Get your daily poem

A poem a day whizzes into my inbox with the sound of a cartoon fairy waving its tinkly magic wand. It’s usually appearing in the middle of my working day, but right now it interrupts a period of intense nothingness with a sharp dose of beauty and craft that has the same effect as opening a window for some icy air.

You can sign up here, but first read today’s excellent poem about a dog park: https://poets.org/poem/dog-park

The best sentence on travel ever written?

“Pake knew a hundred  dirt road shortcuts, steering them through scabland and slope country, in and out of the tiger shits, over the tawny plain still grooved with pilgrim wagon ruts, into early darkness and the first storm laying down black ice, hard orange dawn, the world smoking, snaking dust devils on bare dirt, heat boiling out of the sun until the paint on the truck hood curled, ragged webs of dry rain that never hit the ground, through small-town traffic and stock on the road, band of horses in morning fog, two redheaded cowboys moving a house that filled the roadway and Pake busting around and into the ditch to get past, leaving junkyards and Mexican cafes behind, turning into midnight motel entrances with RING OFFICE BELL signs or steering onto the black prairie for a stunned hour of sleep.”

From “The Mud Below”, by Annie Proulx

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

(Notes on) Reading Annie Proulx

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

I’ve been aiming to read more short stories – with the aim of writing more short stories – so today I picked up Annie Proulx to learn from her craft. I read ‘The Half Skinned Steer’, from her Close Range collection (Brokeback Mountain is at the end of the book). I’m just noting her craft here, some things I pulled out for my own consideration:

• Amazing first and then second sentences, containing the entirety of the protagonist’s life! They are very long sentences.
• The story is chunked into short sections. The telling of the tale of the half-skinned steer (by Tin Head) is paced with a journey, the return of the protagonist to the ranch where he grew up.
• There is great tension from this. The story of the steer is being told in a very tense, sexually-charged claustrophobic room; the journey is full of (self-imposed, foolish) peril in increasingly bad weather.
• The protagonist is not sympathetic. He’s a bone-headed fool, but there’s sympathy for him at the very end.
• The ending is not clear in the sense that does he live or die. The title suggests something bloody, unfinished. The raw horror of that image is a blood-red slash across the story.
• Weird animals roam through the story: lions, emus. The protagonist also watches nature programmes.
• Her writing is dense, rich and beautiful. “He walked against the wind, his shoes filled with snow, feeling as easy to tear as a man cut from paper”…

Did I like it? I did, without perhaps connecting with it, being a 21st C female far from Cheyenne. There is so much beauty, emotion, understated drama… What actually happens?

1. Mero is called by his brother’s niece, to tell him that his brother has been killed by an emu at the ranch (near Cheyenne).
2. He tells her he will drive there (from Massachusetts, he’s 83).
3. He gets stopped with a speeding ticket.
4. He crashes his car at Des Moines and buys another one (he’s rich and careless).
5. He calls in at Cheyenne and gets told it’s likely to snow.
6. Snow hits, and he drives a perilous mountain road.
7. He turns onto the track to the ranch but mis-remembers the way and gets stuck in. It’s night and it’s snowing.
8. He manages to get the car out (breaking a window) and then reverses, getting stuck in a ditch.
9. He sets off to walk in the snow, followed by one of the herd who keeps pace with him. “It tossed its head, and in the howling wintry light he saw he’d been wrong again, that the half-skinned steer’s red eye had been watching for him all this time.”

The half-skinned steer was an animal that cast a curse on its carver, Tin Head, cursing him to ruin. The telling of that story was a pivotal moment in Mero’s life: he is with his hard-drinking father, his leery brother and his father’s alluring girlfriend. After this, he leaves home, determined to get his own woman and not hanker after his dad’s girlfriend (like his brother).

So there’s a whole lot going on. What a story! What craft! This is my kind of short story. Close-reading paid off richly in terms of craft learned…

In the Beginning

This week I am focussing on the beginning of my work-in-progress (WIP). By that I mean the first quarter to a third of the book. By the very nature of things, this is the part that I have been over more times (after a long break I will usually go back to the start) so these pages have seen more revisions. It’s not ready, but it’s not too far off. My aim at the moment is to make it as good as it can be: to have it in a state that could go to a friendly beta reader.

So this is what I am thinking about as I approach this part of the book afresh:

• It’s an immersion for the reader: they are plunged into your created world with your characters. What do you want them to see first as the sun shines in or the lights go up?
• What kind of journey should my reader have up to the end point of this section? It needed momentum, it needs to be gripping, it needs to make them excited. The “promise of the premise” is a great phrase for the middle of a book: the start must be on a path that is clearly leading there and all the signs must be right.
• In plotting terms, there is an inciting incident to set things off and possibly a “Pinch Point 1” to deliver (neat summary here). I do keep a skeleton word count plan to make sure these are vaguely in the right place: I’m a believer in structure!
• I need to get the voice right – my main character is the 1st person narrator and I still don’t feel I’ve quite nailed her tone. Or rather I did, but she’s changed…leaving room for improvement is always good but it’s quite hard work to ripple it through the whole WIP.
• Have any details changed? When revising it can be hard to keep track of the little things that have shifted in the story: I use a paper notebook to make bullet points which I then cross off once I’ve fixed them.

I’m fairly happy with my actual first page: opens right into the moment, gets going pretty quickly, minimal back-story. All I need to do now is nail the next 10k words and I’ll be well on my way…wish me luck! Are you happy with your WIP’s Act One?

Time, time, time…

Photo by samer daboul on Pexels.com

I’d hit the doldrums with revision of my work-in-progress. A difficult chapter, a loss of direction, stagnating in the middle of a plot that I’m otherwise quite happy with. It took me a fair while before I worked out one major issue that was holding me back: my character had somehow got out of time. I knew vaguely where and when they were but I didn’t actually have any account for the passing of time, what happened on what specific date.

So this sent me back to the planning spreadsheet. A new workbook has now been populated with real dates. This has involved digging up calendars for 2016 and 2017, checking for bank holidays and the like. My novel is set in the real world so this also meant finding school term dates for those years for two different areas. These were harder to find but they were still out there. Then I could make sure my dates work and anchor the events of my novel firmly into reality. The full moon is also relevant as at one point the character go aurora-watching. Huge relief as I found my date for that coincided with a new moon, a good time to catch those Merry Dancers without a big glowing moon to compete with.

As an aside: what a terrible year 2016 was! The Brexit referendum in June and Trump’s election in November both make it into my novel as events too large to ignore. I remember it felt like the end of days, both times.

So now I’ve made a few notes and corrected a few assumptions, anchored my characters firmly in real time and place, and I’m feeling like the wind is back in my sails. Onwards!

Creative writing MOOC: failure to launch

The wonderful International Writers’ Program has a new MOOC running: we’re already on Week 4 of “Power of the Pen: Identities and Social Issues in Fiction and Nonfiction” (a similar themed course follows straight after for poetry and plays). I get excited about these courses because I have had so much fun on their previous MOOCs (documented on this blog). However, this time, I have to report failure to launch. I feel really sad about it. The reasons for this are varied, in increasing order of magnitude and containing, it’s fair to say, a decent amount of pathetic on my part:

• I find the learning platform hard work: particularly the discussion groups. It’s a real effort navigating around. I still persist with the writer videos because I love them but I’ve abandoned the rest. Bad design + my laziness = fatal combo!
• I’m not getting a sense of community like before: the groups I joined seem to be people just posting up work seeking comments, nobody was doing any other discussing or chatting or just hanging out. I got lonely! Why didn’t I join different groups? Good question.
• There’s a mix with non-fiction: nothing against this as a genre – I read plenty – but right now I don’t feel it’s a genre I’m suited to. Having said that, some of the author videos are interesting and inspirational so I’m still watching all those but it almost feels like a distraction, something that can lure me off-course if I let it.
• My writing is going well: I’m still happily working on my NaNoWriMo novel and it’s coming along nicely. I’m revising and I want to go with that flow…
• The assignments are too long: not to write, but to read. I won’t submit unless I’m going to review a decent number of other writers’ work but I’ve had enough of slogging through great chunks of work to try to come up with something constructive to say other than bland encouragement with a few hasty recommendations. Of course I want to do more than that – but to review something properly (for me) means printing it out, reading it at least twice, carefully, making notes and formulating a reply. Can I do that for even 3 submissions each week? No. Another key factor for me is not knowing who the writers are – we have no connection. If I know you and you ask me to read your work, I’ll do a damn fine job, but complete strangers? With the best will in the world, it all ends up being a bit superficial.
• The biggie: the theme of this MOOC is social justice and I am really hopeless at tackling that! Do not mistake this for not caring – I care, I rant, I rave and I protest all I can in real life – but it’s absolutely not what I write about. I write for light relief, for entertainment, for escapism. It’s incompatible with writing about social justice. Of course, social themes will creep into my work but it’s never centre stage. So I’ve stalled on all the assignments and felt ashamed it. Maybe I *ought* to be writing with a social justice angle – this is a call to arms – but I just get paralysed at the idea stage. I do have some themes that are personal to me (write what you know) but I don’t want to explore them or dwell on them. I have a massive sense of being unworthy, over-privileged, blah blah poor me in my little white middle class world…the end of this negative thought trail is complete writing paralysis.

The world is already full of wonderful writers doing all of this WAY BETTER than I ever could or would ever aspire to. Nobody’s going to cry that I’ve given up on the MOOC (still watching the videos, mind) but I feel this time it really wasn’t for me.

Having said all that, I’m DEFINITELY looking forward to the poetry/plays version which follows on – that’s a whole different kettle of fish and I’m going to explore that with fresh hope!

#NaNoWriMo2016 – what I’ll do differently next time

NaNoWriMo was an experimental, learning experience for me – never really attempted it before and wanted badly to just let rip on a new novel, one I haven’t stewed and stressed too much about. My stats are below – the massive jump at the very end was because when I pasted it from Scrivener into the validator, it seemed to find a whole load more words? Not sure what that was about.

Having done it once, I’ll definitely be doing it again so here I’m reminding myself of the good and the bad of the experience:

Good

• I have a story that I really like!
• I started planning in October and dreamed up a completely new story from scratch. I loved this and I stopped myself being too precious about it.
• Planning worked well for me: apart from being fun (I’m a plotter…), it meant I started November with a good road map, but also with room to manoeuvre. I had scene outlines but nothing too specific.
• HWWF2016: the MOOC clashed with Nanowrimo which wasn’t ideal in terms of workload but meant I had a ready-made community to egg me on and share experiences. I appreciated this. I also was able to use the MOOC content and assignments to help limber up for Nanowrimo. Having said that, it would be better if they didn’t overlap.
• It made me write – I had a focus all through the month and a commitment that is sadly lacking at other times! It was just easier to say ‘no, I have to do this’ regardless of what else was going on or carving out time where there seemed to be none.
• I took advantage of the extended free trial for Scrivener which kept me well organised. Having said that, I didn’t warm to it enough to buy it. It was good, but not good enough to make up for the shortcomings (i.e. lack of portability across devices unless I pay for multiple versions).

Bad

• I made some of the same mistakes with this novel as with the last one: I didn’t work enough on my protagonist at the start and even now I’m still feeling my way into her personality. More work on characters up front! I’d hoped I’d find her voice as I wrote and to some extent I did, but not enough to sparkle.
• I paced myself all wrong, due to word count fears. As it turned out, it was easy to hit that word count. When the story was going well, I could fly – knocked out well over the daily target. So I ended up finishing the whole thing well under 50k and then having to scrabble around padding it out at the end. I should have measured out roughly how many words each bit needed and done more work on the earlier sections.
• I’m not sure writing from start to finish worked for me? With my last novel I wrote key scenes first and I think that suits me better. It may have solved my pacing problem.
• Some of my writing was REALLY BAD. I know it’s all about quantity but I’m still ashamed of it…
• I’m left with something of a monumental muddle to sort out!

 

Week 4 of #NaNoWriMo2016

The month seems to have flown by and the end of NaNoWriMo is waiting just around the corner. I’ve just re-read my last post and wanted to update my reflections on how it’s going as I can see that my mood and feelings have changed quite a lot as the days go by…

• I’m going to miss it. It’s been so much fun! I’ve loved the challenge, the having to just bloody get on with it, however you’re feeling or no matter how little time there is. I’m not sure I can maintain quite the same level of motivation once it’s over, but it has shown me, quite clearly, how much I can write in a week if I put my mind to carving out the time.
• I got to the end too fast – I’ve been spending the last 5 days or so just adding bits and bobs, worrying at the edges. I can see where it needs bits padding out but at this point it’s quite hard to work over what I’ve written in any meaningful way so I’m just splurging extra bits out to be fitted in later. This isn’t ideal.
• I took the time yesterday to re-read the whole thing. Even though, as I said in the last post, the writing is Not Good, I really enjoyed it! This was a huge relief as I had days where I just questioned the whole thing. I think it’s got a future and I need to commit fully to working it over and over to make it better.
• Some of the characters have surprised me by coming to life in a really good way. There’s a couple I’m really fond of which I would not have predicted at the start. Unfortunately I’m still needing to do more thinking on some major ones but I don’t think that will change the story fundamentally.
• I started in 1st person and very quickly reverted to my more familiar 3rd person limited. However when I read it back I actually found the 1st person much more fun and engaging. This really surprised me as I remember so clearly feeling it absolutely wasn’t working. So there’s more work to do, perhaps trying to rewrite a couple of key chapters in 1st person and see how that goes.
• I need to go back to Orkney! That’s where it’s set. Even though I’ve made a few trips there and feel like I know it quite well, you can’t beat actually being in a place for authenticity. Just have to convince my family…

Tomorrow I’m going to print out the whole thing and see how it looks on paper. I’m currently at 44,189 tonight so I’m feeling confident I’m going to do it this year! Picture me standing beating my chest on top of my laptop, it’s gonna happen…

 

How’s #nanowrimo2016 going?

10 days into NaNoWriMo and my word count is doing well (23k and counting) but what’s the real story? Here are my 10 observations on NaNoWriMo so far…

1. The word count isn’t the problem. Even on the days when I only have about an hour at most, I can churn out enough words. I had a plan for my novel so each scene has rough notes. This is enough to keep me powering through a writing session. The planning worked well for me.
2. I have never written such terrible writing! I’m going with the concept and just writing and writing but that’s not how I do it best. I write a splurge then need to go back immediately and edit and edit to get it into something decent. A bit like a sculptor hacking off a block and then doing some fine tuning. I’m not going back over anything yet and it’s absolute drivel. Not drivel in the sense that things aren’t happening and the plot isn’t moving in the right direction, but absolutely abysmal writing.
3. I’m missing stuff out. Although I have quite good notes to work from, I’m skipping important things and moments.
4. I didn’t do enough work on my characters before I started – I think a lot of the issues I’m feeling are around the fact that I don’t have quite the right voice for my main character, nor the male lead / romantic interest. They aren’t awful, just not quite right yet.
5. Writing in a linear way doesn’t work so well for me. For my previous novel I started writing key scenes and then joined them up. This time I have started at the beginning and am writing to the end. It just doesn’t work so well for me but it’s been useful to experiment.
6. I’m worried that I’m writing the heart out of my novel. I had a really good concept of what I wanted it to be like and was happy with the plot. Now I feel like it’s deflated into a pile of nothingness but I think that relates a lot to (2) and the quality of my writing.
7. I am, at Day 10, full of self doubt and the pointlessness of what I’m doing. You can probably tell!
8. I’m still committed to it. I’m not a quitter. You will see me hit that word count.
9. I’m on course to get to 50k well before the end of the month so that will be my cue to stop and take stock and try to kick some shape into the monster I’ve created.
10. If I look deep into my heart, I still believe in the story I’m writing. I believe it should be told, I believe I’d like to read it if I can ever get it to reflect my aspirations for it. At least I’ve started.

How’s it working out for you?

Ready for #NaNoWriMo?

Mmm croissant…

This is my first serious attempt at NaNoWriMo and, given that I am not a quitter, it IS serious. I have warned my family. I have installed the trial version of Scrivener and filled it up with planning notes. I am carving out time, even on the most difficult days. Above all, I am REALLY looking forward to it!

I’m doing NaNoWriMo first and foremost because I am just not doing enough actual writing. I read about writing, I worry at the edges of my 1st novel which is still in revision, I do some daily pages when I can but I am not putting enough actual words on page. The MOOC has helped with that already but NaNoWriMo is my full immersion test.

I decided to come up with a completely new idea, not the 2nd novel I have had in mind for the last year or so. This is because this is an experiment for me and I wanted to generate something entirely fresh for it, also to see how that works out! The idea I have is based (again) on Orkney so I can use all the research I did for my first novel. It also has music at its core, something that is a massive part of my life. I’ve worked my idea up into characters, themes and finally chapters. In these last few days I am going to:

1. Double-check my plot against the key plot milestones = I think I’m hitting them pretty much but perhaps a tweak here and there may help. I also want to estimate my word count.
2. Check I know the main facts about my characters, key descriptions and facts are in place = I think I’m shakiest here but they are developed in my head!
3. Check my timeline = wishing Scrivener had something fancy to handle this. I have mapped out past years for key back story milestones but I also need to check the actual days when the action takes place.
4. Run through my notes for each scene and make sure it a) has a purpose and b) that I know what is going to be great about it. I have to start each one with a buzz about writing it, otherwise who is going to buzz reading it?

As you can tell, I’m into planning! I enjoy it, so I didn’t want to miss out with this novel but I have done all this in October so it has been an accelerated process. Having said that, it feels like enough time before I just start faffing around rather than doing things that are constructive..

Best thing of all, I’m very excited about my story and can’t wait to write it out. Roll on November!