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.

Retreat!

Retreat: (noun)
3. The act of retiring or withdrawing into privacy or into some place of saftey.
4. A place of seclusion or privacy.
OED

There is a house in France that feels like home to me. Though it doesn’t belong to me, I have a key and I know that whenever I want to go there I can. My family and I have been going on holiday there since, well, since before we were a family. As time has passed and I have moved house and my parents and friends have moved house, this has been the most constant place in my life.

But things change and now the house is to be sold. It’s taking a while, but a couple of months ago I realised time was running out for me to do something I have always promised myself I would do – to go there alone to write. I’ve written there before, writing time set aside during holidays, and once for a week with a writer friend, but never alone. Two weeks all alone? I’d be lonely, they said. Won’t you be scared? Won’t you be bored?

But I wasn’t lonely. I wasn’t scared or bored. It was the most extraordinary thing to have my brain emptied of all the things I usually have to think about for other people, of having to walk dogs and clean things and cook and make money and pay bills. Because of the time difference all the TV programmes I might have watched were on late so I didn’t watch TV. This is the essence retreating, of course – the putting aside of everyday life. It is utterly relaxing. I thought about my work, I read a little, I daydreamed, I slept, I ran. I wrote. I wrote. I wrote.

The lovely annexe where I worked

I had planned a new book. Three thousand words a day was my aim. In two weeks – let’s call that twelve days to allow for travelling – that would make 36,000 words. That’s a good start on a book that might be around 50,000 words in the end. First drafts just have to be hammered out. They’re always terrible, but once the words are on the page you can start sculpting them into something better. My plan was very precise – divided into scenes on a spreadsheet with only two or three places where I had written ‘[they go from A to B somehow]’. I plot using the snowflake method with some slight variations. I find this allows me to build my plot in an orderly but creative way. What I didn’t know is exactly what the tone of the book would be or what the characters would be like. I find these are the things that come as I write if I know where I’m going with the plot.

So, day 1, I got up and went for a run. Then I showered and had breakfast. I made coffee and carried it round to the little annexe to start work. It was eleven o’clock by this time and I was irritated with myself for not getting started sooner. How was I going to write 3,000 words a day if I didn’t start until eleven? I wrote for two hours. I had some lunch and sat in the sun (oh how the sun shone those first two days!) and then I wrote for another two hours.

I had written 5,000 words.

A fluke. Must be.

But the next day and the next I got 5,000 words on the page. I kept up the same routine. Four hours of writing, sometimes five, a couple of hours of some other type of work a bit later. On day 7, I wrote the final words. The book was 35,000 words long. Obviously, I thought, as I packed up that day, that was just a start. I would need lots of polish and there would be plot holes that needed work. So on day 8, I reread it and made notes. The beginning needed changing. It always does. There were a couple of other places which didn’t quite work. And lots of other notes of course. But it wasn’t bad. Four more days of revising and then another read. I couldn’t quite believe it.

Lovely evening walks - though I ended up covered head to toe in bites!

The sun shone... some of the time

Of course I haven’t read it again yet. Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps there are giant plot holes. Perhaps the plot is derivative or dull. Perhaps the characters are feeble. But I don’t think so. I think this book is nearer to done than any first draft I have done more slowly. In a month or two, when I can read it as though someone else has written it, I will bring it out and work on it again. I’m hopeful.

Retreating is extraordinary. Of course not everyone is lucky enough to get the chance to do this. I know I couldn’t have when my kids were younger and I’m privileged to have access to such a wonderful spot to hide away it. But even without being able to retreat completely, I think this experience demonstrates the necessity of clearing mental and physical space for writing so that when I write I can focus on nothing but my story. Just got to work out how to implement that now…

All locked up and ready to leave

How to write 200,000 words in a year

This time last year I made a resolution to write 500 words in every day of the year. Here I am on December 31st 2016 and I’m pleased to report that I’ve made it. My final total (adjusted when I finish writing this piece) is 209,803 words. That’s 26,803 more than the bare 500 words a day for 366 days.

Revelation

I’m going to tell you one of the reasons I love writing.

Are you sitting comfortably?

Then I’ll begin.

Too many ideas...

Many writers keep a handy notebook for jotting down random ideas that spring to mind or observations they make as they go about their lives have some resonance for them. When I decided that I was going to throw myself into fiction writing, I spent a year or so with such a notebook in my bag. But it stayed in my bag for the most part. I looked around, I listened to people’s conversations, I noticed the quirky, the fascinating, the poignant. But I didn’t feel drawn to record any of it.

I don’t write down ideas for new stories as they occur to me either. I have done this occasionally, but these half-formed ideas mock me with their incompleteness. What’s the point of this three sentence outline of a setting without a plot or characters? Why did I bother to record that I wanted to write something futuristic about refugees? The trouble is, I have so many ideas popping into my head and writing them down gives them a substance they don’t yet deserve. Those ideas, they’re the ones people tell you about when you tell them you’re a writer. “I’ve got this really good idea for a book,” they start and they know and you know that the idea is not enough.

Writer seeks plan

I am a person who needs a plan. The idea that you can sit down and write something worthwhile off the top of your head is something I find very hard to understand. Not that I need a completely rigid plan, you understand, just a direction.

So, for example, these past two months, I have been writing tiny pieces of fairy tale each day. If you want to know any more about this you can look back at earlier blogs. The good thing about this is that I have a place to start writing each day but I don’t have to spend time on planning because it’s not part of a plot. What I’ve done each day is, when I’ve woken but not yet got up, I’ve let my mind wander around in the canon of fairy tales until something snagged and then I’ve teased that until I could see a thread, then set it to one side until I was here, with the keyboard under my fingers. 

Occasionally over the two months if I’ve been lying awake, I’ve delved a bit further into my next day’s fairy tale – much better than letting my brain dwell on those dastardly circular middle-of-the-night thoughts. Then, of course, I’ve got hope I remember it all the next morning.

500 words a day – update 3

Current yearly total: 125,245 words


Keeping up with my 500 words a day is proving tricky at the moment. I’m deep in a major new draft of a book I’ve been working on for a couple of years and I have a deadline to finish it. That means, whatever else happens in my day, I need at least a couple of hours to devote on this. My head is right in the rather complex world of this book a good deal of the time, which would be great if I needed to write more of it – I could easily dash off 500 words of stuff that would fit. Unfortunately though, what the book actually needs is streamlining, which mostly means cutting. And that means that after I’ve done my redrafting work on this book each say, I have to tear my mind from this world and find another one to play with.

Now for a good part of the year, I was working on a new book – let’s call it the witch book – for which I had created a meticulous plan (you can find out something about it here). Each individual scene was mapped out and although I didn’t necessarily know the detail of what was to happen, I could conjure up 500 words from these brief scene notes fairly easily. The key was, I suppose, that having all the detail there made slipping out of the world of the book I’m editing and into this one easier. 

However, about a month ago, I ran out of planned scenes to write. All I had left were the final, wrapping everything up scenes and try as I might, those just wouldn’t come.

Since then I’ve been much less efficient with my 500 words. I’ve written blogs and reviews – I can always witter on about books or writing for 500 words and over on the Paisley Piranha blog we’re having Classic YA month, which required more reviews than usual. I’ve also been writing a bunch of totally unplanned scenes for a sequel to the witch book (I have a vague outline of four books in a series). This new thing would come together much better if I had the time to plan it properly, but, until I’ve finished the redraft I’m working on and can devote time to serious planning, I thought I would write a scene involving each of the characters, get to know them a bit and discover the place where my witch, Rowan, finds herself by stepping into the unknown next to her. I’m sure it’s not very efficient, as writing goes; I suspect I’ll end up getting rid of most of what I’m writing, but it’s quite fun to pick a character and write, knowing nothing about them but, for example, that this is someone who will end up being sympathetic but seems antagonistic at first.

Thinking about how this 500 words a day has worked for me over the past few months, I’m trying to work out the best way to use what I’ve learned when the year is up. I don’t think I’ll carry on with 500 a day every day. If I do that, I’m going to end up with thousands of first-draft words and no time to hone them. I currently have three first drafts almost complete – it’s always the endings that come later for me – and there’s no point in churning out all those words if I’m not going to go back and make them into something worth reading. Words need plenty of honing, and they need time to settle between drafts, so you can work on them effectively. So I think I’ll aim for new books to start with an intensive planning session, probably a week to make sure I’ve done effective plotting and given some thought to setting and characters before I start. Then I can write 500 words a day using this plan (as I did with the witch book), so a 60,000 word book would take about four months to write. I can do lesser edits on other projects, proof-reads and so on during these writing months, but I think I’ll lay off trying to do the new words and the deep redrafting at the same time. I don’t think I can do intense editorial work for more than a couple of months before the words start to be meaningless, but that’s fine: I can schedule a couple of months for that and then back to writing something new.

Will this work? I don’t know. It rather depends on how much the rest of life intrudes on my time and energy. You’ll note I’m only talking about the lonely-author-in-her-garret types of work here. At some point I’m going to have to accept that now and then I need to step out of the garret and jump up and down and shout so someone will read what I’ve written!

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.