Mind-Full Monday

Good moaning.

Image: warrelics.eu

It’s Monday again, and my skull is creaking at the seams.

The things on my mind this morning, in no particular order, are:

1. The frustrations of being misunderstood;
2. The difficulty of keeping a load of closing dates for competitions and submissions in mind for long enough to write them down, whereupon you lose the piece of paper you wrote the dates down on and forget them all anyway;
3. The need to come up with stuff to write for these competitions and/or submissions;
4. The sheer absolute awesomeness of this:

5. The horror of constantly checking your email inbox, just in case there’s a message in it which will change the course of your future. Or, you know, not.
6. The fact that I watched ‘The Happening’ at the weekend, despite my brother’s warning years ago that it was utter, irredeemable nonsense. I should have listened to my brother.

But the main thing on my mind today is the fact that what I am going to be doing for the foreseeable future is rewriting one of my own books, in line with Very Knowledgeable Advice – the sort of advice it would be foolish to ignore, in other words. So, I am being very clever indeed by not ignoring it.

The book is ‘Eldritch.’ I don’t blame you for forgetting all about it. I nearly had, too.

So, I had originally imagined ‘Eldritch’ as the first part of a trilogy. In my innocence, I had thought the story needed three whole books to tell it: I had imagined my funny little hero, Jeff Smith (who wishes he had a cooler name so that he could have better luck with girls), and his brave and clever friend Joe Araujo (who would rather be at home eating curry than on an adventure), would enjoy being flung through time and space not once, but three times in order to bring their story to a conclusion. I thought I had crafted good, strong characters, including a compelling baddie (I so hadn’t); I thought, in short, that the story was strong enough to sustain a series.

But – *cue dramatic flourish* – I was wrong.

I was wrong, and I didn’t see it until it was pointed out to me. I didn’t see that my baddie was a mishmash of clichés, and that my story was a reasonably good one, but that it certainly didn’t need three books to tell it. I didn’t see that, while my writing was reasonable and the dialogue between my leads was memorable, so much of what I’d written was so-so and forgettable.

I’m not trying to pretend this wasn’t hard to hear. But if you want to know the truth about it – I took this feedback, and I digested it, and after only a few moments (a few stomach-plunging moments, admittedly) I began to see how much sense it made. Taking this feedback was a lot easier than I’d expected, and a lot less painful than I’d imagined.

Image: 8track.com

Not long after this, I began to re-plot the book in my head. It was tough to disassemble the scaffolding of ‘trilogy’ which had previously existed around these characters and this story; it was hard to even imagine the book as a self-contained unit, instead of a series. It meant a total rethink of the plot, the characters, the motivation, and particularly the ‘baddie’ – he needed to be stronger, scarier, more interesting. In short, he needed to be mine, not a mixture of all the baddies I’d ever read about. I hadn’t realised this was what I’d managed to do, until I re-read him. In short, the bits of the book which didn’t feature him were much stronger than the bits that did.

And that’s not good.

Your baddie is supposed to be your most compelling character. Even more so than your protagonist, your antagonist (to give him his ‘Official Title’) should be unique, and marvellously evil, and logically motivated, and in possession of a Dastardly Plan that makes sense and is workable. He or she should be layered and complex and full of secrets. If not, then you don’t have any proper drama or tension in your story. Your heroes have nothing to fight against or overcome. The danger in your tale is neutralised.

My baddie was a pantomime villain. Looking back, I can’t believe I didn’t spot it myself. But that’s why it’s important to have other eyes read your work, of course.

It also leads me to realise that the most important part of writing is the ability to rewrite, up to and including taking your own work, completely breaking it down, and building it back up again from scratch. A mere edit wouldn’t have saved ‘Eldritch’, but I am only human, and I did investigate whether there were any shortcuts to the process. I wondered if there was a way to salvage most of it, and just change the bits that needed changing. I wondered if there was any chance I could keep some of the features that, I thought, made the book unique – but I’ve learned that only what’s good for the story, not what’s good for the writer, should make it into a final draft.

You have to be willing to do whatever it takes to make the story as good as it can be. If this involves starting again from first principles, then that’s what you have to do.

The only rule is: never give up trying to make your work as excellent as it can be, and always ask for (and heed!) good advice.

All right, so that’s sort of two rules. But you know what I mean.

Image: commitnesstofitness.com

I hope a week of wonder awaits you – and that there will be plenty of words in it.

Following your Instincts

I’m only starting to learn how much of being a writer is following your gut, doing what you feel is right and hoping for the best possible result. It’s inherently unstable, unreliable and unpredictable – but it’s also exhilarating, of course.

Felix Baumgartner knows what I’m talking about…
Image: abcnews.go.com

That’s not to say I haven’t been on the receiving end of some wonderful, helpful advice from people all over the world – people I’ve met through blogging, most particularly. It’s great to read how other people manage their writing goals, and how they achieve the word-counts they want on a daily basis. Everyone has their own style, their own technique, and their own ‘tricks of the trade’. Some people manage their writing completely differently from how I manage mine, and some use techniques that I know I never could. The more I read, and the more I write, the more I realise that writing is a game of doing your best, and doing the best you can to be true to yourself. At the same time, there are hundreds of websites out there offering the secrets of how to write, the tricks of the trade, the absolutely foolproof ‘rules’ – but I’m beginning to think there are no rules. How can there be?

Writing is, like any artform, completely subjective. I bring my own life-experiences to what I write, as does anyone who puts one word after another. I don’t think it’s possible to avoid this, particularly at the beginning of your writing career. Perhaps I’m just particularly bloody-minded, but I really think when it comes to writing I have to learn how to do it myself. If someone tells me ‘don’t do it this way,’ I have a suspicion that I’ll be inclined to try to prove them wrong. Just because a certain technique didn’t work for one person doesn’t mean it’s ‘wrong’ in itself. Of course, there are general rules governing writing (spelling, grammar, sentence construction, paragraph usage, consistent punctuation), designed to aid a reader’s comprehension, but that’s not what I’m talking about here. Those are rules worth following, by and large, though sometimes interesting effects can be created by breaking or bending these guidelines. Even the old rule of ‘a piece of writing needs a beginning, middle and end’ is sometimes jettisoned, to sparkling effect, by writers. It takes great skill to completely throw the rules out the window, though. I’m not at that stage yet, and may never be. In order to break the rules you need to have mastered them completely and be in total control of your technique and material. But how to get to this level in the first place? Hard work and practice until you’ve mastered the rules of structure and composition. Then, experimentation – and listening to your inner voice.

Trying to write in a different way to your normal style can also be a good idea, from time to time. If a person usually writes ‘straight through’ – i.e. linearly – perhaps it’s a good idea to write scenes out of order, and put them together afterwards like a patchwork quilt. Or, as Kate Curtis has recently discussed, sometimes it’s best to start at the end and work your way back. This technique works very well for her, but I’m not sure it would work for me! However, it might be a brilliant thing to do in order to get my brain thinking differently about words and structure, and so it’s a useful nugget of information to have in my writing arsenal. One of the most useful writing exercises I ever did was take a scene I was having trouble with and rewrite it from the point of view of another character; I couldn’t believe the insight this gave me into the scene, the connection between the characters, the dynamic of their relationship, and – most importantly – the motivation behind the behaviour of each of the characters. This technique really helped me to understand why they were acting and reacting the way they were in this particular scene. But no matter what way you write, whether it’s writing each character separately, or whether you stand on your head and write with a pen attached to your eyelid, or whether you can only write on every third Wednesday – if it works for you, it’s right.

As strange as it may seem, having written a blog post which concerns itself with giving out writing tips like lollipops at a doctor’s office, I’m going to conclude that listening to tips may not always be the best thing to do for your writing. I think, from now on, I’m going to limit the amount of advice I take in from others, and rely more on my own instinct. Advice relating to publication, gaining an agent, the book industry, and so on is a different animal – that sort of advice is always worth having under your belt, I think. But I’m going to ration my intake of writerly advice, because reading all sorts of conflicting advice has, lately, been making me panic a little. There is, undoubtedly, a lot of useful, well-intentioned and good advice out there, but it’s a matter of sorting the wheat from the chaff. Instead of trying to take on board all the advice I’ve been hearing about and reading, and changing my writing to suit the advice I’ve been getting (which, now I think about it, is a little bit crazy), I’m just going to write as I feel, and hope I manage to bumble my way towards my dream, bit by bit.

Happy Friday, and happy weekend! May your writing flourish and may your word-goals inch that little bit closer, and may you write in the best way possible – your own way.