Well trodden Memory Lane

The start of 2017 has seen me preoccupied by two things; my submission to the Jerwood Mentoring Programme and a bout of good ol' nostalgia, not altogether unrelated things.

In order to apply for the scheme (a year of retreats and support as a fiction writer - http://www.arvon.org/grants-schemes/jerwoodarvon-mentoring-programme/) I had to put together a Bio and Personal Statement. Trying to ignore that both of these things terrified me, as they meant addressing my consistent floundering and self-doubt, I typed them up frantically (mostly looking away from the screen). I presented them to my husband, flushed and ready for praise.

He destroyed them (not physically, though they deserved it). He was right to do so; they were flowery, eager to please, rushed attempts at demonstrating my able wielding of the written word rather than daring to say anything about my life or my journey as a writer.

Back to the drawing board, and almost two solid days of re-drafts. The more I tried, the more I panicked. I was gearing myself up for this, wanting it, investing. I was inflating myself higher and higher, and slowly becoming aware of the imminent fall.

My husband's advice was not to get too excited. But that's not really me. I don't know how to try but not care, to give everything, but pull the emotion back. If I'm not successful with this it will hurt like a bitch, but that's good. I'm out of practise with failure. I need to get a wealth of failure behind me again, scrap through the hurt and rejection, and be better for it. Failure is good, great even, it suggests effort; a million times better than standing completely still with my eyes shut - my usual attempt.

In my Bio I talked about my frantic scrawling as a teenager. It took me back. I would stay up until the early hours writing, until my floorboards were covered with barely legible sheets, my hand ached and I had nothing left to stay. It is painful to look back and realise that in some ways, the past you was a better version.

I know what changed. It's the same stuff that plagues us all; work, relationships, owning shit we don't really need, cleaning it, fussing with it, selling it on. Adulthood can often fail to be the imaginative wonderland that childhood gave us in abundance. But that's probably our fault.

As we've just bought a house, my Mum has decided to relinquish a huge sports bag worth of my stuff - most of it books from school, letters, old photographs. It's early days, but I'm already finding some absolute beauties, my which I mean, horrific yet endearing writing I'd forgotten about. Perhaps the contents of the bag will teach me how to go back to writing for myself, back to the girl staying up till dawn for the words (even if that does mean for a while, producing a few worryingly odd poems about bullying).

Play me another song

 Written 25th November.....

I’m writing this offline on Black Friday.

Why?

Because we were supposed to move into our lovely new house on the 21^st October, then a week after, then a week after, and so on.

Here I am, still, in our shoddy flat, surrounded by half packed boxes, one eye on this blog, one eye on my phone.

At least, thank God, there is an endless supply of tea.

I am grateful for all the things which don’t require internet; music, Scrivener, heat.

My new house has internet, lucky house.

So as all those Black Friday deals indifferently pass me by, it is with considerable trepidation and dread that I realise exactly what I can fill my zero byte time with – NaNoWriMo.

Let’s see, by the end of today, to be on track, I should have 41,675. Currently I have 35,822. Plenty of room for improvement I’m sure you’ll agree.

But even on this low day, sulking in my pyjama’s I want to raise a toast, to NaNo, to that slippery 50,000 demand. Because instead of being the burden it was looking likely to be, starting when we moved, tearing me away from painting and purchasing, it has instead been a friend in the gloom. 

As I have sat and left yet another voicemail, been informed of a further set-back, hoped and despaired, NaNo has been a persistent nudge in my ribs, ‘Well, I guess you better write then.’ And so I would drop through the bottom of this real, aggravating world, straight into my created one, for an hour here and there, for half a day. 

The insanity of NaNo has somehow kept me sane.

There is something therapeutic and soothing about giving in to your internal voice, trusting it to yabber on and on across the page, believing it is leading you somewhere, teaching you patience. 

Speeding up access to this dark world of mine, is my ever faithful playlist, created purely to support my novel; the mood, atmosphere, the characters. It is 80 ever shuffled songs which help me sink in. Later on in the editing process I may choose to split these down my chapter, tailor them. I know plenty of writers who need absolute silence. For me, the songs are portals.

I’m going to go away and lean on my friend again now, see where I end up. I’ll leave you with a few snapshots of my soundtrack.

Getting dark

Day 11 of NaNoWriMo, and for the first time this month, I'm on track. This involved two marathon writing sessions over the last few days, and (predictably) towards the end of these exhausting stints, my writing was more confident, accessible, and more promising.

Each November around the mid-way point of this challenge my brain likes to say, 'See, this is what it's like to actually be a writer, words showing up.' And I despair at the previous eleven months of myself where I ran away and hid from the page. November is about waking up, reigniting, recognising that this is what it takes.

I started this blog to track my process, to see what I would try and fail at, what would work and wouldn't work within the myriad of approaches I've been taught and told about by others. Turns out my process is erratic, and boy is it drawn out. My process is getting wildly excited about a method one day, only to yawn at it the next. It's furious periods of writing followed by rolling haystacks.

Yesterday, deep in the fug of the world I'm creating I realised something else - that something I often consider a flaw in myself contributes wonderfully to my writing. That is my tendency to look ahead in a very detailed anxious way in day to day life. I tell myself often negative and extreme stories and struggle to pull myself back from the fiction. Such as:

Tomorrow I have to confront Jane on this problem. I bet Jane will take it badly. I bet Jane will blame me. And then John will overhear and get involved. I hate when John gets involved, that's just like him. God, I'm annoyed at John and Jane.

And then I genuinely have to spend some time unpicking that, reminding myself that it hasn't actually happened, and there's no one to be mad at.

Maybe everyone does this.

Anyway, it's funny that this trait is so present when I'm writing. I'm in my head with the characters and the room like a stage director, thinking, what if the worst thing then happened, what if he doesn't forgive his brother, what would that feel like, or what if the brother was angry? In other words, I'm able to forward plan, or imagine many outcomes and follow the emotion of them.

So, a pain in real life, a triumph for my fiction.

What else am I doing in this NaNo bubble? Reading, a lot. Mostly thrillers about missing girls, only truly relaxing into the books once I've established that they're not too similar to mine. I'm trying to learn, pick holes, find ideas. I'm also reading 'We need to talk about grief,' by Annie Broadbent. My novel requires that I go dark, so I'm going. I just have to remember to come up for air every now and again, my eyes full of water, and step away. I found grim subjects easier to sit with then I was younger, but they get to me more these days and I have to accept that.

Otherwise, you know, you might end up going a bit odd and bursting into tears at your writing retreat after reading the line, 'She liked fruit tea.'

Happy NaNo'ing!

The End

Yesterday I attended a writing workshop, part of the Chester Literature Festival - 'How to finish your novel' with Laura Barnett.

Usually I've read at least something from the author, but feeling like the subject was bang on the money with where I was, I booked it and eagerly anticipated.

This is where our wonderful English language has fun with semantics. I'd interpreted it as a session for people who were slowly chugging to the end of the track, desperate for a few final pushes. But it actually focused more generally on endings as a concept, what type of ending a reader might expect from a genre, being unafraid to consider several, wildly different endings, what an ending should serve up; satisfaction, a tidying of loose ends etc.

Unlike my previous novels, this one has an end, organic and imagioned during a frantic explanation  to my husband in a London pub. A true, aha moment (how rare those are). The second draft of my book has utterly revolved around my precious ending. I'm so dedicated to it that I've changed almost the entire book just so that this final chapter can live.

So whenever the workshop suggested that we reconsider the ending, I fell into a wheezy panic attack at the prospect. This was not Laura's fault. It is my fault for continuing to sign myself up to event after event, without squeezing any writing in-between. It's my fault for continuing to reach out for help, and tricks, and discussion, when what I really need to do is sit down, one eye on my roadmap, and crack the hell on.

Thanks in part to The Clockhouse retreat, where after six days of graft my map arose, and to Srivener (which I'll touch on loosely later, but will be no doubt singing the praises of for many blogs to come), the way before me is sign posted and lit.

So it must be fate that NaNoWriMo is just around the corner. On the 1st of November, I'm going to force my sorry-excuse-for-a-writer self to the page, and bash out the day's required word count - 1667 words to be exact. And then on the 2nd. And again on the 3rd. And with any luck, come November's chilly close, I will find myself with a complete second draft at 90,000 words.

So briefly, but with so much love - Scrivener. How has it taken me so long to discover this beautiful, beautiful outstretched helping hand? It's been mentioned  a few times over the years but like the idiot I am, I barely took notice. Then I saw that if you complete NaNo (that is sail over the finish line with 50,000 words), you get 50% off Scrivener, so I took a peek.

I watched a brief tutorial and impatiently imported my Word doc novel. Firstly, it happily kept my track changes - all the comments and highlights. Then I saw that I could add sections throughout (marking chapters if you want, or subplots - anything really), and jump around them easily, no longer painstakingly scrolling through in pursuit of  a key scene. And, there's an index card view where you can add notes to all those lovely sections - which I've typed my chapter map into.

I'm keen to hear about how everyone else uses it, as I've only scratched the surface, but it's already put my novel back into a soft, rosy light.

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.