Nano Diary

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:

4496504859_3e846f5198

Image source

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 Eight

/ lynseywhite / 5 Comments

Woke up, fell out of bed, dragged a comb across my head… and decided this twenty-eighth post of my 30 day challenge would be about ageing.

And then, because I’m in the magic zone where synchronicity just happens, I read an interview with novelist Marilynne Robinson while drinking my morning tea and, abracadabra, these words appeared on the end of my wand:

ROBINSON

I have a sense of urgency about what I want to get done and I discipline myself by keeping to myself. It’s a nice opportunity to be able to know these people, but I have to do other things, which take hours, days, weeks.

INTERVIEWER

Have you always felt that urgency or is this something new?

ROBINSON

It’s a little new. Years ago, I was younger than I am now.

You can read the full article here (which appeared, in 2008, in the Paris Review: and why, when I’m reading the Paris Review, do I always glance down at my clothes, and my choice of beverage, and the shabby chair I’m sitting on, with the airy disdain of a Parisian waiter and remember all over again that I’ll never be truly cool?).

But I digress…

Years ago, I was younger too.

I had the heartwarming experience yesterday of bumping into an old work mate, and being told I looked younger than ever – ‘like a schoolgirl’! (It was a dark street.) Perhaps, with some vaseline on the camera lens, I could just about pass as a schoolgirl of the Grease variety, where Rydell High was patently populated by students pushing thirty, but, no, I am not a schoolgirl and do not look like one. Even though I do wear bunches sometimes. And my management of my finances is positively schoolgirl-ian in its consistent focus on instant gratification.

Perhaps do something clever with soft-focus lenses, a la Joan Collins in a 1967 episode of Star Trek. (William Shatner's focus was warts-n-all sharp as a tack.

Perhaps do something clever with soft-focus lenses, a la Joan Collins in a 1967 episode of Star Trek. (William Shatner’s focus was warts-n-all sharp as a tack.

Like Kit Williams in Masquerade, I’ve laid a trail of clues in recent posts as to my exact age, so, ahem, we won’t mention it here. But I’m quite a lot older than I was when I first had a sniff at a publishing deal (I was 20, Fact Fans). And the 17-year-old Lynsey who tore open her acceptance letter from The Rialto and positively floated to school because she was going to be A Poet… would have to wait an awful lot longer than anticipated for her next piece of work to be published. (Twelve years, Fact Fans. Although two came in the same week, which reminds me of something about buses… and men…)

And now here I am, X number of years later, writing my first novel at the age of… let’s just say I’m une femme d’un certain age and leave it at that.

For a person who’s always written, since the age of 6, it’s a fairly clear indictment of the way I live my life that I’ve made so little finished work in that time. When I say ‘always’ written, I mean: ‘always thought of myself as a writer’ – when others, assessing the ‘work’ they’d produced so far, might have slipped by the wayside and started to call themselves other things: butchers, bakers, candlestick makers. Hah, kidding! I meant, of course, productivity managers, process administrators, data coordinators.

(In the process of writing this post I’ve just discovered a job I’d never heard of before, Penguinologist, and now I’m not entirely sure I want to be a writer anymore. Is it too late to swap?)

Gratuitous penguin pic.

Gratuitous penguin pic.

Is it good or bad to be an older first-time novelist? (I’m going to proceed as if it’s a foregone conclusion that I’ll get my book published, if that’s all right with you; because proceeding on the basis that I’ll have to resign it to the digital graveyard is a bit too annoying to think about at this late stage in the writing.)

Let’s look at the pros:

  • I have never before known as much as I know at this moment. (Not even when I was sixteen, when I knew everything.)
  • I do not believe that alliteration alone is enough to carry a sentence.
  • I have evolved to the stage where I need/want/have very little in the way of social life.
  • My daughter’s on the waiting list for surgical attachment to her iPhone, and no longer requires my presence now, now, now at all times.
  • I’ve been down this jolly old road before, and succeeded a bit, and failed a bit, and I know life carries on no matter what. (Writing carries on, too, no matter what.)

And now the cons:

  • I won’t look like Zadie Smith in my author photos. (Did I before? Er… well… no. But you know what I’m saying here.)
  • Assuming the publishers wanted one at all, I would probably be encouraged to have a very small, stamp-sized author photo as opposed to a full cover close-up.
  • There can’t ever be a publishing frenzy about the Hot Young Author called Lynsey White.
  • My chances of making the Granta Best British Novelists list are dead in a ditch.
  • If there’s ever a launch party for my book, I won’t especially want to go. I’ll want to be home drinking cocoa.

Try as I might, I cannot find a single ‘con’ to do with the actual writing. (Oh, hang on! Here’s a tiny caveat: sometimes when I have a great insight, I go to my laptop to write it all down and… ah, now, what did I come in here for again?)

All the cons have to do with publicity, and marketing, and USPs, and sales graphs, and the fact that a publisher is buying you as well as your book. Graham Greene could refuse to be filmed during an interview, but very few have that luxury now. Not that I’ve got anything against interviews, per se: it’s quite clear to you all, by now, that I really like to talk about myself. (Shutting me up would probably be the issue.) But, no, I’m no spring chicken, no whippersnapper, no Mozart-ian genius sprung from the ether.

But writing is an art that doesn’t lend itself to Mozart-ian genius. Having a ‘way with words’ is all very well – in fact it’s wonderful – and you will need a way with words if you’re hoping to write literature (and a ‘way with words’ is fairly impossible to learn, I think: in that respect, yes, there can be a Mozart-y element to it all). But pick up ‘a way with words’ and rattle it and – yes – it’s empty. Until you have something to say, it will always be empty.

I’ve read books recently (Jennifer Egan’s first) and even a Booker Prize nominee (won’t say which one) that left me thinking: clever, but empty. Step away from the Mozart Model of creativity, and turn instead to Beethoven, who said that mistakes were forgivable; what wasn’t forgivable, was playing without passion. Music schools today are crammed to the rafters with kids who can knock off a Flight of the Bumblebee with the effortlessness I reserve for Twinkle Twinkle Little Star…

…but that doesn’t mean they’re making music. (They might be; they might not.) Flying fingers are a conduit to making music, not an end in themselves, no matter how fantastically impressive it all looks – and is (don’t misunderstand me: if I could play like that I’d be doing it right now instead of writing this post). But without emotion, it’s only sport; not art.

My fingers could fly twenty years ago, but it would have been mostly sport I was offering. And so, at the ripe old age I am, I feel properly (honestly!) glad that I didn’t get published twenty years ago. I didn’t know what I was doing.

I still don’t know what I’m doing half the time. But at least now I know I don’t know what I’m doing…

This post is dedicated to PD James, who died yesterday. She never knew it (and doubtless would have been unexcited had she known) but she was the subject of my GSCE Extended Essay in 1989. For which I got an A. So, thank you, PD James, for my A grade, and for proving that women writers can be wanted, welcomed, accepted, even though they don’t begin until they’re pushing forty.

pd james

Thank you, PD James. Hope there’s a really great library up there in the sky. You deserve one.

 

30 Days of Nano: Day Twenty Four

/ lynseywhite / Leave a comment

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

Image source

And this…

Band_Trooping_the_Colour,_16th_June_2007

And also this…

dal_g_cowboys_cheerleaders_b1_576

Image source

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 Two

/ lynseywhite / Leave a comment

Which dead celebrity would you most like to have sex with?

I don’t even have to think about my answer. There’s close competition from Jeff and Tim Buckley, and I always had kind of a crush on Philip Seymour Hoffman, but give me Franz Liszt circa 1840 and all others pale by comparison.

Hungarian composer Franz Liszt (1811–1886). Be honest: you wouldn't kick him out of bed on a cold night.

Hungarian composer and virtuoso pianist Franz Liszt (1811–1886). Be honest: you wouldn’t kick him out of bed on a cold night.

 

(Editor’s note: This is the post that immediately loses me all the new subscribers I picked up yesterday… It’s mostly an extravagant preamble, an Oscar Wilde-style ‘eloquent circumlocution’ if you like, to point you towards my new page – up above – called ‘Music to Write to, which I hope you’ll take a gander at, even if you drop out HERE and read no further…)

Liszt was a rock god before rock gods were invented. Women collected the butts of his cigars and wore them on chains around their necks. They swooned at concerts. They abandoned their husbands for him. They wrote novels about him. I’m certain they’d have thrown their knickers at him if not for the peskily-awkward nature of Victorian fashion.

And did all this adulation turn Liszt into a massive cock?

Well, probably. At first. But he was also (Lynsey pulls sad face) devoutly religious (except for the ‘thou shalt not fornicate bit’; but if you look like Liszt and you play piano like Liszt and you don’t fornicate, you’re certifiably insane I reckon. Even God on his cloud was, like, ‘eh, go on, then, ya scallywag’.) He was a bit of a Big Head, it has to be said: ‘Génie oblige!’ was one of his sayings – nothing to do with a man in silk trousers granting you three wishes, but rather a twist on the ‘noblesse oblige‘ idea that those with money and power were meant to do their bloody bit for others. Likewise, those who were… well, geniuses (oh go on, let him off; he was a genius) were required to step up and… um… share themselves. (All credit to Liszt, he did share himself admirably well.) Génie Oblige finds its contemporary expression in Spiderman’s dictum that ‘with great power comes great responsibility’. Bet you never thought Liszt and Spiderman would be likely bedfellows, but there you are. We none of us know what life (or, indeed, this blog) will bring our way.

The man in action.

The man in action.

 

All of which is a STUNNINGLY LONG-WINDED way of saying that Liszt played his concerts for free.

For free.

That’s right. Just like the millionaire rock stars of today, who feel they probably have enough money already (how many houses, helicopters, pool tables, swimming pools, etc, does one rock star need?) and they want to thank their fans by…

Charging them as much money as possible.

Lovely.

For years Liszt was nothing to me but a painting on an album cover: a compilation of his Hungarian rhapsodies. Then, one night, I was reading a book about Chopin and, much as I love Chopin, whenever Liszt came striding in he swiped the scene from under Chopin’s pointy nose. While Chopin was pining for Georges Sand and palely coughing, Liszt was charming the copious undergarments from virtually everyone except Clara Schumann (who loathed him) and running away to an island with Marie D’Agoult and being twice as charismatic as Emma Thompson on the Graham Norton Show (and that was a whole lot of charismatic) crossed with Benedict Cumberbum and a side order of Christopher Walken in King of New York. 

In fact, before Madder Hall came along, I was planning a 12-part novel based on Liszt’s Transcendental Études for solo piano… Now, calm down, I know that excites you, but don’t all squeal at once, please: this is an Englishwoman’s blog. I’ll get an attack of the vapours if you keep on like that.

(Heard the oddly-quiffed Evgeny Kissin play this live at the Barbican last year, and practically went into the stratosphere, such was my delight.)

I strongly suspect that everyone’s packed away their pencil case and gone home for their tea now, because you probably all heard the school bell about seven paragraphs ago, while I was enjoying myself on one of my favourite topics. Am I alone now? (As Tiffany nearly sang.) If so, I could literally write anything I wanted to…

Unknown-1

 Image source

Just getting a cat to stroke…

Right, back now. Plus cat.

 

Watch out for the radioactive eyes.

Watch out for the radioactive eyes.

As I said at the start of this L O N G post, I’m in a musical kinda mood because I’ve just stuck a brand new page at the top of the site, and it has lots of musical links you mightn’t have come across before, and there might just be something to tickle your fancy. So do check it out.

And, partly, I suppose I’m trying out ideas for Book Number 2. Book Number 2 is going to be musical. I don’t mean it’ll come with a birthday-card jingle inside (although, hmm, there’s an idea…) or a Jamie Oliver style CD-to-cook-to (could you be any more twee and middle class and faintly annoying, Jamie?). I mean it’ll be about music. (Except it won’t, of course. It will be about having sex and then dying, which I what I always seem to write about.)

It won’t be about Liszt, though. Because Liszt is sort of in Madder Hall. And if you visit my About Me page you can hear me describing the character he inspired.

PS: for those who’re interested, my NaNo word count stands at 43,726. As of 10.04 this morning.

P.P.S. Just realised I told my friend Jon, over coffee yesterday, that this would be about raspberries. (Perhaps it should have been.)

Here's an otter blowing a raspberry. Just for you, Jon.

Here’s an otter blowing a raspberry. Just for you, Jon.

 

 

30 Days of Nano: Day Twenty One

/ lynseywhite / Leave a comment

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 Nineteen

/ lynseywhite / 2 Comments

Day nineteen and the poop’s hit the fan.

 

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Here’s a woman looking shocked, because that’s probably more palatable than a picture of some shit and a fan.

 

Image source

The poop’s hit the fan in sort of a good way (if poop hitting a fan can ever be good). But I’ve got to a take a big, deep, gulp of a breath before I go on, because:

Last night, rather unexpectedly, part one came, splat, crash, bang to a sudden and unexpected end. (Did I mention it was unexpected?) Somebody hijacked the scene (I will say no more because: spoilers), and just plain stole another character’s Big Moment from under his nose.

And now, and now, I have no option but to move on to part two.

If you’ll allow me a teeny tiny primal scream @!*(%&£*@(!*$)£$£)%^&^*^!!!)*(£*$&% before we move on, part two has a change of voice. A change of person, or narrative mode, or whatever you prefer to call it. ‘Third person close’ is my comfort mode, where the slippers and blankie and chocolates are kept. First person (for me) is the writing equivalent of the hospital appointment I’ve got this afternoon (my second this week; how did that happen? Side note: do hospitals mind people tapping away on their laptops while they’re waiting? I am very slightly scared of medical receptionists and do not want to get told off). How could a narrative mode be a hospital appointment, I hear you ask? Because hospital appointments are niggly and worrying, and I’m just a bit niggled and worried about such an enormous change of voice.

Here’s where NaNoWriMo works its magic: if this was any other month than November, I might kick back for a couple of days… a week… a month… a decade… with my butt gently resting on The Laurels of having completed part one (and I use ‘completed’ in the ‘incomplete’ sense of the word, because I already have a list of 5 scenes I’ll have to go back and add later). But this is no ordinary month! This is National Novel Writing Month. Laurels be damned. I have got to start writing the next bit immediately, now, when the iron’s red hot and the tea’s still warm and the story is still fresh in my mind. And this is A Good Thing™ because, too often before, whilst luxuriating on my Laurels, I’ve let go of the story. *Searches for an analogy; realises she hasn’t had breakfast yet; comes up with this.* I’ve let my Story Toast go cold, and when I finally come to spread it and eat it the butter doesn’t sink in properly and the bread is slightly less crisp than a car tyre.

Top tip of the morning to ya: Don’t let a story go cold. Seriously, don’t. If you can possibly help it. *Searches for an analogy; has no idea (Freud, where are you?) why she comes up with this one.* In this respect (and this respect ONLY), a novel is like a testicle: it crawls back up when it’s cold.

But I’m being a tad dramatic (and icky). I’ve already written a chunk of part two (see here for a nouvelle-cuisine sized extract), so it isn’t as massively daunting as it might otherwise be – but it’s still a huge sea change after 36 thousand and something something words in third person. Will it irritate the hell out of readers who’ve spent 36 thousand and something something words with one character, Liddy, to discover we’re moving on? (Sort of.) Very possibly. Enormous SIGH. But the book hasn’t even been written yet, let alone read by anyone, let alone accepted by an agent, let alone bought by a publisher, let alone published – so I say to myself: FEAR NOT, write it anyway, write the book as you want it to be, and worry about the one-star reviews if and when anyone but yourself ever reads it.

Wander by Amazon’s Wolf Hall page and have a look-see at the kicking that Hilary Mantel’s Booker-winning tome receives on a regular basis, and remind yourself that you can’t ever please all the people, etc etc, so pleasing yourself is a good place to start. No? (Now I have to curtsey, doff my cap, and lightly flog myself with something made of birch for daring to write of my own paltry efforts in the same breath as mentioning Wolf Hall.)

It's just you, mate. (And 1196 other people.)

It’s just you, mate. (And 1119 other people.)

 

30 Days of Nano: Day Seventeen

/ lynseywhite / 1 Comment

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

/ lynseywhite / Leave a comment

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

Image source

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 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

/ lynseywhite / Leave a comment
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 Ten

/ lynseywhite / 4 Comments

How to be a Week-Two NaNoWriMo Writer (with thanks, and copious apologies, to Lorrie Moore, whose rather wonderful story How to Become a Writer can be read in full here.)

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Yeah, yeah, 47000 words, yeah *sure*…

Congratulate yourself. You are here, in the wasteland of week two, when so many others have fallen. You’ve watched the NaNo hashtag sliding up and down the trending ranks on twitter, like a lift between floors. You’ve clicked on the hashtag, smug with your word count; discovered that everyone in the universe has actually written more than you; written 900 words in a Chardonnay-infused haze to catch up (although secretly thinking they’ve all gone Jack Nicholson in The Shining: All work and no play, etc, or else are lying).

Click onto your Scrivener file; read the 900 booze-infused words; have a cry. Or some tea. Or some wine. Or some heroin.

Compose lighthearted tweets about willies.

Send inspirational tweets to other writers (who need cooling down after writing a saucy scene):

Replenish your wine glass. Watch the last Doctor Who on catch-up. Wonder if you’re alone in sort of, a little bit, fancying Peter Capaldi. Converse with a writer on twitter, committing yourself in a public arena to writing another 1500 words by the end of the day.

Feel a little bit ‘meh’ about starting this scene (which is hard, as scenes go: strong emotions, etc)… but, joints nicely oiled by el vino, you find it much easier than you thought it would be. In fact (let’s not mince words) you’re writing like a fiend, or a demon, or Jack Nicholson in The Shining, and even if Jack Nicholson came raging towards you –Here’s Joohhnnnyyy! – with a pick-axe in his hand you would probably not even notice. That’s how in The Zone you are.

Nothing can hurt you when you're in The Zone.

Nothing can get you when you’re in The Zone. Not even a pick-axe.

Decide not to actually read what you’ve written (whilst feeling The Flow, In the Zone).

You know. Just in case.

Post your own word count to twitter, thus causing a never-ending ripple through the food-chain of writers: those who have written less than you will now (a) feel insecure (b) chug wine (c) write furiously to catch up (d) post their own word counts to twitter, etc, etc, ad infinitum, because everyone knows The Writer is a curious beast who feeds mainly on jealousy and the failure of others.

Realise you’re still in your PJs. Realise you smell. Stagger into the shower and ruminate on the brain’s need for a SAVE button, as every plot point, weak character, crappy sentence you’ve ever concocted instantly resolves itself the second you step away from your laptop and have no real way of recording anything (unless you have bath crayons).

Kid yourself you’ll write a little more before you fall asleep.

Instead, play Candy Crush.

Dream well. Dream big. Dream something you can use in your novel. Dream that your novel is wielding a pick-axe.

Realise you’re meant to be leaving for work in a minute, not blogging about NaNo. Mutter expletives. Rack brain for a cunning way to end your blog –

Fail miserably.

30 Days of Nano: Day Nine

/ lynseywhite / Leave a comment

Yesterday I was good. I was very, very good. I had coffee planned with some friends, so I wrote all my NaNo words (and posted my blog) before 11 a.m.

We weren't naked, I hasten to add. (This is 'Three Women' by Ferdinand Léger, 1921)

We weren’t naked, I hasten to add. (This is ‘Three Women’ by Ferdinand Léger, 1921)

Today, though, I have a class to plan on POV. And parents to visit. And shopping to buy. And period pains. So I thought I’d jump start myself with a ‘quick’ 900 words in bed last night, having glugged a pair of wines.

The words are not good.

They’re not jump-out-the-window dreadful, but as a general rule I believe I write better without the fortification of a half-bottle of New Zealand chardonnay.

I’ve been having strange dreams lately. I’ve sort of outed myself before as a tingle-head (if you were paying attention) but I’ll out myself fully now, and admit that I fall asleep listening to a camp young man stroking a chair, or a bubbly young woman frying up bacon for breakfast, or a voluptuous blonde Russian encased in a crinkly shirt. I won’t name-check the friend who alerted me to this sub-culture on youtube (in case she’d rather not be outed herself) but I am eternally grateful. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been lulled to a rather lovely, tingly trance state by the sound of certain people’s voices, particularly if those people are also gesturing, carefully, with their hands or scratching a pen across paper, or tapping their fingernails… Ah, I’m swooning just thinking about it. Throughout my life it’s made first days at work rather difficult, if the person who’s showing me round has a soft sort of voice: they’re pointing out the toilets and fire exits and demonstrating the way the computer works and I’m quietly floating away to a higher sphere and not remotely paying attention to what they’re actually saying. If you wanna get blunt, you could call it a brain-gasm. It’s very nice, anyways. And if you’ve ever tingled, you might want to google ASMR and have yourself a veritable whale of a time (once you get over the sorta creepiness of it. Try listening without watching, while you ease yourself in…)

So, what was I saying? Ah yes. Strange dreams. Two nights ago I shot and killed Alan Sugar (sorry, Lord Sugar; I’ll be shot myself by the Aristocracy Police if I don’t sufficiently doff my cap) and got quickly embroiled in a (piss poor) cover-up plot orchestrated by my Adult Ed department. Last night I was finally watching The 39 Steps (which I never have watched, incidentally, in real life) and, in fact, it wasn’t at all the film I had imagined: a poor tenant discovered a perilous series of missing steps in the staircase of his landlady’s home, and narrowly missed what-seemed-like Certain Death whilst leaping, briefcase in hand, across the gaping chasm. It was rip-roaring viewing.

In the sub-plot of this dream, my daughter cracked the car windscreen and two of the side windows by firing rubber darts at them. I’ll definitely be having a word with her about that when she (finally) wakes up. (She is fifteen. ‘Nuff said, I think.)

So why am I rambling about dreams? Honest answer: because I want to! Answer-I-wasn’t-conciously-aware-of-but-have-just-been-pointed-to-by-my-subconscious: this is the ninth day of NaNo, and there is a (very good) book, by David Mitchell, called Number 9 Dream… But look, there is a link to my NaNo project in all this and it’s coming RN (as they say on twitter): right now (for you fuddy-duddies who don’t know what it means; I came across this abbreviation a whole TWO DAYS ago, hence I am superior on the cool scale and not a fuddy-duddy at all). Here are some things about dreams to be borne in mind whilst writing your nano-or-non-nano-novel (or, indeed, short story):

  • You may not resolve the entire plot by revealing (a la Bobby Ewing in the shower in Dallas) that IT WAS ALL A DREAM. If you do this, you will be ejected from The Writers’ Club (which does not exist, but this matters not) with immediate effect and never, never re-admitted.

    'Man, that was a long shower, Bobby! What were you doing in there?' 'You don't need to know, Pam.'

    ‘Man, that was a long shower, Bobby! What were you doing in there?’
    ‘You don’t need to know, Pam.’

  • And, while we’re on the subject, you probably shouldn’t start your book with a dream either. (Unless you are the genius called Daphne du Maurier and it was a dream about going to Manderley. Again. That single word seals the deal and makes the dream acceptable: ‘aha! This is not pretentious pontificating; there is a story here…’)
  • Any dreams you recount in the course of your novel should somehow relate to the plot/emotion/theme of your novel. People’s dreams (as you probably thought whilst reading an earlier part of this blog) are not, in general, very interesting. By which I mean: they’re not interesting at all. Proceed with caution.
  • A dream sequence does not require the presence of a dwarf. See Living in Oblivion if you don’t believe me.

    A dream sequence needn't contain a dwarf. Although a top-hatted Peter Dinklage could be a good addition to your novel...

    A dream sequence needn’t contain a dwarf. Although a top-hatted Peter Dinklage could be a good addition to your novel…

  • And, while we’re on that subject, try not to think in terms of a dream ‘sequence’: the word ‘sequence’ somehow suggests to me that the recounting of this dream will be lengthy, by which I mean TEDIOUS, and the one thing you don’t want to happen whilst recounting a character’s dream is for the reader to fall asleep.
  • If your plot is about living the dream, or the man of your dreams or following your dream, then you have come to the wrong blog and I have no advice for you.

Anyway, I’m 900 (shoddy) words down, 767 (maths on a Sunday morning, ouch; in fact, I just asked Uncle Google to check my sums) still to go. To paraphrase Shakin’ Stevens… nah, kidding, of course: to paraphrase Shakespeare, ‘To write, perchance to write about dreams…) I’m tempted to bung the whole 767 words on a dream sequence. Or a naked man showering.*

One of the two.

* Though I really must stop writing about willies.

Pocketwatch tweet

30 Days of Nano: Day Five.

/ lynseywhite / Leave a comment

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 One.

/ lynseywhite / 1 Comment

images-5Words written: 1676 (good). 1½ glasses of wine (also good). 1 chocolate cupcake, 3 rows of Galaxy Honeycomb chocolate, 2 bags marmite crisps (perhaps not so good).

Began the day wondering where to begin.

Posted ‘humorous’ tweets:

Nanotweet1

Nanotweet2

Wrote a couple of paragraphs. Tweeted about it.

Nanotweet3

Tried and failed to update my word count on the NaNo site. Tweeted about it.

Nanotweet4

Watched ‘Sideways’ with my daughter. Quaffed a little wine. Caught the last five unfathomable minutes of Doctor Who. Watched the X Factor (or, at least, was present in the room whilst said programme was on screen). Quaffed more wine.

Climbed into bed with 1026 words written. Appreciated the Beauty of Nano: having set myself this fecking challenge (no, auto correct, I don’t mean decking) instead of resuming my reading of Sarah Waters’ rather marvellous The Paying Guests I’ve been forced to produce another (hmm, sums… oh dear) 641 words (thanks, google). None of which have been good words. But I did, as you’ll see in my word count above, exceed my daily target by six whole words. Yes, that’s right. I went the extra mile. (Oh, all right, the extra millimetre.) ‘What were the six words?’ I (don’t) hear you ask? They were: ‘trapping Iolanthe inside for the night’. Almost Shakespearean in its genius, I expect you’ll agree.

Probably all the good stuff will happen tomorrow.