

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Picture not entirely unrelated to the next book...
Picture not entirely unrelated to the next book…

There will be one. I was wondering whether I was just going to publish Speak Its Name and call it a day, but my brain decided to dredge up an idea from a few months back. I spent the three mile walk to the station working out how it should finish, and the three mile walk back getting a handle on the narrator’s voice. Also, reminding myself that I’m allowed to have a fictional bike fictionally nicked, and that I do have the power to get it back again, which is more than can be said for real bikes. (Mine’s fine. It’s in the shed. I just fancied a walk today.)

I’ve jotted a few notes down this evening; looking back on what I had before, there isn’t a huge amount of new material, but what I’ve managed to do is to rearrange it into a plausible and exciting structure. Since I was about sixty thousand words into Speak Its Name before that happened last time, this feels encouraging.

Having said that, my focus does need to be on Speak Its Name for at least the next three weeks. I need to incorporate the last batch of suggestions from my army of editors. I need to finalise the cover design. I need to format the inside twice (once for the ebook, once for the print version). I need to hand the book over to my partner for proofreading. And then I need to press the button that says ‘Make available’. (At least, I believe that such a button exists. I have not yet got to the point where one sees it.)

After that I’ll spend at least a week doing not very much at all, at which point my day job will get very busy, so I probably won’t do much outside that until March. All the same, it’s very good to know that there’s something bubbling away in the background, waiting for me to be ready for it.

How I write

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Crossing the barren wastes of plot
Crossing the barren wastes of plot

Experience has taught me that I simply cannot start at the beginning of a story and go on until I get to the end and then stop. I have remarked before that my writing process is less like laying a road than it is like connecting up islands of an archipelago. I start with two or three very definite pictures or ideas in my head, and usually have a basic idea of their position in relation to one another. Writing those down will induce five or six other islands to erupt from the seabed. And they drag more up behind them. After that it’s a matter of building bridges, or causeways, perhaps throwing in an artificial island, perhaps bypassing three or four of the early ones, after all.

It implies a phenomenal amount of rewriting, to ensure that character development and such things are consistent. But that’s probably good for me, and anyway, it’s the only way that I can do it.

I have discovered that, even if I plot the whole thing out in advance, some scene that’s meant to happen two thirds of the way through catches my imagination and refuses to let anything else past until I’ve written it. I then say ‘sod it’, and continue writing the bits that happen to catch my fancy at that moment.

Perhaps island-hopping just suits me.

Reverb day 3: taking my cue from the moon

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When was the last time you stopped to look up at the moon?

What did she have to say to you?

This morning, wheeling my bike out to the road, I looked up, above the houses opposite. A pink-and-blue morning sky, and a crisp, clear-edged half moon, with just a few hours to go, I suppose, before it became a perfect semi-circle. ‘Moon!’ I said, but I was tired and grumpy, and didn’t wait for a reply before cycling off.

Of late, I’ve been paying more attention to the moon than I used to. I’ve been noticing where in the cycle we are. I’ve been looking at the little circles in my diary and at the app on my phone, so that even if I can’t see the moon, I know what’s going on. I can tell whether it’s waxing or waning by looking which way the curve faces.

I’ve also been noticing my own rhythms. Not those rhythms – I’ve never had a regular menstrual cycle, and, if I’m honest, really don’t give a toss – but the less obvious rhythms, the ones that only become obvious when I pay very careful attention. This year, I noticed that every time I participated in a month-long writing activity, I ran out of steam after the first two weeks. I noticed that engaging in social activities on adjacent weekends leaves me feeling exhausted and anti-social. I read Slow Time. And I started wondering.

This year’s experiment is going to involve the moon. I’m going to see how a two weeks on/two weeks off cycle works for me. I’ll begin work on my projects at the new moon, working as intensely as I feel moved during the following two weeks, and then take stock at the full moon. After that I’ll wind down; I’ll tie up loose ends, but I won’t expect my productivity to be nearly so high. I’ll pay particular attention to rest and recuperation. I will make sure to leave every other weekend clear.

My day job will continue as normal. There are some things over which I have no control! But even there I’ll pay attention to the peaks and troughs, and where work eats one weekend I’ll make sure I get the next one to myself.

I have, of course, a whole chorus of objections in my head:

  • “What The Hell Is This WooWoo Hippie Shit”
  • “You Know You Don’t Believe A Word Of This”
  • “You Realise Your Coffee Cup Exerts More Of A Gravitational Pull On You Than The Moon Does”

(These three are slightly mollified by my assuring them that I’m treating the moon more as a clock.)

  • “You Are A Disgrace To The Sisterhood”

(This one thinks that actually I should be attempting to align my menstrual cycle with the moon, to which I say, blow that for a lark)

and

  • “What Is Wrong With You Why Can’t You Just Push On Through”

(To which I point out that this approach has been working so well of late, hasn’t it?)

So perhaps that’s what the moon’s got to say to me today. Two weeks of waxing, two weeks of waning, is enough for anybody. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Full moon
A rather blurry photo of last week’s full moon

Where I am with Speak Its Name

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I saw this floating around Twitter a few days ago:

It made me wince in recognition. I have seen some truly terrible self-published books. (I have also seen some truly terrible traditionally published books, and in most cases I muttered, ‘Get a proper editor!’ and in one I appended, ‘And make it someone who knows that low-church bishops don’t wear soutanes, or at least don’t call them that!’)

It made me smile. On this count, at least, I have nothing for which to reproach myself, except perhaps for only paying my army of editors in promises of gin.

At present Speak Its Name is with five different people. Two of them are looking at overall language and structure and hunting plot holes. Another two are nitpicking: searching for errors in my portrayal of the High and Low Church wings of university Christianity respectively (though the word ‘soutane’ is not used in my book).

And the fifth is telling me where things just don’t make sense. He opened his critique with the words ‘I am probably one of the most critical people you will meet’, so I was expecting it to be dire; in actual fact it was rather like being savaged by a very fluffy kitten, particularly after the first general editor had suggested I cut half the first chapter. Having said that, I’d cut forty thousand words off my own bat, before any of this crowd got to look at it, because I knew those bits just didn’t work.

I’m working on incorporating all those people’s suggestions into my text. I’m waiting on some of their suggestions; these are all people who have day jobs and/or children, and I’m only paying them in gin! I’m also glumly aware that I need to standardise my inverted commas, some of which are straight and some of which are curly, depending on which program I was using when I wrote the scene in question. I’ve already fixed all the en dashes that should have been em dashes.

The inverted commas are going to be tedious, but they’ve got to be done. It’s all got to be done. In a little while – perhaps a month, perhaps longer – people will start reading it, not because they are kindly pulling it to pieces for me, but because they want to read it. Now, that’s scary.

April Moon: day 13: false dichotomies

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Sometimes I wonder if I will ever… shh. Don’t wonder too hard. You’ll wake it, and it needs a rest. So do I. It’s asleep, curled up in a cave somewhere in the Mariana Trench. Don’t worry. It’ll come back when it’s ready.

We’re not talking about this today. We can talk in generalities.

Sometimes I wonder if I will ever make my living by writing – and then I realise very swiftly that I don’t want to.

Oh, I dream. I wander along the banks of the Cam and wonder which house would be the best to live and write in. I think of having a studio with a balcony and looking out at the swans and ducks and rowers. I imagine how my books will change people’s lives. I daydream about being interviewed in my beautiful home, and all that guff.

In the mean time, I write on the train to work.

Here’s a confession. Even in that dream life, I still go to work.

I was talking about other people’s expectations early in this round. I think there are just as many levied on artists, of whatever ilk, as there are on everyone else. Just as everybody assumes that the temp can’t be happy until they’ve found a real job, everybody assumes that the artist must really want to chuck in the real world and devote themself to art.

It’s the dream, isn’t it? Chucking in the [soulless bullshit job] and giving the whole to [one’s vocation]. But is it really the dream?

I have a friend who, in his forties, left the air conditioning trade and went to university (which is where I met him) to study French, with the ultimate aim of becoming a teacher. He tried teaching, hated it, and is now back in air conditioning, although with a life much improved (or so I believe) in other ways. Meanwhile, my uncle has left teaching to become a lorry driver. (He’s also an extremely accomplished musician and photographer.) Life is, as ever, more complicated than that. And people vary.

Personally (and I know I was ranting about the conflation of these concepts earlier in the round, as well) I would no more like to be a full time artist than I would a full time mother. I like my day job. I like getting out of the house and going to the big city. I like interacting with amusing, knowledgeable people. I like my forty-five minutes of writing time on the train. (Hush. Hush. It’s all right. Not you. I didn’t mean you. Nobody’s writing anything more on you at the moment.)

Even if there were a way to earn a living by writing without the nicotine and/or alcohol dependence and chronic financial insecurity that characterised the only household I knew where anyone tried it, would I want to? I don’t think so. I am learning to take better care of myself than that.

Murdering My Darlings, and Other Metaphors

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Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you’re a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff’s worth, without pity, and destroy most of it. -Colette, author (28 Jan 1873-1954)

I subscribe to A.Word.A.Day, which, as the name suggests, emails me an interesting word every day. I know a lot of these already; many more are completely unusable; a few have potential and I put them away for future use.

It also comes with a Thought For The Day. The above was one of them.

I’m rather flattered. I want to say, ‘no, no, that’s the easy part’. Or, ‘I’m not an author, I’m just a proof-reader’. You see, proof-reading has always been the easy part, for me. Or, rather, since I started bothering to do it to my own work, it’s been the easy part. I have been proof-reading since I was in my early teens. I’ve always had a good eye for spelling and grammar; I know without having to delve into the rules how a word should look and where a comma wants to be. I’m as happy with a red pen in my hand as with a black one, and crossing through a word of my own hurts no more than crossing through a word of someone else’s. ‘Purple and derivative – cut!’ is no different from ‘Check your deadline here – you say 5pm on p. 17!’

Writing is the hard part. Oh, ‘everything that comes into my head’ is all very well, but it tends to leave me with an archipelago of unrelated scenes, snippets of description, brief exchanges of dialogue. What comes next is raising the ocean floor to make two islands into one, building bridges and tunnels to join two or three others into a coherent route, adding piers so that one can see a little bit further.

And then I simply go through and take out everything that doesn’t need to be there. Blow up a bridge or two. Bypass one of the original islands. ‘Simply’, I say. It’s a long, tedious, process – since I started writing ‘Speak Its Name’ I must have deleted at least as much as there is in the current almost-finished file – but it doesn’t hurt. ‘Murder your darlings’, they say. It doesn’t feel like murdering to me. It’s more (if we’re going to mix our metaphors) as if I’ve been building a cathedral, and I’ve had to do masonry and woodwork and everything from scratch, and until I’m quite a long way through the process I can’t see what’s scaffolding and what’s a flying buttress. I put in what needs to be there at the beginning, but when I approach the end I find that some of it doesn’t need to be there any more.

I suppose I don’t really murder my darlings. I take them out of class and put them to bed. Sometimes they reappear, adapted for a different character’s point of view or a flashback to somebody’s past. Sometimes they slumber in ‘might come in useful’ for ever. I don’t much mind either way. Resurrecting a paragraph or two isn’t so much like saving a life as picking a useful plank out of the skip, finding that it can fill a hole after all.

An author? How I’d love to accept Colette’s title. I can’t help feeling though, that I don’t really, or really don’t, deserve it; that it ought to be harder than that. Perhaps everything feels not-quite-hard-enough when you’ve already done it, when you know you can.

August Moon: day 13

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What are the stories that limit you?

Stories? I could fill a book with them:

– Doing What You Love is all very well, but one can’t expect to make a living that way.
– Doing anything other than What You Love is a betrayal of your artistic integrity
– expecting to make a living from any form of art is irresponsible and your family will starve
– of course it’s impossible to write without drinking/smoking/coffee
– we are the weird ones and nobody understands us
– it doesn’t matter how brilliant I am, nobody actually likes me
– if it doesn’t get eaten, it’s wasted
– it’s my responsibility to compensate for other people’s shortcomings and omissions

Some of these aren’t even mine. I’ve never smoked, for example. In fact, most of these are now neutralised. Naming them allows me to analyse them, take them to pieces, see how far they are true and where they are not. I’ve got into the habit now of picking up any such sweeping statements I hear myself making, stopping myself, and thinking: what? why?

So much for the verbalised stories. What stories are lurking in my head that I don’t even know are stories, that’s another question. What convictions do I have that I haven’t even thought to question? What could I do without those stories I don’t even know about? Now, that could be fun.

August Moon: day 11

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What is the perfect space for you? How can you start creating a place like this in the spaces you already have at your disposal?

Where am I now? I am sitting with my legs stretched along the length of a sofa, my netbook balanced on my knees and bouncing as I type. I’ve retreated from the dining room (which is being tidied, loudly) and kitchen to the conservatory, which is below the reach of the wi-fi.

I have a pretty good view. Beyond some household debris (a broken office chair, a mountain bike, a Lloyd Loom armchair) is an open French window; beyond that, a trapezium of decking and a buddleia bush, and beyond that, the sea. I can hear grasshoppers, the waves swishing gently on the rocks, a seagull or two, someone shouting down in the carpark.

I’m reading Fame is the Spur at the moment, and the central character is being provided with a study – a rare luxury in the working class nineteenth century world he inhabits. His parents find him a desk, give him a chair with a cushion and let him light a fire in the grate; his friend puts in some bookshelves, and they make regular expeditions to a second-hand bookshop to fill them. There are red curtains and an armchair. Even in 2014 it sounds pretty good.

A space that is mine and mine alone is non-negotiable; it has been ever since I moved in with my partner. The current study is the best yet. I have a bookcase, and my desk and computer, and my pictures on the walls. There is a sofa bed to sit (or lie) on when I want to read, or think, or write long-hand.

What can I do in the short term to improve this space? I can buy a lampshade. I don’t usually look at the lamp, and the light is gentle enough that I don’t notice the absence of a shade, but it would be nice to have one. I can empty the three boxes that are blocking the space between the bookcase and the wardrobe. I can rearrange the books, so that the poetry goes into the study. I can put a tiny little plate next my keyboard, to hold the daily chocolate ration. I can remember to shut the door to minimise the likelihood of my being disturbed.

Improvements that require quite a lot of money, and possibly a whole new house: I’d make it a little bit cooler in the summer. (I’ve not been there in the winter, yet.) I’d swap my desk (which is really a dressing table) for one that’s less likely to do injury to my shoulder and upper back. I’d arrange for more horizontal space, so that I have a surface on which to write as well as to type and I’d have a pinboard. A chaise longue, or a day-bed – either way, big enough to curl up in or to sleep on. And yes, I’d have an open fire, or perhaps a wood-burning stove. A gas ring and a coffee pot. Heavy, red, curtains and a thick, comforting carpet. A window – a big one – that opens to the outside.

In the dream house my study won’t even be given over to guests. We could have people to stay every night of the year and I’d be able to carry on as if they weren’t there. I’d have magic mind-reading wi-fi that would only give me access to the sites I needed for research. There would be far more bookshelves.

I’d have a separate room for the more practical things, very light, with big windows and white-painted walls. A big press to keep fabric in, and one of those merchant’s chests for beads, every drawer labelled. A huge table that I don’t have to clear mid-piece. An Anglepoise lamp (I’ve always wanted one, anyway).

I’d keep this view, though. Who wouldn’t?

August Moon: check-in

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It’s a beautiful moon. We are staying with my mother at the moment, and she has put us in the bedroom with a balcony looking south out over the English Channel. There’s very little sky-glow and the moon is a sharp silver sickle. Vega is very bright and the Milky Way stretches east-west. We’re very lucky.

I have come down with some vile bug and have spent most of today either in bed or sitting up in a chair feeling sorry for myself. I suspect it’s a case of not having had enough holidays, and having been doing too much gallivanting on the ones I have had.

This weekend – a long drive and a wedding and a family get-together – has been the hinge between a week of work and a week of (it seems) enforced idleness. (Although I am still holding on to the hope that I’ll be well enough tomorrow or Thursday to go to Amazon World and look at the poison arrow frogs.) In some ways it’s easier to get August Moon posts done during a work day; I have the prompts buzzing in the back of my mind all day and the words pour out pretty quickly. On holiday – particularly one like this, where there are friends and family all over the place, and the laptop’s at the bottom of the suitcase, and my brain’s running on only two cylinders – it’s more difficult. But I’m managing to carve out half-hours here and there to get on with it.

I’ve just finished reading White Feathers, Susan Lanigan’s first novel, and am feeling mighty privileged because I don’t think it’s officially released yet, and also I saw the thing come together before my eyes. (In the acknowledgements, Susan credits the Pico group. I don’t wish to blow our cover, but I’m part of it too and it’s a fantastic, supportive, encouraging group, the best incentive to write that I’ve ever come across.) I will content myself for the moment by saying, see? It can be done and I can do it too

August Moon: day 8

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Put out the call!

Dear friend,

You know your job title. But who are you?

You are a worthy addition to my circle of godparents, odd-parents and not-parents. You are absolutely convinced that I can do anything I want to. Even when I’m not. Even when I’m trying very hard to persuade you otherwise.

You encourage me. When I’ve been told ‘no’ – when I’ve told myself ‘no’ – too many times, you’re the person who says ‘yes’. You’re the one who gets me to sit down and try again, because I never know. You do. You know, and you’re just waiting for me at the other end, for me to make my way through the uncertainty and the self-doubt. You fight my corner.

You’re a good fifteen years older than me, maybe twenty. You’re confident about your place in this world, and mine. I don’t think you have children. Either way, I’m one of your honorary children. And you understand my ambivalence about having children myself; you know that, whatever else I might do with my life, getting this damn thing out into the world is incredibly important.

You know what you’re talking about. You’ve been in this game for a long time, and the reason for your having been there this long is that you love it. I can ask you any stupid question I need to and you won’t laugh at me.

I am looking forward to meeting you.

Much love,

Kathleen