Writing diary: May

I’ve been pottering along working on the same book since the beginning of the year, going more and more slowly. I started the year with a very full plan and then wrote every day, first by hand and then typing up what I’d written. This was a lot of work, but I thought it was cutting out a stage of drafting by making me really think about what I’d put down on paper as I typed it. However, I think now that there’s something larger at stake with the book, a fundamental thing in the plot that I thought was minor but which is actually right at the heart of it. What this means, I think, is that before I am done with this first draft I need to examine one particular central adult character and their motives and see how this links in with the plot and even more importantly with the central child character and their actions.

This realisation is kind of a back-to-the-drawing-board moment. It’s daunting and makes me question the whole premise of the book. However, I think these are often the moments from which the best ideas are born. This is when you, the writer, realise what the story is trying to tell you. Of course, not all stories necessarily need to tell you anything, and what this particular story tells me may not be what it tells my reader, but the story has to work for me first.

I’m not sure what the best way to go about examining this character is. I think probably to start with I’ll read what I’ve written and make some notes about her motivation and character. I’ve started doing this already, but I was considering lots of other elements at the same time, so I haven’t been consistent. I think at the moment this character starts out being one kind of person when you only hear about her and then when she appears in person she seems rather different. Then I’ll have to set out to answer the questions I’ve raised. Or possibly I could write from her point of view telling the story of what happened to someone else. I don’t generally like writing extra bits that I know will definitely not be part of the finished book, but – hey ho! – sometimes you’ve just got to do it. The other thing that can work for me is to talk it through with someone else. At least, that usually works for plot – talking sparks ideas for smoothing out plot knots. I don't know if it would work for character.

In the meantime, the new idea that’s edging into my mind seems so much more appealing than slogging away at this one. I don’t really know anything about this idea, except that it’s historical and to do with fear of nuclear war. A friend of mine who tells me she never throws away anything printed that comes into her hands lent me a copy of the original Protect and Survive booklet from 1980. Honestly, it makes my head spin. Did the government actually believe the advice they were giving would protect anyone? Was this what scientists were telling them? 

What seems extraordinary to me now is that I lived through this period and simply didn’t think about it. I had other existential worries – I suppose most teenagers do – but I guess I must have trusted that governments would not be so stupid as to blow each other up. What a dope!

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My new book, Snippets, is available now.

For a taster tale, you can read a Snippets story that's not in the book here.

You can get a copy of Snippets on Amazon or if you’d like a signed copy send me a message on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook. 

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Writing Diary: March

 

When I last wrote this diary, I’d just got to the end of the first draft of my new book. Finishing that draft coincided with my getting something else I’d written back from my agent with lots of things to do and think about, which turned out to be perfect timing. The thing about first drafts is that you really need to write them and then turn your back on them. ‘Drawer time’ some writers call this. What it means is that you get your mind completely free of it, so that when you come back to it, you view it with fresh eyes. You can see what’s great, what’s less than great, where there are holes and inconsistencies. Drawer time is an essential part of the creative process and having something else to immerse your creative self in totally during that time is a perfect way to unshackle yourself from the draft in the drawer.

 

Did I throw myself into working on the book my agent sent back to me straightaway? No I did not. I griped and complained to myself about what they thought needed to be done to it. I asked writer friends for their opinions about the comments. I asked my agent for clarification on some points. I resisted and resisted. These changes were IMPOSSIBLE! They’d make the story into something else entirely! It wouldn’t be my story anymore. I reread the book from beginning to end. I calmed down a bit. I thought about it for a few days, a week. I did all the other things on my to-do list.

 

Then I started with the changes that made sense to me, the ones that were easy to do and wouldn’t have a knock-on effect elsewhere in the book.

 

Then I spent a good bit of time on the beginning. The first 5,000 words are key. Many of the people who are going to be involved in buying and marketing your book will never read beyond those first 5,000 words, so they’d better be hooky as hell. Mine needed more tension, more threat. I tend towards subtle, which has its place, but maybe not in these first 5,000 words.

 

I came to the big problem, the thing that according to my agent and their industry reader knocks my book from realistic YA speculative fiction into sci-fi: the inclusion of teleporting. My feeling is that it’s such a minor element in the book that it can't change the nature of the book. The way people travel is very important to the world-building and in this particular context, I needed something as near instantaneous as possible. But could I have almost instantaneous travel in a ‘realistic’ way? I just couldn't see it. So I wrote a list of possible ways to doing this by advancing technologies we have now. I came up with a solution. It’s not as elegant as teleporting and I’d argue that it still seems a bit sci-fi, partly because I had to give more explanation of how it works, whereas with teleporting, well, everyone knows how that ‘works’.

 

More reading, more tweaking. Another beginning to end read-like-a-reader read. And now the book's with a couple of useful readers for comments before I finalise the changes and send it back to my agent to see what they think.

 

Which means it’s time to open the drawer and take out that first draft again. I’ve read it through. There’s everything I expected: parts that work and parts that don’t, a big hole where I somehow missed out a scene that was on my plan, some overlaps because I wrote out of sequence. But, you know, it’s a great story. The beginning and end are in the right place. All the people are there. I can see where I need to build on it. Drawer time, folks – it’s invaluable.

 

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My new book, Snippets, is available now. 

 You can read a Snippets story that's not in the book here. 

You can get a copy of Snippets on Amazon http://authl.it/c5p?d 

Or if you’d like a signed copy send me a message on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook.

Go to https://ko-fi.com/clairewatts to read a new Snippets story every month. 

It’s free, but you can support me with a donation if you like.

Writing Diary: February

 

I started working on a new book on January 4th, with the aim of writing a thousand words a day five days a week until I was finished with the first draft. I had expected this to take me until near the end of March but I discover to my surprise that this first draft is coming out much shorter and I’ll be done with the initial writing by the end of this week. On reflection, I’m not sure why I ‘m surprised; I’d divided the plan into scenes and I’ve written one scene of a thousand words or more each day. True, I’ve added in a couple of extra scenes along the way, but basically I’ve run out of scenes.

 

Even though I’m finished putting words on paper for this first draft I haven’t actually finished with it to the point that I’m ready to set it to one side. This one is far too scruffy for that stage. I like to play around with different working methods. The act of putting a first draft into big blocks of words on a screen can be extraordinarily tedious. Some of it sings at once, of course, but for other bits you’re simply working out how to move your characters from A to B or what they should be doing to break up their conversations. I find that varying the method I use to write means I’m not completely comfortable with the writing and that keeps it from being dull (mostly).

 

This time my new method was to write by hand first and to write out of sequence. Before the start of each week I’d write a list of the five numbered scenes that I was going to write that week, picking them randomly from my detailed plan. Then each morning I’d get out of bed, check the plan and write for an hour. That was usually long enough to write a scene. I generally write in pencil but I decided to use one of the fountain pens I own and never use instead. I discover that writing with a fountain pen is extraordinarily pleasing. The nib floats across the paper.

 

After the hour of writing by hand, I’d get up and dressed, possibly run, and then sit down and type up what I’d written. But of course, I wasn’t typing word-for-word what I’d written at all. I was refining and reordering, adding in things I’d thought of as I ate my breakfast, smoothing out knots, occasionally checking facts. The typed-up scenes mostly fell at around 1,000 words. I suspect when I come back to look at them again I may find that some seem rushed and others stretched, but the aim was to get words on paper My idea was that by handwriting first and then typing up I’d get through two draft stages in one go and I think it’s worked.

 

When I’ve finished writing all the scenes at the end of this week it’ll be time to go back to the beginning and sort out the unevenness created by working piecemeal. I know there are places were one scene overlaps with another and there are probably gaps too. There are things I invented in later scenes that I’ll need to add in earlier. I suspect there’ll be plot holes because it’s quite a complicated plot and I know there’ll be places where I need to let my character have some fun with her situation and others where I need to scare her a bit more It’s a long way from being a finished first draft. But the hard bit, the big chunks of words on paper that tell a story, that’ll be there. The rest is much more fun.

 

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My new book Snippets: Tiny Pieces of Fairy Tale is available now.

Why I’m calling this draft Draft 0

Writers have a lot of different names for the first draft of a novel – many of them not all that polite... This is the draft you write when you’re working out how the story fits together, when you’re telling yourself the story.

It’s not for public consumption.

It doesn’t always make sense.

As you write, the characters may change their names requiring you to go back and do a search and replace to make them consistent. Chances are that once you’ve done this you’ll notice a lot of squiggly red underlines beneath words you didn’t intend to change. In my most recent book, I changed a character called Abby to Karen. As a tabby cat also featured several times in the story, I then had to do another search and replace to change tKaren back to tabby.

It could be that some vital piece of a character’s identity will only be revealed to you halfway through writing. You could go back… But no, onwards, always onwards. There’ll be more to sort in the next draft. Right now, you just need to get to the end.

Then there are the places where you can’t make a decision about something or you need to go away and do some research. But the clock is ticking: on-wards, on-wards. And so your draft becomes a patchwork of margin notes, square brackets and highlighting.

Don’t even get me started about the beginning – you may as well face the fact that whatever you’ve written in this draft almost certainly isn’t actually how the finished novel will start. You have to put the words on the page and move on.

The ending will be worse. How do you tie up a story in a surprising but inevitable and satisfying way? How do you return your characters to a settled state showing that they have changed somehow from their experience? And what is more, how do you do these things without great big signs pointing out, “Look! Here’s how my character has been changed by the story!” It’s entirely possible that you have no real idea about what change has happened or what the underlying theme of your story is.

So here you are with your first draft, little more than a document full of words and ideas and notes strung together in some sort of order. Perhaps the most expressive of the expressions writers give this first draft is the vomit draft. No matter which way you look at it, it’s RUBBISH. It’s so thoroughly disheartening to look at that you could almost just press the delete key right now...  If only you hadn’t sweated so much over this worthless pile of words.

Here’s the thing, though. When I started the last book I wrote, I labelled it Draft 1 as I usually do. I will expect to get to around Draft 5 before I’m happy with it. But this time, just after I started to write, I happened to look at Robin Stevens Instagram account. Robin usually posts a picture of the corner of her screen every time she gets past another 10,000 words. I love that she does that – it’s the kind of thing I expect from not-yet-made-it writers but for her there are legions of avid fans just waiting for those 10,000s to show up in her next book. I’m always ready to cheer on any writer for their next 10,000! Anyway, in the comments Robin had called the draft Draft 0. And as soon as I saw this a lightbulb flicked on in my mind.

Draft 0! Of course! This first draft isn’t really a draft at all. It’s the raw material that Draft 1 will come from. It’s work you do on a lump of clay before you throw it onto a wheel and make a pot from it. Readers, I went straight to my computer and relabelled my mess of a manuscript Draft 0!

And now I’ve reached the end of Draft 0, I can put it away in its virtual drawer to mellow and mature for a while, confident that when I get it out again and discover that it’s not a book, it’s not a disaster. It's inevitable. It’s not supposed to be a book yet. I can love it for what it is: the raw material from which to build a book.

Getting to know you

I’ve just started writing a new book. It’s all planned, carefully broken down scene by scene, with the ups and downs of the plot mapped out, because that’s the kind of writer I am. But there are always unknowns.

The main one, for me, is who these people are that I’m writing about. I know what their role in the book is, I know what their character is and how they relate to each other in a broad-brush sort of a way. My protagonist, Ravi, for example, is male, sixteen, clever, his shyness makes him seem a bit aloof, likes computer games. That’s more or less it.