Setting: Stir and allow to settle.

That setting i couldn’t make real in my own head? Even though these things usually take no work at all, if i start with a clear visual picture and some atmosphere? I may have cracked it.

I was thinking Arabian Nights – and today it came to me to mix in some Celtic myth. Ali Bab meets Druids? Believe it or not, i can imagine that. And if no one else can on their own, then they’re just waiting till they read my version – which is all good!

Brief update on this morning’s post which went out this afternoon

I have typed nearly 4,000 words this afternoon/evening, and that’s about 2/3 of what was sitting there untyped. Reached stuff written in June, and stopped. Not sure how long it took me – far longer than it should have with a past as a touch typist – but however long it was, i’m hurting all over from it.

But it means i will total about 47 or 48,000 when it’s all typed (without scribbling any more), and i have arbitrarily designated the end of a chapter so that brings me into Chapter Seven. This number, being close to 50,000, makes me feel good.

By being bigger than 40,000 it makes me feel good, as well. That ’40’ has been stuck in my consciousness for too many weeks.

I wondered about skipping some of this back-into-the-groove scribbling – not typing it up at all. Lucky i did in the end, as some ideas that came to nothing may still be useful in one way or another. For example, i set up a wedding party gathering ahead of T and another character as they go along a street, with mental images of entertaining chaos, and then after a few days away from my big pink book had forgotten all about it. But at a different moment in the story it still may be handy.

What eventually worked was thinking around the characters, reviewing in my head what we know so far about each of them and their motivations and individual stories, BUT instead of doing that ‘straight’, doing it via T. He did the thoughts about them, and i wrote down what he was thinking. It combined getting me back into that world, and his head, with reminding myself what was going on (in a way that reading my notes or summary doesn’t do) and also, of course, getting me back into the pen-in-hand habit.

None of it will stay, i should think, but the bold cuts are not for Draft One. That’s why i typed it all, too – trying to stay out of edit mode for the time being.

And that’s why i didn’t do anything about the writing itself, which appalled me. (Quite apart from the handwriting, which almost defeated me.) Repetitious, inevitably since i wasn’t focused, but also long-winded, full of dreadful grammar, terrible phrasing, and inconsistencies; stylistically clunky… just as my conversation when i’m tired goes round in circles and takes five sentences to explain something that would have taken one if i’d been about to remember the right word. I was aware that it was drivel while i wrote it, but ploughed on, and it’s even worse when looked at from the ‘outside’. And i don’t care, cos i can rewrite the bits where something happens that’s worth keeping, and scrap all the rest. It’s ALL first draft, so i’m still including it in my word count!

Not such a brief update after all. No time to make it shorter!

Can you feel the relief? It may last me the whole weekend. 🙂

It’s all happening (again) – yay!

In the last just-over-a-week i, tubigripped, dressing-gowned and mixedpollened, have done 17 handwritten pages, which i estimate to be about 4,000 words or more if i’m lucky. It’s hard to guess as my coverage of the paper is so variable. (I also have a chunk not typed up from before the hiatus, so the 41-nearly-42,000 words so far could be approaching the 50,000 mark; it’s nice to think so.)

And TODAY it started ‘flowing’ again. Good ol’ persistence arrogant pig-headedness.

Yes, it has been very hard getting back into it after the break. But for a month before taking that break, i was struggling to get back into it anyway. Without skipping a single day, i’d got myself out of it.

I don’t think it was about the travelling-hopefully principle – i do not think it was because of having no plan, or too vague a plan. I’m still in that state; i know roughly the end in a non-concrete kind of way, and i know (at last) what’s just about to turn up. I think it was because i kept going when i’d got lost.

UPDATE: Also, i think, it was having taken T out of his native country into another, very different, environment. I was muddling through without any real feel for the place. Normally i don’t need to think about a setting – not with my conscious mind. Normally i just need a vague visual impression and each detail shows up when a character focuses on it. For once, that wasn’t happening. So without going backwards for now, from here on i’m changing this second land into something else. They do say one of the best bits of writing is playing god…  😉

It’s interesting that my confidence isn’t back as fully as my words. I’m looking ahead to a lively conversation between T and a new character (not until tomorrow; i have my physical limits). I can hear their voices and i know exactly the outcome of the conversation. But i don’t feel i can do the actual words. T will talk his way out of a situation, and that’s one of the ways we differ – he has the gift of the gab and i definitely do not, at least not out loud (not so bad on paper, lol). I don’t feel i can put the sneaky, nimble words into his mouth that i know he will come up with on the spur of the moment.

It will depend on EITHER inhabiting the character, OR working really hard in an artificial-feeling way. That’s not the point. The point is that i, today, have no faith in being able to do it, which is unusual for when i’m in this it’s-flowing state of mind. Which i diagnose as a hangover from being choked by the hiatus. I’m interested to find out about the anatomy of this difficulty. I have had ‘writer’s block’ (not the term i choose) before, but have never come from it back into the work it sprang from. Until June 2009.  🙂

Lucky i do, really, know dialogue is one of my strengths. Dialogue, emotional truth, atmosphere. (Not as sure about atmosphere as i used to be, but it may be that i’m more ambitious with my settings nowadays.) Plot, realistic props, etc, not so strong. Can’t decide where to rank myself on world-building but otoh i don’t need to, do i? 😛 When i get the hang of plot, and stick that onto the things that come easily by nature, i can’t help but knock ’em dead.  😉

And now OpenOffice won’t open, which may be about Firefox so i will go offline and see if that is it. Though i only have nine tabs open this morning, about 1/3 as many as yesterday when OpenOffice was fine. But i’d better go and put some clothes on as well.

ps That was all typed earlier, though i had to get into OpenOffice to check my word count – and walk the dog and give her my lunch – before actually posting this at 3.30pm. I don’t want anyone thinking i sit around this late before getting dressed!

Four measly hundred

Yesterday i put in a few hours of solid work on a (writing) thing i owe someone, and couldn’t get my head around it. This was a discovery, therefore interesting. Interesting is positive. The context of this particular interesting isn’t. I want my old brain back please.

Today i have the hangover from that.

This morning 400 words. Provoked out of bed mid-sentence by the gas man wanting to read the meter, but he left his card instead (how Jane Austen of him) as i couldn’t come downstairs. My ideas are happy to write, but my body doesn’t want to, so i stopped there but at least i’ve got it typed up.

As long as i have ideas, i can push through physical objections so that’s the right obstacle to have.

Progress is likely to be glacial as today is end of term for both boys and in the next two weeks we have guests, Easter, guests and weekend outings. Shall i become a crochet designer instead of a writer?

Something’s shifting

It didn’t feel like block. That’s not the name that came to mind. It doesn’t feel unblocked. But today i’ve scribbled maybe 500 words, which DOES feel like relief. Samantha Clark’s advice made me feel i’d had a hug, which helped. It also helped to be told to forget about joining up the plot.

I’ve got my main character, T, in a situation where he needs some secure privacy for about twenty minutes to go through the contents of a bag and assess what he’s carrying. Just realised that i was pootling along trying to find his alone-time. Got him into a public toilet, but the door didn’t lock. Got him a hotel room, but he has to share it. Finally i see that i’m not planning an itinerary for him – i don’t need to be sure he has a Plan B at every step in case he misses a connection. That uses the left brain that i’m trying to keep out of this creative First Draft process; the left-brain, think-in-grids stage is Revision. Obvious, i know.

So i’ve just started from sometime (an hour? a day?) AFTER he’s had his look in the bag. I’ll find out exactly what he saw when it gets mentioned, but i know all i need to: he has enough of the right items, it has cheered him up, he thinks everything’s hunky-dory now and is feeling clever about some of the problems he’s just managed to sidestep. (Little does he know… heh, heh, heh.)

The Reader will need this explaining. When we went backpacking he liked to have the train timetable always open in front of him as well as memorised.

But the Reader (sorry, dear Reader) is extraneous.  80)

What it did feel like was laziness and excuses. But hindsight (we all love hindsight) says it was keeling over cos i hadn’t taken a break when i needed to pause.

It’s only 500 words, and i only know the next two steps – perhaps the next half-hour of what’s going to happen to T. Something is keeping me on a need-to-know basis. My own brain is keeping me on a need-to-know basis! And i’m collaborating with it. How weird is that?

But however sluggishly, the Slog’s moving again. Baby steps, baby steps. Confucius said, ‘It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.’ OK, so it will matter if i’m still only halfway when i’m ninety. But for now, it’s a comforting thought.