30 days of nano

30 Days of Nano: Praise the Lord, it’s Day Thirty!

/ lynseywhite / 6 Comments

Am I sad or happy that NaNoWriMo, and hence my 30 Days of Nano blog challenge, comes to an end at midnight tonight?

I’m a mix of the two: I’m shappy.

I didn’t do any writing at all yesterday. I’d already locked and loaded the day’s blog post ahead of time, so I didn’t even write a blog. (Boo! Hiss!)

Statler: I hear they're calling this the Medium Blog. Waldorf: Well it certainly wasn't rare or well done!

Statler: I hear they’re calling this the Medium Blog.
Waldorf: Well it certainly wasn’t rare or well done!

But the day before that, I finished the first draft of my novel.

I don’t think you heard me.

I FINISHED THE FIRST DRAFT OF MY NOVEL!!!!!

Oh yeah. Go me.

Oh yeah. Go me.

 

I had my headphones in when I ‘validated’ on the nano site, and was promptly deafened by their cutesy recorded cheers. But I get to call myself a Winner. Hurrah! I like being a winner. Although it’s possible I’m only a winner for the remainder of 2014…

Winner-2014-Twitter-Profile

But at least I’ll have a month off from being a loser!

What have I learnt from this year’s nanowrimo?

We could really do with a Team America montage round about now.

 

Instead, have some bullet points:

  • The more often you write, the easier it gets.
  • Dorothea Brande was right: the subconscious will provide, if you let it.
  • The more you write, the more frequent your typos.
  • The more you write, the less inclination you have to amend those typos.
  • Sometimes, when you’re writing a lot, your brain attempts to reread, reflect, revise with every random thought you have, and this is almost as annoying as an Agadoo ear worm when you’re trying to sleep.
  • An insight scribbled in your notebook at four in the morning is better than two insights in a bush.
  • Two years of planning and writing and failing and writing and failing and tearing up plans and despairing and agonising and shredding and howling at the moon are all worth it when you’re not even writing your final scene: you’re following it, like a child in the Pied Piper’s wake, and you eat dinner because you have to eat dinner (you’re a human being, natch, and human beings need dinners) but you are eating with your left hand so you can carry on typing with your right.

Over the coming weeks and months it will all go pear-shaped. Of course it will. Bliss is fragile. I’m enjoying it now, because I can. I haven’t read my first draft yet. Why would I? I’m enjoying my honeymoon. You don’t go checking your new husband’s internet history when you’re on your honeymoon, do ya? No siree. You leave that for a rainy day in the future.

It’s not raining today (yet). And it’s too soon to go back to it yet. Fireworks and first drafts: leave ’em alone, for the love of God! 

But I have got a nagging awareness of the ‘project notes’ in my Scrivener file, where I noted down inconsistencies as I thunk of them. And I’ve sent Nancy Drew on the case of The Missing First Four Chapters and she’s presently teaming a rib-knit sweater with a pair of capri pants and enjoying a morning coffee with her kindly-eyed housekeeper Hannah Gruen, but she’s made some preliminary observations already:

  • At 8.04 a.m. the chapters were seen to be partially assembled.
  • They seemed not to be written in English, but gibberish.
  • Consultation with relevant sources suggests that it’s easier to write the beginning once you’ve got the end.

So, mainly because I find that I want to be writing today, and every day thereafter, I’m heading back in to the war zone with my dictaphone and my camera to start fiddling around a bit. (NB: Not to read the draft. Oh no. I don’t want to blow my face off with an unexploded rocket, thank you very much.) Expect further dispatches at some point in the future:

Novel is shit stop send reinforcements stop wondering if I should just stop 

And what have I learnt from my 30 days of daily blogging?

  • I should never compose a post in public, because I find myself quite funny sometimes (and that isn’t socially acceptable).
  • Some posts are bigger than others. (As Morrissey almost said.)
  • If I had to blog every day for the rest of my life, I probably could. But I don’t, so I won’t.

I do like blogging, though. And I like it when folk like my blogs.

This is me in the internet pond:

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This is not me:

That's me holding the fish. Kidding.

That’s me holding the fish. Kidding.

Image source

But that’s cool.

Sometimes a few people stop by. They get snagged on some click bait in a tweet I wrote, or they google a search term that whisks them my way, or they (just occasionally) set out intentionally to come here. They put on their shoes, and coat, and gloves and they strap their binoculars round their neck and they brave the harsh winds of the internet in winter to peer through the fast encroaching fog for the faint glow, up ahead, of lynseywhite.com, where legend has it there are comfy chairs, hot tea, fluffy slippers for frostbitten feet, and a roaring log fire full of clichés. Not to mention willy jokes.

Excuse me a second while I just open the door to let these folks in...

Excuse me a second while I just open the door to let these folks in… they’re cold and tired and mightily in need of a joke about members.

Blogging gives me something (an outlet for my lunacy) that I don’t get from fiction – or don’t get so quickly, and easily, from fiction. So, whether or not there’s anyone out in that snowstorm searching, there’ll always be a brew on at lynseywhite.com (tea only; I don’t do coffee). It’s just I’ll be boiling the kettle slightly less often from December 1st…

We’ve had muppets, and fireworks, and insights in bushes, and weary travellers, and tiny fish… and if that ain’t enough confusing analogies for ya, then let me point you to some of my favourite posts from this whole 30 Days of Nano experience:

Day 18: in which Nano comes of age.

Day 10: my homage to Lorrie Moore’s How to Become a Writer

Day 28: on being an older writer. (The internet liked this one the best.)

Day 6: something quite sensible about finding your ‘seed word’ (as Scarlett Thomas calls it).

Day 29: in which nanowrimo reports on my progress. 

December, here we come.

30 Days of Nano: Day Twenty Nine

/ lynseywhite / 1 Comment

If NaNoWriMo wrote report cards…

Report Card

In general we are pleased to inform you that Lynsey has worked well this month. She completed a total of 74,435 words, amply achieving her personal monthly target of 70,000 with 24 hours to spare, and as regards the story contained within those words we are pleased to describe the present status as ‘motoring along nicely’.

English

Lynsey has shone in this subject, and frankly, considering what she does for a living, it would be bloody worrying if she hadn’t. 

Biology

Lynsey has demonstrated a thorough acquaintance with the human body, in particular the breasts, buttocks, and genitalia and, indeed, writes so frequently about these three areas that one might even describe her as ‘fixated’.

Chemistry

Lynsey has survived the month with no recourse to illegal chemicals, with the exception of the occasional syringe of heroin for medicinal purposes.

Physics

In general, Lynsey has excelled at battery management as regards the use of her laptop in various cafes, except for that one occasion when she didn’t turn the plug on and, consequently, achieved very little actual writing with the 2% remaining of her battery life. She had to read a book instead.

Physical education

We regret to inform you that Lynsey’s progress in PE has fallen far short of the minimum standard required to maintain the healthy functioning of a human body. Indeed we are surprised she’s still alive at all.

Home Economics

Lynsey has used the microwave this month rather oftener than we’d recommend. She did, however, serve vegetables at least twice, and only once, on a wet Wednesday, did she have recourse to a packet of Super Noodles. 

Mathematics

We cannot congratulate Lynsey on her success in this subject. Indeed we are curious as to who she actually is, having never once seen her in class.

Art

Lynsey spends a long time gazing at images on the internet, and although these fall largely under the ‘fine art’ umbrella, as opposed to the ‘hard porn’ umbrella (and frankly we hope never to see such a thing as a hard porn umbrella), she has yet to exhibit any personal skill with a paintbrush. In addition, she has a tendency to daydream. There are those of us in the art department who strongly suspect she’s imagining future book covers.

French

Zut alors! La plume de ma tante. Etc.

German

Efficiency has risen notably since we, in the German department, refused to participate in these fake report cards.

Information Technology

We are quietly pleased with Lynsey’s progress. She has learnt how to arse around on the internet conduct research via google, how to embed tweets and youtube videos in her blog posts, and how to use the strike-through function with the aim of making said blog posts more amusing. We await the examiners’ decision on the success or failure of the latter point.

Religious Education

We gave up on Lynsey a long time ago, and can only report that she needn’t pack woollens for where she’s going. 

History

We are pleased, or perhaps disappointed, to report that Lynsey has utterly failed, this month, to let history repeat itself. Whereas, previously, she might have sat on her arse all month eating biscuits, this year she sat on her arse all month eating biscuits with one hand whilst typing with the other.

Geography

By and large Lynsey has remained in one spot. All month. Thus proving Hemingway’s dictum that writing broadens the ass as well as the mind.

30 Days of Nano: Day Twenty Four

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A first draft is for telling the story to yourself.

The second draft, and the third, and the fourth… and the twenty-seventh… and the four-hundred-and-eleventh… are for telling the story to the reader. In other words: what to leave in (so that everything is not completely baffling) and what to take out (so that you’re not too patronising) and what to rephrase (because that sentence was aesthetically pleasing as the spiral of cat poop that was left for me in the bathtub yesterday morning – not a joke), and so on and so forth.

I wrote 9000 words yesterday, although large swathes of the day were spent on other things, which seems such a miraculous happening that I think we need a spontaneous picture here of some ‘Assorted Saints’ (that’s what the image is called; again not a joke).

And when, then I'd written my 9000 words, I turned some water into wine and verily I did drink it.

And then, when I’d written my 9000 words, I turned some water into wine and verily I did drink it.

 Image source (if you’d care to purchase some religious wallpaper)

There has been some fall-out along the way. A surprising amount of typos can be made when you’re writing as if the story is a train that you’re racing to catch. I’m aware (as I said in yesterday’s post) (which slightly, old-fashionedly, makes me think I’m inside the postbag, or the postbox, or being squeezed through someone’s letter box) (um anyway…) WHERE WAS I? Ah yes. I’m aware of wanting 70 thousand words, instead of the recommended 50 thousand, from this hectic month of November, but that’s only a back-to-front way of approaching the fact that the story seems to need/want/demand another twenty thousand words or so. (The Story should get together and go on a date with those Markets we’re always hearing about, and have a good chuckle over the power of an abstract concept to enslave humankind.)

Really, I’ll just keep writing until I run out of story. It doesn’t matter if that’s 70K or 170K, and

Unknown-2

 

before you tell me ‘no one ever buys first novels longer than 100K’, because first drafts have their own rules, and one of those rules is: THERE ARE NO RULES! Hurray. Cast caution to the wind

Goodbye, caution!

Goodbye, caution!

Image source

and write your little ass off, as badly – or goodly (erm…) – as you like. You will never, never, never again be as free (with this particular book) as you are now.

Remember those halcyon days at the start of a long-term relationship? When it doesn’t really matter what you’re saying, because the other person isn’t listening: the fact that you’re speaking at all – the fact that you exist – is reason enough for your mouth to be opening and closing, while they gaze at your face through the rose-tinted candlelight and wonder how ever their heart could have bothered to beat in the wasteland of their existence before you – you, oh wonderful creature – walked into their life. And even though you never fart in front of them, if you did it would waft like a squirt of Chanel no 5, because nothing can really be wrong that comes out of your body. You could probably even (don’t take my word on this) have a dump on the ground in front of them – possibly even in their shoes – and get away with it. And they’d still want to snog you.

That’s where I am with the novel right now. It can do no wrong. I think about it constantly. I don’t want to know what other people think: if its breath smells like a month-old egg sandwich, or it once went out in public in a denim hat, or it’s actually a closet Tory, or it wanted to do some really strange things with the last girl it slept with. I don’t want to hear that now! I don’t need to hear it. My story’s on a pedestal, god damn it, and it’s going to stay there.

For now.

After Christmas, when I come out from behind the curtains and sneak up on it, unawares, I’ll have taken my love-goggles off and I’ll see it for what it really is. I’ll cringe when it tells me that anecdote about getting arrested in Prague that it doesn’t remember telling me, already, two months ago – and I didn’t really enjoy it the first time, if I’m honest – and I’ll tilt my head and say, ‘Is that a beer belly under there?’ I’ll stop looking under the sofa cushions for that month-old egg sandwich and start leaving breath mints next to the bed. We’ll be out somewhere for dinner with friends, and I’ll hear my novel braying about privatisation, how that’s a good thing, and I’ll notice the man sitting opposite me at the table, who’s telling his neighbour to boycott Shell, and I’ll think to myself, ‘Now he seems nice. Why can’t my novel be like that? Look, he’s pouring water for everyone else first… My novel’s just taken the last shrimp off the plate, and he’s already had his fair share already and then some… Oh Christ, did he just burp?’

It’s going to be a sad and disappointing time. When I start the second draft, I’m going to think everyone at that table is kinder and sexier and sweeter-smelling than the novel I’ve been lumbered with. And I’m not saying I should stay with that novel forever (god forbid, in fact), but you’ve got to at least try to make it work, right?

No matter how much it stinks.

30 Days of Nano: Day Twenty Three

/ lynseywhite / 1 Comment

Some of this please:

FRAME-4

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And this…

Band_Trooping_the_Colour,_16th_June_2007

And also this…

dal_g_cowboys_cheerleaders_b1_576

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Because this happened last night:

So, yes, all the bells and whistles please. With knobs on. I have ‘won’ NaNoWriMo. Sadly there’s no monetary reward, but nevertheless I feel all warm and snuggly inside and isn’t that reward enough on a dull Sunday morning when the rain is dribbling down my window and I didn’t clean the blender yesterday so in order to have our homemade smoothies I will have to WASH DISHES, which I definitely do not want to do.

But that’s not the end of the story! Regular readers of this ‘ere blog may know that, although I’ve been ‘doing’ NaNo, I didn’t begin my project from scratch. It all began (settle down, children, and I’ll tell you a story) two years ago when a yellow-haired girl appeared in my notebook (I never fought in a war, children, so instead must harp relentlessly on about other matters) and then, yada yada, I got a place on the Writers’ Centre Naar-ich’s (people from Nar-folk will know what I’m doing there) Escalator Literature scheme, followed by an Arts Council grant, and before I knew what was happening I’d committed to writing an actual book about old Yellow Hair. And the rest, children, is history.

The important thing, therefore, having ‘won’ NaNo, was to continue writing immediately. Which I did. I wrote another thousand words last night, and then, goodness gracious me:

And:

And… I just swerved there, when you tried to punch me.

And swerved again.

And I will sleep with one eye open, if you’re planning on coming to smother me.

Can I briefly re-enrol myself for Procrastination 101 and point out that it isn’t a book yet. It’s only a sketch for a book. If I posted a few sample pages you’d all like me again, because there is heaps and heaps of work still to do. My target is 70,000 ‘new words’ + the words I’ve already written = something roughly approximating the length of a novel (82K-ish). A lot of those words will go straight in the bin, but it’s all full of story, story, story, so I’m happy enough. For now.

Is this what it feels like in the end stretch of a novel? I’m genuinely asking. Because I’ve never been at the end stretch of a novel before. Not properly. Not since I was 11, anyway (and thrilled because the teacher wanted to make photocopies of it), and I don’t think it counts.

It’s like being a piñata. And somebody hit me, really hard, on the head, and all the words fell out in a single big burst – and the burst is still happening, it seems, so I’d better get back there and keep scooping up the words before some other writer nicks them.

30 Days of Nano: Day Twenty One

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Now I face the important decision of whether or not to hyphenate my twenties.

Decisions, decisions. I’m not very good at them. Which is unfortunate, because a writer needs to make more decisions than an Apprentice project manager in the midst of a cross between a brainstorm and a shitstorm.

You need to make decisions in two places: inside, and outside your novel.

Inside your novel… we’ll come to in a moment.

Outside your novel: simply put, this means making a decision like the one I made at 7 a.m. today. That’s our usual waking-up time on a school day, but my daughter’s not well and after a wee bit of negotiating (in which she made her case very well; guess which side she was arguing?) we agreed that she could embrace that wonderful moment every school kid knows: the one when your mum/dad/gender-neutral-caregiver says, ‘Oh, go on then. Have the day off school.’

 

So now (being an adult who ner-ner-ni-ner-ner can’t be told what to do, not by anyone*) I faced my own little decision: head on the pillow or fingers on the keys?

* If only this was true.

‘I think I’ll do some writing,’ I said to Poorly Daughter.

‘Why would you do that to yourself?’ said Poorly Daughter.

Laughter ensued. ‘Will my typing disturb you?’

‘No,’ said Poorly Daughter. ‘I like hearing you work.’

Spoken like a true Slave Master.

Two things had to happen before any writing could begin: the kettle had to be boiled, and the two large furry cat beasts who dominate our little household had to be momentarily calmed with porcelain dishes of manna from heaven, rubbed on the thighs of virgins and sweetened with the blood of a sacrificial… errrrrr, I don’t really know where I’m going with this. The cats are demanding, anyway. They had some cat biscuits, etc, and became temporarily less demanding. I’ve probably got carried away here.

The Slave Master made this rather excellent montage of her cats. Numbers 1 and 4 are the ones in our house.

The Slave Master made this rather excellent montage of her cats. Numbers 1 and 4 are the ones in our house. Although number 3 actually looks the most demanding here, I have to admit.

So anyway, Decisions inside the novel, she says in a forthright and tally-ho sort of a manner. Now I’m Alan Sugar in the boardroom, loading my firing finger for another fatal shot. (God, I’d love to know if he practises that in front of a mirror.)

Yesterday, after more to-ing and fro-ing than a to-ing and fro-ing thing (I’ve opened my head like a pervert’s purse in a stripclub and all of my similes have fallen out. Except that one. And perverts probably carry wallets, not purses – if that’s not too sexist a comment; it probably is – but damn it I like purse better. So I ain’t changing it. See above, where I said ner-ner-di-ner-ner)… what was the point I was making again? Ah, yes. I’ve been dithering for the longest time about whether or not to have a Dowager Countess in The Fecking Novel. She was in, she was out, she was in, she was out – it was like she was doing the Hokey Cokey! Here come all the similes at once in a veritable avalanche of the bastards: cover your heads, down below! – and I liked writing about her. I liked the way she looked. (Not in that way. Shut your pervert’s purse, please.) She was based, a bit, on my first piano teacher, who was a magnificent turbaned former ballet dancer with perfect turn-out, called Cicely. (She was called Cicely, not her turn-out. Just to be clear. Although Cicely would be a good name for turn-out, wouldn’t it?) She had a Kings Charles called Figgy, who used to sit on the pedals when I was trying to use them, for which I – not Figgy – would be blamed. It was a cardinal sin, during lessons, to glance at the clock. This was the height of rudeness and not to be tolerated. My friend, Kim, was once caught red-handed and claimed, in a rather unconvincing way for a snotty teenager, to be ‘admiring your wallpaper’.

Once, oh hallowed day, I was invited into the Inner Sanctum to run my fingers across the pristine keys of the grand piano that students weren’t allowed to play on. She had a photograph of the bronze cast of Chopin’s hands. I was given a copy of Chopin’s waltzes to borrow.

I went home and told my mum, ‘I’m playing Choppin next week.’

‘Actually, lovey, I think that’s pronounced…’

So, RIP Dowager Countess of Madder. You are cold in your grave. Probably shouldn’t have smoked so many cigarettes. Your only real job was to take your granddaughter to London, but as the plot’s thickened it makes much more sense for your daughter-in-law (who you always hated) to do it instead. Life’s a bitch, sometimes.

And now I’m making the Executive Decision to stop writing this, and get back to the novel. I can do a whole twenty minutes before I have to get dressed, etc. And actually, though you mightn’t think it, you can write a helluva lot in twenty minutes.

Set your timer and see for yourself…

 

 

30 Days of Nano: Day Seventeen

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Hi, I’m Liddy. I’m seventeen, and I’m the protagonist heroine of Madder Hall. 

I’m actually right in the middle of something quite important, but Lynsey’s the boss I’m the boss. And I don’t really like what Lynsey’s making me do. It feels like, everything was fine, okay, and then she went off in this really weird direction and something happened that wasn’t meant to happen, and now we’re just, um, what’s going on, Lesley? (We call her that to annoy her. Once, when she was a little girl, her friend’s mum got confused and wrote Lesley on her party invitation, and ever since then it’s weird but whenever someone gets her name wrong they call her Lesley.)

She got this painting off the ‘internet’ (don’t ask, because I don’t know) and it’s got a vibe about it that reminds her of me, she says:

If you think I know who painted this you've got another think coming.

If you think I know who painted this you’ve got another think coming.

Even though I’m blonde, and this girl is a ginger, and I spend nearly the whole book fiddling with my long yellow hair (it’s like she can’t think of anything else for me to do!). But anyway. Lesley says it’s the look on her face that makes her think of me. Who is she anyway? She’s someone out of the Bible. Change the subject, please.

Lesley recommends ‘googling’ (eh?) a character’s physical ‘attributes’ (whatever they are). She says finding the right sort of face can be very inspiring.

I suppose I’ll have to go back to the plot in a minute. I’m meant to be finding a key. I am really, really cold in that house. We keep having power cuts, because it’s a useful plot device it’s the 1970s. I keep stubbing my toes on the furniture. Give me a torch, Lesley! Or just leave the lights on. (Stop saying it’s the electricity board, Lesley. We all know it’s you.)

She’s says it’s 2014 now, when you’re reading this, and people don’t have hover cars or tinfoil trousers, but they do keep really tiny phones in their pockets and the telly’s on all day. I said, can’t you set the book in 2014 with the permanent telly, but Lesley says no, it’s really not possible because it’s a well known fact that modern technology ruins plots it’s an artistic decision that’s crucial to the tone of the book. So, god, it’s 1979. I don’t even know what a deely-bopper is yet. Or a ra-ra skirt. God knows if I’ll live long enough to enjoy the atrocities of the 1980s.

God knows? I meant to say Lesley knows.

30 Days of Nano: Day Sixteen

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Like Withnail, who went on holiday by mistake, I’ve begun waking up by mistake. At the crack of dawn. And it’s the bloody weekend.

Today, for instance, I woke at the rather tidy time of 5.55 a.m. (6.66 would have been better; spookier. Also, of course, impossible.) I’d been hoping to rack up 30K last night (in total obviously; I’m not that much of a maniac), but as I announced on twitter it proved a step too far:

So, 5.55 (or even 5.59. The twitter clock never lies). You’re awake, it’s a grey Sunday morning, there’s tea in the tin… oh bugger it. You might as well get up.

Boil the kettle, etc. Then get back in bed, where it’s toasty, and crack on with reaching 30K.

I made it! Hurrah!

I tweeted some more stuff about tea:

I made a fresh cup and I got back in bed and I carried on writing. Eventually, when my neighbours woke up, I had this to contend with:

But it takes more than a bit of insanely loud ear-splitting drilling to stop me these days. I’m a woman on a mission. (I like having a mission.) My mission is this: to deliver a first draft (to myself) by Christmas.

I have a few rules: the writing itself can be shoddy as hell, but it has to EXIST. What I mean is, no gaps of the ‘Chapter where something happens (not sure what)’ variety. It’s fine to leave continuity errors to sort out later (Scrivener comes into its own here: each document has a note card for mid-scene scribbling of things to remember), but in general I’m trying to solve each problem as it occurs. 

A large part of the novelist’s job is problem solving. In film terms, you’ve got to produce the damn thing before you pull out the megaphone and direct it.

You start out with this:

Unknown-1

And you end up with this:

images-1

Or possibly this:

discovery-rubiks-fashion__small

Image source

The main thing, with first drafts, is to find the story.

Mme de P and Mme de P prints

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I’ve never been much of a seamstress (I can just about sew on a button) but, having been in a couple of pantomimes as a child, I’m familiar with standing awkwardly – like an upright chalk-outline – while somebody sticks pins in my clothes. (On a side note, I’ve just discovered, via this site, that I was in panto – Dick Whittington – in 1983 with the Chuckle Brothers’ brothers… Genuinely a brush with showbiz glory. The following year it was Wayne Sleep and the Golden Shot’s Anne Aston, who was well known for her boobs, apparently, although being 11 at the time I was unaware of my proximity to these famous assets.)

They don't make them like this anymore. Thank God.

They don’t make them like this anymore.
Thank God.

Enough of that. Although I am writing a book set mainly in the 70s, and if anyone watched Channel 4’s It Was Alright in the 70s last night – which really ought to be ‘all right’ as two separate words, Channel 4, if you’re interested – breasts were everywhere in the decade that taste forgot.

Just when you’re wondering, ‘why are there so many images in this blog?’ you go back and count them and, hey presto, there are sixteen of the buggers. One for each day of nano. See what I did there?

But, wait, you cry! There are only fifteen…

Here you go, pedant.

30 Days of Nano: Day Fifteen

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First draft dialogue, eh? Isn’t it marvellous.

According to a bloody good documentary I saw a while ago, ‘er Royal Highness Hilary Mantel begins with dialogue. (I believe, in said documentary, she claimed she could make dialogue out of the telephone directory.) (And I, for one, believe her.)

First draft of Wolf Hall.

First draft of Wolf Hall.

What makes good dialogue?

I can tell you what doesn’t make good dialogue: the bobbins I wrote this morning. But it’s NaNo, right? It’s just about getting the words down and shaping the scene. And that’s fine.

Just so long as no-one (NO-ONE) ever reads it. Until it’s been put through the Subtlety-Wringer and exorcised of its hideous melodrama.

Most first-draft dialogue (unless you’re extremely good at it) tends towards the melodramatic. People speak their thoughts. They actually answer each other’s questions, as if life was just one big interview session, and tell each other all sorts of things that an actual human being would never reveal without thumbscrews, or a box full of rats, or a hot poker to one’s rectal cavity.

I like writing dialogue, but it isn’t my forte. To be honest, I used to suck harder at dialogue than Linda Lovelace in Deep Throat. It took a long time to get better at it: for a long time I thought ‘getting better at dialogue’ meant rearranging the words somehow (and it partly does mean that; all writing means rearranging the words somehow). It was reading Story by Robert McKee that really woke me up to the flaws in my dialogue. I’d been writing, and rewriting, the same short story – on and off – for fifteen years (this is honestly true) and the bit I was stuck on was a monologue, delivered by a naked nineteen year old boy. It was a Big Moment. It needed to lead to an Even Bigger Moment. I arranged and rearranged those words more times than an obsessive compulsive word-rearranger. But nothing was working. It never rang true.

And the reason it never rang true? I was force feeding him. Like Vincent Price taking gastronomic revenge on a critic in Theatre of Blood (once seen, never forgotten).

More poodle, Sir?

More poodle, Sir?

Good dialogue, as McKee says, comes from knowing your characters. In the case of my unfinished story, the naked nineteen year old’s dialogue never rang true because neither did he. He was only a stooge, shoe-horned into the story to do what I wanted him to. (NB if you’ve just tuned in, I’m talking about a fictional character: I’ve never done anything to a  naked nineteen year old with a shoehorn.) So I had to go back to the drawing board, and re-draw him. He still isn’t right, and I’m still not happy, but neither am I wasting time on dialogue that’s never going to work. I’ll come back to him one day, when the novel’s done, and finish him off. He’s been standing beside some brown curtains in only his birthday suit for a very long time now, watching the rain, and I do feel I owe him a climax, eventually. One day. (I repeat: this is a fictional character. I do not keep naked boys next to my curtains.) (And, besides, they’re red, not brown.) (The curtains, that is.)

Crap dialogue, though, is the lifeblood of NaNoWriMo. (Ah, go on, you know it’s true.) When you’re strolling along in your own time, 500 words a day for instance, you’re stopping and noticing what’s going on in the scene you’re writing. You know what everyone’s wearing, what the weather’s like, what sort of chairs they’re sitting in. You dot the Is and cross the Ts.

When you’re knee deep in NaNo and 4000 words in the red, there’s a natural tendency to resort to dialogue. Slowly the rest of the scene decays, like Joel’s memories in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and you’re left with disembodied voices. Like an episode of the Archers, without any sound effects. (Did you know they use yoghurt pots to make the squelchy lamb noises? And, ahem, this 2013 Storify of the Archers’ twitter Q & A includes a question from… well, yours truly.)

images

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with this. What’s good enough for Her Maj, HM, is good enough for me. Dialogue is a great way of sketching a scene. Just so long as you know that it’s only a sketch, and the colours and textures will have to be painted in later.

As for my word-count, it’s 27,758. Today we’re halfway through. Thanks to yesterday’s slightly bonkers 3798 words, I’m ahead of the game – in spite of a paltry 102 words (of shit dialogue) this morning. I keep having ideas for What Happens Next, and they all seem to function in harmony with each other = A Good Sign, no? I’m also projecting forwards, beyond this draft, to the moment I have to go back and change bits that don’t work. But, hey. That’s what writing is.

I’m off to eat my half-time oranges. Good luck with part 2, everyone!

30 Days of Nano: Day Fourteen

/ lynseywhite / Leave a comment

The one in which I (accidentally) wake an hour early and decide to start writing immediately (by which I mean, after checking Facebook and twitter), amassing 2378 words before breakfast and earning my virtual badge for passing 25,000 words.

It’s been a long week.

On Wednesday I wrote nothing.

On Thursday I wrote garbage.

Discarding paper rubbish

The fruits of Thursday’s labour.

Today I caught up with the story again and, although, yes, I wrote garbage, it was useful garbage.

I had a little epiphany in the shower (which isn’t a euphemism): I think I can actually finish this book. Which isn’t the sort of epiphany you perhaps ought to be having after TWO YEARS of work on a project, but finally it feels concrete and real: an achievable journey – like driving to Sainsbury’s, for instance, as opposed to hang-gliding over the Atlantic ocean.

For so long, a sizeable chunk of this book has been nothing but air. I’ve got lots of beginnings (I really mean lots) and a couple of bits that belong near the end, but the rest was a grey area, filled with Things That Happen and Bits I Haven’t Worked Out Yet and Bridges To Be Crossed When I Come To Them.

Q: Why did the writer cross the bridge (after watching the bridge through binoculars for four months, making copious notes on the bridge’s design and structure)?

A: To get to the other side.

It happens to us all in the end. (Even those of us who could procrastinate for England.) The longing to get to The Other Side becomes so intense that you can’t put off crossing the bridge any longer, no matter how wobbly it looks or how fiercely the wind might be blowing. No matter how many trolls there are underneath it.

Baaaaaaaaaa.

Baaaaaaaaaa.

Image source

Goats have to be brave sometimes, and so do writers. Doing anything that matters to you – really matters – is going to be scary. So long as you’re only thinking about it, and not really doing it (or doing it half-heartedly), the Thing That Matters remains on its perfect pedestal in your mind: unsullied, unspoilt, a work worthy of Shakespeare, and if by any chance it doesn’t quite meet Shakespearean standards, well that doesn’t matter either. You’ve only put half your heart into it: if you really, really, honestly, properly, truly tried it would certainly be a work of brilliance.

And then, eek, you do really try. You honestly, properly, truly try to write this book you’ve been sort-of-writing for so long. And you’re on stage naked and everyone’s pointing and laughing. And what if they’re right to laugh? And what if you’re not very good at the Thing That Matters, the thing you’ve been dreaming of your whole life?

Oh dear.

That’s scary, isn’t it?

Last year I was picked by the Writers’ Centre Norwich as one of their ten ‘Escalator Literature’ writers.

escalator tweet

 

I won’t go on about that, because I’ve already gone on about that probably more times than the average human can bear, but as I wrote in that guest blog for Writers’ Centre Norwich (follow the link if you’d like to know more) our year of professional development had downs as well as ups. Thank the Lord we were never actually naked on stage, but my innermost soul was exposed on a couple of sorry occasions. ‘You want an extract from my novel? For your website? You mean the novel that doesn’t exist yet…?’

‘You want me to give a reading? In front of a bunch of agents? And this would be a reading from…? Oh, right. That novel that doesn’t exist yet…’

If I actually finish this book, then I’ll have to be naked on stage all over again when I send it to agents. And that’s a bit daunting. Am I all mouth and no trousers? Am I scared to put my money where my mouth is? Will I need mouth-to-mouth when the first rejections arrive?

The answer to all three is: maybe. But if three little goats have got the balls to cross that bridge, than so have I.

Although, PS, I don’t actually have balls. I am considering a larger penis though.

 

 

30 Days of Nano: Day Thirteen

/ lynseywhite / 1 Comment

Happy thirteenth day of NaNo! It’s the day your novel gets its tongue pierced and tells you to go feck yourself.

'Thirteen' good film, but seriously bloody scary for anyone who has a teenaged daughter...

‘Thirteen’: a good film, but seriously bloody scary for anyone who has a teenaged daughter…

At least it’s not a Friday, right?

Is your nano-novel having a teenaged tantrum? I left mine alone yesterday, entirely without supervision. Heading back there now to check it hasn’t trashed the house in my absence…

5 minutes later

Fixtures and fittings still in place. An empty bottle of vodka inside the toilet cistern and some fag butts under the bathroom window, but otherwise all seems much as I left it.

An hour later

Hmm. Well, this is a bit annoying. Until today, I had all of my nano words in a single Scrivener file (easier to tot up the word-count that way, as I reasoned) but every five thousand words or so there were strange blank spaces appearing (as if the words had been struck-through, but the strike-through itself was invisible, if that’s not too horribly complicated an image to fathom). Hence, a decision was made! Create a new project, solely for nano, split everything in that way too long document into separate scenes, give the scenes little titles, and see where we are. (It turns out it’s the work of, oh, about six seconds, to click: Project; Statistics and tot up the total.)

Where we are, people, is 410 words down on what I thought my word-count was. I’ve heard mutterings, on the internet, about Scrivener word counts not being entirely reliable, and I’m as confident as a jelly-head like me can be that I haven’t accidentally deleted something. So I’ll have to push on, writing 410 extra words on top of the double quota I already had to do today, anyway, because yesterday didn’t happen, blah blah, world’s smallest violin, etc. 410 words is a small price, though, because two important things have happened:

  • I’ve been reminded of things I’d forgotten I’d written (continuity errors ahoy!)
  • I’ve gained a bird’s eye view of proceedings (insert proverb here about ‘wood’ and ‘trees’ and not being able to see one for the other).
I heart Scrivener.

I heart Scrivener.

I know I’ve gone on about Scrivener before (here), but I really, honestly, do recommend it for those of you writing novels. If you do what I’ve done, and name every scene, you’ll be able to look at the spine of your story, so far, while you’re writing, in that left-hand column there (see above). I much prefer finding the spine in a book that has flesh on already, instead of the more traditional way: spine first, flesh later. Which isn’t to say I’m a ‘pantser’ (a person for whom plotting is anathema). It’s just that plotting ‘cold’ doesn’t work for me: I need to plan a bit, write a bit, plan a bit, write a bit. Realise my original plan was bullshit and start all over again. It takes longer that way (unsurprisingly). But, for me, it’s more truthful. I can’t get on board with a scene – no matter how ‘vital’ to my plot – if that scene doesn’t yank my chain somehow. And there’s simply no way to know what will yank your chain, when you actually sit down to write it, and what will leave you colder than David Cameron in his underpants than to… well, to actually sit down and write it. 

I don’t think I’m that great at the nuts and bolts of plot, but I do know when it isn’t working (I’m in good company, here: Stanley Kubrick – one of my top five directors – often knew what he didn’t want, more than what he did want). I make up for it, I hope, by being pretty good on theme and unity. I try to convince myself, quite often, that what I’ve got is okay, serviceable, perfectly good – but there’ll always be a niggle, until I’ve condensed all the disparate elements down to their absolute minimum. As I wrote about here, you don’t want any extra baggage.

Trust your instincts. If something feels wrong, it probably is.

30 Days of Nano: Day Twelve

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Yes, it's day 12. Here's a film poster with the word twelve in the title. Just me, or does this sound vaguely homoerotic?

Yes, it’s day 12. Here’s a film poster with the word twelve in the title. Just me, or does the tagline sound vaguely homoerotic? Is there an extraneous L in the title…?

Last night, at the eleventh hour on day eleven of my NaNo experience, I’d tucked myself up in bed with a cat lightly nestling against one of my legs in a don’t-you-dare-get-up-to-use-the-toilet kind of a way, when I realised that (in spite of being, at 20,000 words, a little ahead of the word-count game) my daily word-count was thirty words below the magic 1667 required to make the daily word-count bar turn green on the NaNoWriMo site. As I’ve already told you here, the girly swot inside me loves the back-pat of the bar turning green. Hence, with a bit of a huff and a puff, I decided I’d dash off thirty words and make my target like the good girl I am.

First, and most obviously, before any actual words could be written it seemed imperative to tweet about the terrible quandary I’d found myself in: https://twitter.com/LynseyAnneWhite/status/532311154539102209

A couple of handy suggestions arrived from other wrimos (including perhaps a little too much about snot).

nanonanotweets

There was also a top tip from @Eamonngriffin to splurge the 30 words on note-taking for the following day. However, as I work in Scrivener I have a virtual yellow notebook in which to store my notes, and if this was my Nano 2012 (as I blogged about here) I’d have been carefully totting-up every one of those notes and adding them to the word-count. But this is Nano 2014, and I am deadly (deadly) serious about finishing this fecking draft by the middle of December (because, as I blogged about here, NaNoWriMo should really be called National Two-Thirds of a Novel Month. Except it’s not so catchy). So I am not minded to cheat in any way whatsoever. I’d only be cheating myself.

So, back to the drawing board. Thirty words. Should have been easy, right? After all, I’ve expended about 300 of the buggers just describing The Quandary of the Missing 30 Words (one of the great, lesser-known Nancy Drew stories) in this post that you’re reading now. (Possibly skimming…) Here’s a picture to draw your attention again in case you are skimming:

shocked_face

Image source

But the thing was… the place where I’d left the story (I’m always leaving things in inappropriate places: keys, purse, brain…) was midway through a sentence. And not just any sentence, but one that had no clear ending in mind. You hop in the car to go collect your daughter, thinking the sentence will finish itself while you’re driving, but then you start singing along to an Elliott Smith CD (as you do) and shouting at people who aren’t driving their cars as you firmly believe they should be driven (i.e. at a speed greater than that best described as ‘pootling along’ when the bloody light’s about to go red, you Olympic Slow-Driving dope), and you get home from your journey with the sentence still unfinished.

More crucially, when I read it again, it turned out that the start of the sentence was taking things in the wrong direction. And, also, more woefully, the two previous sentences weren’t right either. Faster than you could say ‘never delete anything from your nano word-count (just grey it out instead)’ I’d done the unthinkable – and ended up with an extra 89 words to write. In the spirit of NaNo, this was a giant bah humbug of a thing to do. But I’m not really arsed (if I’m going to be completely honest) about ‘winning’ NaNo. I like the companionship of it all, and the gold stars of the bars going green (if you’ve clicked on some of the previous links this will make more sense to you), but I ‘won’ NaNo in 2012 with a pile of directionless drivel. And it wasn’t actually (sshh, don’t tell anyone) that great a feeling. Gah, I’m sorry. I don’t want to rain on the nano parade, but the process of accumulating words is a poor relation to writing an actual story. In novel-writing, as with sex, it’s a lot more enjoyable for everyone involved if you’re at least working towards a climax.

So whereas, in NaNo 2012, I had over 1000 words (a mere tenth of my final day splurge) about two girls peeling potatoes, I decided to spend my 89 words on an unexpected turn in the dialogue: to build myself a through-road, instead of a cul-de-sac. A thousand words spent backing your story into a corner are probably, in all honesty, a thousand words wasted (although nothing is ever wasted in creative endeavour, blah blah blah). As you travel the road to nano word-count victory, whether you’re Lewis Hamilton or Mr Olympic Slow-Driver, don’t forget you are meant to be nudging the story along, occasionally…

30 Days of Nano: Day Eleven

/ lynseywhite / 2 Comments

Weird how you can talk things up sometimes. After yesterday’s post about sickeningly enormous nano word counts I went to my local wrimo write-in and found myself next to a couple of (very non-sickening) young women with (extremely sickening) word counts of 37,000 and… 49,500. The latter actually won nano whilst sitting beside me.

It is day eleven. What the fricking frick is going on? Now I’m a fast typist (used to be 150 wpm in my Glory Days, which weren’t that glorious at all actually, as a London secretary) and ask me how quickly the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog and the answer is: pretty damn quickly. But, still. I mean, that’s insane, right? (Please tell me I’m right.)

What does a dog have to do to get some sleep around here?

What does a dog have to do to get some sleep around here?

             Image source

And I can vouch for the fact that Miss 49-thousand-er* was neither lying, nor writing Shining style (as I suggested yesterday) because I had the tiniest of tiny crafty glances at her screen and they were proper sentences n all that. And she wasn’t wielding a pick-axe, nor bouncing a ball against the ballroom walls, nor developing strangely peaked eyebrows.

But she was writing with an almost inhuman speed. Like a nano-bot, you might say. No pauses. I had a little burst like this, myself, last week, but I can’t sustain it long term. I need to pause, look up, look out, reflect, make tea, unravel my legs occasionally. Another gunfire burst as the words spurt out, then head up again – above the parapet – and kettle back on.

What was even stranger, last night, was the way they launched straight in without stopping to think: whenever I come ‘cold’ to my laptop, I need to be wound up first with my little invisible key (oh, all right, if you want to be all factual about it, I need to read back over what was last written; or, sometimes, read another writer’s work) before the music box begins to crank out its tune and, as for that plastic ballerina on her springy leg… you wait all day for a pirouette, and then three come along at once.

Writing, eh.

* Through the magic of twitter, I’m reliably informed that Nanobot Maximus of the 49000+ words, is in fact a local nano legend with the twitter handle @RiaJay21, and well worth a follow.)

30 Days of Nano: Day Eight

/ lynseywhite / Leave a comment

I like the number eight. There are eighty-eight rooms in my imaginary house called Madder Hall. There are eighty-eight keys on most pianos. I was eight when I first learnt the piano. I like how the number eight looks. It’s so curvy and perfect. I like that it stands infinity on its head. (Or perhaps on its bum.)

The Apollo 11 spaceflight in 1969 lasted eight days in total (and three hours, 18 minutes, and 25 seconds if you wanna be a pedant about it). For as long as it took them to fly to the moon and back, we’ve been writing our novels. That’s something to think about. One small step, and all that.

Cue the pep talk about small steps leading to giant leaps leading to completed novels? Nah. This being me, I’m going to talk about the moon instead.

A book about men on the moon, not early pregnancy. (Although the rocket does look a little startled.)

A book about men on the moon, not early pregnancy. (Although the rocket does look a little startled.)

As it happens, I’ve always been happy to look up and see that it’s there, without taking the trouble of hurtling through space in a rocket for one small step (or one giant leap for that matter) on its famously-cratered surface. (And maybe you’re one of those theorists who don’t believe Apollo 11 went either, that film director Stanley Kubrick faked the whole thing with smoke and mirrors.) Whatever your thoughts on the matter, you might like to click on this link while you carry on reading, and listen in to my favourite track from Brian Eno’s 1983 Apollo album, composed for a documentary about the moon landings.

But what has the moon got to do with writing? Lots, of course! It’s one of my favourite props, for a start, (other favourites are clocks and wallpaper, although sideboards appear to be moving up the Madder Hall charts).

A waning gibbous moon, such as we'll see in the sky tonight.

A waning gibbous moon, such as we’ll see in the sky tonight.

A good long lean on your windowsill, late at night (moon-spotting tends to less successful in the daylight hours…) and you’ll find yourself pulled from the grotty interiority of your head and reminded that, hey fella, you’re only a pin-prick in the Grand Old Scheme of Things; but you’re not less of a person for that – you’re more. You are made out of stars (so the science folk tell me), and here you are, living on earth, breathing air, being human, all sharing this moon. If you let your mind stretch up to space for a bit (on its tiptoes) and feel the vastness of the universe, you’re less likely (I reckon) to find yourself writing this sort of thing (from the very wondrous Wondermark by David Malki: much amusement to be had if you click that link):

More wondrousness can be found at http://wondermark.com

More wondrousness can be found at http://wondermark.com

I have one more reminder for you, in the shape of Graham Greene’s short story, The Invisible Japanese Gentlemen (full text here), that a good novelist always looks outward as well as inward. Your first job is to notice. Go out in the world and just, you know, notice shit. If you don’t take the trouble to look, you won’t see it.

And, talking of looking: well, looky-here. How many (invisible) Japanese gentlemen are there in Greene’s story?

Eight, of course.

I love it when a plan comes together.

(Oh, and PS: 13,369 words and counting on the NaNometer. Kinda wishing there were 8,888 instead. But, also, kinda not wishing that.)

30 Days of Nano: Day Seven.

/ lynseywhite / 2 Comments

lucky-7On the seventh day of Na-No… I have no swans-a-swimming (or French hens, turtle doves, or gold rings for that matter), but I do have 12,659 words. And, better still, I have fallen through the hole in the paper, as once described by Stephen King. There’s a feeling, a rather nice feeling, that the story is happening all by itself and I’m just an observer. images-1

I know better, though, than to trust this feeling. Your relationship with your work is like any other relationship: it changes from day to day. If you never get too cocky, and never get too despondent, it all evens out in the end.

When I first did NaNo, two years ago, it was like throwing paint at a canvas to see what would stick. Not a lot, as it turned out. In lieu of a story, I wrote random scenes – in no particular order, as Dermot says, tediously, every week on the X-Factor – interspersed with quotes: ‘Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea’ – Iris Murdoch, and comments on my progress, e.g. ‘Utter shit I’m writing! I have no idea where to begin.’ (I did, of course, include these asides in my final word count.) If you’d asked me five minutes ago, I’d have said that I’d jettisoned everything in that 2012 NaNo, that all of it turned out to be useless (although not a waste of time: I’m a great believer that nothing you write is ever really wasted). But, as if to prove doubly my point about waste, I’ve just come across this in the 2012 file:

What had become of their caps, she wondered? She thought of their hundreds and hundreds of caps,

And their aprons, their dresses, all starched, and smart. Their shoes. She could picture them. She could smell the starch of their dresses. The [what did they use to clean with?] She could hear a broom sweeping.

Partly gibberish, of course, but not a million miles, I’ll sure you’ll agree, from this passage in the latest draft:

In the old days, she thought, it would have been different: a snowstorm of white caps and aprons, an army of boots on the backstairs, the slashing of starched black skirts. She imagined them lugging tin buckets to fill bathtubs, red-faced and steamy, their hands squelching wet. All the linen would have to be lathered by hand, or by mangle – whatever that was; she had seen the word once in a history book – and there weren’t such things as telephones back then: when they wanted to summon you, there were old-fashioned bells with brass tongues; the same bells she’d seen in the passage downstairs that were turning to rust.housemaids_001

You’d never put on a play without rehearsals; our first drafts (and second, and third, and so on) give us writers an opportunity to rehearse. Whereas NaNo 2012 (for me) was pure improvisation, this year’s NaNo (so far) feels more scripted. The sets have been built, the lights rigged up. There were lots of extraneous people just hanging around: they’ve gone home now (‘home’ to the Character Graveyard in the sky). In 2012 I felt a bit like an actor playing a novelist. I don’t quite feel like a novelist yet (because that would be cocky, and cocky is wrong), but I think, this time round, the giant blob of words in my nano file is beginning to resemble an actual novel…

30 Days of Nano: Day Five.

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FuenfteDeckblatt It’s fair to say that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is a lot more successful than my fifth day of NaNo has been. Then again, Beethoven’s Fifth is a lot more successful than 99.7% of human artistic endeavour, so I’m not feeling too disheartened about it. I’ve only done 962 words, but I also wrote some cheesy limericks for an evening class on prose rhythm:

There was once a balloon that deflated
On its owner’s poor ear drums it grated.
It went round and around
With a terrible sound
As if someone was being castrated.
 

I’ve been reading a lot about metre today. As I said in a previous post all my writing is done to a rhythm. I can’t seem to stop it. I free write sometimes purely for the sound of words, because trying to balance meaning and sound gets too damn frustrating now and again. It’s only in the last few years that I’ve known what anapaests and amphibrachs and dactyls are, though I’ve always (it seems like) known instinctively that I need a TUM-ti-ti rather than a ti-ti-TUM to make a sentence ‘scan’. I could write till the cows came home about sausages burning in cauldrons and yellow-tipped whiskery ladies and bombs dipped in sugar for no other reason than this: that I worship the sound of the words (and I even chose that pretentious word, ‘worship’, because love didn’t fit with the rhythm). I learned today that Jean Cocteau knew Shakespeare was a great writer, because – without speaking a word of English – he could ‘hear’ his greatness. Some words just sound nice together. (Although let’s also quote Auden here, in an essay on poets in translation: ‘A poet like Campion […] whose principal concern is with the sound of words and their metrical and rhythmical relations, cannot be translated at all. Take away the English language in which his songs were written, and all that remains are a few banal sentiments.’ Quick confession: I don’t know who Campion is.)

I’ve just been a-googling and, hey nonny nonny, he’s referring (I assume) to Thomas Campion, a 16th century musician and poet. Don’t laugh at me if I’ve got the wrong Campion.

It’s not to be forgotten, though, that the simplest and plainest of sentences – ‘It felt nice’ are the final three words of one of my stories – can offer an impact, in context, that can’t be achieved by sound alone. When I read young people’s writing, now, I can hear the same cockiness I recall from my own early pieces: rejoicing in words for the pure sake of words, and the cleverness of it all. When you don’t know a lot about life you’ve got nothing but words. This is not to say someone who’s young has no hardship to write about – that would be stupid – but only that those of us not in the first flush of youth have had longer to process those hardships, and being a little bit closer to death you do tend to assess your life differently. I am wiser, now, and a better writer, than I was at twenty-one, or thirty-one. I no longer hear rounds of applause in my head when I find a new simile (I can still recall typing the toothpaste tips of the waves on the crappy old plasticky typewriter I took to university and thinking I was nothing short of a genius). I like writing dialogue now – whereas I used to hate it: I couldn’t be quite so pretentious when writing dialogue. It felt like a waste.

If there’s one thing a word-freak like me can be thankful to NaNoWriMo for, it’s the useful reminder that novels are stories, and stories are all about people, and words are the medium through which we elucidate character – not the other way round. There’s no time, writing close to two thousand words a day, to get precious or picky: you have to do what the novelist Julie Myerson once advised, on the subject of ‘getting stuck’: lower your standards, and move on.

Let’s finish with a picture of the band Five to ensure we cover the whole musical spectrum.

On second thoughts, let’s not.

30 Days of Nano: Day Two

/ lynseywhite / Leave a comment

Family emergencies: ONE – NaNoWriMo: NIL 86809283 It’s quarter to five in the evening (or is quarter to five still afternoon? I’m never quite sure). The sky is a moody blue (Mike Pinder, say) and the moon looks hazily through my bedroom window: ‘Ahem, you there. Yes, you, with your laptop open to BBC iPlayer. I’ve travelled 54,000 miles in the last 24 hours. What have you done?’

Hmm. Well, we did have a family emergency (literally just as I’d opened my document to start working…) The moon is a little blasé when it comes to emergencies. The moon has a serious work ethic.

*

It’s quarter past five now. The streetlights are on. What was green just an hour ago has become only vague silhouettes. Nightfall has swallowed the rooftops and chimneys. The moon has moved on, to a new piece of sky, a new window, another work-shy writer.

I’ll just boil the kettle and then I absolutely will get on with my novel…

*

The sky is black now. Light shines on the rooftops of cars. People walking appear for a little while as they pass by a streetlamp, then vanish again. There are fairy lights in my neighbour’s tree. They’re like stars. I can see my own face in the window in front of me.

Night falls faster than you think it will. Time flies.

I think I’m panicky enough now to actually start writing.

(P.S. Final word count for the day: 1829. V. good.)