Excuses, excuses

I spent a glorious week in September at a writer's retreat. I'd never done this before and wasn't sure I would last a day, never mind a week, with just other writers and my fledging novel for company. As it was, I needn't have worried as the week flew by in a flurry of new friends, lots of laughs and 20,000 words added to The Sound of the Sea.
However, I've written virtually nothing on the novel ever since, due to the pressure of the day job and a brand new term's teaching. However, I know these are only excuses. There are two things stopping me writing.
1) I wrote some quite dark passages while I was on the writer's retreat, involving tough 'stuff' that happens to my main character. This was fine in the cosy atmosphere of the retreat but having come back to daily life again, I find that I don't want to finish writing these dark passages and I just want to get to the 'fun' bits, particularly after a tough day at work.
2) I already have, to date, three and a half other unpublished novels (the half is a whole other story) under my belt. Two of these have already done the rounds of literary agents but no avail. One was read by a publisher but rejected. The lily-livered part of me is thinking: why do I want to continue writing yet another unpublished novel?
And yet (there always is an 'and yet' for writers). If I could muster just one tenth of the enthusiasm with which I started writing all these novels, I would have the first draft of The Sound of the Sea finished in a trice.
So maybe it's time to start to 'fool' myself into falling in love with the novel again. I know it's only because I've got to the saggy middle part of the novel, like a cake that has failed to rise in the middle. Maybe I'll start this week by making the following resolutions:
*to write for 10 minutes a day for five days a week
*to write some more fun bits if the dark stuff makes me feel like I'm cloaked in Proustian misery.
ends

'Honesty' of the First Draft

The rest of life has intervened over the last few weeks. The Sound of the Sea has been put to one side for the moment, in favour of the day job and trying to get a few more short stories off for magazines. I was also at an excellent summer writing school, which, as always, provided much food for thought.

On a more populist note, I was watching the Jack Reacher film, an adaptation of one of Lee Child’s novels starring Tom Cruise as Child’s Lone Wolf type hero. What interested me was the interview with Child afterwards, where he talked about the ‘honesty’ of the first draft. And how, when an editor says to him: “Well, it would make more sense if X came before Y”, he argues that things aren’t perfect in real life so why should they be perfect on the page? (I’m paraphrasing here. It was a Saturday night with friends and I wasn’t sitting there taking Teeline shorthand notes).

I’ve been thinking about Child’s remarks a lot lately. The current trend in writing (in creative writing handbooks etc) seems to favour endless re-drafting and editing, moving things around, ditching characters who aren’t working to say nothing of the ruthless cutting of the adverbs (a debate for another blog post, to be sure).

Certainly, I re-draft and edit a lot, especially for the magazine short stories, where every word has to work hard. However, I’m wondering how much of this endless re-drafting and editing is tied in with the advent of the PC? I remember typing up stories on a Rexel electric typewriter in the early 1990s and re-drafting was something you had to do by hand so you had to think very carefully before you started typing, as any changes had to be done with Tippex papers or simply starting all over again.

I wonder too what effect going back to a typewriter (not that I ever would - how I bless electronic “cut and paste”) would have. Would it make me think more analytically about my story and characters before plunging  in?

ends

The siren call of the past

The sunny summer weather has meant a few trips to the seaside. Having got The Apple House (the dodgy first novel) into a much more reasonable shape, I've spent a little time working on the latest novel, The Sound of the Sea, trying to use the aforementioned seaside trips to bring a little colour and life into the story.
The Sound of the Sea has two sections: 'past' and 'present' and the narrative jumps between the two. Well, I hope it doesn't jump, I hope it floats seamlessly, though that's possibly a question for another blog post.
I've just finished reading two novels with 'past' and 'present' sections. However, as I read, I find that one section - usually the 'past' - is more interesting than the present.
I'm also finding this as I write the 'past' sections of The Sound of the Sea. These sections seem more alive and to have more resonance than the 'present' sections. Perhaps that's because the landscape of the past (both physical and emotional) is partly based on my own childhood so they seem very easy to write.
However, the 'present' sections feel a bit clunky - somewhere between a bad chick lit novel and a diary entry after a trying day at work. Paradoxically, I feel this is because the character in the 'present' is too close to me.
So, I'm going to try the following. Now that the main character, Clare, finally has a sense of humour, I'm going to try to give her things that are as unlike myself as possible. I'm going to make her a passionate cook and give her a fractured family and a dodgy husband, who may or may not be all he seems.
I'm also going to give her stuff (that's the literary technical term!) to do, so she doesn't just float around, mooning about the past.
So maybe it's OK to have the 'past' section stronger than the 'present', as long as the balance evens itself out in the end.
ends

Continuity Clipboard

I think that 'overhauling' a novel draft is more a case of trying to make sure that the continuity is consistent. I've spent a few  of my 'writing sessions' this week on The Apple House, the dodgy first novel. Some of these sessions were spent tinkering with an earlier draft, when I had actually made more changes in a later draft, which, because I had forgotten to label said draft correctly, I forgot about.
But I was thinking about once being on a film set and there was a continuity woman with a clipboard, meticulously noting every minor detail so that nothing would jar with the viewer in the final film. I realised, as I noted gaps in time sequences, scenes which were too short, or narrative points of view which just weren't necessary, that when it comes to novels, sometimes it is as simple as getting the 'continuity' right.
Can a short, flimsy chapter be moved to be part of a longer chapter, so that everything feels less 'jerky'? Can I jettison one flimsy narrative point of view, knowing that the story will still be complete without it (and the reader won't get bored reading the same thing twice?). Can a 'passive' scene be replaced by some short, snappy dialogue, to liven things up a bit, so that the poor old reader doesn't fall asleep?
Of course, overhauling a novel draft (particularly one you haven't looked at for a long time) requires a level or organisation that sometimes feels at odds with creativity. It also requires a 'chunk' of time which I don't always have.
So, I'm going to try to keep a note of what page number I'm on, what still needs done and tick off what I've done, so when I next pick up the threads of The Apple House, I'll know exactly where I am.
In theory anyway...

Fudging the First Novel

So, as The Sound of the Sea starts to take shape (43,000 words and counting), I'm drawn back to edit another novel, which I first started in 2007, called The Apple House. I'm not entirely sure if this is a good idea or not.
The Apple House was my first novel. I started looking at it again when I was trying to tidy my study last week. I'm very fond of it and all the characters in it, even though it has lain in a drawer, unpublished and unloved, apart from by me, like a forgotten bridesmaid at a wedding.
I made all my mistakes with The Apple House. I made things vastly complicated with multiple narrative points of view (five in all) and didn't write things in a linear fashion, so the action jumps about from scene to scene.
Unsurpisingly, structurally it's a bit dodgy too (note my use of posh literary technical terms). Scenes are either too short or repeat things that have already been described by another character, 10 pages earlier.
All these things a kindly publisher told me, when they critiqued The Apple House for me some years back. Having since gone through the rigmarole of trying to get an agent, written two and a half more novels (the half is a whole other story), applied for grants and attended numerous literary events, I realise just how kind this gentle critique from the publisher was.
So every year or so, I take out The Apple House again, try to iron out a few more of its numerous mistakes and fall in love with the characters all over again. Now, I'm thinking that I might try to dislodge one of the five narrative points of view and see if the story will stand up without one of them and risk the whole thing collapsing, like a house of cards.

Character doubles

So, my main character, Clare, is a bit more lively now I've given her Muriel to play with. I can feel Clare's sense of humour coming across in dialogue with Muriel. However, (gosh, why is there always an 'however'?) Muriel reminds me of Miriam. Miriam was a character from another novel who served as my main character's confidante, to dispense advice and a shoulder to cry on, when necessary. She also provided information on the new town my character was living in, which was much more fun than endless paragraphs of rather dreary exposition.
So maybe I need to change Muriel just a little so that she doesn't end up as an exact double of Miriam. I'm not sure if there is anything wrong with 'character doubles' but when they sound the same, heck, when they even have names beginning with the same initial, is there not a risk that the faithful reader will feel a little bit short-changed?
I can just hear them now: "She hasn't made an effort at all, you know. Muriel's exactly the same as Miriam in the last book."
As well they might. I think I might have answered my own question...

Knickers in Alaska

Now, before you think I've gone all Fifty Shades of Grey, the headline for this week's post came about during a random conversation with a friend. She mentioned another friend who lives in Alaska and always gets her - well, pants - in Seattle. This led to another conversation on the difficulties of finding said items of underwear in small towns and villages.
It was one of those giggly moments that stayed with me and made me realise that my main character, Clare, is lacking a sense of humour. This may be because a) she's still a work in progress b) tough stuff has happened to her or c) I haven't given her one yet.
However, if I'm to spend any amount of time with her (as I'm going to have to), I will be deadly bored after five minutes unless I give her something to laugh, or even smile at. It may be something as random as overhearing teenagers on a bus describing (and indeed acting out) their favourite episodes from Friends (this happened to me on Saturday).
Of course, humour is so subjective and it can't be forced. But, gosh, I've got to get her smiling soon or I'll be crossing the street to avoid her...
PS - I'm reading James Scott Bell's excellent Revision and Self Editing for Publication at the moment. Highly recommended.

What's in a name?

So I seem to have managed to get the novel into first gear anyway. I took all the bits of false ‘starts’ , stuck them into one folder on the computer, labelled the chapters and read through the whole thing. I realised that I had given the main character three separate names and none of them was right. So she’s now called Clare, which was the name of a minor character but in a scene of dialogue between the two, I had accidentally called the main character ‘Clare’ and it stuck.

After my main character became Clare, the story started to come together a little more. So maybe the naming of characters is more important than I thought it was.

A writing colleague also mentioned something else. I always had a ‘fear of influence’, you know, that whatever I was reading would somehow seep into the first draft of my novel and get mixed up with my own voice. Well, my colleague suggested that because I was dipping in and out of all sorts of projects (short stories for magazines, trying to market and edit a previous novel, teaching) that I was possibly being influenced by other characters from my own writing J. So maybe there’s something to be said for just focusing on one thing at a time…

getting started

What happens when you can't seem to get started with writing a new novel? I've been trying to take the plunge since Christmas with a new, shiny novel. I've compiled a list of all the 'short stories' I've written that haven't worked because they were novels  in the making. I've played around with characters and situations from those. I've started to write what I thought was a beginning but somehow it all seems to be lacking in life and the novel stubbornly refuses to grow. I love writing, I love the thrill of the daily word count, I don't have any problem writing when I just have a few moments. So why isn't this one coming to life? Answers on a postcard please...