500 words – an update

It’s twenty past seven on Friday night. I’m sooo ridiculously tired and I haven’t yet written today’s 500 words. I did try, but I spent the day going on a school trip which involved getting to school early followed by a two-hour bus journey on winding roads, four hours of child-wrangling with a 3D film (which I can only bear to watch if I don’t wear the glasses and I kind of squint) in the middle of it, and then another two hours of bus… My attempt to write was on the first bit of winding road, typing on my phone, and I stopped 65 words in when my head and stomach protested. So, though it wasn’t late when I got home, it was way past creative o’clock and hence, I thought I’d just have a chat to you about how the whole 500 words is going instead.

So here’s the thing. So far, so good. 123rd day of the year and I’ve written at least 500 words each and every day, giving me a grand total of 66,167 words so far this year. They’re not all good, or even all useful, but they are a sustained creative effort and I feel, I think justifiably, proud of my efforts thus far.

It hasn’t always been easy. There have been days like today, when it seemed far too difficult to fit it in. Once, I didn’t even start until quarter to eleven at night. A few times when I knew the day was going to be busy and draining I did it in bed at six in the morning before I got up. But 500 words isn’t much. If you know what you’re going to write, you can knock it off in half an hour. Not that it always takes half an hour. Just under an hour most of the time, I’d say, but once or twice, much, much longer. The thing is though, if I’m really struggling, I can do it in bits: 100 words and then I’ll go and do one of the other things I’ve got to do; as much as I can manage in the fifteen minutes I’ve got to spend on it and I’ll come back to it later.

It helps to have a plan. On days when I know I’m going to struggle, I like to make sure I know what it is I’m going to be writing before I start. On those days, I’ll probably go for one of the options that requires a bit less in the way of imagination and a bit more opinion – a blog piece like this or a review. I’m never short of opinions! Occasionally I’ve set myself a writing exercise.

It’s been much easier to complete the 500 since I planned out my next book. I’ve written a really detailed plan (scroll back a few blogs if you want to find out more about it) and it means I can always pluck a scene from somewhere in the plan and just get writing. I’m mostly working on it in order, but occasionally, when I fancy writing action or scary or something else in particular, I go for a scene later in the book. When I was working on the previous book – the one that’s complete but waiting for me to pick it up and work on the next draft – I had a much sketchier plan, and I’d just add another 500 words each day wherever I felt they were needed. Consequently I think I may have to cut a good bit from it. Heigh ho – fortunately I’m not counting deletions against my total!

Of course, there are days when having a target of only 500 words can make me lazy, days when I could easily get several thousand done if I kept going. But look – 66,000 words this year. What more can I say? There are also other things I ought to be getting on with that may be getting side-lined while I concentrate on this target. I’ve been so busy lately I haven’t really given this enough thought. Certainly I have two other books which need editing rather than more words and they both come behind my daily 500 in the queue for attention.

So to sum up, yes, I’ve written 500 words every day so far this year and I feel it’s working for me. It’s most effective when it’s backed up with advance planning. I’m still determined to keep going until the end of the year, and longer if I think it’s still useful.

Watch this space.

RETREAT!

It is possible you’ve heard enough from me about my latest writing endeavour. I picture you sitting there going, ‘stop bloody writing about writing, woman, and get on with WRITING!’ But think what a fool you’ll feel in x-number of years when you’ve spurned these insights into my creative process and I’ve turned out to be the you-know-who of the 2020s. Ha! There you’ll be, sitting there like the editor who sent a standard rejection to Robert Galbraith telling him to join a writers’ group and read the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook…

Enough…

So, if you’ve been keeping up, you’ll know that my friend Gill and I have been on a do-it-yourself writers’ retreat (little wave to Gill – she’ll read to the end, even if YOU don’t – thanks Gill!). I stress the ‘do-it-yourself’ because writers’ retreats exist in many different forms: some cost money (writing turns out to be much more expensive than you’d think); some are in exotic locations (too distracting, plus also expensive); some you have to apply for (NO! It’s bad enough getting publisher rejections)… Our retreat involved three days of me and Gill staying at Gill’s house in the very unspringlike Scottish Highlands with no dogs and no people. And I also chose to have no internet.

bit bleak for me

So for a good amount of time, Gill and I sat in separate rooms in front of our computers. I’ve no idea how much time we actually worked per day. Five hours? Six? Not much more than that. It was enough. Every couple of hours we’d stop and eat or drink or go for walks in the wet and the cold (it’s good though, clears your head so that when you sit down at the computer again anything’s possible). And we talked and talked and talked, about what we were writing and writing in general and the state of the world and our lives and books we loved and … everything.

And when we weren’t talking and walking and eating and sleeping, I made my plan.

It’s a beautiful thing, my plan. It’s the skeleton of the book I’m going to write. I’ve mapped out forty-nine scenes on a spreadsheet. For the first time, I’ve taken into account all the things I’ve been finding out about plotting: I started by thinking of the book in terms of three sections, beginning, middle and end, each with an inciting incident, complications, a crisis, a resolution. I thought about my genre (genres actually) and what the obligatory scenes of these genres were. I thought about the one true thing I want my novel to express and how I would make sure that the story told that truth.

Using this method of rules and structure is an experiment for me. All those things – inciting incidents, obligatory scenes and the like – have always sounded like unnecessarily complex jargon to me. I am sure that the novels I have written or partially written previously have taken them into account even though I did not deliberately set them out before I started, but rather found them in the course of the writing. I felt that considering a story in such a technical way before starting might be more of a barrier than a help. It seemed to me that the natural structure of a story is just that, something that comes naturally.

As well as my scene-by-scene plan, I have created a character spreadsheet with details about each character from what they look like to what their favourite TV programme is. I also started to map out the three books that I plan to follow this one, but by the time I started on that it was the afternoon of day 3 and I’d had enough. That’ll have to wait.

The next stage is to write. I already have 12,000 words, random pieces I’ve written when they popped into my head and I hadn’t yet done my daily 500 words. I have two other books I’m working on, both almost finished, but needing editing. I think I’m going to focus on completing these others, but continue to write the new book when I have the inkling. After all, it’s all planned now, should be a doddle.

While it’ll take some time to discover whether my planning experiment is a success, the retreat experiment gets a big thumbs up. And judging by the way my creativity was flagging by the end of three days, it was the right length too. Unless next time we go somewhere exotic and allow ourselves to get distracted now and then…

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Claire Watts writes and edits fiction and non-fiction 

for children and young adults. 

Her latest YA novel is How Do You Say GOOSEBERRY in French?

Ready ... Steady ...

I am feeling nervous. New job nervous. Like, you know you can do it, but will you be able to just go in there and do it right away, and what if you’re wrong, and actually you can’t do it.

This is clearly ridiculous.

I haven’t got a new job.

No one’s watching me. (Except YOU. Are YOU watching me?).

I’m about to do something I’ve done lots of times (but in a different way).

Today I am going to stay with my lovely writer friend Gill. We are planning to spend the next three days writing. There’ll be some walking and eating and talking too, of course, because otherwise we’ll go mad or get bored of writing (imagine!) and also what’s the point of being with another writer if you can’t spend ages moaning about how terribly difficult it is and cheering each other on.

I will not be writing.

I will be planning.

I used to write notes in fountain pen!

I’ve been dipping my toe in around the edge of this book for a long, long time. My first research notes are TWENTY years old. I’ve been pushing the idea around all that time, flicking it away when something else came into focus, then, more recently, letting it in, just at the edge of my vision, finding myself writing a snippet as an exercise in my writers’ group, wondering how the plot would work in my wakeful hours, letting my half-awake brain write the odd 500 words of it when I wasn’t sure what else to write for my daily writing target. I have a plan with some big holes in it, I have nine and a half thousand words that might possibly appear in the finished book and might just be playing around. I’ve been reading (possibly too much) about how to plan and structure a work of fiction – something I’ve never done before despite having written … several novels already (vagueness due to the fact that it’s hard to know what counts: two published, three works-in-progress which are full length but still need work and a flawed book I wrote for my children which could be salvageable). 

I could have started last week. I’ve had no work and no children to take up my time and my head-space. Instead I’ve been reading and reviewing books. I’ve been emptying my mind. 

I’m ready to take the plunge.

So this is the plan of what I am planning to plan (sorry, couldn’t resist).

1. First, I’m going to work on a single sheet plan outlining the movements of the plot. This will be the Master Plan. I’d like to get it complete before I start anything else, but I suspect there will be holes I can’t fill and I’ll just have to write things like ‘and then this gets resolved/more complicated’. The point is to have a skeleton on which to hang the more detailed planning.

2. I will write character notes. This is something I’ve only done once before and it definitely helped, particularly with the minor characters who seemed to spring more fully formed to the page, even when the details I’d worked out were never explicitly mentioned.

3. I will start a scene-by-scene plan of the book, filling in first the details from my Master Plan, adding the scenes I’ve already written if they seem relevant and working around these until I have an outline of the entire book. It is likely that this plan too will have bits that say ‘and then this gets resolved/gets more complicated’.

I’ll use a calendar to date each scene; this is the one bit of planning I’ve always done because I find it helps to ground the book in reality, and also, for me, it helps with pace. And I don’t end up with five day weekends or two Thursdays in a row.

4. I have no idea how long all this planning will take me. In an ideal world, I’ll come home on Tuesday morning with every scene mapped out so that my 500 words a day for the next few months will get the book written.

But, should I find that it’s Sunday night and I’ve finished all this planning, with a whole day left to play with, on Monday I will be attempting to write a Master Plan – or even a vague sketch – of three further books about my character. Chances are, I won’t get to this, but I do intend to do it soon as it seems only sensible to see the series in terms of a whole and make sure that I’ll be able to extend and reflect on things I’ve included in the first book later on.

Here goes!

_______________________________________________

Claire Watts writes and edits fiction and non-fiction 

for children and young adults. 

Her latest YA novel is How Do You Say GOOSEBERRY in French?