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

OctoberPrep

The days of October are ticking away.

Half gone already.

Do you know what that means?

It means I’m half done with my NaNoWriMo prep…

(“Nano-what?” some of you say. Here’s the explanation.)

I know I can write 50,000 words in a month. I did it last year. In fact, I’m just now finishing the edits of the book I wrote last November and I’m pretty pleased with it. Strong on plot, I’d say, which is a bit of a departure for me as my characters are spend quite a lot of time drinking tea and chatting. The difference is probably that I’m aiming younger, what’s known as ‘Middle Grade’ even though that’s a reference to the US education system which is meaningless in Britain. Middle-graders don’t have a lot of truck with tea-drinking and chatting in books.

The great thing of course about writing a book that’s strong on plot is that there’s a clear forward pull on the narrative. Every time the characters stop running, you pull the rug out from under them and they’re off again. And for me to keep that much plot going at a rate of 1,667 words per day throughout November, I need to do plenty of planning.

I’ve found that the best way to plan is to ambush myself into creativity. That sounds slightly bonkers written down, but here’s what I mean. I know that my mind is at its most creative first thing in the morning before anything else has come to fill it. I spend a precious half-hour in bed with a notebook and pencil and the cup of peppermint tea my lovely husband brings me. I set a timer and for half an hour I write notes about the book I’m planning. They could be characters notes, plot notes, lists of names or places, lists of possible situations to throw my characters into, questions I need to solve. Anything and everything that comes into my head gets written down. After half an hour I put the notebook aside until the following day and begin the rest of my day. I hardly think about the book at all the rest of the day, but presumably it's all slotting into place as the day goes on because I always have more questions and more lists the next day. Last year I did this every day of October and by November 1st I was champing at the bit to get started on writing. (A side note, I worked out that if I could keep up this 30 minutes a day every day of the year it would add up to over five 35-hour working weeks of creativity – there’s a thought!).

Last year was the first time I’d tried this method and last year my daily notes were quite random. This year, just before the start of October I discovered the snowflake method of plotting so that’s what I’m trying this time. It’s more focused and because it requires you to continually go back to what you’ve planned before and expand, I think I’m going to have sorted out a lot of the potential plot holes before I start. Of course, there are potentially lots of these – I’m having a go at a detective story which turns out to be incredibly complicated… but more of that in another blog.

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.

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?