30 Days of Nano: Day Fourteen

November 14, 2014 / 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.

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.

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.

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.

The #PenisSpam has outdone itself today: the sender is a Mrs Scarlett Tugwell. Almost Dickensian in its brilliance.

— Lynsey White (@LynseyAnneWhite) November 13, 2014

30 Days of Nano: Day Nine

November 9, 2014November 9, 2014 / 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)

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.’
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…
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.

A Case of the Glums, or The Feedback Limbo.

December 7, 2013December 8, 2013 / lynseywhite / Leave a comment

You know that thing when you’re halfway through tidying up and the room looks worse than it did in the first place and, GOD, you wish you’d never started?

Hello, novel.

As some of you may know by now (I bang on about it often enough), I was lucky enough to be chosen as one of the ten Escalator writers for 2013: my prize being (primarily) a year’s free mentoring from the wonderful writer Michelle Spring, creator of my second favourite female detective, Laura Principal. (No. 1 spot reserved, of course, for my childhood crush, Nancy Drew.) Every three months or so I bring joy to Michelle’s existence with 10,000 words or so of my putative novel. She waits – her breath bated, heart pounding, a light film of sweat on the palms of her hands – till my latest instalment has landed, at last, in her inbox, and life can have meaning again. (Or something like that.)

But, of course, as we know – courtesy of Nelly Furtado – All Good Things (Come to an End). And I’m writing this post from the uppermost step of the ride we call Escalator: poised to get off, with a businessman jostling his brolly behind me and somebody, late for a train, racing past in a fug of BO. The good ship Escalator has docked, at last, at the Port of Mixed Metaphors, and this mentoring session – on Monday – marks (sniff, sniff) the end of my year. So last night – deep breath – at a minute away from the witching hour, I gathered my last little bundle of words in a hastily-renamed file (originally titled ‘Massive Balls for Michelle’) and, sipping a last drop of wine for Dutch courage (South African actually – Porcupine Ridge; not too shabby for six quid, Sainsbury’s, thank you), I hovered my mouse over ‘send’ and I fired my words into the ether. Gulp. Now I wait until Monday, midday, for The Verdict.

Gulp

These few days in Limbo are strange. Here I am with the ‘guiltless but damned’ of Dante’s Inferno: the virtuous pagans, the unbaptised, the Christ deniers. Excluded from heaven. Protected, so far, from the fires of hell. (Any writer who’s handed in work of a first draft quality for perusal by actual human eyes will appreciate hell as a metaphor here.) I mean, what are you meant to do while you’re waiting for someone to give you a yay or a nay? Are you right to be secretly yipping inside that you’ve hit on a really cool twist… or, come Monday, with nothing but tea to console you, will everything crumple to dust in the cold Cambridge light? Will you plod up the road to the station, loathing yourself and your book and the universe? Will you, in fact, get a Case of the Glums, that might last you a day, or a month if you’re really unlucky, when every last phrase that you lovingly plucked from your mind seems to shrivel and die in the light of another’s dislike of it?

Hmm. It’s a cold kind of place. You will need to bring blankets. You’ll need your own file, like my own, labelled ‘Pep Talks’, where quotes such as this are collected:

‘The blank page breeds a crisis of confidence every morning’ (Hilary Mantel)

My old mucker, Hilary Mantel

‘I’m having to tear each word out; it’s like digging for coal’ (Ian Rankin)

Ian Rankin, no visible coal-dust

‘I’m not at all confident about the quality of what I do’ (Peter Porter)

The late poet, Peter Porter

‘Midway through writing a novel, I have regularly experienced moments of bowel-curdling terror, as I contemplate the drivel on the screen before me’ (Sarah Waters)

Sarah Waters. On the inside, her blood is curdling.

Sarah Waters. On the inside, her bowels are curdling.

‘There are times of boredom, there are times of regret, there are times of disappointment’ (PD James)

PD James, perhaps looking a tad regretful?

PD James. Is that regret on her face? Or just boredom?

And mighty glad I am to hear it. Every writer, apparently, gets the Glums sometimes, as REM very nearly said, so here’s the aptest quote of all, to finish, from J.D. Salinger in his correspondence to Marjorie Sheard, an aspiring writer, currently on show at the Morgan Library and Museum, NY – so good it deserves to be capitalised: