I'm logging off for a while. I have only given this URL to two people and I don't get much passing trade but for anyone looking at this - Arlene? Rachel? - I hope that Christmas is ace for you.
I am going into the festive season having determined that a character is going to have to die. Resurrection is an option yet to be considered but is unlikely.
In the meantime here is some seasonal cheer from Francesca Stavrakopoulou, Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Religion at the University of Exeter :-)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p012w5fr
Saturday, 22 December 2012
Tuesday, 18 December 2012
Well that was odd.
I went into my office earlier with the intention of progressing some material I am committed to hand in at work this week. Like an idiot I thought I'd first type up some rough notes for this "limbering up" novel/series that I had scribbled down longhand in a notebook.
Three thousand seven hundred and eighty three words later the work is not progressed but a fairly detailed set of story outlines for three and a bit novels is done. There is a long way to go, especially with brainstorming some world building material including an economic structure, but I'm almost at a stage where I could split the notes into chapters and sketch some core scenes in.
Essentially I just let my mind run free and jotted down what seemed to work then went back through and harmonised it all, jotting in story features from book three that I need to presage in one and two. I am both pleased and puzzled by this. I'm pleased because I didn't think I had it in me - and puzzled for exactly the same reason.
Of course it may look like nonsense in the morning but it is progress.I do have a nagging guilt about not getting my paid work done though.
Oh, and one of my very, very few readers may be pleased to learn that a certain Glaswegian talking dog has survived. Despite my best efforts, throwing sticks over cliffs and all sorts, the brute won't leave.
Three thousand seven hundred and eighty three words later the work is not progressed but a fairly detailed set of story outlines for three and a bit novels is done. There is a long way to go, especially with brainstorming some world building material including an economic structure, but I'm almost at a stage where I could split the notes into chapters and sketch some core scenes in.
Essentially I just let my mind run free and jotted down what seemed to work then went back through and harmonised it all, jotting in story features from book three that I need to presage in one and two. I am both pleased and puzzled by this. I'm pleased because I didn't think I had it in me - and puzzled for exactly the same reason.
Of course it may look like nonsense in the morning but it is progress.I do have a nagging guilt about not getting my paid work done though.
Oh, and one of my very, very few readers may be pleased to learn that a certain Glaswegian talking dog has survived. Despite my best efforts, throwing sticks over cliffs and all sorts, the brute won't leave.
Yay for Displacement Activities
I linked yesterday to "Plotto". Here is something from the same author under a pseudonym which, though dated, is an interesting diversion. The Fiction Factory.
Monday, 17 December 2012
Plotto
Remember I said yesterday that there were really only seven stories? Turns out there are one thousand four hundred and sixty two plots
Sunday, 16 December 2012
A Quiet Week
Alas, work has intruded on my writing this week, although notes have been scribbled for future reflection. I also spent a while this afternoon concentrating on brainstorming a plot for the limbering up exercise even though it is some way off. It is a bit of a magpie's nest of ideas nicked from here and there and it came out of my head significantly nastier than I expected.
I have to deliver some stuff in the real world in the coming week too but the holiday period should afford some opportunity to move things on.
In the meantime I am digesting Kurt Vonnegut's advice for aspiring writers: don't use semi-colons.
Added:
Bugger!. Bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger!
After that last paragraph I went back to my desk to brainstorm that limbering up novel some more. What came out? A trilogy. Bugger.
It serves me right. The original in the nineteen nineties was intended as a parody of fantasy novels and nothing makes a fantasy novel more than a trilogy except, perhaps, a trilogy of trilogies. However I also came up with a solution. I said in my last post that the whole farago was a sub-Moorcock thing and I remembered that when Moorcock was writing his best known stuff in the sixties he was rattling out 15,000 words a day and had a novel every three days. Of course if you read them now the drawbacks of that approach are pretty obvious but it is a method.
In this age of fantasy novels the size of breeze blocks 45,000 words barely represents a chapter but in e-Publishing for adolescents with impaired attention spans, 45-60,000 words, even if only barely competent, might bring in enough $$ to buy a bottle of ink for my pen. That represents a first draft comprising a scene by scene outline then 5000 words a day on a second draft for a couple of weeks: polish it up and away we go. With a pseudonym, of course, to spare blushes later.
Incidentally, what later happened was that Moorcock wrote a novel of some substance called Mother London which is well worth a read.
I have to deliver some stuff in the real world in the coming week too but the holiday period should afford some opportunity to move things on.
In the meantime I am digesting Kurt Vonnegut's advice for aspiring writers: don't use semi-colons.
Added:
Bugger!. Bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger!
After that last paragraph I went back to my desk to brainstorm that limbering up novel some more. What came out? A trilogy. Bugger.
It serves me right. The original in the nineteen nineties was intended as a parody of fantasy novels and nothing makes a fantasy novel more than a trilogy except, perhaps, a trilogy of trilogies. However I also came up with a solution. I said in my last post that the whole farago was a sub-Moorcock thing and I remembered that when Moorcock was writing his best known stuff in the sixties he was rattling out 15,000 words a day and had a novel every three days. Of course if you read them now the drawbacks of that approach are pretty obvious but it is a method.
In this age of fantasy novels the size of breeze blocks 45,000 words barely represents a chapter but in e-Publishing for adolescents with impaired attention spans, 45-60,000 words, even if only barely competent, might bring in enough $$ to buy a bottle of ink for my pen. That represents a first draft comprising a scene by scene outline then 5000 words a day on a second draft for a couple of weeks: polish it up and away we go. With a pseudonym, of course, to spare blushes later.
Incidentally, what later happened was that Moorcock wrote a novel of some substance called Mother London which is well worth a read.
Monday, 10 December 2012
What lies beneath
Finally for today, having sketched in where I seem to be with the process of putting together the core narrative and getting to know the characters, there is something else that is filling my notebook and that is the underlying meaning to me of what I am trying to do.
I'm being vague here because ideas are still developing and haven't even got to first draft stage yet. It should be enough to say that the characters I am encountering and the situation in which they find themselves is developing according to something else that is going on in my head.
The Russian formalists used to say that the secret of all good fiction is to make the familiar seem strange and that seems to me to apply equally to the subtexts and themes.
This brings up, in a lateral sort of way, some of the fundamental issues I referred to a couple of posts back about motivations and particularly the question of for whom one is writing. Honesty means saying that I would be disappointed to write something and for it not to speak to anybody apart from me; but far worse, I think, would be to produce something which doesn't even speak to me either.
In that sense I am my own first audience and to speak to me the book has to raise issues that engage me in a manner I want to read. My personality is such that these are fundamentally philosophical and ethical issues and so what I want to do is to explore issues for which I have no fixed views, the questions which make me wonder, and do so in a way that makes the familiar seem strange because it is strange.
One of the key bits of advice for writing novices is not to lose sight of the story and that seems to me to be right, but my current novice thinking is to ensure that applies to the whole story, not just the surface narrative.
Anyway, there is a rich irony in having spent a couple of hours writing about writing rather than actually doing it. I plan to come back round here from time to time to deliver despatches as to where the story is going. My current project plan is to
I'm being vague here because ideas are still developing and haven't even got to first draft stage yet. It should be enough to say that the characters I am encountering and the situation in which they find themselves is developing according to something else that is going on in my head.
The Russian formalists used to say that the secret of all good fiction is to make the familiar seem strange and that seems to me to apply equally to the subtexts and themes.
This brings up, in a lateral sort of way, some of the fundamental issues I referred to a couple of posts back about motivations and particularly the question of for whom one is writing. Honesty means saying that I would be disappointed to write something and for it not to speak to anybody apart from me; but far worse, I think, would be to produce something which doesn't even speak to me either.
In that sense I am my own first audience and to speak to me the book has to raise issues that engage me in a manner I want to read. My personality is such that these are fundamentally philosophical and ethical issues and so what I want to do is to explore issues for which I have no fixed views, the questions which make me wonder, and do so in a way that makes the familiar seem strange because it is strange.
One of the key bits of advice for writing novices is not to lose sight of the story and that seems to me to be right, but my current novice thinking is to ensure that applies to the whole story, not just the surface narrative.
Anyway, there is a rich irony in having spent a couple of hours writing about writing rather than actually doing it. I plan to come back round here from time to time to deliver despatches as to where the story is going. My current project plan is to
- Keep working at this story until I have it at to the stage of first draft and then print it and put it away in a box for a while;
- Take one of my earlier "crap" stories (which is almost pure Moorcock-style fantasy), brainstorm ideas around it and then try and get it right through to the stage of a complete first draft and preferably beyond but explicitly as a "limbering up exercise" before
- Taking my draft story out of its box, reviewing it and then writing the real novel that I want to write.
Mutations
I started out in September with some ideas sketched out as twenty-nine bullet points on one and a half sides of A4 paper. These ideas are as much to do with time and place and tone as anything else although there are some key ideas there too. Essentially they reflect an idea of a slightly whimsical and light-hearted set of linked short stories.
Right at the beginning I had a notion that one part of the story would involve my protagonist listening to a gruesome after-dinner tale and I made an effort to write that tale. This taught me immediately that I had a way to go to learn how to write although I did kick it into a shape that I am happy to let sit on a flashdrive until I can come back and re-write it.
Of course this after-dinner tale immediately set off a train of thought - how did my protagonist come to be listening to that story? Who is telling it?, What is the bigger picture? How did my protagonist get to this particular geographical place? Can he get out again? Who else is there? and so on. I played around with ideas on this in my spare time for three or four weeks until I read an article in a Sunday paper that slapped me around the chops a few times and dropped a complete and fully formed McGuffin in my lap.
Eek! The McGuffin changed my idea of gentle whimsy into something deeper and more substantial and this immediately provoked fear that I don't have the skills to handle it. Aargh! How does it now look? Well, it looks familiar to be honest. They say that there are really only seven stories and this was recognisably one of them. Great, I can relax again, sorta. Maybe.
Next step was research - how could I get the McGuffin from one location to another in a way that sets up the underlying plot dynamic? Flashback time. A random news-report set up a remembrance of something that a tutor mentioned in passing at University in the early nineteen eighties which had interested me at the time! I realised that the flashback gave me the basis of a backstory for the McGuffin as well. By now I had -and have- ideas that felt "right" but which were not obviously latent in those bullet points except with the clarity of hindsight.
But that backstory gave rise to a dilemma - how far to research it? On the one hand there is the approach which the late, lamented Bob Ross used to take to his painting - if you want to put a little fluffy cloud or friendly little tree in right there then do it, make it up (although Ross also paid a lot of attention to form and structure). On the other hand I need to write a piece in a given historical setting in a reasonably authentic voice from that time and the anal part of me wants to get it as correct historically as I possibly can. This does not mean writing an academic essay: it means having enough period detail and colour correct to frame the narrative convincingly. For me this means doing quite a lot of research and following up on offshoots and intuitions, almost all of which will never go any further than my notebook.
To do this I asked my character write his story for me in the first person. There is a falsity here as this character at that time would not ever have considered doing any such thing. Nonetheless he is doing it at my request in some other place while I am writing this blog because that's the kind of guy he is. And it has proven very valuable to help him in that effort as I have had to think hard not only about obvious stuff, like synchronising his particular story with the historical record and making him recognisably a man of his time, but also about how to structure that story and put in place the narrative dynamics I want it to set in play for the main story.
Also I am using all of these early efforts as practice pieces. At present I am just trying to get the narrative and some character elements down and blocked in to really work up in the second draft. However in one important respect that autobiography is working some magic - the man behind the character is starting to live in my head.
There are five more characters in my mind at present at different stages of introducing themselves.
The first character is the geographical location itself which is important to the story I want to tell and also in setting up a deeper dynamic. At the moment I know something of its character but still need to put on my boots and go for a walk of discovery through it, learning its little ways, how it looks in all weathers and the importance of its flora and fauna. I need to understand its geology and how deep time has shaped it and formed it; what once crawled and walked there - and what still does.
The second is my main protagonist. He has recently become much clearer in my mind as a result of my thinking about some of my reactions on re-reading Paramahansa Yogananda's "Autobiography of a Yogi" and encountering Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri's "The Holy Science". The protagonist is in some ways me as I might have been had life taken different turns. I look forward to reading his autobiography when he writes it for me.
The third character is fundamental to the story, including the bigger backstory, and closely tied to that of the location. She drives a second set of research that I'm going to have to do. I know her name, though, or at least the one she is currently known by, and I have caught glimpses of what might or might not be her past. She intrigues me and she probably looks like Pat Tallman.
The fourth is the character who tells that after-dinner story I mentioned up there in the second paragraph.
The fifth character is, for want of a better descriptor, the baddie although he wouldn't characterise himself as such. He is still lurking in the shadows although I have once or twice caught a reflected gleam in his eyes which glare malevolently from his encloaking darkness.
And that is pretty much where I am right now in terms of character and story - I know the direction of the story I want to tell, my time at the moment is engaged in meeting the characters and working to put flesh on the raw narrative. However that raw narrative isn't the be all and end all of what I want to write and that will be the subject of my next and final post for today.
Right at the beginning I had a notion that one part of the story would involve my protagonist listening to a gruesome after-dinner tale and I made an effort to write that tale. This taught me immediately that I had a way to go to learn how to write although I did kick it into a shape that I am happy to let sit on a flashdrive until I can come back and re-write it.
Of course this after-dinner tale immediately set off a train of thought - how did my protagonist come to be listening to that story? Who is telling it?, What is the bigger picture? How did my protagonist get to this particular geographical place? Can he get out again? Who else is there? and so on. I played around with ideas on this in my spare time for three or four weeks until I read an article in a Sunday paper that slapped me around the chops a few times and dropped a complete and fully formed McGuffin in my lap.
Eek! The McGuffin changed my idea of gentle whimsy into something deeper and more substantial and this immediately provoked fear that I don't have the skills to handle it. Aargh! How does it now look? Well, it looks familiar to be honest. They say that there are really only seven stories and this was recognisably one of them. Great, I can relax again, sorta. Maybe.
Next step was research - how could I get the McGuffin from one location to another in a way that sets up the underlying plot dynamic? Flashback time. A random news-report set up a remembrance of something that a tutor mentioned in passing at University in the early nineteen eighties which had interested me at the time! I realised that the flashback gave me the basis of a backstory for the McGuffin as well. By now I had -and have- ideas that felt "right" but which were not obviously latent in those bullet points except with the clarity of hindsight.
But that backstory gave rise to a dilemma - how far to research it? On the one hand there is the approach which the late, lamented Bob Ross used to take to his painting - if you want to put a little fluffy cloud or friendly little tree in right there then do it, make it up (although Ross also paid a lot of attention to form and structure). On the other hand I need to write a piece in a given historical setting in a reasonably authentic voice from that time and the anal part of me wants to get it as correct historically as I possibly can. This does not mean writing an academic essay: it means having enough period detail and colour correct to frame the narrative convincingly. For me this means doing quite a lot of research and following up on offshoots and intuitions, almost all of which will never go any further than my notebook.
To do this I asked my character write his story for me in the first person. There is a falsity here as this character at that time would not ever have considered doing any such thing. Nonetheless he is doing it at my request in some other place while I am writing this blog because that's the kind of guy he is. And it has proven very valuable to help him in that effort as I have had to think hard not only about obvious stuff, like synchronising his particular story with the historical record and making him recognisably a man of his time, but also about how to structure that story and put in place the narrative dynamics I want it to set in play for the main story.
Also I am using all of these early efforts as practice pieces. At present I am just trying to get the narrative and some character elements down and blocked in to really work up in the second draft. However in one important respect that autobiography is working some magic - the man behind the character is starting to live in my head.
There are five more characters in my mind at present at different stages of introducing themselves.
The first character is the geographical location itself which is important to the story I want to tell and also in setting up a deeper dynamic. At the moment I know something of its character but still need to put on my boots and go for a walk of discovery through it, learning its little ways, how it looks in all weathers and the importance of its flora and fauna. I need to understand its geology and how deep time has shaped it and formed it; what once crawled and walked there - and what still does.
The second is my main protagonist. He has recently become much clearer in my mind as a result of my thinking about some of my reactions on re-reading Paramahansa Yogananda's "Autobiography of a Yogi" and encountering Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri's "The Holy Science". The protagonist is in some ways me as I might have been had life taken different turns. I look forward to reading his autobiography when he writes it for me.
The third character is fundamental to the story, including the bigger backstory, and closely tied to that of the location. She drives a second set of research that I'm going to have to do. I know her name, though, or at least the one she is currently known by, and I have caught glimpses of what might or might not be her past. She intrigues me and she probably looks like Pat Tallman.
The fourth is the character who tells that after-dinner story I mentioned up there in the second paragraph.
The fifth character is, for want of a better descriptor, the baddie although he wouldn't characterise himself as such. He is still lurking in the shadows although I have once or twice caught a reflected gleam in his eyes which glare malevolently from his encloaking darkness.
And that is pretty much where I am right now in terms of character and story - I know the direction of the story I want to tell, my time at the moment is engaged in meeting the characters and working to put flesh on the raw narrative. However that raw narrative isn't the be all and end all of what I want to write and that will be the subject of my next and final post for today.
So, as I was saying...
I am writing a novel.
It is traditional for new novelists to say that they have written stories since they were a small child and the years of practice are now coming to fruition. In my case that is not true, or not completely.
I have always enjoyed writing although it has usually been academic or business. I also keep a blog elsewhere and have done for a very long time in internet terms. Then too I worked for the government for a long time so I am quite capable of writing at least one sort of fiction, and I spent a while writing songs, one of which reached the dizzy heights of popularity at my local folk club for a couple of hours and one was a big hit in Bexley Heath.
But at various points in my life I have sketched out ideas for stories and have twice previously started novels only to abandon them when I realised that they were crap. Generally there have been plenty of other displacement activities to occupy my time relatively creatively. I am now of an age, though, where I would like to write something serious and substantial if only to prove to myself that I can.
A couple of years ago I was struck by some ideas which flew in the window of the car and stuck themselves to my face. I had the sense to write them down and then promptly changed jobs and was off on another voyage of discovery. But I came back to them in early September this year and took another look. While my two earlier efforts are still crap (though I can see why they are crap and why one of them might be salvageable) my notes from a couple of years ago are a different matter.
My initial spur to try again, aside from a consciousness of my advancing years, was reading a novel called "A Discovery of Witches" by Deborah Harkness. I found the book in a secondhand shop and thought that it looked sufficiently chunky and interesting for a holiday read - and so it was. I enjoyed the book but what interested me was Harkness's initial impetus for writing it which was some daydreaming in an airport lounge about what witches and vampires might do by way of careers. This struck a chord for some reason. It also helps to know that Harkness has a very successful career as a Professor of History and managed to write a substantial and enjoyable novel in her spare time, wrote an equally substantial sequel and is now on sabattical for a year while she finishes the third volume.
After some pondering I decided to pick up on those notes and try to develop them into a more fully fledged idea. I did some of the usual stuff that I bet most people in my position do - I looked for some help in published "How to.." sources and on line. Although a great many of them are formulaic, nevertheless they have all been helpful in one way or another, mainly by provoking ideas and pushing home the classic verities of structure, characterisation etc. - all of the things that English teachers stress when you are too young to appreciate what they are talking about. Characterisation and absence of serious structure are also a substantial part of why my previous efforts were crap.
There is another big change: motivation. My earlier efforts were effectively sabotaged the minute I put finger to typewriter key in the nineteen nineties or laptop keys in the early two thousands because I was doing it for the wrong reasons - I did not want to write but rather had some notion that I wanted to be "a writer" as an ego trip. I hope I have shed that: I want to write something now because I think I might have something interesting to write.
Next up, the surprising way ideas have mutated in the last three months.
It is traditional for new novelists to say that they have written stories since they were a small child and the years of practice are now coming to fruition. In my case that is not true, or not completely.
I have always enjoyed writing although it has usually been academic or business. I also keep a blog elsewhere and have done for a very long time in internet terms. Then too I worked for the government for a long time so I am quite capable of writing at least one sort of fiction, and I spent a while writing songs, one of which reached the dizzy heights of popularity at my local folk club for a couple of hours and one was a big hit in Bexley Heath.
But at various points in my life I have sketched out ideas for stories and have twice previously started novels only to abandon them when I realised that they were crap. Generally there have been plenty of other displacement activities to occupy my time relatively creatively. I am now of an age, though, where I would like to write something serious and substantial if only to prove to myself that I can.
A couple of years ago I was struck by some ideas which flew in the window of the car and stuck themselves to my face. I had the sense to write them down and then promptly changed jobs and was off on another voyage of discovery. But I came back to them in early September this year and took another look. While my two earlier efforts are still crap (though I can see why they are crap and why one of them might be salvageable) my notes from a couple of years ago are a different matter.
My initial spur to try again, aside from a consciousness of my advancing years, was reading a novel called "A Discovery of Witches" by Deborah Harkness. I found the book in a secondhand shop and thought that it looked sufficiently chunky and interesting for a holiday read - and so it was. I enjoyed the book but what interested me was Harkness's initial impetus for writing it which was some daydreaming in an airport lounge about what witches and vampires might do by way of careers. This struck a chord for some reason. It also helps to know that Harkness has a very successful career as a Professor of History and managed to write a substantial and enjoyable novel in her spare time, wrote an equally substantial sequel and is now on sabattical for a year while she finishes the third volume.
After some pondering I decided to pick up on those notes and try to develop them into a more fully fledged idea. I did some of the usual stuff that I bet most people in my position do - I looked for some help in published "How to.." sources and on line. Although a great many of them are formulaic, nevertheless they have all been helpful in one way or another, mainly by provoking ideas and pushing home the classic verities of structure, characterisation etc. - all of the things that English teachers stress when you are too young to appreciate what they are talking about. Characterisation and absence of serious structure are also a substantial part of why my previous efforts were crap.
There is another big change: motivation. My earlier efforts were effectively sabotaged the minute I put finger to typewriter key in the nineteen nineties or laptop keys in the early two thousands because I was doing it for the wrong reasons - I did not want to write but rather had some notion that I wanted to be "a writer" as an ego trip. I hope I have shed that: I want to write something now because I think I might have something interesting to write.
Next up, the surprising way ideas have mutated in the last three months.
Re-birth
Well, it has been a while. Resetting the password so I could get back into it has helped of course.
This blog is being resuscitated and repurposed, although it will remain anonymous. All I am going to say about my earlier entries (now deleted) is that my fears about Cameron and Osborne have proven to be well-founded.
Anyway, the next post will go into more detail about where this blog is going to go.
Later babies...
This blog is being resuscitated and repurposed, although it will remain anonymous. All I am going to say about my earlier entries (now deleted) is that my fears about Cameron and Osborne have proven to be well-founded.
Anyway, the next post will go into more detail about where this blog is going to go.
Later babies...
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