Nano and the lull

Admittedly, me trying to get words on a page last week was just about as far away from Kerouac's feverish output as you can get. But I did force myself to sit down on occasion and do it anyway.

There's always something salvageable, even if it's only a string of three words from an hour. Even if it's a tangent, which with enough attention, can spread out into a subplot.

I'm convinced that after the Public Edit  tomorrow, and my writing group on Wednesday, I'll be back in the creative headspace. It's often just a top up of writing chatter that I need to set me back on track.

Whilst I am very much wading through the sludge, I want to do a check in of progress so far, going back to November 15.

Every November for the past six years, I have taken part in NaNoWriMo, a national challenge to write 50,000 words (a very short book) in a month. When I tell people I've completed this in five out of the six years, they typically say, 'Great, what did you win?!' And I reply, 'Nothing, well, five books I guess.' They are very confused indeed.

Without fail, I despise Week 1, fall enthusiastically behind in Weeks 2, and 3, turn into an over-caffeinated, sleep deprived, frightening thing in Week 4, and emerge very dazed, the light hurting my eyes, yet victorious on day 30.

The elation does not last long. At first, I greedily dine out on replying to the question, 'What have you been up to?' with 'I finished a novel in a month.' I then quickly add that it's messy, and confused, and sort of, well awful, and manage to talk myself out of any real hope for it.

My 2014 book was left to stew for a few weeks, then uploaded to my Kindle. An approach I can't recommend enough, if, like me, you can trick yourself into seeing it as any other book, downloadable from Amazon. It affords me a welcome distance, and I become an almost independent reader. Unfortunately, this did allow me to see that despite the odd nice line, my efforts to construct a dystopian world had fallen a little flat, and the effort it would take to inflate it, seemed too daunting.

I abandoned it to the slush pile, and, true to form, experienced another December - October of pushing the writer part of me into a dark corner and trying not to think about it.

November 15 - My sixth Nano. The only difference with this year when compared to the others, was that I had even less of an idea of what I wanted to write about. Up until a few days before, my entire novel was to revolve around the line, 'My mother decided to die in my favourite place.' This didn't end up launching my book, or even featuring. In fact, no mothers were harmed during the writing of this novel.

It's blurry, but a story suggested itself to me, in a genre I'd never attempted - murder mystery. I had nothing to lose - true of every attempt. I spent four weeks making it up, hating it, loving it, hissing at my shallow characters, tangling myself up in an unruly, nonsensical plot, changing names which began to grate and celebrating epiphanies.

This time, reading it back on my Kindle, I was pleasantly surprised. Was it still bad? Of course it was. You really have to lower your expectations of yourself during speed writing. The difference is that for a change, I wanted to fix it, and I felt it would be worth the significant time required to shine it up.

And so, it began.