Keeping my head above water (just)

When I got home last week, I wrote a list of things I had to do before the 7th of June. It was a salutary list, and when I added it up it came to 31 thousand finely crafted words. After my head hit the desk a few times in despair, I got on with the first few bits and worked out a schedule. My initial plan (write 500 words...panic...write two hundred more words...panic...) proved unhelpful but taking out all the panics and rescheduling them for 7th June made it seem slightly more manageable. So far I've written and posted TMA06, sent a short story to the course anthology Litmus, sent a short story to the university creative writing magazine, Vortex, and written 1,500 words of the dissertation proposal thingy. TMA06 came back at 87% giving me a good chance of a distinction, which was more than I expected, so all I have to do now is write a fabulous EMA. The hardest task is proving to be 'write a couple of sentences about your plan for your dissertation', which we are supposed to email to our tutor. If I could condense a novel to two sentences I don't think it would be a novel. Filling in the form for the proposal first is helping, as did TMA06 which was about the novel too..

On a brighter note, I went down with the family to Woolacombe for a walk, as it was the first day I could stand upright in a week. The weather was stunning and the walk was lovely, even though I'm on heat pads and painkillers now. The beach was busy as usual, well, it is the Easter holidays.

I'm now slightly worried about the 7th of June, when I have to catch up on all the panics...   

What's the book about, anyway?

I've had a number of people ask me what the book is about. Answering, so far, has involved twenty minutes, a white board and a list of background reading. Now I have to get my book down to one idea, partly for TMA06 and partly for my dissertation. So I've had a few goes.

'It's a supernatural thriller about the struggle for survival at any cost, set in present day Devon and Eastern Europe of 1576.' Snappy, isn't it? Just rolls off the tongue. Would anyone even want to read more?   OR

'In 1576, occultist John Dee travelled, in secret, to King Istvan, King of Poland, Lithuania and Transylvania, to create a monster that is still killing teenage girls in present day Devon.' Better? I'm not too sure.

'It's a muddle of characters and plot on many, many little white cards with random scenes and very poor grammar. It may one day become a story.' This, at least, has the virtue of being the truth, but I'm a fiction writer, the truth is negotiable.

In the meantime, I'm sat at home in glorious Devon totally distracted by spending time with my lovely girls and surrounded by wildlife. Well, actually, we're inundated by rats again, the chickens will have to move into the ark so they don't get bitten, and the path in front of the house appears to be being undermined. I have four cats that we clearly are overfeeding. Here are two of them working on the rat problem.

Nice going, guys.

The Joy of Research

My book was wallowing a bit lamely, what with having a plot full of holes, like a fish with half its bones missing. Then I had a bright idea of putting a sub-plot in from a historical event and the whole thing inflated like a puffer fish and took off with me in pursuit. Better than that, the POV character is a crook, so much more interesting than some virtuous hero. Being a crook, he's extra sensitive to other people who might be dodgy too. I like him, he's sort of funny (even though I know he's not real and I'm just channeling some crooked, funny side of myself) and a good foil for my scholarly John Dee. The story is legitimately set around real events, which are actually rather stranger than than I'm going to make them. Our main antagonist, for example, was actually born five years after her father died. I like the idea of the character who exists in both the sixteenth century and the modern day to sort of collide in the middle of the book, when I match them up. Should be fun. My teenage character is getting less of a point of view and is being downplayed a bit, while I develop the main character. I write my smaller characters more vividly than the central characters, I don't know why but I've noticed lots of people do. Even published authors sometimes  leave the main characters a bit unfocused.

Tonight we had a great talk by two editors from Working Partners who offered a lot of very useful advice. Listening to one of them, Sara Grant, talking about her journey to get her book, Dark Parties published (coming out soon) was inspiring and entertaining. An extract from the novel was published in the first Undiscovered Voices anthology (2008) published by SCBWI (which is sponsored by Working Partners). It was a fantastically energetic round up of another way to approach getting published as a children's writer, which wouldn't have made a lot of sense to me a year ago, because I have always written children's stories. I just never took it very seriously (oh, but doesn't everyone knock out short stories, poems and plays for their children? Apparently not.) but I am really enjoying writing a piece for my assignment about a girl who has to fit into a completely different way of life, and her relationship with a talking bird.

We also listened to the process of getting our dissertations underway, which was a bit daunting. I have had one of these helpful pep talks already, but promptly went into denial anyway. Silly me. What dissertation?  

I'm a poet!

I'm enjoying writing poetry but sending it off to be marked is difficult and painful. So I was very, very pleased and relieved to get a 96% for my TMA05, three poems about my sister and the sea, and my tutor really liked them. I only lost marks because I chose to leave off an envoi on one of the sestinas (though the limited line count influenced me) because I liked the last line so much. I've been working on a bit of prose as a starting point for another poem, but I don't know if it will work. That's the problem with working poetry for assignments, you have to be struck with the muse and you can't force it. I can't really for fiction, either, but at least I can edit or plot or something for fiction. There's always such a lot of clearing up with fiction, it's like keeping a horse, lovely to see it trot out over the field but there's such a lot of shit left in the stable to clear up... Poetry feels like cutting a doll's hair: you have to cut exactly the right amount off and it won't grow back (my sister, if she were alive, would testify to the fact that I couldn't get that right, either). Some poems have been trimmed down to the plastic scalp and discarded forever, I don't seem to be able to resurrect stuff once I've thrown it out, even though I keep old drafts around. I'm going to tidy up poems and send them off. That's cheered me up enormously, even if it now means TMA06 is due in in only ten days and has to be part of the first chapter of my novel, the one that I have completely scrapped and am now rewriting....

Losing the Plot

I had had my literary ducks in some sort of a row, and then a fox got in and scattered the lot. It seems that a completely brilliant sub-plot will just lift the story but I have no idea where it will all go. Plus, despite my best intentions, my characters have an odd tendency to morph into whatever actors I'm watching on DVD. At the moment, Richard Armitage is giving all my characters a Northern accent after watching him play Thornton in North and South. Great, great ending by the way. Why don't real men kiss like that?

Back to research and a HUGE coincidence (which I hate when they happen in books). I've narrowed down the origins of my character to a real life woman and the sigils I've made central to the book to a real life man. Then I find out they may actually have met! Maybe I'm unconsciously channeling a true story...

Now I have to get on with assignments so I have some 1st drafts to work on over the Easter break. I really shouldn't be sitting her moving white cards around, occasionally replaying that final scene in North and South. But I haven't seen my own 'Mr Thornton' for weeks and weeks and I have to wait until Thursday for our reunion. Back to work.  

Plotting a Novel

Here is my tried (and tried and tried) and slightly tested method for plotting a novel.

1. Have a brilliant idea for a story. Play around and see if it's still a good idea for a story a week later. Hopefully it still feels slightly interesting by week 2 after which you will begin to lose hope.
2. Taking little coloured cards, map out scene by scene, your characters' journeys, different colours for different characters' POVs.
3. Sit down with card one and write the scene, allowing it to veer a tiny bit from the plan, but that's OK because you can modify card two. Which then means cards three to six need modifying and cards 6a and 6b need to be created.
4. Write the scene from card two,trying to keep it on track even though it wanders wildly down a much more exciting path and your character turns out to be a lot bigger and bossier than you expected.
5. On card three discover that your second hero character is actually the antagonist. throw cards away.
6. Write completely unplotted for 45,000 exciting words, following a rollercoaster of an adventure. Some bits are wild knuckle rides, some bits are look-out-at-the-view and eat your sandwiches. A few bits are sit-quietly-twiddling-thumbs and have no tension at all.
7. Rush for the ending which has eluded you, but it now seems inevitable that the protagonist gets eaten.
8. Rework the last 20,000 words so the antagonist doesn't get eaten, but now seems that the protagonist will have to eat the antagonist. This wasn't supposed to be that sort of book.
9. Scrap whole book. Go and sign up for an MA so you can learn to plot. Start writing again but slower.
10. Start MA and tart up a few chapters. Realise they are hopelessly unpaced.
11. Rope in eldest son (mine) to write a synposis broken down by chapters. You will  immediately see the wallowing-in-the-doldrums middle chapters.
12. Use Vogler's mythic structure to loosely map more rising tension. 
13. Get some white cards (is this the magic trick to plotting?) and put each scene on one.
14. Organise into some sort of sequence and into chapters. Highlight wallowy scenes.
15. Rewrite synopsis from white cards (which I'm sure are significant) moving them around and bringing the tension up. Explaining the loose ends and pruning out others before they even start.
16. Cut out two small characters completely. One of them will have to be rewritten in when you realise the ending doesn't work without them.
17. Make the ending much, much bigger.
18. Throw magic white cards away (this might be a mistake) because the story has moved on. You now have a chapter by chapter and scene by scene plan for the book in about 25 pages. You probably realise how many words of prose you could have written in the same time...

I am optimistic that I have something I can write from, anyway. At least if I write scenes I can just move them around and my first draft gave me a clear picture of the characters. It can't be worse than getting to the two thirds of the way in a book and realise you are completely lost. 

TMA05 finally sorted!

Having had a long week (overdid it completely last weekend, laid up with silly migraine until Thursday) I have finally worked on the three poems needed for the TMA. For those of you not part of the Open University, this TMA (if you are daft enough to hand in poetry) requires you to write 80-100 lines of poetry that must be in the form of villanelles, sestinas, pantoums or sonnets. Plus the 750 words of a commentary. I've been writing much more free poems (I don't like rhyming much anyway) so two sestinas and a pantoum were hard work. I threw away a lot of stuff that didn't quite work, too. This is one of the pantoums that didn't make the grade:

 Sitting on the Slates

We sat, on slated steps, to watch the light
fade into bat colours, greyed,
misting with midges in smoky flight,
the swallows on their last pass stayed,

faded into bat colours, greyed
the orange glow tinting the limewashed walls,
the swallows in their last pass stayed,
screaming their summery calls.

The orange glow tinting the lime washed walls
reddens the windows, reflecting gulls
screaming their summery calls,
who shrieked and gossiped round dory hulls.

Redden the windows, reflecting gulls,
pull in fishnets glowing with stars,
to shriek and gossip round dory hulls,
by tide etched shore in sandy bars.

Pulled in fishnets glow with stars
bats stream out from under the eaves
by tide-etched shores in sandy bars
salt air adrift, bedewing the leaves

bats stream out from under the eaves
pipistrelles bathe in supersonic air
salt air adrift, bedewing the leaves
as we sit, cooling, on the garden stair.

Pipistrelles bathe in supersonic air,
fading into bat colours, greyed,
as we sat, cooling, on the garden stair.
We sat, on slated steps, to watch the light.

The book is back on again, having thrashed out a new sequence for the scenes and put them in chapters. I now have an extra POV (point of view) character who has three chapters of action no-one else can see. I also have a few chapters where the action switches from one character to the other with changes in POV. Now I'm working on writing up each chapter plan into a big overall plan, and the process is sparking ideas for the writing too. A new first chapter is writing itself in my head - I'd better write it down while it's fresh! My week is looking fairly busy with things on every day until Saturday but then I've got a few days off before heading back to Devon at the following weekend.