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She began the book with her characteristic rush of early enthusiasm, which as usual barely lasted beyond the second chapter. She wrote at speed, spurred on by the inspiration of the Olympics and the testosterone-fuelled enthusiasm for ‘personal bests.’ Within the month she had surpassed her own ‘pb’ and completed a piece of writing so turgid and dull that she despaired of ever editing it to her satisfaction.
She attempts a change in tense. She sits at her laptop and tries to inject life into the story of her poor protagonist. It is hard, harder than it should be. She thinks about all the other books that she has written and changes her heroine’s name. When that doesn’t work she writes a short story. The short story is quite good, at least compared with the novel, which is still terrible. She walks to the shop and buys more coffee. She cleans the house. She discovers that the laundry basket is not actually bottomless. The book is duller than ever and as the summer fades to autumn she finds her spirits sinking lower than the barometer.
I make a decision and change my point of view. Not that radically, I still hate my book though at least my prose perks up. I am still drinking a lot of coffee, but I am less morose and I have stopped whinging about my inability to work. I begin to see what might be done, how the blasted thing could be beaten - violently so that it is light as a meringue. Books are trickier than meringues and the lighter they are the more effort they take to get off the ground.
I was perhaps too optimistic too early. It was the tense. I was tense - obviously - not working always makes me tense, but the present tense was a little too tricksy for a romantic, frothy tale. It was too earnest and literary. I needed to find an easy natural voice, and I thought this first person past tense would work. Of course I underestimated the effort involved: simple is always hard. I was very tempted to cut my losses but you know how it is.
You start something and you want to finish it. You pride yourself on being a professional, on doing what you set out to do. You consider turning your fluffy romance into a crime novel as it better fits your mood.
You knew that the plot was never that strong and your protagonist never that likeable. You brewed more coffee and drank the whole six cup cafetiere’s worth. You wished you smoked, perhaps that would have worked: nothing else had. You considered locking yourself in a small room without internet access. Maybe past tense was better after all and just maybe, you speculated, your protagonist was more believable in third person?
It all depends on your point of view...
I am fascinated by the creative process, particularly when I'm not engaged in it. The more I think about it and try to pin it down the weirder it seems.
Do you picture a scene before you write it and then describe what you see or do you bring the scene into being by the act of writing, the words themselves populating your brain with images? Do you hear the voices and try to cpature them or do characters only speak as the words tumble onto the page?
I think for me the words precede thought, or at least that's what it feels like. I never know what is going to happen until it emerges somehow or other from my incompetent careless fingers. But words definitely make pictures in my head so that in editing I can take a closer look, re examine a shadowy figure and discover that he has black hair, that his shirt is crimson, that he holds a damascene blade in his left hand and that his nails are painted the colour of ripe plums.
I always thought that this process of writing was the same for all writers, but of course it isn't. I am intrigued to discover that many people know what they are going to write before they start, that some people don't picture what they write at all and others are haunted by the disemboided voices of characters they have never met, though they may just be the mad ones.
It isn't much discussed, this actual business of envisaging or creating perhaps because it is so hard to describe, the moments of making things up are fleeting, the ideas, intangible.At times writing comes close to lucid dreaming at others it is more like constructing a flat pack wardrobe from IKEA - one of the ones with the key piece missing- and doing it blindfold.
And another thing is this imagining universal or is it only writers or painters who work this way? When people ask where we get our ideas from is it because they don't have them? Doesn't everyone sit and extrude images, places people, pulling them like rabbits from a hat of our imagining or gathering them like candy floss on a stick. Are we writers particularly strange or is it just that we, spending long hours staring into space, are more inclined to notice? Any ideas?
So where do you get your ideas from?
I know we all dread the question and, even though I know I’m going to be asked it, I still haven’t come up with a sensible answer. Philip Pullman (note name dropping ) told me and two hundred other people that he bought them at ‘Ideas R Us.’ I want to say that elves leave them on my desk in return for chocolate crumbs, but the truth is I often lack for any ideas at all.
I rarely think to myself: ‘I want to write a story about...’ That’s not how it works for me. I can’t wait for inspiration. I haven’t got the patience to wait for a bus I always set off walking so why would I wait for inspiration? Instead I start writing and hope the idea bus will catch me up.
Often an idea will emerge within a paragraph, sometimes within a first line. Most of the time characters, places, situations, rebound like snooker balls on a billiard table and I discover that they have all arranged themselves in such a way that I can pocket the lot. Sometimes sadly, that doesn’t happen and it takes a lot of work and a lot of miscuing before I get to that point, indeed to any point that might count as a desirable destination.
My new book (out today as it happens) is one of those latter books where the ideas didn’t all come together either by happenstance or by gargantuan subconscious effort; they resolutely refused to arrange themselves within potting distance of a plot resolution. ‘Wolf Blood’ was the result of more of my blood, sweat, tears and foot stamping than is usual. It was not high concept.
Give me credit. I tried to make it sound like it was (Oh - did I try!) ‘Roman werewolf meets warrior seeress with bloody consequences?’, ‘Roman werewolf meets Celtic firestarter?’ Nah. It really isn’t that kind of book. It is hard for me to sum up because it isn’t one big idea, delivered neatly packaged by elves on a sugar high, but lots of little ones, colliding tangentially until somehow the game got resolved. ( I hesitate to say won.)
I do not give good elevator pitch. I don’t work like that. I can’t get to the point, the point of the book until after I’ve written it and sometimes not even then.
What I’ve learned is that you don’t need a big idea to write a novel, but you do need the confidence to carry on regardless, in the hope that one will arrive. Someday, eventually, it probably will.
That small (and possibly inconsequential) message of hope to those lost in plot pits is the point of this blog.
It happened again. Not a moment too soon. After a year of on off rather unsatisfactory writing, I had five days of joyous, out of my control/forget-to-eat writing possession.
The last book, which I’ve just delivered, finally found its shape and rhythm only at the very last minute, on a deadline and after much spitting and cursing. I had a good few of those desert days where you can’t see the oasis or when you think you’ve found it only to have it dissolve - another bloody mirage. I briefly became a menopausal ancient mariner stoppething anyone who’d listen about the futility of it all. I drank a lot of coffee, ate a lot of chocolate and was unfailingly, unfeasibly grumpy for far too long.
My restoration began innocently enough when my son and his girlfriend reminded me of a story idea I’d had a year or so ago. I’d regaled them with it over the course of lunch: they were students, I was paying - they were obviously a captive audience. At first I thought they were mistaken. I had no idea what they were talking about. It must have been some other novelist, or some other book, but as they continued I felt the first flicker of something, recognition, enthusiasm and the blam it hit me! Passion swiftly followed by possession. I couldn’t type fast enough: sentences tumbled over sentences, characters walked into my head talking to each other, kissing each other, killing each other, enacting, no, living a plot. How could I have forgotten such a brilliant premise? Why hadn’t I written it? Within the hour the whole thing had unfolded in my head like some exotic, wondrous plant. I was consumed.
Today I am knackered and bereft. Where did it go? Obviously it was just another writing mirage - the idea of a perfect novel. Still, it was wonderful while it lasted. It reminded me that sometimes writing is just great fun. I am determined to push through the plodding phase of uncertainty and self doubt because if your son remembers the plot of a story for more that a year - there’s something there - right? And the passion, that possession might return? Please. Pretty please.
I am feeling rather impotent. I can’t save my kids from massive uni debt, or help libraries buy or stock books, I can’t do anything to prevent PLR slipping away without a body to administer it. I know there are far worse evils in the world but education, literacy and an acknowledgment of the importance of culture are three bastions of civilisation and they are all under threat.
This is not a call to arms. There are things that make me angrier and I’m confident that I will have plenty of opportunity to get angrier as cuts get more radical. This is more a call to write. I mean there’s not much point in going on strike is there? Who would notice?
No. I am fighting back in a singularly ineffectual but morally satisfying way. So you think by destroying libraries, reducing discretionary income and bringing in a double dip recession thereby destroying the retail book trade you can break me, hey?
I am made of stronger stuff. I will finish this book, dammit, and it will be great and even if no one reads it but my kids ( because I’ve bribed them) and the librarian's daughter (who liked my last one,) I shall not be beaten. We practitioners who deliver culture at the frontline ( sadly a quote from the culture minister) are not so easily discouraged, we will continue to ply our trade with little hope of earning a living wage, we shall defend the value of the written word ( however it is delivered by book, download, or psychic transfer) and we will prevail!
So there. See. Not so impotent after all, huh!
I’ve always liked history - reading historical novels, studying it ( in moderation) and now writing it ( in slightly modified form.)I’m not a real historian - not remotely - and even when I studied it, I liked the ‘what if’ questions much more than the facts. I’m not that keen on facts to be honest. They are generally inconvenient and gritty; lumps in the smooth cake mix of my imaginary confections. Fortunately I write historical fantasy or sometimes alternate history, (depending on who is writing my book blurb) so you would think I could discard them at will. I can’t. Unfortunately, it’s the grittiness of fact that keeps my fiction grounded and authentic and I am just as bound to the damn things as if I were writing real history.
This might be mad. I mean if a story is going to feature were wolves or magic perhaps angsting about the exact type of helmet a soldier might wear is a little neurotic. But I do angst about that. I am currently battling a major panic that my current story, set in AD 50, has my main character ( a seeress) too ignorant of battles down south to be believable. (She’s a seeress, Nicky, she can see the future she’s never going to be ‘believable’.) I am also worried that her companions would be wearing lorica segmentata rather than, the altogether more convenient, mail shirts. I pore over maps to try to work out how far my heroes could realistically cover in a day and track down details of the kind of provisions you might be expected to find in a first century Roman’s pack in mid winter. OK one of the Romans then turns into a wolf, but at least he eats the right kind of food.
I have of course rationalised this absurd incongruity - an obsession with this small stuff and a tendency to rewrite the really big stuff - the laws of physics for example: I believe that when I am asking readers to suspend disbelief and accept the impossible, it helps to go the extra ( Roman) mile to establish credibility, to build a story world that is grounded in verifiable truths. I also believe that I cannot write any other way. My perfectionist streak, which is otherwise indiscernible to the naked eye, will not allow me to just make everything up.
I am occasionally urged to write stories set in other times and places and I wonder if the people doing the urging appreciate how much time is involved in researching a book. I don’t particularly like research, I don’t get lost in it, I do it with a clear purpose in mind and only cope with it at all by choosing periods about which little concrete is known so that even being picky about the facts leaves me vast amounts of interpretive wriggle room. I don’t think I could write a story set in well documented periods because I would be paralysed by the vastness of what I don’t know.
I have tremendous admiration for people who write real historical novels, who take me to another place that is as tangibly foreign and bizarre as the past would have been.The past is not like the present without lycra and with poorer hygiene, it should feel like another planet not just another country.
For me the research is worth while when one small discovery brings that strangeness home, because fact is stranger than even fantasy fiction and nothing I can write can ever do justice to real history. I love it that the Romans had a tradition of were-wolf stories and that the condition of my poor benighted character was understood. In honour of that delightful fact my new book is called ‘Versipellum’, skin changer, or at least it will be when
I am a wolf. This is somewhat inconvenient because wolves don't cook or clean or shop for food. I also seem to be something of a stay-at-home, chocolate eating wolf, inclined to sleep a lot: a semi hibernating wolf who, lacking opposable thumbs, is pretty useless at living my life.
I thought I was going to have to be a wolf for most of my book but I am rapidly changing my mind, though, to be honest, as a wolf I don't do much rapidly. My claws make too much noise on my wooden stairs, my breath smells and my dog has forsaken his place under my desk; I think I have to give it up. I have been a fox before now, but she was female and largely co operative if more feral than I would have liked. I am often a man, or a boy anyway, which is straightforward, though I obviously have to remember that it is only in my mind that I pee standing up.
I like shapeshifting it's what we novelists do. I always remember an internet friend remarking that she had persuaded herself she was several inches taller in order to live in the skin of her heroine and was constantly surprised that she couldn't actually reach the pickles off the highest supermarket shelves. That hasn't yet happened to me, though I am occasionally disturbed to see the face of an old woman in the mirror in place of my youthful and (invariably attractive) protagonist: always a bit of a let down that.
The wolf is different. The wolf is semi-nocturnal and always tired, plus he has no self discipline. Absolutely none. He is an alpha male who won't compromise and is horribly territorial about the best place on the sofa. He expects the pack to obey him, which, frankly, has come as a bit of a shock to the pack who are used to a little less snarling.
None of this poses an insurmountable problem, the deal breaker is that the wolf doesn't want to tell his story. He can't be arsed. The wolf doesn't care if it never gets written. The wolf wants what the wolf wants and it isn't what I want so I think I have to let him go, let him slink off back into my id or wherever the hell he's come from and take his stink back with him. I think my husband will be pleased.
It seems pretty obvious to me that a writer, writes. It isn't very complicated you are a writer if you write and a fiction writer if you write fiction and a children's fiction writer if you write children's fiction. So far so good. But what if you are not actually writing - just talking about it? Can you still hang onto that status? We have all I'm sure bumped into the writer who published a slim volume of poetry forty years ago and has dined out on it ever since - can they call themselves writers? Can I?
I am Ok with people saying they are writers even if they are not currently working on something - if they are on holiday , or briefly between books but if the hiatus goes on for too long surely they are ex writers or former writers rather as women of a certain age can be 'former glamour models.' I say this only because I haven't actually written a novel or even really done more than a couple of hours writing for the best part of a year.
I have lectured on writing, run workshops on writing, critiqued writing, given talks about writing, given advice about writing, got into arguments about writing and even assessed other people's writing but I haven't done any myself.
This makes me feel fraudulent. Is an actor still an actor if they haven't had a part for ten years? And what is the cut off point? Am I still a writer now but not if I don't write for another year or two?
I don't think you can be a writer in your heart or head without also being one with your fingers ( or with whatever appendage you use to generate words on a page). I think you can be 'resting' for a while but not for too long or it begins to look like retirement. Sure you can be between books as you can be between jobs but doesn't that kind of make you just unemployed?
Maybe you are different and in your soul you 'just are' a writer, but I didn't start writing until my thirties. I wasn't a writer before then and I fear that I can cease to be a writer as easily as I became one. I am not sure my soul has noticed.
Does it matter? A bit. I like saying rather grandly that I write when asked what I do at parties. It seems more glamorous somehow than saying I hang around for long periods of the day in my dressing gown reading the paper and arguing with imaginary people on t'internet. I would miss the label, but would I miss the activity?
Would you?
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In an earlier blog post there was the suggestion was that one of the aims of education might be to encourage children to love reading. Now I believe passionately that every child should be taught how to read, but that is about it. This is a dangerous thing to say here, but I’m not sure that people who love reading are actually that much use.
Now I am talking specifically about reading fiction here and not the great jewels of English literature either, because great writing and great thinking is always needed. A small number of precious books have changed the world and every child should have the chance to read them. However, if you walk into any of the (remaining) grand emporia of the written word the greater proportion of material on the shelves isn’t particularly great and I suppose it must be what most of us are reading ( if we are reading at all) or they would be in even worse trouble than they already are. This stuff is the OK stuff with which I have filled too many of my waking hours. The kindest thing that could be said about my writing taste is that it is eclectic.
I was a mal coordinated child, egotistical and narcissistic as all children are and not good at making friends. From the first time I managed to read for myself a whole sentence of story ( written by the much maligned Enid Blyton ) I was hooked as surely as if fiction were crack cocaine and story has been my addiction ever since. I read my way through my infant school, closeted in the book cupboard, I read my way through a whole year of maths in junior school and never did learn long division. I read through most of my adolescence, living only in a kind of lucid dream My children’s infancy were the years of sleep deprivation and door stop fantasy read against the background drone of Ringo Starr narrating ‘Thomas the Tank Engine’. The sound of the theme tune even today induces instant catatonia and dreams of elves. How many conversations have I not had because I was lost in a book? How many times have I been absent when I ought to have been present? In fiction I could be anyone, do anything and what I could do in fiction I didn’t have to do in life. And there’s the rub. Why bother to change the world when you can read about other people doing it (and succeeding,) why bother to change yourself when in fiction you can be anyone you want to be?
My children quite like reading and that’s fine by me, I actively don’t want them to love it. I don’t want it to be for them what it has been for me, my addiction, my obsession, my crutch and my refuge. I want them to love living not reading about it.
Yesterday I enrolled on a Phd course. It was OK. I have a student ID – a photo that makes me look like my ninety five year old grandmother and my date of birth prominently displayed. ‘It’ll be useful when you go to clubs,’ the administrator smirked. I tried to keep the razor blades out of my returning smile.
There was an introductory session. The woman next to me made swift notes on her phone while I scrabbled around in my handbag for a pencil and notebook. I looked around surreptitiously to discover that though almost everyone in the room was youngish there were a few others there who looked like they’d lived harder or at least longer than the others. I was reassured. One by one the older people revealed themselves to have got their Phds decades before; they were all staff. That was OK too.
Then, in mid lecture, my phone went off revealing simultaneously my dodgy taste in ringtones, my absentmindedness and finally my utter technical incompetence; I couldn’t turn the damn thing off. As all eyes turned to me I reassured myself ‘It will be all right, you can do this’ fortunately remembering just in time not to say it out loud. Attention shifted. I slunk into my chair; it was OK.
It was then that they started talking about the work. I love the idea of work, the fantasy of research, of being knowledgeable, and, if I am honest, of reading all day but the actual business of work? I am not sure if that is OK. What the hell do I think I am I doing? Why do I want to put myself through this?
There is an upside I get 10% off at Topshop, which has convinced my daughter my new project is a good thing, I have an excuse for drinking too much and vomiting, ( I don’t think I’ll do it but I know that I could now that I’m a student again) and I really, really want to write fiction. This might be a radical solution to writer’s block but if it works don’t knock it. It will be OK.
For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, I live more by the academic year than the calendar one. The first hint of autumn in the air, the chill winds, the shortening days and I get an unseasonal burst of energy, a desire to make new resolutions, dye my hair some unnatural shade of russet and buy a new pair of glossy, conker-coloured boots.
This year my first and most significant resolution is to enjoy what I do. No longer will I angst over the demise of the mid list or whinge about the parlous state of sales. I refuse to be envious of top sellers or bitter when my name is absent from short lists. I am going to enjoy the moments when I have a story I want to tell and the leisure to tell it. Autumn is always a reminder that things will probably get worse; colder, bleaker, darker so I am going to enjoy the last lingering golden days of sunshine and have fun.
Secondly, I am going to stop making crazy resolutions (I’m not including the above resolution in that category whatever you might think.) I know I’m not going to be up and dressed and working first thing in the morning. I am rubbish in the mornings and my brain does not come on line until significant amounts of caffeine have been imbibed, until I have listened to the Today programme, skimmed the paper and surfed the net. I am very unlikely to write a thousand words every day – I never have so why should this year be different? I am going to write what I can when I can and wherever I can and not beat myself up when the quality is a little bit dodgy either.
Thirdly, I am going to read more teenage fiction and enjoy the skill and talent of my fellow writers. I am going to be glad to be living in an age when such good books are available instead of depressed by the quality and quantity of ‘the competition.’ I am going to be pleased when my books are in stock, not cross when they aren’t. I am going to smile benignly when people ask me whether I’ve ever been published or thought of writing a real book - for adults. I am going to laugh in a warm, friendly and entirely non hostile way when someone asks if I’m going to be the next JK Rowling. In short I am going to be a veritable peri- menopausal Pollyanna. I think I’ll be happier.
Watch this space...
I am always intrigued by the language writers use to talk about writing. Perplexed, but intrigued. On-line, cyber space is full of talk of the writer’s tool box. All aspects of writing are tools. Not being a dab hand at DIY I routinely use a hammer to crack a nut and a similar approach to writing might be problematic.
I think people who think of aspects of writing, point of view, voice, world building, character building as tools must have a story in their head somehow, a platonic ideal of a story that they somehow reconstruct with the aid of bolt cutters, electric drills and a pair of pliers. I find the metaphor useless as I have no ideas at all when I start. None. Sweet F A. I don’t need a tool box I need a clue.
Is writing for me like doing a puzzle? A bit. Maybe. I don’t know; I don’t do puzzles. Certainly at the start it is like twenty questions. Is my heroine a princess, a slave, a dog, a duck billed platypus? I really don’t know anything at all at the beginning.
I kind of find all that POV, character and voice stuff arrives with the story – like the instruments I know I want to use from the moment I start trying to come up with a tune. I know the kind of sound I want – more or less, but I work out how to make it as I go along. Does that make sense? Probably not. I don’t understand enough about the mechanics of musical composition to strike a chord with those that do.
When obliged to talk about writing process, I often talk about weaving, which is ridiculous as I have no idea how to do that in real life. I definitely have story threads that I need to be worked into an overall pattern, different colours that need to be given prominence at different times, but as a metaphor it isn’t terribly helpful which probably explains some of the blank looks I get from students.
‘It’s like painting’ I say, a woman who hasn’t painted since about 1978 and wasn’t very good at it then. ‘The narrative kind of drives forward like a snow plough.’ What? ‘It’s like sewing – the main thread is a strong red line I embroider as I go.’ What is this girl on? I can’t do embroidery. I spent the year I was supposed to learn cross-stitch reading ‘Biggles’ under the desk and the same goes for knitting – only I think I was reading ‘Narnia.’
At secondary school I forgot my fabric every sewing lesson as reading the text book was more interesting. I can’t do craft and I can’t explain how I write – metaphors break down, melt or fizzle out in thin air like spells with no substance, lacking truth or power.
I don’t know how to describe writing a book – it’s like writing a book OK?
I never write much in the summer which is why all my books take place in bad weather. My protagonists are always fighting the damp and the cold as I am when I’m working. They never get to lie about in the sun because when it’s sunny I am too busy seizing the day and replenishing my vitamin D supplies to write them into the experience. I write miserable books in the autumn and slightly more hopeful ones in the spring but I have yet to write anything more substantial than a post card in the summer – I have a writer’s version of SAD – seasonal airhead disorder. I don’t need a light box but an ice house in which to work – a few dark clouds and the promise of snow and my muse is pulling on her ugg boots and her woolly tights – the moment the sun shines she is out of here, lazing in the garden or checking on the sales. I like reading other people’s sunny stories but cannot find it in me to write one myself. My imagination likes a minor key and a monochrome palette.
Now that the dark clouds gather over Richmond and the barbeque summer has failed to materialise things are starting to stir, I can visualise my characters shivering in a stiff breeze and I start to feel hopeful – time to begin.
First of all I don’t believe in writer’s block. I believe in butcher’s block – I used to have one in my kitchen and plumber’s block – the kind that costs a fortune to unblock in my experience. I even believe in builder’s block the process whereby nothing can happen because the electrician can’t start before the plasterer, the plasterer can’t start before the plumber and there’s no way the plumber can do a thing until the electrician’s finished, but writer’s block, no. Writer’s block is the figment of an author’s imagination, an excuse for melodrama, existential despair and excessive drinking ; it is another word for idleness.
Secondly, I would like to explain that I am not personally ‘blocked’. I eat plenty of prunes, walk my dog regularly and, apart from the red wine, caffeine and chocolate habit, have quite a healthy life. The only reason I am not writing at the moment and indeed haven’t written for months is...
Well there’s the weather – we get so few nice days and I can’t see my screen outside and I can’t remember how to write with pen and paper – I get cramp just signing my name these days ( and not because I do so many autographs.)
Then there were the exams and the fact that now they are over, well,it seems only kind to let my poor overwrought children take over my work space. They do need to catch up on Facebook, MSN and Youtube so much more than I need to write a new novel. And again I think some ideas need to – how shall I put this - germinate slowly. This is especially true of ideas you haven’t yet had. The unthought story seed is as elusive as a windblown dandelion clock, that great high concept thingy waiting in some kind of inchoate state for the mind to be receptive enough to allow it to exist, needs time and patience. Of course this not another way of saying I’m clueless, how dare you suggest it! I’m merely waiting, biding my time, not stuck at all.
In the meantime, I feel the author’s mind needs plenty of sunshine – to aid germination, fluid (preferably of the pink variety, rose, kir maybe even pink champagne) and rest. I also recommend plenty of visual stimulation, sales shopping is particular good for this as it also allows the writer to engage in useful imaginative thinking: this yellow, sleeveless sundress would look wonderful if I got a tan, worked out, lost the bingo arms, had breast augmentation surgery, botox, new teeth and wore very high heels.
What me? Got writer’s block? Whatever gave you that idea?
I have spent the last week talking about work, but not actually doing any; I’ve been swanning around being ‘a writer.’ I quite like this as it makes me feel self important and wise and because I can temporarily forget the fact that I am currently stalled on the actual putting words on the page front..
Anyway, in all the thousands of ill judged words that have dribbled from my lips a very few actually made sense.
Someone asked me what I’d learned in my years as a writer. I quashed the reflexive ‘not a lot’. I battled not to pass on my top hints for the home worker ie ‘It is surprisingly easy to give yourself caffeine poisoning,' ‘ Don’t eat toast and then laugh while at your keyboard or you’ll be picking out crumbs for weeks,’ and the most helpful ‘Don’t work in your (grubby, pink fluffy) dressing gown as if you do someone you don’t wish to meet in a state of slovenly dishevelment will inevitably call.’ In the end I took a deep breath and said: ‘Don’t be a writer unless you love writing.’ This was quite sensible I thought ( though I did spoil it rather by suggesting that if they wished to be rich and famous they should maybe take up stripping or going on a reality TV show, neither of which seemed to be on the cards for that particular audience.)
I really do think that the only reason to be a writer is because you love writing, because the joys of being ‘ a writer’, even of swanning around pretending to be wise are limited and don’t pay the gas bill ( unless you use a really tiny amount of gas.) The hourly pay is rubbish, the career progression unpredictable and often in the wrong direction, and the brief moment of joy when your book is published is subsequently undermined by the frustration and despair, of no shops stocking it, no punters buying it and no critics reviewing it. You have to do it because you think it is worth doing in and of itself. I’ve also learned that it helps to be a thick skinned optimist, with either private wealth, a flexible second job, or a generous benefactor/other half but I didn’t want to depress my audience too much. I’ll stand by my one sensible comment in my flood of chat. ‘Don’t be a writer unless you love writing.’ Honestly. Why would you?
I have just recently been arguing on line with some writers who think that the only possible speech tag is ‘said.’
I am at that age where I am easily irritated and I am allergic to writing rules of this sort. I am a natural heretic when it comes to style rules and immediately feel obliged to break any ‘rule’as soon as it is suggested to me.
I suppose that most of the time I use ‘said’ but I reserve the right to use ‘muttered’, ‘grumbled’,’ argued’, and anything else that suits my story if I choose. So there.
Anyway, having made my point repeatedly, forcibly and not particularly well, I came up with this piece of flash fiction which probably says it better.
'My husband was a novelist and a good one. He wrote the spare, minimalist prose that won prizes. The idea of using an obvious speech tag horrified him. ‘I love you,’ he said. ‘let’s get married,’ he said, and years later after some small success,’ I am finished,’ he said.
‘Mark!’I howled when I found his corpse. I sobbed his eulogy, shrieked his last words at the graveside – overwrought and overwritten like the cheapest of airport novels. In all the things he said in all our long years together, he never ‘spoke’ to me at all.'
I am a bout writer; I don’t mean I write about anything in particular, more that I am a lay about for much of the time. I shuffle uncomfortably and look shifty when students or people at parties tell me that real writers write every day. I don’t write about anything at all for months on end. I talk about writing a bit and I am guilty about not writing a lot. Then suddenly I am in thrall to a story and I can’t stop.
I am obsessed at the moment. I’ve written 40,000 words in a fortnight – a confession rather than a boast - as I don’t really see how it could possibly be any good. I wake up thinking about the story, I go to bed dreaming about it. When I walk the dog, my characters are arguing with each other in my head. Last night I had to go to bed early, exhausted and emotionally drained. I’d spent the day awash with real adrenaline as I tortured my imaginary protagonist.
I cannot rest until the story is done. There is no food in the house. I forget to walk the dog. I am avoiding social engagements; I resent time spent away from my desk. I am lost to this world.
I would love to claim the story is a masterpiece, but I’m obsessed not deluded. I know that once it is finished I will lose all interest in it. Obviously I will be disappointed if it doesn’t sell, but I won’t be devastated. I will keep it on my shelves in a binder for a while, but only until I need the binder for something else. It will be over for me, my passion will be spent the moment it is done.
Like a bout drinker, a bout writer is sober in between times. In a week or two I will wonder at the compulsion that gripped me. There will be food in the house and I will walk the dog conscientiously. I will talk about writing a bit and be guilty about not writing a lot – until the next time.
The other day I found myself pontificating about hinged and unhinged thinking. As it happened I was at a party, drink in hand, spouting general gibberish as I am too inclined to do, but unusually and inadvertently I might have said something that is almost true.
I need to be unhinged to write or at least to write easily. I need to uncouple my brain from my rational, logical mind, from my inner critic, my sub conscious editor, the still small voice of reason that might say – ‘Come off it – who are you trying to kid? That doesn’t make sense!’
My unhinged self is happy with the impossible, the unplanned and the illogical. In response to the whinging of my hinged self she simply shrugs her implausibly broad, pale green shoulders and responds: `‘And your point is?’ and then she’s off with a flick of her iridescent, metal wings.
My unhinged self has infinite faith in the power of the story, in the capacity of my unconscious to work things out. She doesn’t much care what anyone else thinks: she plunges into the story world and believes wholeheartedly in everything she puts there. She is quite obviously certifiable, but remarkably productive when given her head. The problem is that as she lives in mine, I am not always able to free her, to unhinge my thinking and let her out.
It’s a pity really because she can write really fast...
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What is it about middles? I don’t mean the bit of flab that sits where one’s waist ought to be, but the middle of a novel (where in truth there is often a bit of extra padding where the plot should be.)
Normally I like middles – I mean the middle of a sandwich is always the best bit – as a kid I never ate the bread.I was also extremely good at deconstructing Jaffa cakes so I could be left to savour the delicious orangey bit in the centre. Even today when eating cream cake I’m quite likely to skip the cake and go straight for the cream. The middle of the year is good, the middle way had a certain appeal and I’m even finding middle age tolerable, but I hate writing the middle section of books.
In the beginning there is that excitement – this is ‘The One’ – the breakthrough book, the best thing I’ve done. At the end there is the promise of those two wonderful little words ‘the end’ when all is resolved and the damn thing (note no longer ‘The One’ – just another one) is finished. The middle, however, is just all that stuff that makes the story work – I think it’s called plot and then there’s character development and world building and ... Well, the middle is just graft - the hard yards through which the shiny new idea is dulled and tarnished by much thought and occasional reworking.
I left my current book at the beginning of the summer at the mid-point, the middle of the middle. I do not know what I was thinking! Take it from me, you should NEVER leave a book in the middle. I have done it before and that story never got finished. This current one is lurking at the back of my head, taunting me even as I write this – half formed and whimpering...
I am sooooo past the point of initial enthusiasm and such a long way from the finishing line. I have procrastinated for weeks, but today the kids are back in school, my friends are back in work and I have just run out of excuses. Wish me luck - I’m going to need it.
Time for a new word of the day (perhaps, though, as I’ve said before I should call it word-of-the-random-timeperiod since it has never been a daily offering in my blog). Anyway, today’s word is: FOIBLE
Foible (noun) a failing or weakness of character.
So a foible is a failing one has, but I’ve noticed that the term is often used in an almost endearing way – as in ‘he has his little foibles’ rather than ‘his foibles really annoy the heck out of me.’
The word has got me thinking. "What are my foibles?" I asked Primula, but she wouldn’t have a bar of this sort of soul-searching. “I’m not going to list your faults, Pemberthy dear,” she admonished. “I love you warts and all. I don’t want to hurt you.” Warts? I have warts? Lucky my fur keeps them covered. Anyway, Primula suggested if I wanted to know about my foibles, it was better to do some quiet reflecting on them for myself. So, I started a list, and here it is, for public consumption.
Pemberthy’s Foibles:
1. I have very poor balance. This is what led to me falling from the shelf which, ultimately, was a good thing because that’s how I met Primula.
2. I tend to be a bit gruff. However, since I met Primula, I am much happier and much nicer to be around.
3. I am sometimes a little conceited. Yes, I know as one is cute and fluffy as well as being a great singer and a good writer, that I have a lot to be proud about, but at times I forget to be modest. I’m working on it, though.
4. I have warts. Apparently. Though I didn’t know this till Primula told me so today. I’m not sure if this is a foible or not – after all, warts are just a skin condition, really. – not a personality trait.
So, there you have it – a list of my foibles. Can you still love me after knowing my faults and failings? (That sounds like the title of a book – faults, failings and foibles.) I do hope so. I try hard to be loveable.
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Difficult to follow, the path of the writer is. The true path of third person past follow you must. If once you allow your prose to flow down the ways of first, second, or present tense, there can be no return. Save your babies you might, yet all that they have stood for will be lost.
Some things just need to sit in the 'needs work' corner of the computer for a year or so! (Please tell me I'm not the only one with a bulging 'needs work' corner?)
All I can say is "absolute sympathy!"
It's wrong to take pleasure in another's woe, but I really enjoyed this post - thanks!
JO - you are not. I think every corner of my computer is devoted to the 'needs work' pile.
Empathy, Nicky!
Great post, Nicky - we've all been there. I think of the 'needs work corner' as 'composting.'
Fantastic post, made me laugh so hard I spilled my 6-cup cafetiere all over my desk.
Sympathy. Empathy. Coffeee.