One Girl Went to Mo, Went to NaNoWriMo…

Yes. The rumours you may have heard are true. I am, in fact, taking part in NaNoWriMo 2017. I’m currently way behind on my word count, naturally, because as well as being the mother of a toddler so energetic that, basically, by the end of the day I’m barely fit to sit upright in a chair, I’ve also been sick for the past three or four days.

*cof*

I’ll be all right in a minute.

*sniffle*

I don’t think it’s catching – hey! Come back!

Anyway. For those of you still within shouting distance, you can check out more about NaNoWriMo here. If you’ve never heard of it before, it’s basically a writing challenge for the month of November where people all over the world attempt to write 50,000 words in 30 days. I took part in it before, back in 2013, and managed to complete the challenge; the novel I started then turned into what has become The Eye of the North. I’m far from being the only person who has turned a NaNo project into a published book – check out the #NaNoWriMo hashtag on Twitter, where other authors have talked about turning their fast-drafted first drafts into polished, publishable work.

So. Have I convinced you to try it yet? Check it out. 50,000 words sounds like a lot – it is a lot – but it’s basically 1,700 words a day for the entire month. And then? You have the bones of a finished book. It’s an amazing thing, to validate your novel and get marked as a winner – and even if you never do anything with your words, you’ve still managed to complete a challenge that most people will never attempt.

And maybe you’ll find yourself, in a couple of years, reminiscing about good ol’ NaNoWriMo as you sign your publishing contract with an artistic flourish. Who knows?

In any case, wish me luck. I’m going to need it. My NaNo project is titled – for now – The Leaky Witch, and you can read a bit more about it here. I’ll keep you all posted!

 

 

*Tears Out Hair*

So, I’m editing.

It would be brilliant, wouldn’t it, if we could just write and have done with it. If every word that spilled forth in our first drafts was the most perfectly crafted jewel, settling happily into place without a whimper. Sadly, however, this is not true of anyone (no matter what they tell you), and if anyone who wants to write is reading this and believes it to be true, then please allow me to dispel the notion.

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Editing is what it’s all about. That doesn’t make it fun; far from it. But it’s unavoidable.

However – for the first time – I know that, right now, I am not the only person editing my work. As I labour away on the manuscript for ‘Web’ (not its real name), my wonderfully patient and hardworking agent is hacking through ‘Emmeline’ (also, not its real name), and I can’t help wondering how it’s going, whether she’s found any major clangers, and/or whether she’s now regretting with every fibre of her being that she ever offered me representation. I’m very lucky (and I know it) to be represented by an agent who likes to edit, who works with her clients to get their work as polished as possible before submitting it to publishers; as well as that, as an editor she has worked with the likes of Roddy Doyle and Frank Cottrell Boyce, which is simultaneously impressive and terrifying.

Roddy Doyle. Frank Cottrell Boyce. And me.

Anyway. It’s best not to think about these things.

Yesterday, I finished my first read-through of ‘Web’. It’s not terrible, but it’s not great. I’m going through a bit of a crisis, actually, because I’m pretty certain that ‘Emmeline’ is a better book, albeit very different in style and tone; surely, one is supposed to improve from book to book, and a writer is meant to get better the more they write – right? Well, not if I’m anything to go by. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that I am still very much wrapped up in ‘Web’; I’ve only just finished the first draft, after all, and the first read-through is still fresh in my mind. But I think it’s more than that. I think it’s my instincts telling me that ‘Emmeline’ was more original, more interesting, better structured and paced, and that ‘Web’ is far more pedestrian. Having said that, it’s reasonably interesting until about three-quarters of the way through, when it seems to fall apart a bit. I’m not sure why, yet, but I’m hopeful I’ll figure it out.

I am the kind of person who finds it hard to see other options when a first draft hasn’t gone the way I wanted – I’ve set the story down, now, and it’s a huge challenge for me to see that it can actually go in any one of thousands of other directions. It’s like my brain settles itself into a groove, like a river cutting through rock, and that’s it. Getting some distance from the text will help, but I am pretty sure that even if I left it alone for months I’d still manage to come back to it and fall into my old patterns again. This is why it’s so important to have someone else edit your work – it’s practically impossible for anyone, no matter how talented or good or experienced – to read their work the way an editor would. It’s even tough to read your own work the way a reader would. Distancing yourself from it is the best thing you can do, but it’s not foolproof.

How brilliant is this bookshop? I’m pretty sure anything you’d read in here would seem like the best thing in the history of the world… *resolves to track down said bookshop*
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I hope that my feelings today are a combination of my natural tendency to be hard on myself coupled with the fallout from my ‘speed wobble’ earlier in the week, and not a consequence of my disimprovement as a writer. It would perhaps be better to remind myself that I have managed to bring a story seed to a complete first draft in little over two months, and that is something I should celebrate, not lament. It’s also good to remind myself, from time to time, that working hard, and fast, means that you don’t have a lot of time for reflection, and that it’s easy to forget that simply completing a book is a great achievement. If I didn’t have a first draft, I’d have nothing to work with at all. Second drafts and third drafts and published books can’t exist without first drafts, after all.

Also, as someone very wise reminded me last weekend, it doesn’t always follow that the book you, as a writer, love the most is the book your readers will love the most. I might feel that ‘Web’ is not my best work, but something about it could appeal strongly to someone else, and they might take something from it that I hadn’t even seen. Also, ‘Emmeline’ – which is my favourite of the books I’ve written so far, even though I know it’s not flawless – may never be read by anyone but my agent and me.

Gah. This writing business is tough, y’know? And not always for the reasons you’d expect. Lucky I love it, I guess!

 

 

This is The End*

Firstly, apologies for neglecting this blog yesterday. I know some of you were probably expecting a new short story, as I’ve been rather in the habit of promising a new tidbit of flash fiction every Wednesday for the past while, but I hope you’ll find it in your hearts to forgive me.

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I wanted to blog yesterday. Honestly. I sat with prompt images for almost an hour, thinking. I almost had an idea, and then realised it was nonsense. My brain kept skidding towards my WiP like water draining down a plughole, you see, and I simply wasn’t able to drag my attention away long enough to focus on anything else.

So, eventually, I gave in. I dived into my book, and I wrote, and I wrote, and I wrote. I wrote for seven and a half hours, straight.

And I finished draft 1.

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Now, it’s not perfect. Already, I’m thinking of things I need to fix. I want to rewrite most of the last chapter, for instance, and I can’t help but allow myself to get started into that today. It’s like an itch; unless I scratch it, I won’t have any peace. If I give it a go, I’ll be able to take my mind off it for long enough to start enjoying life again for a while. (That’s the theory, at least). It’s such a strange feeling, writing a chapter which you know you’ll have to re-do at the first available opportunity, but writing it anyway, half in a fever, because you simply must get to The End. The magic words which allow you to sit, staring at your blinking cursor and your word count, and realise that you’ve done it.

You’ve written a book.

No matter that it might never leave your computer hard drive. No matter that nobody else but you may ever read it. No matter that it might be rubbish, or that it needs extensive editing, or that it’s at least ten thousand words too long, or that the final chapter is a load of old horsefeathers. None of that matters when you’re looking at The End. Getting a story to that point is a cause for celebration; it’s an achievement, and should be recognised as such.

This is the fourth time I’ve managed to get to this point in a book (well, fifth, if you count the ‘first’ version of Tider, which I don’t tend to do); only one of these ends, so far, has rounded out a book which is good ‘enough’, or in other words good enough to get me an agent, and good enough to get my hopes up that it might actually make it to bookstore shelves one day. The others have been endings which are also beginnings – they’re ideas which have potential, but which haven’t been fully realised. They’re endings which need to be revisited, and now that I’ve managed to bring another idea to The End, I can think about going back and perfecting the others. Ideally, I’d love to be looking at four endings which I am happy with, which I feel close out a story world which is fully realised and expressed as well as I can express it, and looking forward to bringing more stories, loads more stories, to successful and satisfying conclusions. Maybe as I progress in this ol’ writing career of mine, I’ll get better at writing The End – I’ll start writing it in the calm realisation that I’ve just completed a good story, one which has a proper conclusion that isn’t a mere placeholder – but even if I keep having to muddle through, at least getting to The End is a good start.

Now. The End is in my metaphorical rearview mirror, and I’m off to see what happens next…

Photo Credit: … marta … maduixaaaa via Compfight cc

 

*Apologies for the over-drama. I couldn’t help myself.

 

 

Ghosts and Gods in the Machine

My brain is all a-scatter today.

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Focus has been a real issue for me lately. This could be due to tiredness, or anxiety over whether my current book is any good, or stress over the fact that I’ll be receiving edits on ‘Emmeline’ from my agent during the month of August (which will be painful), or it could be due to none of those things, or all of them. All I know is, I sat down yesterday with the intention of finishing my WiP, and it didn’t happen. I struggled to write half a chapter and eventually – my forehead burning and my brain in a knot and my mind and body shattered with exhaustion – I had to give up in the hope that I’d do a better job the next time I tried.

Well, today is upon me now. The ‘next time’ is about to begin. And I feel about as capable of completing the work today as I did yesterday.

I think that finishing a book is difficult, in and of itself, but what makes it more difficult is the fact that, by the time you’re writing your last few chapters, you have to keep a lot of stuff in your head. You’re trying to keep your characters consistent and pick up on the little ‘hints’ you dropped all the way through your story and remember the imagery you’ve already used so you don’t use it again (on this point, I read a book recently which used the exact same metaphor for something twice within a hundred pages, and I found it unspeakably annoying) and you’re trying to bring your plot to a satisfactorily interesting, unique and surprising climax. Is it any wonder that my brain is baulking at the prospect? What adds to my difficulty in this case is the fact that I’m writing a ghost story, which in some ways is cool and in others is ridiculous, because I’ve never written about a ghost before and I haven’t read very many stories about them. Also, I can’t watch films which feature ghosts or spirits for fear of losing what remains of my sanity. So, it’s safe to say I don’t know the genre in any great depth. It was somewhat of a disaster, then, when this story suggested itself to me and having a ghost in it was absolutely vital to its existence.

Booo!!
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One thing writing this book has taught me, though, is the importance of rules when you’re creating a ‘world’ – and every story creates a world, whether you set it smack-bang in the middle of your own home town or on a far distant moon in the twenty-fifth century. Writing fantasy stories, of course, can involve more rules – the more elaborate and imaginative the world, the more rules you’ll have and the more important it will be not to break them – but even in a contemporary story (which my WiP is, to a large extent), you cannot break the rules once you’ve introduced them. Not if you don’t want your reader to rip your book in half, at least. Contemporary-set stories have to obey the rules of our world – people have bills and mortgages and jobs, and gravity works the way we expect, and people get sick, and accidents happen, and characters need to eat and sleep and go to the loo, and distances have to be crossed without recourse to teleportation or something which would make it any less difficult, and there’s time (which can be a major pain). Then, if the story has other elements – supernatural or magical, say – they have their own rules, which may interfere with the real world all they like, so long as they do it in a systematic, consistent and believable way. The upshot is you make the rules, whether in whole or in part; you’ve just got to remember what they are, and keep to them.

So. In relation to my story: I have a ghost in it. She has certain abilities, which revolve around water. She has a particular ‘realm’ in which she is almost all-powerful, and then there’s the ‘real’ world in which her abilities are limited (though she’s still scary). It’s very important for me to remember these limitations when it comes to writing the conclusion to the story. I’ve been relying on them all the way through the book, and so the worst possible thing at this stage of the tale would be to reverse that, or develop an ‘exception’, or something which is a blatant breach of the construction I’ve worked so hard on up to this point. Pulling the rug out from under your readers – if you’re a master of your craft – works well if you’ve foreshadowed it correctly through the book with just the right balance between blatant ‘Look! Look what is happening over here! My goodness but it is a Hint!’ and subtlety you’d need an electron microscope to spot; anything else just looks like the writer threw their hands up in despair and decided to go for broke. I’m not a fan of ‘deus ex machina‘ (‘God in the Machine’) type plot twists, unless they’re done with huge skill and intelligence – and if they bring something exceptional to a story, which often they don’t. In order to break my own narrative rules, I’d have to rewrite the whole book, which is something I’d really rather not do. There should be no need for drastic action like this if you’ve thought about your plot and characters and you know where you’re going with them.

Which, of course, I’ve done.

In any case, after I shut the computer off yesterday and went to do other stuff in a fit of temper, ideas as to how to bring the book to a conclusion began to trickle into my overheated brain. Some of them were useful, and most weren’t, but it proved once again that giving yourself a break once in a while can be the most useful thing you can do for your writing. Let’s hope that today’s effort flows more smoothly, and that the rules remain unbroken.

If not, I’ll write something like ‘And then a giant donkey fell out of the sky, braying as it came, and it crushed everyone flat until they were all dead and then they flew up into the sky holding hands and singing tralala and everyone was happy. The End.’

(Whatever I come up with, it can’t be worse than that – right?)

 

Self-Criticism: The Good, and the Bad

Inspired by this blog post from the ever-lovely Kate Curtis, this morning I would like to muse, briefly, on the challenge of keeping a muzzle on the mouth of your inner critic.

Image: thefailedstate.blogspot.com

Writing is tough – there’s no doubt about that. Writing is even tougher when you can’t stop telling yourself to put your pen down and step away from the words. ‘Give it up while you still can.’ ‘Quit while you’re ahead!’ ‘What a pile of rubbish – as if anyone would want to read this drivel.’ ‘Do you really think this is the best you can do?’

It’s vital to have a quality control process, of course. Just as you can’t win NaNoWriMo by bashing out the word ‘the’ fifty thousand times, it’s important always to do your best when you sit down to write. You should bring your strongest self and your most alert brain and your most alive imaginings. You should do yourself, and your urge to write, justice.

But – as Kate herself asks in her original post – how do you keep going? How do you nurture your ideas? How do you stop yourself, and your inner critic, savaging your work so badly as you go that you never manage to bring anything to completion?

Image: ci.desoto.tx.us

Editing, for me, is something I like to do mainly when I’ve finished a long piece. I like to read something in its entirety before I tackle it for a second draft – it’s hard to edit effectively if you’re only working with a percentage of the full picture, I think. Sometimes, however, I find myself re-reading the previous day’s work and picking out little bits here and little bits there, seeing errors and mistakes and typos and plot holes and all the rest of it, and I understand how easy it is to allow yourself to slide down into the pit of Neverending Edits, from which it can be very hard to return. It is really easy to convince yourself that you’ve made so many mistakes in just one day’s worth of writing that how on earth you think you’re going to produce a story or – don’t make me laugh! – a novel, well – you may as well give up now. Go on, give up before you put too much time and effort into it. In case anyone finds out about it and laughs at you. Just put it away and forget about it, and that’ll be that. (Sound familiar?)

So how do you get that voice – the bad inner critic, the one who isn’t interested in helping you to improve your work – to shut up? Well, I think the first thing you need to do is work out whether you’re listening to your ‘good’ inner critic, or your ‘bad’ one.

A good inner critic will look at your work. A good inner critic sounds like: ‘Oh, okay, so you’ve made a bit of a plot blooper there, but that’s no problem. We can fix that. You’ve made a spelling error in the fourth paragraph, but that’s no problem. We can fix that. Lucky we caught all these things before we moved forward too much, right? It would be so much harder to deal with all this further down the line!’ A bad inner critic looks at you. A bad inner critic sounds like: ‘Who do you think you are, trying to write a novel? What sort of fool sets out on a task like this anyway, without any of the necessary qualifications or whatever it is you need? Look at all these errors – you’re useless! There are far too many to fix. Come on now, just leave it. You’re not able for this.’

How many great ideas, and how many wonderful writers, have fallen at this hurdle?

Everyone needs a critic, just like everyone needs an editor. No writer is good enough to do without feedback, and nobody’s first draft – I firmly believe! – is good enough to be their final draft. However, it’s really important to know when your inner voice is criticising you, or your work; whether it’s attempting to sabotage you completing a piece of writing because, if you do, you’ll prove it wrong; whether your inner critic is tearing apart what you’ve written because it’s terrified that you’ll succeed, and not because your work is no good. If your inner critical voice is making you feel like a failure before you’ve even begun, then it’s time to take action against it.

Starting out small by entering competitions, putting some of your work into the public domain and allowing other eyes to see it, is a great way of doing two things simultaneously: bringing on a panic attack, and shutting up your bad inner critic. Once you get through the panic, the benefits are more than worth it. If other people read your work and like it, even a little, it’s a vindication for your good inner critic. If other people ‘get’ what you’re trying to say, it’s a score for your good inner critic. Your bad inner critic has no response to other people’s approval besides to try to convince you: ‘they’re only saying those nice things to be kind! They don’t really believe all that about you!’ That, however, is rubbish. If other people read your work and give you ideas on how to improve it, that’s one in the eye for your bad inner critic. If someone cares enough about your work to try to help you with it, then – logically – your work has value.

So. Letting other eyes in, and letting other minds digest what you’ve written, is step one in taking control of your inner critic. Step two: write, without reviewing, until you’re done – jotting down a summary of your work as you go, to which you can refer as you sit down to start a new day’s writing, can help with this. Step three: leave your work aside and let it mature. Step four: read and review your own work as though it wasn’t ‘yours’ (time away from it helps with this.) Step five: seek more feedback, and take it in the spirit in which it’s given – which is, more often than not, a spirit of helpfulness. Over all these things, though, one golden rule remains: Continue writing for as long as you want to write, and let no voice tell you to stop.

It also helps to have a support team, whether it’s virtual or real, to pick you up whenever the bad inner critic goes off on a rant. Having an inner critic is an inescapable part of doing anything which involves creativity and vulnerability – the key is to make sure whether your inner critic is, at its heart, for you or against you. The good thing is: a bad inner critic can be silenced, and a good one can be nurtured.

Now: write!

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