Best laid plans

This week, I'm having the week from hell as far as time goes. I have two lots of marking to do -- something I try to avoid as far as I can. And indeed I'd staggered these assessment tasks so that one was coming in last week, but then Higher Ed called a strike and, because they'd be picketing the gates, I pushed back the assessment task a week. Now that's the shortened version of the story, but close enough for the purposes of this blog as to why it was moved. 

Fine, I was going to have a big week marking. No problems. I'd finished my Ada Cambridge shortlisting, and was waiting for a manuscript I'm supposed to be editing for a small press publisher. All I had to do was be focused, not waste a second, mark, and I ought to be able to write as well.

Tuesday, I worked all day -- got home at ten thirty pm, only to find out I had to go to a funeral on Wednesday. Normally, I'd have writing group, so some of this time wouldn't have been spent marking anyway, but it did mean driving over the other side of town (an hour each way). But I'm not complaining. I had to go. I wanted to go. Sometimes these things happen, and part of living a writer's life is living a life, and that involves commitments and family time and all of that. (And, anyway, I had spent the morning marking.)

Thursday, though, I spend the day in hospital, taking my son to a fracture clinic. This involved several lots of waiting, casts being taken off and put back on, Xrays, the works, and by the time I got home in the late afternoon, I felt flat. What I didn't know was I was getting sick.

So, I spent Friday laid up. No, that's not exactly true. I spent the first couple of hours ferrying around my son, but that's a long and irrelevant story. Suffice to say, by the time I got home I had a fever and was aching all over, so that was really it for the day. I rarely have sick days, so shouldn't complain -- but couldn't it have been another week?

So, today, I'm marking like mad. Tomorrow too. Monday is class prep, perhaps workshopping. Perhaps more marking?

Somewhere in the next two days I might also need to hop back over to the other side of town, as another family member is desperately ill. And I don't use that adverb lightly.

And I have to do some writing. I have to squeeze it in somewhere. I could put it back a few more days -- I haven't done any since Monday, so what's the difference? The difference is that I'll rise further and further out of our story. I've just blogged about my writing process on our student blog and talked about how important immersion is for me. What I don't want is to emerge from the story, and I will if I don't get back in, quick smart.

I still come back to hearing Robin Hobb speak at one of the SF conferences in Melbourne a few years ago, and she said that we would never have more time to write than we have now. It's a sobering thought, and a true one. Life is precious. And it's short. And as busy as Flinders Street Station. Whenever you have free time, you have a million things that want to fill it, that want to cram out every writing moment. At least I do. I listen with envy to people who say they are bored. How does anyone get time to be bored? I mean, really. Boredom -- what is that? A luxury, I say, to those who have computers and want to write.

Writing the novel

I had a discussion with a student last week about how many projects a novelist can work on, because our students who are taking multiple classes that involve novel writing are expected to work on different projects. Of course, there's no correct answer to this question, and I've always said that you've got to find what works for you. Only this last year I've found that that's not necessarily the case.

Up until recently, I've always thought I was a one-project-at-a-time person. Even when it comes to short stories.

I get an idea and think about it, and that's where my focus is. It's one of the reasons I don't write many short stories -- because mostly I'm focused on my novel. It's a lovely, indulgent, obsessive thing, writing a novel. I don't get that same pleasure out of short stories or poetry -- but they do offer their own pleasures and satisfactions, especially the satisfaction of finishing something!

Some people have bags of projects on the go -- they swap and change depending on their mood or deadline, even working on several in the same day. My friend, Sherryl, is like this, and it's always made me shake my head in wonder. But writing our group novel this year has taught me that I can work on more than one project at a time, and the longer I've been doing both the easier it's becoming.

At the beginning, it would take me a few weeks to reacclimatise -- I'd have to sink back into the depths of whichever project I was working on. Being in the writing group and doing the plotting or reading out what we'd just written and discussing it made it easier to get back into this. But there was the unfamiliarity of what others had written -- I say unfamiliarity because clearly I had heard their portions and discussed them, but they weren't integrally part of me the way the parts I'd written were. I know the details of my character's background, for example, in far more details than I know of their characters'.

The challenge with my own novel has been different. I've been working on this book a long time, so I'm very well acquainted with it. But it's a complex story with multiple viewpoint characters, and worse than that, multiple drafts. I say worse because the problem is that when I've been out of it awhile I forget which things belong in which draft. I might remember that A does this, but it might be something that I've taken out of the current draft for whatever reason.

Paradoxically, I've found that the thing I thought I needed (time to reimmerse) has been the thing working against me. It's actually easier to work on multiple projects if they're all on the boil at once, if I'm working on both in the same week, rather than having that gap between them. This works really well in that I can do whatever the mood takes me. If I'm in a writing mood, I'll head off to the group novel. If I'm in an editing mood, I'll work on my own -- which also requires some slabs of writing as I make changes that I've decided on. This week's change, for example, is in a background scene that my main character remembers. When he was a small child, he found his sister hanged, and that change has been to make him find her a few minutes earlier, when she was dying and imploring him to help her when things went wrong (knot on the wrong side of her neck so that she was strangled slowly). This secret he has kept. Everyone else thinks he found her dead. It's all about making the worst thing possible happen to your characters. This doesn't have a great effect on the story as a whole, but does strengthen his motivation for doing the things he has to do, and is perhaps something I'm thinking more about because I'm busy writing the other novel, putting my character there through the wringer. Honestly, you have to love writing!

In the zone

Is there anything as wonderful as writing in the zone. You sit down to your computer -- you may or may not feel inspired, and you stare at the blank page, bring up the novel that you've been working on, read over the last few pages, make a few changes, fix a comma, take out that apostrophe in "it's" that shouldn't be there, add a bit more setting, and then suddenly your fingers are alive and trying to keep up with that zinging going on in your brain. You're in the zone. In your character's head. The ideas are coming thick and fast, and you're struggling to keep up. You go, go, go. And keep going. An hour later there are 1500 words on the page, and you know what? They're not too damned bad. You know, though, that in the morning, when the heat has passed, you may look back on them and think they're crap. There's a high probability that this may happen. You expect it. But you know what else? You get up in the morning and look at those words and think, hey, they're not too damned bad!

Inspiration's like that. It can hit at any time. And when it hits writing is magical. At times like that you know that writing is the best thing in the whole world. That's not how you feel when a rejection comes in. Or when you realise you still haven't been paid for that award-winning story that was published twelve months ago, and that the reality is you're not going to be paid for it. Contract or not. Not unless you go and do some serious chasing.

Sometimes writing as a profession sucks! The endless waiting. The heart-dropping parcel on your doorstep. The no, thank yous -- great story, but we've recently accepted one just like it. Or the no, thank yous -- I just didn't fall in love with your story. How could they not, with a hero like yours?

But you plug away at it because you have to.

You plug away at it because you're driven.

You plug away at it because you've got no choice.

Sometimes it's the hardest profession in the world. You have a deadline, and no time. After all, you have a real job -- one that pays you money. You have to make work deadlines because they're your bread and butter. And you're not feeling inspired to write.

The gut-wrenching truth is that professional writers write whether they feel inspired or not. They sit on their chairs and sweat blood, trying to distill words from thin air. This is their alchemy. And they do it: that's the real magic of writing. They do it. Day after day after day.

Sometimes, lightning hits, frazzles the locks on their brains and unleashes their creativity. Not very often, but sometimes it does. Then they're in the zone. They take those days and they know that such days are gifts. The stories that come out of such writing are gifts.

Many newcomers to the craft are out searching for the great secret of how to write. Books tell them there are no secrets. Published writers tell them there are not secrets. No secrets, only words on the page, long hours of practise, practise, practise.

But there is one great secret. Shh, don't tell anyone, because I'm going to share it with you. The great secret is that professional writers look at the writing they've done and they can't tell whether they wrote it while in the zone or not. Those hardwon words are just as precious, just as polished, as those rarer ones that come as gifts.

It's something you need to remember when you're not feeling inspired. Something I need to remember too. Something we all do, because, really, lack of inspiration is no excuse not to write. You know it. I know it.

We just have to keep at it.

Deadlines are great. NaNoWriMo is great. Writing contracts are great.

This is your passion so take it seriously. Professionally. Back yourself in. And when those gifts arrive, celebrate them, for no doubt if you're plugging away daily, you've earnt those gifts, and they are rightfully yours.

NaNoWriMo: the lessons learnt

Here they are in no particular order:

i) recognise when you're too tired to write. Often I'd know because suddenly I found I was writing nonsense. The next day I'd turn on the computer, and the last sentence would be about my children, or about characters that weren't in this particular storyline. The sentence would have no bearing whatsoever on what I was writing.

ii) deadlines are the best motivators ever. There's no way I would've ever thought I could write 15,000 words in two days. My best ever total before was about 4650 in a day. Now I know I can do more -- I can ask more of myself.

iii) when on a big deadline, don't take time off in the middle -- or you might find you have to write 15,000 words in two days! (There's something about the aftermath of a writing retreat...)

iv) when trying to write lots, don't try to do it all in one session. Seems obvious, right? But it was something I'd never thought consciously about before. My 4650 (or thereabouts) was one sitting. That was how I did it. Now I'll think more about blocking out my day to include more than one session.

v) you don't have to follow your own process. I usually read over and edit the previous day's work, and this is how I started NaNo, but by the end I didn't feel I had the time to do this, booted up the computer and read over the last para or so, just to pick up where I was (and to delete that totally irrelevant sentence).

vi) you can work on more than one project at a time. At least I can. I never thought I could. A novel is such a big project that I love to immerse myself in it. Think of it and nothing else. For months on end. No short stories when I'm novelling. This month though, I did a scene of the group novel we're writing for writers' group (contemporary novel cf to fantasy NaNo) and a chapter and a half of my other novel. My NaNo novel was book 2, so I was in the same world with some of the same characters, but still a different headspace.

vii) make hay while the sun shines and all of that. I could've got ahead on NaNo in the early days when I was at the island, but instead I worked on my first novel. Still, being under pressure at the end and letting the writing consume my days meant I got more done.

viii) I really don't like writing on my laptop. The motor vibrates under my left wrist, and very quickly my wrist starts to itch and burn (not literally burn). This time I stuck teatowels between my wrist and the laptop, but could still feel it. Give me my desktop and WordPerfect any time.

I'm sure there's more so I may do a follow-up post later, depending of whether I can think of anything else.

What's in it for me: NaNo

I've just passed the 30 k mark. Usually when I write I get into some kind of flow, and the words flow. I'm a splurger, not an agoniser, and I reckon that's a good way to be for a novelist -- which is not to say that agonisers can't write novels, because of course they can. But I think a big, fast output of words is a handy thing...

So am I in the flow? No. Of my almost 31000 words, I reckon 2 k have been easy, and the other 29 have been some of the most stubborn, intractable, obdurate words that I've ever met. Does it matter? Not really. Because I haven't given up on them. I have till Friday now to write 19000 words. Might seem an impossible task, but I'm quietly hopeful -- if not confident. Nothing like a deadline to egg me on.

Deadlines are good, helpful things. Pressure is good. I'm not sure why I lost the plot in week two (maybe I literally lost "the plot"?), but at that point I could have said, to hell with it. I'm glad I didn't, because around about now I'd be looking at the 15 k I've done instead of the 30 k. I am going to have a good bash at it and see if I can't win this stupid thing. Already, I've gotten what I want out of it: a more effective practice. I used to have that. Before I started teaching. Now I'll have to keep it up. My December goal will be finishing my first novel -- about 45 k to go, and to do an editing pass, but we will be away four days. (Still I can take hardcopy with me and edit... Oh, happy thought!)

NaNoWriMo

Every year I've looked at this NaNoWriMo thing and thought, why does it have to be in November? Why not NaJaWriMo or NaFeWriMo -- months when I'm not marking. Last year I spent most of November wrestling with writes and rewrites (students') of Liberal Arts essays. I felt like my head was going to explode. This year I wasn't teaching over there -- our semester ends earlier and mine earlier still because of the Cup Day holiday, and so I really had no excuse.

I was 50 k from the end of my novel (in the rewrite) and it's a 50 k commitment, so I thought, why not? Except when I read the rules it's not supposed to be stuff you're rewriting. Originally, I thought that it didn't matter. After all, if it's my NaNoWriMo, it could be whatever I wanted, right? Right. Except that when I read the reasoning why it shouldn't be a rewrite, I thought they made a good point. So I decided to head into book 2. Now, technically, this is also a rewrite because I'm already 140 k into book 2; however, I haven't worked on it for a very long time and don't remember the ins and outs. Plus I wrote a lot of it so long ago that it needs to be partly rewritten, so I decided to tackle this and do it from scratch.

Now, this was the perfect project for my long weekend away, and boy did I make a great start at it. But I still wanted to be working on my novel too, so it became a juggling act. Normally, I can't work on more than one thing at a time, but these are both the same world and characters -- same headspace -- though there is this curious experience of writing 50 k to the end, and 50 starting at the end. Bizarre. And in book 1, I'm working on two storylines simultaneously: human and Myrad (alien), whereas for NaNoWriMo, I've restricted myself to just writing the one (Myrad).

But now I'm stuck. I was referring back to the original book 2 far more than I wanted to -- but, in any case, I've introduced a major new storyline that affects this storyline dramatically so things were about to diverge radically from what I had. I think for me that really what is needed is an hour of plotting. Sometimes, I like to write without plotting, just see where it goes, but sometimes I need more structure. I suspect this might be one of those times. Today, I'm going to spend half an hour plotting and then some time writing. I'll report back in later to say how I've done!

Process

One of my students blogged on our student blog about how she's writing two different novels: one for my novel class and one for her Writing for Young Adults class -- one she's writing sequentially and one she's not. She's having a lot more trouble with the one that she's writing in bits and pieces. In my response to her post, I said she had to find the method that works best for her. We all write differently, all have a different process.

I am writing my novel sequentially. I pick up from where I left off the day before, read back over my work and edit it, and this is usually enough to get me straight back into the story. It seems natural to me to write from start to finish -- in plotted order. I make this distinction because of course a plot follows a straight timeline, but plot isn't always presented in such a traditional, ordered manner. Writers can apply all sorts of structures to organise the plot/s in their novels.

The first book I ever started writing was a book about a buckskin stallion called Diablo. I wrote this sequentially. I was about eight, and doing the illustrations myself. I wrote about eight chapters. The second was a Star Wars ripoff. Somewat longer than my first attempt, and written sequentially. My third was a big sprawling King Arthur novel, which I wrote in bits and pieces. As a scene came to me, I wrote it down. I was travelling at the time, and spent several weeks in my aunt's house in Holland, where I was the only one who spoke any English. My characters kept me company, banished the loneliness. I remember reading The Quest for the Holy Grail, and basing several chapters on this -- but all from Arthur's POV, which involved scenes with grail knights coming back and relating their tales. I think I started by making it clear that it was reported dialogue but then segued into their scenes. Did it work? Don't know, because I decided it was too static and threw the whole lot out. (Note to self: remember, never, never discard your work this way!) I was always worried about how I was going to stitch it all together. These days, I'm not sure whether I'd be so worried.

My next novel is the one I've been writing/reworking. Back to sequential order. I have, on very rare occasions, written scenes ahead (usually in the second book) and then caught my way up to them. I'm not so worried about assembling bits anymore -- ever since I added a second major plotline to a finished draft, which required careful weaving in and, because it was an entirely independent group of characters from those already in the novel (with one very minor exception), building links between the two plotlines. A fascinating process that taught me a lot.

I also write in scenes. It seems natural to me to write this way. Novels are usually constructed of scenes -- so that's almost always been my reading experience of a novel. So it seems strange to find people who don't write in scenes, but in one long, flowing plot that they then break up into chapters. My best friend does this. That to me is more strange than writing out of sequence. To use an analogy, people who write scenes in sequential order have pieces of a puzzle they put together in a logical sequence. Those who write their scenes as they come insert the pieces in random order. But the others -- they don't even have a puzzle. What do they have?

Really, though, it doesn't matter. If whatever you're doing works for you, then you're doing it right. It's that simple. And if what you're doing doesn't work -- then try something else. Read books by writers on their process and see the many different ways they achieve what they do, and perhaps in that great collection of varied processes, you might find one that suits you.