Restarting

My dad has a great word for how it feels when things just get out of hand, a little, and you lose control of where you’re at and what you’re doing and how you’re feeling. He calls it a ‘speed wobble’.

I had one of those at the weekend, which sort of bled into yesterday.

Keep it together… Keep… It… Together…
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The end of last week started out well, with an amazing Friday, wherein I met a blogging-friend and his family who were passing through Dublin on a flying tour of Ireland. That was brilliant. It was great to get away from my home office and into the city (with my printed-out WiP in my natty wee backpack, of course), and to spend the morning working and the afternoon enjoying myself… but after that things went askew, a little. I wasn’t a fun place to be for the rest of the weekend.

I’m not sure I can explain it. I’m not sure it needs to be explained. It just was. It’s part of being human, maybe; a human who thinks and feels and who is prone to over-anxiety at the best of times. So, I had a couple of bad days. I feel better now. I’m ready to tackle a new week.

I think.

My agent is – as far as I know – beginning the work of copy-editing the book known to this blog as ‘Emmeline’ as we live and speak; perhaps that’s adding to my sense of Approaching Doom. It’s also the centenary of the outbreak of World War One at the moment (we watched a very emotional BBC broadcast from Westminster Abbey last night commemorating the declaration of war), and since even thinking about the Great War can set me off at the best of times, perhaps that’s part of it too. I just know that these ‘speed wobble’ moments, when you feel your hands slipping off the reins, are completely inconducive to general functionality. Sadly, they are part of existence. If you weren’t doing or being or trying anything, you would never feel yourself losing the plot a little, from time to time. I guess the speed wobbles remind you that you’re alive, and that you’re striving, and that you’re making progress.

Unfortunately it’s hard to keep working and producing and doing all the other vital and necessary and unavoidable things which are part and parcel of being a Responsible Adult when life starts feeling like a snowball rolling down a hill, and even more unfortunately we don’t get to have a choice about it. We’ve just got to keep going, no matter what. It’s a shame we don’t live in a world where we can call ‘time out’ on our lives when we don’t feel able to continue – just for a day or two, to let the speed wobble pass over us – but that’s the reality. Perhaps if we did live in a world which allowed us a little leeway when we started to feel overwhelmed we’d all start feeling less overwhelmed and it would be to the benefit of everyone. Who knows?

Anyway. On Friday, I managed to get almost halfway through my WiP, red pen in hand. I found one typo – I was aghast – where I’d written ‘of’ when I meant to write ‘if’, and I made three or four lengthy ‘notes to self’ along the lines of ‘But if that’s happening in chapter five, surely this should have to happen in chapter eight’ or ‘x, y or z on page eighty-seven just does not make sense, no matter what way I look at it,’ and – importantly, for me – I learned that, overall, the book is pretty decent. I’m the kind of person who, when they finish a piece of writing, feels really enthusiastic and full of beans – for about five minutes. After that time I slowly begin to convince myself that what I’ve written is a load of old pants, and I keep reminding myself of errors and shortcomings and possible plot-holes and things I’ve forgotten and clumsy phrasing and so on, until – in my memory – the work becomes a monster of horrifying proportions. This tendency has a couple of drawbacks: it leads to regular speed wobbles, for one, but it also makes it very hard to work up the courage to go back over my own work. I tend to have myself lathered into a frenzy by the time I get around to opening the document up again.

The only upside is that, sometimes, I find that things aren’t as dreadful as I remembered.

However, I have to tackle the book’s second half, now, which I know is less polished than the first half. I do realise I’m probably doing the whole ‘lathering into a frenzy’ thing again, but I also know my own work and its many shortcomings. I may give myself a day or two, just to be sure the speed wobble has done its worst, but knowing me I probably won’t.

Yeah. Let’s not kid ourselves. I’m just waiting for all you people to clear off out of here before I get started.

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Have a wobble-free Tuesday, all.

 

Editing. What Larks!

So, yesterday I spent most of the day picking my way through ‘Emmeline’ with a fine-tooth comb, searching for inconsistencies and errors and repetition (boy, do I repeat myself, a lot), misplaced punctuation, frankly stupid conversations between characters (there were a few), scenes which were more ‘filler’ than ‘vital’ – there were a few of these, too, probably because the book began life as a NaNoWriMo project – and clumsy description. I’ve realised when I’m writing under pressure that I can be a huge fan of the old dangling modifier, and that my powers of description go out the window. Stupid metaphors and ridiculous similes abound, and I remind myself of Bambi on the frozen lake, skidding around doing my best to write something right, and succeeding only in ending up on my behind.

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I didn’t get through the whole book, of course. Between Friday’s efforts and yesterday’s, I’m probably just over halfway, now. I’ve trimmed over 5,000 words from the total wordcount, which means the book is still far too long – but it’s an improving situation.

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Strangely, I’ve discovered that the bits of the book which I thought would give the most trouble actually turned out to be the smoothest, and the parts I thought I’d be able to gloss over are the ones which have caused me the most eyebrow-raising difficulty. It’s funny how your memory works; I remembered certain parts of the book as being particularly thorny and challenging, and so I figured editing those bits would be a major hassle. Perhaps, however, the harder the scene is to write, the easier the edit – at least, that’s how it seems so far. Lots of ‘Emmeline’ just flowed out of my brain and onto the page, which felt great at the time, but it means that, on re-reading it, I’m left a bit stumped by my plot choices, or word choices, or character motivations. Nothing so far has been a deal-breaker, or a book-destroyer, and I’m hoping it carries on that way, but I’m a bit bemused by my own memory nonetheless.

One of my major fears with this book was that the central third – the ‘sagging middle’ – would be too flabby and over-written and unnecessarily long. So far, I’m finding that it’s not as bad as I thought. That’s not to say whole chunks of text haven’t been excised – with plenty more lining up for their turn under the scalpel – but the plot moves along faster than I remembered, which is good. At this point in the book both Emmeline and Thing are on their own, separate, quests, and – when writing it – this was difficult. I was constantly switching between their viewpoints, writing one section in Emmeline’s world and another in Thing’s, trying to keep a certain balance between them and always thinking of ways in which their journeys could be linked or even contrasted, and – to me – it seemed to go on forever.

Luckily, however, it doesn’t really read that way. It seems that the harder a scene, or even an entire section, is to write the longer and more turgid it feels in your memory. This can be a surprise, come editing time.

I’ve also realised that I always, always write linearly. I know there are writers who write scenes separately from the parts that come before and after them, much like a filmmaker puts a movie together; a scene from the book’s opening can be written right at the end, and perhaps the author will write the middle third first, perhaps in an attempt to ensure it doesn’t get overblown and out of control. I admire this sort of technique, but it just struck me the other day that I have never used it myself.

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The above isn’t a map of my writing process, but it could easily be. I don’t think I could function writing a scene from the end of a book before the beginning – my brain just isn’t flexible enough for that. I also edit the same way – from the beginning, straight through to the end. Once a square, always a square, I guess.

I’m beginning to wonder, though, if I should shake things up a bit and start editing non-linearly. Perhaps it would make things easier to see if I’m reading sections out of sequence, and it might make the book seem fresher and more surprising if I edited backwards, or from the middle out, or something like that. Anything which makes mistakes and excess and injudicious word choice stand out more clearly is a good thing when you’re hovering over your work with your editing hat on. Sometimes, other writers read their sentences backwards to check for spelling mistakes – as your eye is less inclined to see what it wants to see when the sentence is out of order – and so it makes sense that shaking things up when it comes to your editing habits can bring benefits. So, I think at least one of my runs of edits, this time, will be a non-linear one – and let’s hope I don’t end up like this in the process:

Image: menagerieofminds.wordpress.com

I also hope I’ll be able to bring the wordcount down to where it should be without causing myself, or the book, too much pain. Soon, it will be time to start printing out whole chunks of text and going at them with a pen, a process I always enjoy – I guess there’s a hint of a masochist in me, somewhere.

Stay tuned for updates from the editing coal face, and the results of my non-linear experiment (that sounds pleasingly scientific! *polishes spectacles*) – and, with any luck, the good news that ‘Emmeline’ is ready for querying, just as soon as possible.

 

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.

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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?

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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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