On Retreat - Arvon - The Clockhouse - Day 6

On the last long afternoon of my retreat we explored the grounds a little more - discovering a large allotment - we fought with the insects for raspberries. The greenhouse was full of wild tomatoes, grapes and wasps. When we realised that tiny spiders were running across our shoes, we happily went back to the writing.

Around lunchtime, I finished planning the second half of my novel after three days. The realisation that I was staring at the bare bones, up on the wall, and I just had to colour in between the lines, was indescribable. I ran to get Sheena, dragged her into my room and said, 'Look, there's my book!'

Thinking that my brain needed a break, I spent the afternoon researching, reading the true story of a woman who's daughter went missing. Three months later they discover that her body was under the bath in her own house, the whole time.

Pretty difficult stuff. But I drank my coffee and spoke to my family and cracked on with a flashback chapter.

I knew that I was feeling strange when I went down for dinner. I guess I'd spent six days trying to imagine what it would be like to lose a child. And for the most part I was able to hold the reality of that horror and my fictional book separately in my head.

After eating, discussing things we'd been good at growing up, we gathered for the final night of reading. I couldn't get through my chapter. I had underestimated the toll of days reading about a little boy eventually found on a mountain ledge, the ones never found, the girl under the bath. It also only hit me during the reading that I had touched upon something painfully personal (though this isn's the place to go into it).

Amazingly (trust me, this is rare), I eventually managed to get it together, make a few jokes and enjoy the rest of the time. This in mostly thanks to how great the other writers were; not making me feel embarrassed. In fact, making me feel like they understood.

In the morning, as I tried to remove the Super Tack (a.k.a chewing gum) from the walls, I felt like a big mess of sad and elated. A week had been cleared to give me the time to get on with being a writer and little else. I'd forgotten I had a job, I'd allocated myself a tiny window at the beginning and end of each day for emails, Facebook and my digital writing group. To an array of requests and tasks and things asking for me to do them I'd said, 'You can wait.'

And it really was wonderful.

On Retreat - Arvon - The Clockhouse - Day 5

Hurst

There's a spider made of hair in my sock
And one in the bathroom, which converses with a fly
Long dead

There's a spider where wood meets wall
And another in my mind, which places mouth on memory
And webs

There's a forest god in a drinking glass
And one that dances when the steam hits

And one birthed in the cave of a lamp

There's a spider asleep in the downy folds of my bed
Who has more right to them than I - to spin a dream

~


I don't usually write poetry, but this one arrived this morning.

It's the last full day. Instead of a desperate urge to produce and demonstrate time well spent in pages, I feel strangely happy with the mix of it all - the walks and tea breaks, the cutting of paper and reading under a blanket.

Last night we shared again. Laura got the fire going and the house smelled like November.

We laughed for hours. We talked about insects and dwarf frogs and goldfish who betrayed us, and cemeteries and burial, and our own work - from years back, or from now, and we listened.

They helped me to figure out how I could play with time, weaving in the flashbacks. And in a moment my novel shifted into something else, something better. I struggled to sleep. Each night, after sharpening my mind on our conversations, sharing and a day of my book, I sleep worse than the last.

We drove into Craven Arms for super tack (as it turns out) and hayfever pills. Marvelled at the local butchers which was a man in a van by the side of a country road.

I stuck my plot to the wall where it can't blow away.

I finished my missing children PI book on my study sofa, grateful for the small and large ways it has influenced my story.

I am learning to live with the spiders.

On Retreat - Arvon - The Clockhouse - Day 4

I spent a lot of yesterday sitting on the floor of my study, arranging pieces of torn paper. I needed to find half my book. So I wrote down all of my remaining ideas; scribbled in notebooks, typed up in an unnamed file, swimming about in my head. I had three different colours, sizes of square and categories:

-Big ideas
-Chapters
-Tiny things

Then I took the pile, sat on the carpet, surveyed them and sipped my tea. I arranged them into their individual group. Then I started to look for families - chapters which could sit within big ideas, tiny things which could cling onto chapters. Finally I looked for the order I wanted to tell them in; spent a while picking up and placing down, swapping and sliding.

A few didn't fit anywhere, but I felt like I needed to write them, had already attempted a few, and saved them in a file titled, 'Oddities.' What they all have in common, and it took a while for this to register, is they are all flashbacks, from the before of the book. No, they don't work with the body of what I have. No, I didn't plan on creating them. And, yes, I have no idea if I can find them a logical, defensible space, or they will be thrown to the murdered darlings pile.

This is before I energetically swung open the door of my study and annihilated them with a gust:

Today, I'll go in search of Blu-tack and fix the book to the wall. It's not finished. When it is, I'll write it down. For now I like the bizarre and only way it exists.

All the hours eaten up by plotting and charting. I read through twenty chapters and made notes on each in answer to the question, 'What actually happens?' I looked at each character in turn and bullet pointed their journey. I was quickly getting too far away, too zoomed out, and needed to check in and see how they were travelling.

I also took an old chapter, written during the white heat of NaNoWriMo, November 15, and re-worked it. Plot wise, I needed it, but the original execution didn't work at all. I printed it, marked what I like, what made me laugh, what was trying to make me laugh and painfully, heavily, failed to.
Then I sat down and tried to start with that. I realised how much better I knew my characters now, on this second re-telling. I had a deeper understanding of what they'd been through and the inner workings of their minds.

This draft was better, cleaner. And the idea of taking the same approach again seemed less scary - highlight where it sings, mercilessly cull the duff notes, fill in the gaps.

And once more, with feeling.

I also visited the pond with Sheena in my pyjama bottoms (my jeans are still drying from our cross-country adventure). We ate kinder eggs, pointed out weird bugs, debated how much money it would take from the other, to willingly cannonball in.

Later, we ate baked cheesecake and talked about the magic state of childhood.

On Retreat - Arvon - The Clockhouse - Day 3

It's much colder today. The sun isn't coming out. It's a day for thick jumpers.

Yesterday I woke up early, again, without an alarm. I woke up excited. Usually mornings feel like they're against me, but here, it's a different reality - because every moment is mine. My only role is 'Writer'. The simplicity of it is like a much awaited deep breath.

After writing my blog, I headed down to breakfast. I ate a lot. In Chester, I am greedy and I mindlessly consume. Here, I am an engine and I tip in fuel. The food doesn't matter. The words matter.

We write timed exercises. I fill two pages on the prompt, 'Freedom smells like...' I decide it smells like suncream shiny and greasy across shoulders, flowers heady and bowed under the weight of their own pollen and a pathetic bubble of strawberry bubble gum. I write about a one night stand and a phone number etched into the wood of a toilet cubicle door. I write about a girl searching for her mother.

In the afternoon we decide to go for a short, easy walk, but are quickly lost. We are nettle stung, over heated, brook jumping, private land invaders. We sneak around bulls and hide from men in tractors. We emerge hours later, paddle in a Ford and sip elderflower fizz, making up imaginary childhoods for colleagues.

Back to writing. I produce a few new chapters out of sync - the ones I want to write. Its hard but somehow it works. My cheeks are flushed and my shoulders ache and the words are showing up. I realise that half my novel is still unplanned, unknown. This is somehow a surprise. But ideas for plots and people are coming to me from a range of sources. Keep going.

More wine. More reading. I share an unedited piece, all at once terrified and delighted. 'Be shit,' I tell myself. 'Let yourself be shit, and let that be okay. Fix it later.' The writing is better than I hoped. Or maybe I am just kinder to myself than I imagined.

More discussions - an argument has broken out at the tutored retreat next door; Black writers furious at the idea of a white person writing about how life is as a black person. The group is split and charged. Apparently this is called, 'Trespass.' We mull this over. Jane talks about a poet who writes a lot about sexual abuse, and the assumption that she had been abused. She tries to put words to discovering that the writer had never actually experienced anything like this. We talk about wearing different hats, and different skin, and how limited we would be if we only wrote about our own small lives.

At midnight, we crowd around the dishwasher trying to get it to work. Confused. Beaten. Five approaches later, the water floods in.

On Retreat - Arvon - The Clockhouse - Day 2

For as long as my back can take it, I pile the cushions up and sit in the window. I'm not sure that's the intention, but the sills are deep and I like building a nest. I sit there with my coffee and notebook, and watch other solo writers walk the grounds, trying to unknot some tangle in their plot or find inspiration around the pond. Sometimes they look up and I wave and smile like an idiot. Sometimes wasps fly into my forehead and I fall off, back into the room.

The silence is punctuated with baa-ing sheep.

Yesterday's breakfast exercises were both painful and necessary. I ended up writing about my Dad buying my my favourite book, crying on the National Express, a girl who finds a skeleton in her brother's room and a woman who can't have children. Words were dragged out, clinging on, petulant things.

Something changed during the day. I spent most of it reading the autobiography of a Private Investigator of missing people cases. After a few hours of reading, I knew how one of my useless, destined for the red pen and the chop characters, was going to suddenly become indispensable and interesting. I discovered a way to raise the ante. I randomly wrote the sentence, 'Flashlights in the dark, like low stars.'

In the afternoon I wrote an easy chapter where my character Poppy has just gone missing, and the locals organise a search party. I say easy, because it was there. The words didn't fight me, they wanted to arrive. There was no evidence of labour. I had broken through the pain. I didn't know how long it would last. One thing I've known for a while is that in order to do this, I have to be comfortable with all types of writing and manage to push through; shit writing which it embarrasses me to produce, lazy writing when I'm too tired, artificial writing which even I don't believe in. I have to trudge through, allow it, accept it, wait for better. Because it's often only by giving into that that I eventually reach a sun-filled clearing. The warm up is vital, but I usually quit during it.

At night, we drank wine and shared. I was comfortable but nervous. Jane is an incredible poet. We are all in such different places - she is relaxed and assured in her voice. I am battling with mine. Sheena is just starting to experiment with hers. Laura is staring up at the mountain of her book and prepping for the climb. What did we talk about; can creative writing be taught, tamagotchis, rap, Brexit, the quality of our sleep, habits, exasperation, Ophelia.

I went to bed, late, tipsy, checked in with my novel. The last sentence I'd written sober, 'An old pair of willies don his feet.'

On Retreat - Arvon - The Clockhouse - Day 1

During the day, you can only hear birds. At night it's completely silent and black.

It's very strange to actually be here, after months of mulling over how I would use the time. I awkwardly set up my desk, neatly pushing pens into line, notepads to the left, then just stepped away from it all, scared.

Yesterday, fear was allowed. We arrived around 4pm, greeted with cake, and sat together in the library/lounge talking about our projects, enjoying being surrounded by shiny, new books. Dinner was a cheese board followed by fresh bread and soups from a local Chef. I called my husband, delighted at the prospect of an evening of wine, face mask and a long bath. He chided me, 'You know this isn't a holiday right?'

Yes, but I'd forgotten. It's unnatural to find yourself living with a group of strangers in a magical setting and push against the urge to talk and socialise, and crowd together.

After dinner I managed an hour or so of writing in my Study, atmospheric playlist filling the room, fussing with the various lamps for the perfect amount of light. But I was nursing an over-excited headache, a few hours of travel and generally overwhelmed. So I forgave myself and went to sleep, promising that it would all start tomorrow.

So far, so good. I've flung the windows open; the hills beyond the forest are almost lost in morning mist. I've prepared a list of goals, broken up around meals. At 10am I'll head down to the kitchen, and sit down with my friend Sheena, over a gargantuan pot of coffee and breakfast. We're going to share our plans for the day, and roll out a few writing exercises, like stretching before the run. I loosely intend to write this blog and fresh writing in the morning, research and edit in the afternoon, and pick up the writing again in the evening, into the early hours if possible. That seems to be the time my mind is the most relaxed and open, letting the gold words fall out.

Perhaps tonight we will gather around the wood fire and share our work with flushed cheeks. Or perhaps, like last night, we will eagerly consume our dinner and debate the merits of a writing group, our favourite authors, and the differences between poetry and prose.

Laura, a novelist herself, certainly agrees with me that the novel is a beast, a looming monster. We both despair at how to approach taming the thing, but at the same time know there's nothing else we could be doing, nothing else which would cook up the same bizarrely delighful mingling of fulfilment and challenge.

Here's a few pictures:

Better late than never

Word by lazy word, my novel is coming back to me. My characters are starting to yawn and stretch out in my head. I'm re-visiting the problems, re-reading the parts which convinced me I was on to something better than my usual. I'm writing; a sentence here and there, erasing a comma, changing a name, a painful restoration of the flow.

I always tend to write more in the winter. It's darker, more magical. The cold and desire to stay indoors helps the fiction. So yes, I'm looking forward to the leaves dying and the frost taking over. Somehow I have started trying again, to mark out a path as a writer.

Tomorrow I'm at Gladfest, a small literature festival, on a novel planning session with an admired author - Francesca Haig.

Then it's the writing retreat at the Clockhouse for six days later this month. I'll have a ridiculous amount of time on my hands to make some headway with this stubborn book. My first commitment is to produce a blog on here at the end of every day, tracking my progress (or lack thereof).

Then October, the Chester Literature Festival, where my story will be read out as part of our Chester Writer's Gothic event - http://www.storyhouse.com/events/gothic-chester-writers/
Yes, that does mean that I actually finished a short story this year. I'm surprised too. I've even submitted it for a competition.

November sees another NaNoWriMo (Novel in a month challenge) where I have to decide if I'm going to find a way to write 50,000 words of this novel (perhaps branching out, exploring character and different plot lines) or take a break and create another beast. More than anything I'm excited for the Kick off party, the weekly lock ins, hysterical and tired in coffee shops. Chester is my home now and I'm excited to meet the writers (125 of them gave it a go last year).

My point is, that I'm trying. It's not something I do that often. Currently I'm trying to obsessively plan how to make the most of my six isolated days in the forest. Any ideas?

'Take your life in your own hands and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.' - Erica Jong