nano moth

sending stuff off

nanomoth — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 11:25:33 +0000

Oh my god, how I hate writing query letters, hooks and synopses. If it weren’t for the phenomenon of Miss Snark, I’d probably give up. For years I’ve been chasing the holy grail of what a decent query letter looks like, or what a decent synopsis looks like; and hook, what the hell is a hook? Sell it don’t tell it? Jeeze, pass the smelly cheese.In all the past advice I’ve read in writers’ magazines about how to approach an agent, there has always been the stipulation that you must say why the agent is right for you, and say what qualifies you to have written this book, etc. Miss Snark advises against this sort of thing. Perhaps it is all subjective. Perhaps some agents like being arse licked but I suspect that getting over the gist of your novel before the agent tosses the paper in the reject pile is a bit more important. So whilst I’m bashing my head metaphorically over my new lap top and belly aching over adjectives for my polished and completed novel, I am already thinking about what the query letter for my most recent nano novel will look like when I get round to it. I WISH I had had this information (filched from Miss Snark’s blog) when I first began querying: A hook requires more than “what this book is about”. There needs to be an enticement to read it. What’s the central decision that [he/she] has to make? What are the stakes? You can’t just describe [him/her] like a dossier either. [He/She] needs to have substance so we’ll want to read on …

tools and all that caper

nanomoth — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 20:10:36 +0000

With nanowrimo over it’s hard to keep away from the forums and get on with making mince pies and christmas presents, but one thing caught my eye this evening and that was the stupendous range of writing software out there that people have been using to write their nano novels with. I hopped over to Scrievener to have a decko at what all the fuss was about and sure enough, it look impressive and ooh ahh, I could use that, but really, if your writing sucks, no amount of gizmo technology is going to help. I think I will stick to text edit on my mac and the good old pencil/pen and notebook, real folder and real paper index cards. Besides which I am jittery about downloading stuff in case it messes with my machine in some unforseen way.

nanomoth — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 10:18:47 +0000

This always happens in the winter and I am always surprised: I get a bug: a cold, or a cough or a sore throat or a dose of all three with an accompanying headache. But it’s an absolute pest when you come down with something in the middle of trying to write a whole crappy novel in November.
The only thing you can do is eat loads of fruit and drink a lot and tell yourself that you don’t really feel that bad and (have the box of tissues next to the computer) another five hundred words won’t be too difficult to pull off and never mind that you can’t remember what you were going to do next or what your characters decided to do instead of that, which seems to be the way it has been going the last week or ten days. I decide something and the characters say, ‘bugger that for a game of soldiers, you’re not killing me off/ putting me in bed with that moron/ making me catch that train/ make that phone call. NO WAY. I’m doing THIS.’ And I have to run about like a blue arsed fly trying to make sense of what the hell they are all up to. Or not up to.
So I am over the 50k mark but still a long way off from the end of the novel – from the possible conclusion, I should say, and I need to pump out another 30k or so to get there.

nanomoth — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 10:25:08 +0000

I took Snow by Orhan Pamuk back to the library after only one and a half chapters. I think it must be better in the original Turkish but as I don’t read Turkish I’ll never know. But I need a book to read during Nano apart from the non-fiction piled around my bed so I’m re-reading Tobias Hill’s The Cryptographer. It’s been a couple of years and I can only barely remember the plot but I’m mostly reading it for the language anyway.
Some people (writers) avoid reading fiction when they are writing but I’m always writing something. The theory is that if you read too much fiction when you are writing you’ll just end up emulating those writers and lose your own writing voice. I think the answer is to read as widely as possible and write as much as possible. And after all, nothing is created in isolation. Some people might like to think that their writing is unique but it won’t be, everyone is infuenced by someone, whether they realise it or not. And I think it’s better to be influenced by as many different sources as possible. It makes life more interesting an prevents stagnation.
Preventing stagnation during Nanowrimo is of utmost importance too.
Week two is always the most difficult, and for some reason, outside distractions always seem to heap themselves on me during this week, just when I think I’m getting into the swing of things.
I’m going to try and hit thirty thousand today. I’m going to unplug the phone, while I write, which I forgot to do yesterday.

nanomoth — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 22:11:18 +0000

End of week one and I am ahead of myself in terms of words written but I am behind myself with my actual plot. There is an awful lot of irrelevant stuff that is creeping into the text, but I will be able to scratch together some kind of novel from it all afterwardds I think. The characters are coming into their own at last – only taken me 20 thousand words to get them breathing (!) But I have already fallen back on the steamy bedroom scene device to get things moving along. All of it excruciatingly embarrassing for my poor characters and will be severely chopped after NaNoWriMo.
But I feel hopeful about the book now, whereas before I was wondering where on earth it might be leading me. That can all change though.

nanomoth — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 20:07:43 +0000

The first two days of NaNoWrimo have gone better than I expected in terms of word count – I have managed to rack up over 7 thousand words, however I am mired in character building and character background, trying to get the voice of each character before I move on with the action. There is some movement forward in the story, albeit very slowly. I am trying to get as much written as possible so that when I come to edit it all at some point I have something sizable to work with.
Rather predictably, the Nano site is exceedingly slow at in the evening from about tea-time to bed time. In fact so slow that I just keep on getting timed out pages so I am updating my word count in the mornings. It’s not going to give a very accurate picture of my actual daily word count because half of one day will be carried over to the next day, but it averages out in the end. It’s just numbers, the main thing is that I am getting stuff down, printing it out and not reading through it too much. Difficult when you’ve written stuff by hand though.
Even though it’s just the first draft, I still find myself wanting to make it the best that I can as I go along, which is good in a way but might end up slowing me down. I have to constantly remind myself that it doesn’t matter if it’s crap because you can shape the crap into better crap later on.
But I can’t just spend every spare minute typing. I need thinking time as well for the novel to develop, so even though it might seem that the writing is standing still, its moving along all the time. You need to give yourself space to have eureka moments for the plot, which makes it more of an exciting journey.
And I’ve just got Orhan Pamuk’s ‘Snow’ out of the library to read during the month. I did want to get My Name is Red, but typically they didn’t have it.

nanomoth — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 20:03:04 +0000

A good start to the NaNoWriMo high speed novel. I woke up at ten to six this morning and despite trying, couldnt get back to sleep so I grabbed my notebook and began writing the insistent voice that was bugging me. At least I know who one of my characters is now and what nationality he is. I found another character this afternoon as well, a female – and they both have names too, so I am less nervous about the whole thing, especially as I have gone over my daily quota to hit 50k by the end of the month.
A few irritating things happening with the laptop not saving stuff as I would expect it to but I’ll have to work around that.
I’ve noticed that the site is s l o w in the evenings too, so I’ll have to steer clear of it in order not to waste writing time. Besides, my partner wants to get on the internet in the evenings anyway.

nanomoth — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 09:35:20 +0000

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…

nanomoth — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 12:50:21 +0000

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

nanomoth — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 19:27:23 +0000

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.