30 Days of Nano: Day Thirteen

November 13, 2014 / 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 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 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.

30 Days of Nano: Day Six

November 6, 2014November 7, 2014 / lynseywhite / 1 Comment

Have you found your seed word yet? I’ve been reading the very good Scarlett Thomas book, Monkeys with Typewriters: How to write fiction and unlock the secret power of stories (phew, that’s a gob-ful), in which she suggests you need three things before you embark on your novel: (1) a (main) narrative question; (2) a thematic question; (3) a seed word.

Narrative question

Thematic Question

(from ‘Monkeys with Typewriters’, by Scarlett Thomas)

So what, then, is a seed word and why do you need one? The seed word, as Thomas describes it, should contain ‘the main essence of your thematic concern’, whilst simultaneously, somehow, containing ‘everything in the novel’. She suggests you make a list: a list of all the separate things your novel seems to be “about”‘ and, ideally using a dictionary or thesaurus, you try to find a single word that links them (most likely an abstract noun). Words have lots of meanings, Thomas says, that you may not – consciously – be aware of. The odds are remote that Jane Austen sat down, consciously, to concoct a seed word, but Thomas suggests (very plausibly, I think) that you might say the seed word of her novel Emma is ‘respectability’, containing, as it does, ‘both the idea that someone is […] worthy of respect […] and the idea of respectability as being inherently to do with a polite society.’

She makes a promise, too: ‘when you find the correct seed word for your project it will make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. While constructing a thematic question gives you focus and purpose, finding the correct seed word is quite magical.’

Well, the hairs on my neck must be lazy, I’m afraid, because did they stand up? No, they didn’t. But, still, I have found my seed word (somewhat late in the writing process… better late than never, eh?), and that word is ‘autonomy’. And in spite of the bone-idle hairs on my neck it was – and is – an exciting thing, because seeing how clearly and cleanly this single words fits all the disparate strands of the book, like a stick of seaside rock with the word autonomy right through the middle, I feel I must be doing something right (at last): in my humble experience, when the pieces all lock into place, with no wiggling or fiddling, it’s usually (fingers crossed…) because what you’ve concocted has some sort of truth in it.

In the midst of NaNo (especially for all you pantsers out there) finding your seed word might well seem a waste of precious writing time. But the brain has a strange way of solving creative tasks when you’re least expecting it: don’t exchange precious writing time for the pondering of your seed word, but do let your mind have peace and quiet, occasionally (put down your phone, switch the radio off); take a walk, or a bath, do the hoovering, pick up your knitting… You never know when your seed word will come visiting.

30 Days of Nano: Day One.

November 2, 2014November 4, 2014 / lynseywhite / 1 Comment

Words 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:

Wrote a couple of paragraphs. Tweeted about it.

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

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.

A Novel isn’t just for November.

October 28, 2014November 27, 2014 / lynseywhite / 10 Comments

Remember, people: a dog is for life, not just for Christmas. And although (I sincerely hope) it won’t take the whole of your life to write a novel, it will certainly take you a wee bit longer than 30 days. (Dear Calendar Gods: if NaNo gets much bigger, you might consider bumping November up to 31?)

For the uninitiated, I’m talking about National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo, as it’s known by the initiated, or just plain ‘NaNo’ if you’re really well acquainted). It’s been running for 15 years (as I learnt last night at my local chapter’s inaugural meeting: more about NaNo’s history here if you’re interested), in which time it’s snowballed from local and folksy to a global phenomenon with more than 300,000 participants. Those participants sign up to write ‘a novel’ – or at least 50,000 words of one – in the month of November: that’s 1667 words a day: Twitter users who find the #amwriting hashtag slightly sick-making may find they have steam coming out of their ears by 1st December as word counts, and coffee consumption, and sample sentences are relentlessly tweeted. We all have a novel inside us, as the old adage would have it. And November is the month you get to regurgitate it into the cold, cruel world.

As tweeted by Scott Dykes (@Scott_Writing)

First off, some facts from that cold, cruel world: most novels are around 80,000 words, so ‘National Two-Thirds-of-a-Novel Writing Month’ would perhaps be more honest. Any novel genuinely written in a month is unlikely to be one I’d care to read (with the exception of those by my ex, who could churn out an entire series of YA novels while I sat deliberating over the placement of a comma in my opening sentence. Bastard!) As I said in a previous post, there are no short-cuts to writing a novel, although some people seem to make lighter work of it than others (I am of course among ‘The Others’). It isn’t difficult at all to write 50,000 words in 30 days: what’s trickier is writing good ones. Ideally, in the run-up to ‘NaNo’ you will have done 1 to 2 years of #NaNoPrep (as twitter has it). You might think I’m joking, but no. ‘Fraid not. The majority of novels take 3 or 4 years on average from initial concept to completion. I first started ‘composting’ mine (you might prefer brewing, or fermenting) about 2 and a half years ago, when a yellow-haired girl appeared in one of my notebooks, pushing a bicycle. I ‘did’ NaNo in 2012 in an effort to sketch out the world of my book (as I blogged about here), before finding myself on the Arts Council’s Escalator programme in 2013 and receiving a grant for the writing of said novel, now called Madder Hall. In its many, many, many incarnations, the book has had characters called Morag, Arthur, Hestia, Dickon, and even Mr Horn (fnar fnar): all of which are now resting in peace in the graveyard of my imagination. I’ve slashed and burned the majority of my cast. I’ve turned the structure upside down and inside out. I’ve gone backwards in time (from 1989 to 1979), and forwards in time (1910 to 1939). I had lots of dead 12 year old girls: I have none now. The book as it was in 2012 bears so little resemblance to what I have now that I’ve thought about calling it (sorry, poor joke; can’t resist) Renee Zellweger.

By now you may be wondering, in the style of Edwin Starr: ‘NaNo… HUH… yeah… what is it good for?’ The answer is not, I’m happy to say, ‘absolutely nothing’. (But, NB, war is still useless; no change there). NaNo is good (in my humble opinion) for the following things:

Solidarity: It’s a lonely business, writing. And although NaNo can’t, and won’t, detract from the I’m-so-ronery aloneness of it all (only click that link if you’re A-Ok with the F word, by the way) it does provide you with a virtual world full of shoulders to cry on (outside of the month of November you’ll be hard pressed to find anyone who gives two shits). There’s a Blitz-like ‘all in it together’ sort of spirit. No, we’re not being bombed – but we might be bombing, quite hard. And a kind word from a fellow bomber can lift you from the doldrums long enough to get you writing again.

Permission to write badly: ‘The first draft of anything is shit,’ as Hemingway said. Nonetheless, there’s a common tendency for one’s inner editor to step in from the very get-go. You type your first sentence and out of the ether (with snakes in her hair) she emerges: ‘You think you can write? I’ve seen two year olds with a crayon in each fist compose sentences with more verve’, etc, etc, etc. The great Christopher Isherwood (creator of the Sally Bowles stories that became Cabaret, and writer of one of my favourite autobiographies: Christopher and his Kind) excreted first drafts of such abysmal awfulness (allegedly) that he’d never show them to a living soul.

How DARE you use an adverb in my presence?

When you’ve got to write 1667 words a day, no matter what (and, let’s be honest, some days you’ll be writing 3334 because yesterday, meh, not entirely sure what happened to yesterday) your snake-haired inner editor is required to piss off, please and thank you, and let you get on with the sketching of your novel. Because that’s what it is. An outline. Don’t whatever you do waste perfect prose on your very first draft, because changes will need to be made, and sentences perfect as neatly-crossed pairs of kittens’ paws are so much harder to brutally murder than passages with the prose-style panache of a bag of spanners. Trust me on this.

I said CROSSED paws, god-dammit!

Permission to write at all: This, folks, is probably the single, most valid reason for NaNo’s existence. It’s a truth universally acknowledged that anyone writing a novel, unless paid to do so, is (a) sadly deluded in the manner of 97% of X-factor contestants, (b) a decadent, work shy lay about, (c) not really serious, surely, and (d) ought to bloody well get off that computer now and feed the kids/take the bins out/mow the lawn (delete as appropriate).

In order to write you need time. And in order to carve out that time you will need at least 97% of your nearest and dearest to give you permission to tappity-tap at your keyboard, no matter how futile it seems from their perspective – and probably, often, from yours too. (Underestimate at your peril the power of raised eyebrows to make the amateur writer die a tiny death inside.) I think NaNo is good, huh, yeah, for precisely this reason: the artificially-imposed deadline (common to so many TV shows) that allows you to say ‘I’ve got to write, sorry, so please go away’. Permission to write? Permission to come aboard the Good Ship Writer, and sail far away from the land of raised eyebrows. At least, until December.

Me time (85% cocoa).

April 29, 2014June 22, 2014 / lynseywhite / 3 Comments

I ought to have been in an orchestra, really. I ought to have played a more sociable instrument (i.e. not the piano, the sulky loner of the music world) and gone to rehearsals with seventy other musicians and hung out together (I see us all wonderfully stylish in polo neck jumpers) and made sweet music en masse. There’s a lovely sense of solidarity in that.

Art print from Society6 http://society6.com/WORDSBRAND/PLEASE-DO-NOT-DISTURB-I-AM-DISTURBED-ENOUGH-ALREADY#1=45

Art print from society6 at http://society6.com/WORDSBRAND/PLEASE-DO-NOT-DISTURB-I-AM-DISTURBED-ENOUGH-ALREADY#1=45

Instead, I chose writing. And writing, as everyone knows, is the sulky loner of the art world. I’m a sulky loner myself, so it’s no surprise, really, that we found each other. And yet there are times – this is one – when I question the wisdom of two sulky loners conspiring like this. Isn’t writing a thing best done by those with more resilience? Is it good for us loners to really embrace our aloneness? The danger is one that’s befallen me recently: life on your own becomes so flipping normal – status quo – that the world recedes, with the flesh and blood people who live there, till what you’ve got left is a notebook, a Scrivener file, and long stretches of silence. It’s frighteningly easy to get yourself so swept away in a book that the whole of your life becomes ‘me time’. The question I’m asking, then, is this: Is so much ‘me time’ good for the soul? And would miserable writers be miserable whether they wrote or not? Would Virginia Woolf have drowned herself if she’d played second bassoon in the London Symphony Orchestra? Would Hemingway have been happier tooting a horn than exposing the innermost core of his soul? And dear old, mad old Sylvia Plath – perhaps self-examination on a daily basis wasn’t the healthiest way to proceed. Might her tale have ended differently if she’d spent that February night with a gaggle of polo-necked viola players instead of surrounded by rancour-filled manuscripts and an empty flat?

Well, sigh. You’d be right if you thought I was bitter. If blog posts were chocolate bars, this one – I have to admit – would be 85 % cocoa. I’m currently stuck on that hamster wheel of The Road Not Taken, and anyone (musicians, actors, dancers) who gets their arty kicks in a gang of likeminded folks – and not staring, alone, at the screen of a laptop – is garnering my envy at this present moment. God, but it must be so nice – so bloody, bloody nice – to have someone else physically, actually, there when you’re knee deep in doing your thing – and I don’t mean disturbing you (breaking the train of your thoughts with the offer of tea when you’ve just bloody sewn up that sentence at last but you haven’t quite managed to scribble it down); I mean, doing it with you. Collaborating. You actors, musicians, and dancers – how lucky you are.

Footnote

To be fair I should probably mention the fact that I did once play in an orchestra, long, long ago. I was ten at the time. I wanted to play the cello. There weren’t any cellos at school; there was only an oboe.

My playing was so bloody awful I ended up having to mime in school concerts. The whole thing was torture from start to finish. Perhaps I do prefer writing, after all.

Oh, the times they are a-changin’ (or actually changed quite a long time ago without me bloody noticing).

December 14, 2013December 21, 2013 / lynseywhite / Leave a comment

When I first started hawking my stories round town, the only real tool at my writerly disposal was a manual typewriter approximately the size – and weight – of London, with an ever-increasing number of jammy keys, and malfunctioning ribbons.

Yes, ribbons.

Ribbons. Not just for little girls’ hair.

In those days ribbons had quite a lot to do with writing. They lived on two spools in the typewriter’s casing, and slowly unwound and rewound themselves, over and over again, till the ink was worn out. (Or, well, that’s how I remember it. Funny how something as normal as breathing for so many years seems so hazy and alien now. Take a trip here for the Wiki-How low-down.) At least, that’s what they did when they worked. But mine didn’t. I’d get to the end of one spool and I’d WIND BACK THE RIBBON BY HAND. That’s how much I wanted to keep writing. (For one memorable time in my life, I had two-tone print, like a half-baked sort of traffic light, with red at the bottom and black at the top.) If you wrote something silly you reached for the salaciously-named corrective fluid or (more often, if you were me) retraced your steps with a row of snarling Xs. A bit like barbed wiring.

To summarise: you had to be really ashamed of a line, in those days, to delete it.

I’m going all warm and squishy inside at the sight of this.

The other thing I mentioned was the jammy keys. You’d literally hammer the words on the page, in those far-away days, and my hammers would sometimes – quite often – refuse to lie down again after I’d used them. Perhaps (in my fantasy land) they were trying to read what I’d written. More likely they needed some oil. Either way, it was quite an ordeal, most days, to get more than a handful of paragraphs onto the page. These machines were so flipping noisy you couldn’t type much after ten if you lived within listening range of other humans. Your fingers grew steadily flatter from thumping the keys. It was hard bloody work. It was manual labour. (See what I did there? Sorry.)

You sent off your stories by post (a nice pigeon arrived at your door with a clip round his leg, and you gently attached your short story and waved him goodbye). When you entered your work for a prize the results would arrive in a similar fashion, or maybe by telephone – landline, I mean – and then only, of course, if you’d won: if you hadn’t, and hadn’t requested a notification, you might never know the results.

When I hung up my writer’s gloves for a while (with a crippling case of The Block) things had already changed. Like Dylan, I’d long since gone electric (first with a plug-in typewriter – whoop! – then the humble Word Processor. Yes, I’m a sort of computer, but whoa there, girl, what’s this internet shopping you speak of? And today’s top compilation of Cats Being Jerks? Are you out of your tiny mind? I’m a word processor, sweetheart. For the processing of words).

Sometimes, laptop, much as I love you, I wish you were humbler and simpler and more single-minded. I wish you were more about processing words and less about oh what’s that nice shiny link over there – and, aw, that’s so cute – and, haha, that’s the funniest ever and – fifty-seven flagged emails I haven’t replied to – and sign this petition – and, oh, I’ll retweet that – and, yes, I love cutting and pasting, and googling for everything possibly relevant (certainly saves on the telephone calls to my dad: ‘Do you know when the sun sets in March?’; ‘When were seat belts made law?’; What does camphor smell of?’, etc) but my brain seemed to shape its thoughts more easily – in the tap-tap-tap-ding! of those olden days – when it took so much work to commit them to paper.

And competitions, too, have moved on. There are prizes for stories and poems, same as always, of course – but the stories have sub-sets now (flash fiction and memoir), and something Tania Hershman tweeted the other day about ‘drabbles’ had me reaching for my dictionary (by which, ahem, I mean googling for the definition) to learn that, no, these are not the off-spring of Margaret Drabble, but rather a tightly-laced Victorian governess of a story form: 100 words exactly. Ouch. That’s rigid. (Rigidity rather works, though, when it comes to short stories… but that’s for another post.) And the last prize I entered myself (the Fish Short Story Prize 2011) was entirely an online-affair. Did they want my address? No, they didn’t. But what if my email dies, somehow, I was thinking. How will they tell me I’ve won? (Oh, come on, we all think it. Fess up.) In the end I was short-listed (close, but no cigar), and my email continued to function as normal, and yes, the website crashed when the long list was published, but, ultimately, the world kept on spinning, and no-one but me was remotely sniffly or sad for the ritual of giving the big brown envelope a kiss for luck before sending it, actually, physically, off to its fate. Call me an old romantic, but, sigh, there was something I liked about that.

Does the universe need another writer?

November 14, 2013November 14, 2013 / lynseywhite / 2 Comments

Since joining Twitter a couple of months ago, two things have become immediately obvious: (1) that I’m not half as interesting as I secretly hoped I was, and (2) approximately 97.5% of the population of planet earth is currently writing a novel.

Another wake-up call came via a recent workshop run by Writers’ Centre Norwich (you can also read my guest blog on their website if you’re so inclined). From the doctor-esque scribble I found in my notebook the morning after, I’ve managed to decode (and probably falsify) the following, rather sobering, fact: each year around 86,000 new titles are published in the UK. Around 59,000 of those titles will sell an average of… 1000 copies? 100 copies? 50 copies? (Knees trembling slightly now.)

The answer is 18 copies.

And that’s the average. Meaning, of course, that many new titles sell fewer than 18 copies. Which, by all accounts, is a bit of a slap in the face.

It could be that I’m labouring day after day (my social life dwindling to Howard Hughesian proportions; my bank statements gathering dust in the hallway – too frightening to open) on a book that only my mum will buy. (And, if I’m honest, she’s not that keen on my fiction anyway, so…) Gulp. And that’s if it’s even published. Anyone fancy an uphill struggle?

Well, yes, actually. I do. There aren’t many things in my life that I’m really wholehearted about, but writing is one. And here’s why: I can’t not do it. Jump cut to Jean-Paul Belmondo in À Bout de Souffle: ‘Informers inform, burglars burgle, murderers murder, lovers love.’ And writers write. A day without writing feels wrong and unworthy. A day without tumbling headlong into something made-up makes my brain feel like two pennies rattling around in a pauper’s money box (by which, of course, I mean my money box): depressingly lonely. That’s right, yes, I’m really that sad: I feel lonely without my imaginary friends. And since they’re still there, in mid-gesture (a bit sore and stiff from their freeze-framing yesterday, when I had ‘proper work’ to get on with), I’d better scoot off now (my brain nicely heated from writing this blog post) and bring them to life again.