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)