With only a couple of days to go before the start of the novelling (double ‘l’ because I am british, like travelling) head-rush that is NaNoWriMo I am beginning to get slightly nervous. I think I picked up a tummy bug while I was away. I threw up spectacularly on a particularly jolty bus ride on the way back to England, and assumed it was travel sickness but the nausea still resides, and visits in waves. Could it be nerves, I wonder. Either way, I am nervous about not feeling like the full shilling, of not being entirely Gregory when November 1st comes around and I start with supposed gay abandon on my new project which may or may not turn out to be something worth working on at a later date.
I am all in a tizz. I tried to calm myself by preparing some notebooks. I got some cheap spiral bound things and I have covered them in a nanowrimo cover using a scanned nano sticker. In his wonderful book, Chris Baty advises against these as they can snag and pages rip out. But I like them because you can lay them flat on the table by your computer/typewriter, or prop them up easily for typing up your notes and rambles.
The idea of taking the new laptop to a cafe to write appeals very much, except I am paranoid about spillages of liquids on my computers. So I won’t be taking my laptop to a cafe. Instead I will be taking my notebooks and a retractable pencil. I have covered them in wipe clean clear fablon stuff. The stuff you never had when you were little and the presenters on Blue Peter always assumed you must have a wide variety of designs for all your home-made cindy doll houses.
I have to make a deal with myself though, not to edit my scribbles, if anything, I must add to my notes when I type them up.
Having prepared the notebooks I then flicked through the empty pages, wondering what the hell I might be going to fill them with. I thought I had a vague IDEA, but as the day gets closer I am wibbling, and doubting whether it will work at all. I should remind myself that it was an extremely vague idea, and in fact I can write about anything.
Writing in the first person is always easier. You get into your character far quicker, and the words flow out in a way that seems impossibly easy sometimes.
Last year my nano novel was half 1st person, half third and I have ditched all the third person part in favour of a rewrite in 1st from 2 or maybe 3 POV.
Character, I think, is the main thing. If you have a character with a conflict, then everything else will follow.
I don’t know why I feel this stage fright. It could be that the anticipation is almost at a close and the intensity about to begin.
With a few novels already written, it’s inevitable that at some point you’ll wonder perhaps fleetingly, perhaps over days and weeks or even months, if there is anything else that you can write about. But of course there always is. Because as you get older, you see the world from a different angle, a different point of view, a new standpoint. The novel I wrote at 26 is very different from the novel I am writing now and in another ten years it will be a different animal again.
When I began writing, when I secretly began to think of myself as possibly doing this thing called writing, all my output was either autobiographical or semi-autobiographical or stuff based on things that had happened to people I had known. It took some time to get all of that out of my system. In the beginning it was a very different kind of therapy, although I loathe that word when it is linked to anything creative.
Orhan Pamuk, in this week’s Weekend Guardian Review has written a very candid piece on why he writes. He comes across as being totally obsessive and I recognise some of myself in what he says about needing his daily fix of literature, either in reading or writing or thinking. (guardian.co.uk)

a bit of healthy competition, or maybe not…

I am sitting up in bed typing in the dark, on my new little macbook. I know you are not supposed to have these things on soft furnishings because of the overheating problem, so I went into the garage today and found a piece of hardboard, which is exactly the right size to make a nice little flat surface. Then I have a small tapestry cushion that I made a couple of years ago which also happens to be exactly the right size, so I have a flat hard surface and something to stop leg burn too.
My partner had a go with it for 2 minutes(he said he was too tired to play with it for longer and wanted to go to bed) but he wrote the opening lines of a novel. He who never writes anything except emails and reports for work, and it was one of the most intriguing openings I have ever read. I am so jealous. I asked him if he was going to do nanowrimo, I even dared him, but he said with a grin on his face that he didn’t need to wait until november, that all months were the same to him. I think he was more than mildly surprised at his opening lines, and quite chuffed and rightly so. But now I am wondering if I have opened pandora’s box. I don’t think he would ever have thought of writing fiction of any kind (outside of his reports) if I hadn’t offered to let him test out my new laptop. He said he didn’t know that he was going to write what he did, that it just came out. I assured him( as pooh assured piglet on the way through the hundred acre wood to find tigger some breakfast one morning) that a lot of literary fiction(and poetry) gets written that way(“it’s the best way you know,letting things come” said pooh, “oh, I didn’t know,” said piglet). Anyway, he asked me to save his flash of genius, which I have, I just wonder now whether it will turn into anything. And I wonder too if it might just make him stop and think about why I am so obsessive about what I do, why it is so important. The kick you get out of writing.

writing groups

My writing space is full of old notebooks as well as lots of books that I think might be useful one day, but don’t ever read. I just can’t throw stuff awaay. Until very recently I belonged to a writing group. It was one of the (seemingly) last postal writing groups in the UK. It would take anything up to twelve weeks to get the package back again, in which time you’d have moved on and written other stuff and the piece you were so eager to get feedback on was either finished and sent off somewhere, or you’d decided that it was a pile of rubbish anyway. But somehow belonging to this group was a comfortable thing. You’d enjoy tunneling through the others’ drafts of work and thinking of ways it could be improved. And you’d appreciate the rather delayed comments about your own work too. Some of the people in the group were good at criticizing.
But gradually over the years the writers in the group whose work you most admired dropped out. Eventually the remaining people in the group seemed only to be interested in telling each other where they went on holiday and what they’d been doing in their garden. NO mention of books or reading. The comments you’d receive back on your work were sometimes one line from some of the members. They’d say things like, ‘I don’t understand this so I can’t comment’. Or, ‘You certainly have kept me interested. Looking forward to more.’
And I kept all these bits of paper. Five years’ worth of comments. The other day I went through it all and I couldn’t find one piece of paper I thought would be worth keeping. Even from the time when there were good people in the group.
And the lesson I have learned very slowly is that you have to be your own best critic. You can’t rely on anyone else. Putting stuff away and letting it fester for a few weeks or even months is just about the best thing you can do. You’ll know when you’ve finished with a thing. It will either feel right or it will scream ‘UNSALVAGEABLE’ in day-glow yellow at you.
Belonging to a writing group, whether it’s by post or online, isn’t just as simple as getting feedback though. I think when I joined my ill-fated writing group I was keen to assert myself as a writer in some small way. To have a captive audience. To know that my stuff was being read by another human being. And it’s different when it’s a stranger. Giving your writing to your family and close friends is a recipe for disaster. They’ll want to say the right thing and not offend you. You’ll suspect them of doing just that and grumpiness will erupt. But to have a real audience you have to just get your stuff out there. Send it to the right magazines. Send it to competitions. And if it’s a novel, send it to literary agents when you are sure it’s the best it can be. And in the meantime, while you wait for those inevitable rejection slips, read books. Read copiously. Read widely. Read stuff that gets a bad review in the papers. Read the one that didn’t win the Man Booker. Or the Orange. Read everything you can. Read short stories and novels and poetry. Read before you go to sleep and read on the loo. Read a book in the doctor’s waiting room, and shun those crappy magazines. Because if you don’t read, you can’t be a writer. Nothing, as they say, is created in isolation; but that doesn’t mean you have to be a member of a writing group.
NaNoWriMo is different. It’s about us all trying to get a novel written in a month, and you don’t have to upload an extract from your first draft if you don’t want to.

writing in bed

Sometimes a good idea comes to me just as I’m falling asleep. Usually I don’t have anything to write on except my mobile phone which isn’t ideal. The idea can get too truncated and in the morning I wonder what it means. So now, as Nanowrimo looms nearer, I’ve taken to taking a notebook with me to bed, and just writing any old thing in it. Last night I did this for half an hour and no sudden idea for my nano novel appeared until after I’d turned off the light, got comfortable and warm enough and was really dozy. Then PING. A solution to a nitty gritty problem with my loose idea. Rather than get up to switch the light on I used a maglite and wrote a page of details that I’d be able to use. This is allowed in nanowrimo. You can write notes but not the actual text until Nov 1st. I’m sure some people cheat an awful lot, but I believe in entering into the spirit of the thing properly or not at all.
However, I’m still not sure whether my MC will be male or female, I don’t have a name for them, or a location.
Strangely, I never get the urge to write anything on waking. All I’m interested in is getting a cup of tea, and waking up properly before I have to get the family organised and off to school.
Tea and coffee this year are decaff. I know caffeine is supposed to be good for short term memory but last year I drank so much coffee I was like zebeddee from the magic roundabout. BOING. I went cold turkey with my favourite beverages this spring. Being tanked up on coffee and tea all day isn’t conducive to a good night’s sleep and if you need the day to write, then you should sleep properly. I’m going to rely heavily on bananas and oily fish on toast this november. But not at the same time.

books to read

Ok finally this damn image uploaded properly. If you’re going to do Nanowrimo, then you just HAVE to read this little gem. It’s fun and irreverent, it makes you laugh and it will keep you motivated throughout the month long slog of getting those 50 000 words down on paper, screen, parchment, or whatever your chosen medium. I’ve read it twice. Last year I read it straight after nanowrimo which was a bit odd, but this year I read it at the beginning of October to get myself reaquainted with the madness that is nanowrimo. I will be reading it again at the end of the month, whilst I am on holiday, along with a Julie Myerson novel called Me and The Fat Man, which I am not going to upload an image for.
If you came here via the nano site, and you haven’t yet read a copy of Chris Baty’s book then I strongly recommend that you do. Pinch, borrow, buy or read over someone’s shoulder, just do it, you’ll not regret it and I think it will make you experience of nanowrimo that bit more fun.
If you have dropped in here from outerspace then visit the nano site and see what all the fuss is about.
The next book I want to tell you about is this:
As you can see from the imageof my copy, it has been very well read. I don’t know how many times I have referred to this book over the years. It is a series of essays on writing but you mustn’t let that put you off. David Lodge is an academian and an author and has a very accessible style of writing. Each chapter/essay begins with an excerpt from a well known work of fiction and he then talks about the theme he’s chosen which is relevant to that excerpt. For example, chapter one is all about Beginnings and he uses the opening paragraphs from Jane Austen’s ‘Emma’, and Ford Maddox Ford’s ‘The Good Soldier’.
It’s a book for people who read fiction and a book for people who write fiction. The range of different texts he uses to illustrate and complement his chapters is quite diverse, both classic and modern. You can dip into this book, according to whatever kind of fiction you might be writing or whatever element you might be needing help with, and there’s stuff in there that you might not have considered before as well, which could help breathe new life into a flagging manuscript.
So you’ve got the perfect mixture here, to get you in the mood for Nanowrimo.

candle

In the run up to NaNoWrimo and during the month of november I’ll be making (probably) infrequent posts of varying lengths whenever I feel like procrastinating and jeopardising my daily word count. last year I did a lot of my nano novel on a second hand silver reed tabulator, perfect tool for avoiding procrastination and irritating people next door – the walls are thin thin thin, you can hear them farting, sneezing, coughing, peeing, singing and ehem, on one side. The other side just laugh in a maniacal sort of way at the television which seems to be on all day long. Nice people though, in a simple kind of way. Harmless. Kind to cats. Tidy with their bin. Cruel to rats though, that’s the only thing.
However this year I am adding another tool to my writing kit in the shape of a macbook.