Do the Maths*

When you’re at the beginning of a month, the days seem to stretch out before you like a perfect, verdant valley, rich and lush and full of possibility. The unknown landscape beckons, drawing you in. ‘Look! Here’s a little hidden lake. Isn’t it pretty?’ or ‘I bet you didn’t see this fantastic rock formation coming, did you?’ You’re encouraged to skip and dawdle and tiptoe through the tulips, and all that other time-wasting stuff.

Speaking of time – it feels like you have loads of the stuff, that you’re dripping in it and that, when you need it, there’ll be more – as much as you could ever want.

Image: wattpad.com

However, none of this is, in fact, the truth.

I thought, at the beginning of November, that I’d have time to complete NaNoWriMo – all my other commitments taken into consideration. However, yesterday I sat down and did a little scribbled ‘timetable’ for the rest of the month, breaking down the amount of working days I have left and the amount of words I have yet to write.

 

Image: sodahead.com

I realised, in a sort of sudden and painful way, that I don’t have as much time as I thought, and I have a lot more words to do than I realised.

Having said that, I am now up to just over 22,000 words, which is 22,000 more than I had two weeks ago. That’s nothing to sneeze at. However, it also means I have 28,000 more to write before November 30, and I only have twelve days (possibly fewer) during which I am free to write. No matter what way you look at those numbers, they don’t crunch very well.

I really want to finish NaNoWriMo, and to get these 50,000 words written. I like the idea I’m working on very much, though I’ll be the first to admit it needs tightening – edits and rewrites and reshaping all need to be done before I can call it properly finished. I think, though, with a bit of work, this idea could turn into another book which I’ll be able to start querying in the new year. I have discovered a character I love, a little boy who calls himself ‘Thing’ because nobody ever gave him a name, and whose dialogue is effortless to write; he is brave, sparky, independent and dealing with a deep, painful rejection which he hasn’t found himself able to share with anyone just yet. I always knew I’d love Emmeline Widget, the little girl whose life is turned upside down when her parents go missing, and who is determined to find them not because of anything soppy like love or loneliness, but because they belong to her, and nobody else is allowed to take them; Thing, however, was a revelation.

The plot is going in unexpected ways, too. So far, nothing I’d pre-planned has actually ended up happening. I realise it’s early days yet (in terms of the creation of an entire book, if not my NaNoWriMo schedule) but I like this sense of improvisation, and the feeling that the characters are driving the plot. In that sense, doing NaNoWriMo – starting out on a project without any clear ambition to turn it into something, just writing it because you want to – is a brilliantly freeing and creatively fulfilling thing.

Also, several people have let me know that they enjoyed my little excerpt from the book, which I posted last Friday. If you’d like to see a little more – perhaps the chapter where Emmeline and Thing meet for the first time – I’d be happy to post it here. As always, criticism (gently worded!) would be welcome.

Now, it’s back to the coalface for me. Have a great Thursday.

 

*Math, if you’re American, though the word sounds utterly illogical to me.

Wednesday Write-In #42

This week’s words, via CAKE.shortandsweet, were:

scrape  ::  cuddly  ::  reduction  ::  octopus  ::  plain

Invasion
‘He wasn’t as cuddly with me as normal, do you know what I mean? He was sort of… fractious? Moody, nearly? That wouldn’t be like him.’

‘That’s fine. Can you take us back a little, though? To the onset of symptoms? Take your time.’

‘Sure. Yes. Well, it all started to happen when he came home, that first day. He’d been out with his friend Neil, and when I saw him that evening he had a scrape across his knee. I didn’t know what had caused it or how he’d hurt himself, but…’

‘Which friend, for the record?’

‘Neil (surname redacted).’

‘Where does Neil live?’

‘His parents have a farm about two miles up the road. Greg would often walk there and back – it’s a quiet stretch. We thought…’

‘That’s fine. So, he came home with a leg injury, and then what?’

‘A leg injury? Look, he’s eight! Scraped knees are part and parcel…’

‘Mrs. Barker? Answer the question, please.’

(silence)

‘Mrs. Barker? Do you need a recess?’

‘No, no, I’m… let’s just get this done.’

‘Fine. In your own time.’

‘Right. So, Greg came home. He was limping a bit, so I brought him in and washed the knee. It looked like a scrape, that’s all. Just a tiny scrape. It was red and inflamed, but the wound looked clean and so I thought it’d be fine. Like I said, he was a bit out of sorts, but I thought he was just sore and upset, you know, from his injury. Anyway, I bandaged it up and made him eat a plain supper, just toast or something. I don’t remember.’

‘Fine. Did you have any cause for concern at all at that point?’

‘No. None. Well… He took his toy octopus with him to bed, which was a bit strange, now that I think back over it. He hadn’t been too interested in that thing for a year or so before… before…’

‘Yes, thank you, Mrs. Barker. Now, if you can, take us through what happened the next day.’

‘I… God. I woke early and went to check on Greg. There’d been a reduction in the redness around his knee, and I remember… I remember how pleased I was by that, like it was a sign he was getting better… If I’d known then what it actually meant…’

(sounds of weeping)

‘Mrs. Barker, if you need a recess, just…’

‘Jesus! I just want this over with! Can you stop asking me if I need a break!’

‘Mrs. Barker. Please, remain calm.’

‘Calm? Sir, if you’d seen what I have, calm would be the last thing…’

‘Mrs. Barker, I have to ask you to refrain from shouting.’

(silence)

‘I’m sorry. I forget, sometimes, that it’s been tough on us all.’

‘Yes. Yes, it has. Now. We were at Day 2?’

‘Day 2. Sure. Well, Greg woke up fine, and his knee looked better. He had most of his movement back, and little pain, and he seemed… he seemed happy. Himself.’

‘When did that change?’

‘At around lunchtime. I know, because…’

‘Mrs. Barker?’

‘My…  my husband had just sat down to his meal when we heard the explosion. The first one. And so he was there… he was with me when we ran outside to check if the children were all right…’

(silence)

‘Mrs. Barker, if you’re having difficulty…’

‘…but the children were gone. There was just Greg, and he was… he wasn’t my son, not any more, not then. Now, I know it had already taken him over. But all I saw then was my baby, in the centre of a ball of fire, fire that was bright and red and taller than the house. I could see his little legs and arms, and the back of his head, but there was a flame, all around him. I could feel the heat of it on my skin. I was just about to run to him when he turned, and he looked at his dad and me, and he smiled. He smiled through the fire. And then he…’

‘Mrs. Barker, could you speak up, please? For the microphone?’

‘He threw a ball of flame at his father, and I heard my husband scream in agony. And, God forgive me, I ran. I ran and left him there. I ran…’

(sounds of weeping)

‘Okay. Let’s leave it at that for today, Mrs. Barker. Thank you for your help. Let the record show that interviewing on Day One of the Invasion Inquiry concluded at 7.37pm; we’ll pick this up in the morning.’

(Recording Ends)

The Wavy Green Line of Death

I am tired today. I worked until midnight last night, because my husband went to bed early (like a sensible person). Instead of seeing my abandonment as an opportunity to perhaps read a book, or watch some TV, I grabbed the WiP and edited until my eyesight began to fail.

Image: someecards.com

But, in a way, it was worth it.

Yesterday’s editing was brutal – it was a merciless slaughter of words. Line after line of useless text fell beneath the blade of my Green Felt Pen. (In fact, my word-thirsty Green Felt Pen may need to be replaced with the even mightier Blue Felt Pen later today, because I’ve nearly worn out the nib on Green the Destroyer, such is the swathe it has cut through the excesses of the WiP.) And, surprisingly, I’m learning that it actually feels good to edit. It feels good to re-read a paragraph or a page after I’ve cut lumps out of it, and realise that it now says exactly the same as it did before, but in fewer words and without doing all the work for the reader.

It won’t have escaped anyone’s attention (that is, if you’re a regular reader) that this edit is my seventh. Seventh. And I’m still finding things to fix. I’m almost embarrassed to admit that I’ve read the manuscript of this novel about ten times at this stage, and it’s only becoming clear in this edit that I’ve made a huge amount of rookie mistakes. Thank goodness for the all-powerful Green Felt Pen of Doom, then! Maybe the power is in the pen – that would explain a lot, actually.

Anyway. Let’s do a little round-up of Things I Have Done Wrong, in the hope it’ll help other writers:

Item the First: My book is narrated in the first person. This can pose tricky problems for me, because all I have to go on is my protagonist’s viewpoint. Yet, at regular intervals through the book, my protagonist describes for the reader how other characters are feeling. This, of course, is a no-no. It’s only striking me now how silly this is, and how badly it reads. People can make guesses at how others are feeling, of course, based on body language, tone of voice, and so on – but for a first-person narrator to say something like: ‘He looked at me, and there were dark circles under his eyes. He was so anxious. His heart was racing,’ is plainly ridiculous. (I have to point out that the sentence I’ve just used is most definitely not taken from my WiP – I wasn’t as silly as that. I’m just trying to give an illustrative example!) So, anywhere I’ve noticed my protagonist making assumptions about other people’s feelings which are not based on very clear physical cues, the Green Wavy Line of Death has been employed, and those needless words have fallen. And hurray to that.

Item the Second: I’ve also realised that my protagonist describes things in too much detail sometimes. If she encounters a machine, or a vehicle, or a piece of technology, she tends to go on and on about it, describing every last dial, switch, and piece of tubing. She’s not a particularly enthusiastic engineer, and she’s not a machine-nerd. These things are not out of place in the world she lives in. So, I ask myself, why does she go on about them for half a paragraph? It’s equivalent to someone in a modern novel taking fifteen lines to describe a washing machine, or a refrigerator. Unless the refrigerator in question was powered by a meteorite and made from solid diamond, or the narrator is a freshly-arrived alien, there’s no need to do that. Of course. What I’ve done – as, I’m sure, will be clear to you – is I’ve mixed up my own voice with my narrator’s. That is a shocking mistake to make. I’m fascinated by the machines and technology in this world, and I’ve thought deeply about them. I’ve done some research into steam-powered engines, and condensers, and propellers, and so on. So, when someone in the book enthuses about something which should be totally ordinary from their point of view, it’s actually me speaking, not the character. I’ve slapped myself on the wrist for this already, don’t worry. And slash slash scribble goes the Green Felt Pen of Doom.

Item the Third: One of the things I was most proud of yesterday was condensing six pages (or, approximately 3600 words) of descriptive exposition with a bit of dialogue into about 2.5 pages (hopefully, fewer than 1000 words) of pure dialogue, with a tiny bit of exposition. It was a scene which had bothered me for a while, but until yesterday I had no idea how to fix it. Eventually, I just ended up rewriting the entire thing. It’s an important scene, because in it, our Fearless Protagonist is learning things about her family, and realising how little she understands about them and what they do. But, as I’d written it up until yesterday, the scene was basically a lecture given by one of the other characters, both to the reader and my protagonist. Now, it’s more like a discussion – she engages more, puts things together herself (without having to be smacked across the head with things that are, actually, obvious), and I don’t feel the need to expand on every tiny detail. As before, with the overdone descriptions, I’ve sketched around things that would be clear and unremarkable to the character, and allowed them to gradually reveal themselves to the reader.

So, basically, this is what I’ve learned (the hard way): Don’t give your characters knowledge they couldn’t possibly have; Don’t confuse your enthusiastic, nerdy voice with theirs; and Don’t allow Captain Obvious to visit your manuscript and explain everything in minute detail. Smack him with the Green Felt Pen of Death.

I hope this has been helpful, and mildly diverting. Do let me know if you have any other editing tips, or if you disagree with anything I’ve said here. It’s all about the discussion, people!

Have a wonderful Thursday.

 

Narrative Voice, and other stuff

This morning, dear readers, I’m a bit of a mess.  My head’s swirling, my thoughts won’t sit still and behave, and my poor brain feels like it’s trying to tapdance and balance plates on its head simultaneously.  So, before we begin, I beg your forgiveness.  There were so many things I was going to blog about this morning – I flicked through my memory-book from childhood in order to pick out some juicy reminiscences, and then I thought maybe I’d comment on some current events.  Then I discounted that in favour of yammering on yet again about how much I love books, or perhaps lamenting the fact that I need not only to replace my clapped-out mobile phone, but also my end-of-life (and much beloved) CD player.  Sigh.

(I might yet mention all these things – we’ll have to see how this thing pans out!)

For lack of any other point of beginning, though, let’s start today by talking about the book I stayed up late last night to finish – ‘The Obsidian Mirror’, by Catherine Fisher.  My poor tired husband had to put up with my reading light for far longer than he should have, and for that I thank him.  I really loved this book, but that’s no surprise to anyone who knows me, because Catherine Fisher’s work always meets a warm reception in my house.  This book is also somewhat connected with my blog from yesterday, where I wrote about feeling as though your cherished ideas are no longer ‘yours’ when you see something similar on a bookshelf; when I saw ‘The Obsidian Mirror’ my heart first leapt, then sank.  It leapt because I love few things in life more than collecting a new Catherine Fisher, and it sank because the book proclaimed itself to be about the theme which has been occupying my mind these past few years: time travel.  Well, my WiP isn’t about time travel, strictly, but there is a certain similarity of theme going on, and I had to read the book immediately to see if there was any point in my continuing with my own novel.

As it happened, the plot of ‘The Obsidian Mirror’ is brilliant, and nothing like my own work, which was a bit of a relief.  I won’t spoil anything for anyone who wants to read it (I recommend it highly), but I do want to talk about some of the things which I feel Catherine Fisher does very well, namely dialogue and narrative voice.  I’ve always enjoyed reading her interactions between characters, especially when they ‘speak’ in their Welsh accents, as they do in some of her books (not ‘Obsidian Mirror’, though).  One of the special beauties of her work is the fact that the reader can ‘hear’ things like accents and intonation, just from the way she writes.  Her dialogue is among the least flat and sterile I’ve ever read, and I know enough to realise that’s a talent she has honed through years of practice.  This skill is immensely useful near the end of the book, when we’re hopping from character to character and from storyline to storyline; it’s never unclear who is speaking, because Fisher is able to differentiate each character’s voice so perfectly.

‘The Obsidian Mirror’ is written in the third-person, but I’d hesitate to call it omniscient – the reader finds things out at the same time the characters do, more or less, but it’s not exactly limited strictly to their points of view, either.  We (the reader) get hints at the start of each chapter, when there are excerpts from diaries, letters or ballads to give us some idea what we’ll be facing.  My own WiP is written in the first-person (with one small exception, yet to be written, at the very end), and I’ve been thinking about the benefits and drawbacks of that choice since finishing Catherine Fisher’s book.  Of course, with first-person, you get the chance to really explore a character’s development and personality; you get the chance to allow your readers to love your character as much as you do.  But there’s so much you miss out on, too.  For instance, my protagonist is ignorant of a lot of very vital knowledge about her world and her family, and because of the way I’ve chosen to narrate her story, it’s difficult to write about her learning process without having other characters tell her things, or without having her overhear conversations, and that sort of thing.  There are things she needs to work out in order to survive, and I want to express her intelligence and resourcefulness, of course.  But because (through me) she’s narrating her own story, that doesn’t always come across – she’s not the type to blow her own trumpet, so the challenge is to hint at it through other characters’ reactions.  Things she might notice, or dispassionately comment on, are far more meaningful to a reader than they are to her.

This works, up to a point, but I know I’ve loads of room to improve.  The last thing a writer wants to do is have page after page of a character gently explaining to your protagonist things like, ‘Well, darling, you really should know that your mother was a flatulent swamp-monster made of broccoli – it’ll make certain aspects of your life now seem much clearer.’  Instead, you want to have your character feel a mysterious pull towards broccoli, which leads her to investigate further and uncover an arcane mythology about broccoli and swamp-monsters which bears some uncanny resemblances to her own life – we should see her put the story together herself, instead of being told what to do or think.  Or, if the story must have explanation, it should ideally be ‘off-camera’ – as in, a character learns something without the reader being privy to it.  Again, this is difficult when you’re writing in the first person.

How do you write, in terms of narrative voice?  Do you have a preference for first- over third-person, omniscient or limited?  I’m interested in how others find ways around the challenges posed by each type of voice.  My current WiP demanded a first-person limited narrative voice – I couldn’t have written it any other way, though I really do feel a third-person would have been easier.  If anyone has any narration tips, I’m all ears!  I’d love to know if there’s something I’m missing…