Nanowrimo: Coming Up For Air

As well as hacking out a couple of thousand words a day for Nanowrimo, I had also intended to keep a blog talking about what problems and story blocks I was encountering. The idea, nebulous as it may have been, was that I discussed various kinks in the story (even as no one was listening, which was at least very likely), I would be able to recognise the solutions to whatever narrative problems I was having by seeing them at one step removed, by the simple method of just talking about them.

Of course, it didn’t quite work out like that. I haven’t been able to keep a blog detailing the progress of my novel in progress, simply because it hasn’t. I did about a thousand and a half words on the first day (which was an effortful hack job) before real life got in the way, and I haven’t been able to commit any more time to the damn thing. Some of that is the same reason why many other nanowrimers (is that what we call ourselves? I haven’t checked) fall by the wayside as the month goes on – full time job, etc. Actually, I will go as far as to say (to be arrogant enough to say, in fact) that if you ever set out to complete Nanowrimo, and you didn’t have a full time job and/or a family to occupy your time, then you probably don’t deserve to be a writer. I mean, there are people I know who are hitting their targets every single day. And they have a full time job. And a family. And it’s not like they’re neglecting any of their duties, or locking themselves away with the laptop for hours on end (maybe just a hour), but the point remains, they’ve got a lot of demands on their time, and they’re still hitting their targets.

Me? Yeah, I’m way behind. We’re on Day 10, and I still haven’t reached 2,000 words. That’s pretty much fatal, especially when you consider that I’m working seven days a week, and some evenings. (why the hell are you wasting your time/word count coughing up into a blog then, I hear you ask. I can hear you ask, incidentally, because I’ve got a particularly febrile imagination that’s just starved of affirmation. Well, we’ll come to that.) In the big race to November 30^th, 50,000 words strapped under our belts, I’m quite dangerously behind. I’m like the kid that you chose last in track, and I’m doing a half-hearted jog roughly sixteen miles behind everybody else, too wheezy to ask anyone to wait. What am I saying? I’m not like that kid. I was that kid. But anyway.

It would be very easy at this point to throw in the towel, to give up. To not finish the damn thing. It would be an intelligent move, too: I’m curating an evening of short plays in December, and seeking other scripts for a thing in March. Added to that, I’m working on something for International Woman’s Day (also in March), and there’s an open air theatre script, another script for next Christmas, possibly something for the Brighton Fringe and ohgodwritingitalldownlikethat makes me realise just how many projects I’m juggling at the moment. And, it’s worth remembering that all of these things are going to result in little or no money (more often the latter). So, it would be a smart move to junk the NanoWrimo work in progress: I don’t win anything, it’s reasonably unlikely to be read by anyone anytime soon, and it’s very likely, if and when it gets finished, to be reasonably terrible. So then, the question is: what’s the point? What do I get out of it?

The short answer is, of course, not much. At least not immediately. But the real point I’ve already mentioned, albeit in a throwaway fashion. NanoWrimo gives you the purpose – the excuse, even – to finish your damn stuff. Yes, I could put all my attention on the other projects right now (and it’s not like I’m exactly ignoring them, I put some work into them every single day), but one of the major challenges of having so many creative projects on the boil with hazily defined intentions and even vaguer deadlines is that every single one of those projects becomes a distraction – the Shiny New Thing. This is the problem when a project becomes slightly too hard, when it stops being fun: maybe you finally have to do some research, or you’ve already written all the exciting sexy stuff – now you have to write all the boring, nuts and bolts expostiony stuff (and then put lots of effort into it not sounding remotely boring, or indeed expostiony). It is then obviously very easy to get distracted by the other Shiny New Thing, the piece of work which still needs the fun explosion scene to be written, the project where three hours of work don’t seem like work. The net result is that you end up with lots of work that has some fun scenes in them, but are ultimately incomplete. And here’s the kicker: those fun scenes aren’t nearly as fun as you think they are, because they won’t have the set up (and probably not the resolution) that is required to make them truly succeed. You know the set up, it’s in your head, but nobody cares about the big explosion if they don’t know about the people causing it / trying to stop it / caught in the middle of it.

So, to have an excuse to actually FINISH YOUR DAMN STUFF is a good thing. Rather than bailing on something when it becomes just a bit difficult, you are forced to commit to finishing. The deadline is arbitrary, the pressure to finish is entirely fictitious.  But you’ll know. YOU’LL KNOW. And if you’ve announced that you’re embarking on NanoWrimo, other people know, too. And that, in theory, shames you into having to complete your draft. This, I suspect, is the reason why so many ‘writers’ (speech marks intentional) can’t help talking about their work in progress at parties. Obviously a big part of it is that talking about a good idea is much more exciting that having to edit and redraft it, but I think another big pull is the belief that if you announce it to the world, you are making a verbal contract that you can’t back down from. Of course, this doesn’t actually work: people can and do back down from such verbal contracts. And that, I think, is where NanoWrimo comes into play – it makes it sort of ‘official’, and more particularly, since you only have a month to play with (and not one of those pesky thirty one day months, neither), you absolutely can’t think to yourself ‘well, it’s not going so well, I’ll do it next month’. Because next month is too late.

So, yeah. Why am I wasting time (and words) on this blog when I could be filling up a word count on the novel? Mainly it’s because I have already spent such a long time away from it. I’m not expecting this novel to be any good in its first draft (I’m not even expecting it to be readable), partially because I will be making it up as I go along (not necessarily a good idea), and partially I don’t have any genre-supports (thriller, horror, suspense) to help me bridge any gaps in storytelling. So, whenever I’m away from the computer, it’s a vast, impossible project. Too much to cope with, and it makes my mind shrivel in fear. But – and this is what I remember from the last time I did NanoWrimo, when I was away from the computer for about a week – once I was able to get back into the writing – by the simple and frankly underrated act of just putting one word after the after – the rest of the world just fell away. Once I started writing one word, the insurmountable mountain became a tarmacked road. Listen, I don’t have to worry about editing and polishing until December.

So this blog has just been a starter, reminding me that I can still put one word after the other, and they don’t even have to be particularly interesting. If I can do this, I can get stuck back into the book.

Alright, then. I’m going in.  

Saturday 6th April 2013

I'm probably two, maybe three drafts away from the final draft of a story I'm working on called 'Broom Handle'. If I'm lucky, it's only one draft. When I had the idea for the story, it seemed really simple. And, actually, it is: the idea itself is quite a basic one, and shouldn't require too much in the way of complicated add-ons. But because the concepts aren't that simple for the characters themselves, I need to be a bit clever about how I'm telling the story, a cleverness that's currently hiding from me. Over the last few drafts, I've begun to hate this story. Not actively, not with real passion, not even so much that I consider the writing (and re-writing) of it to be a genuine chore .. but certainly enough for me to question if the story is actually good enough. And, by extension, if I'm good enough as a writer. 

Again, this is why it's useful to have deadlines. If I'd been writing this story a year or so ago, pretty much at any point in my history, there's a damn good chance that I'd have given up on it by now. After all: what's the point? Who's actually waiting for this story? No-one. (actually, that's a bit of a lie: two friends have asked to read it when it's finished, because they quite liked the sound of the idea behind it). It's so easy to let a pretty good idea wither and die even before it's finished. That's any idea: whether it be for a short story, a film - or even a little blog like this: if you don't get the damn thing down as quickly as possible, even if it's not particularly good, then there's a very good chance that nothing will get written at all. Of course, that's a major factor in itself: so many things don't get written because they are not perfect in their first incarnation. Then the inner critic gets disheartened, dials back, and thinks that they'll do better if the first running jump is much better. What happens, of course, is that there are lots of running jumps, quite a few bad stumbles, and then: nothing. Nothing actually gets finished. Writing (as well as anything I do, like acting, directing, improvising, whatever) seems to be a journey of constantly re-learning the same things, over and over. You can have twenty years in the same discipline, and still, in that twentieth year, re-realise with evangelical fervour the thing that you learnt in the first day. For me, in this past year, it's been this: it really is irrelevant if I write every single day. Even if I'm producing, say three thousand words every single day: that doesn't matter. Sure, it's relevant, but those three thousand words a day don't really add to the pile if you don't do one simple thing: ACTUALLY FINISH. 

I think it was doing Nanowrimo last year that really cemented that ethos for me. Now, I haven't yet looked back at the novel that I finished in November (with about thirty minutes to spare), and I'm reasonably confident that it's a pretty shoddy bit of story telling. But I know that it's a pretty shoddy bit of storytelling  and that in itself has been a instructive experience. Just the pressure of finding narrative closure (or a deliberate lack of closure) for my characters demanded of me a certain amount of discipline  that I hadn't always really buckled down to before, mainly because of that old idea that nobody's actually waiting for the story, so it didn't matter - not really - if I didn't actually buckle down and finish the damn thing. 

This year, I seem to have got a lot better at actually finishing stories. Some of them, I even think are reasonably good. So far, fate doesn't quite agree - none of them have been shortlisted for any short story competitions that I've sent them off for. On occasion, I suspect that the story wasn't quite right - either for whatever comp I was sending them off for, or maybe even that the story itself wasn't perfect. I haven't sent off a story that I didn't think was as good as it could be, however. 

So, these deadlines are a real life line. As I've indicated, there's a reasonable chance that if I didn't have a deadline for this story (April 15th), I might have bailed on it quite some time ago, as just so much damn hard work. It's easy to forget, however, that writing - good writing - is supposed to be damn hard work: it's not as if you can just throw one word onto the page after the other without so much as a re-write or checking over to see if it makes any sense whatsoever (like this blog, for instance). It really is - without getting pretentious about it all - an actual craft, and that demands a certain amount of respect and hard work. It can take a very long time to understand exactly what that means. I suspect I'm not even close to truly appreciating what I'm taking on. 

Lots of rehearsal this week for both the Brighton Fringe shows. With Three Kinds Of Me, we're having to do a fair bit of re-write in order to get the balance of the show right for the new space (and the new running time). We always knew that, just because of these seemingly innocuous and irrelevant details, that the show would be very different, that, indeed, it would be about something different, but it's still a helluva challenge to rip up what you've already achieved, and, for all practical intents and purposes, begin again. Well, I say we: all of the work is being done by writer/performer Sarah Charsley, who is doing extraordinarily well. I can imagine how challenging it is to totally re-do something that you are creatively so close to. 

As  well as 3KoM, we've got A Beginning, A Muddle, And An End, the totally improvised show. I'm still debating with format, etc - I don't want it to be too much of a ringleader/circus type improv show, where the 'director' directly addresses the audience and asks them to call out suggestions, because I feel (this week, anyway) that this is not quite in the neighbourhood of what I want the finished product to be. This isn't a judgement call on one kind of improvisation as opposed to another, but I certainly want the audience(s) to have the very real experience of a play - rather than an extended sketch - being formed before their very eyes. This week, we were rehearsing in the DukeBox Theatre, which gave the cast a good chance to experience how it will feel to perform on an actual stage, with light and music / sound. Things are beginning to fall into place .. 

Not Long Now

Christmas is going to creep up on me this year. I think it's because it's on a Tuesday. Monday's in the holiday season can just be added to the proceeding weekend, and Wednesdays or Thursdays mean that the entire week has been dismantled and sold off for parts, but with the big day falling on Tuesday, I rather suspect that I'm going to be caught unawares. Even though I'm writing a blog entry about it right now.

I feel a little big groggy, and I suspect that that's all to do with my body holding off the worst of the illnesses and fatigues for the past fifteen weeks, and waiting for a period of time where I'm not constantly dashing from one place to the next, and taking that as a signal that I can just shut down. I'm determined not too, however, and to still make good use of the time that I have off, knowing that it will be over all too soon. I had intended to do some writing, but my main computer has died. I do most of my writing in cafes and suchlike, finding that if I try to write at home, all too often I'll get distracted by the lure of a DVD, a sandwich, a book, or equally often, the chance to doze. So I'll come out to a cafe, and try to write as much as I can that way. I'm not always good at avoiding those cafes in Brighton that have a free wifi connection, but at least I'm making an effort. I'm aware that there are a great many writers who are unable to write unless it's quiet all around them. I'm not one of those writers. I quite enjoy the hustle and bustle and muttering of people around me, music playing that I'm not familiar with (even if the Mad Hatter, where I am now, has a seeming over-fondness for the oeuvre of Gloria Estefan). It's even better on a day like today, when the weather is miserable, and all you have to do is write out a few words, fuelled by decent hot chocolate. I almost remember what being human feels like. If I could get paid to do this every day, then I'd consider myself very lucky.

However, as I said, my computer has died. I forgot to keep it charged, and it has no power on it. It means that I'll have to move on to another cafe very soon, and plug it in there. I would try to plug it in here, but the usual spot has been taken up by something like fairy lights (you see, once again, Christmas leaping out at me unawares). I am running the risk of being one of those people in coffee shops who sets up camp at a table with their laptop and a mocha for a couple of hours at a stretch, writing absolutely nothing of any value whatsoever.

Last night, I was at Brighton's Burning Of The Clocks, which sounds a lot more traditional and paganistic than it actually is, whereas in fact it's only been around for five years. It marks the winter solstice and is mainly a children's festival. Thousands of people (it certainly seemed like thousands last night) gather with paper mâché lanterns which are lit, and finally end up on a huge bonfire on Brighton Beach, followed by an impressive fireworks display. Oddly enough, I was there partly because of research, since there's a sequence in a book that will take place during this event. I can safely talk about this scene on this blog with little fear of somebody else stealing it, because - if I'm honest - I'm reasonably doubtful if this particular book will get started, let alone finished. It's book four in a series of six, and so far I've only had vague ideas about how to put them together. I'm certainly in danger of becoming (or continuing to be) one of those people who talk about their upcoming projects as a way of avoiding actually doing them, but things have started to lock in a different way. The NaNoWriMo book was one point. The book itself might be awful (it actually might be; I haven't dared read it in the past month), but it was a extraordinarily useful tool in learning how to discipline my writing methods. It's a tool that's easily forgotten about if you're not careful, but it's still there for grabs. The other thing, of course, is the sending off short stories for competitions. Now, it remains to be seen if those stories actually get anywhere - the best method once they've been posted is to simply forget about them - but the whole process of completing the stories and sending them off to some kind of destination is incredibly useful - it gives you some kind of closure, rather than having to constantly return to them, or even worse, have what's more - much more - than a half decent idea - and, by not doing all that much about it, allowing it to wither and die.

And therefore, there's another thing worth noting. Aside from the fact that I'm generally quite a morose person, I've been very encouraged by the amount of - well, encouragement - I've received from so many people on my writing and directing and even acting this year. It's these kind of voices in the darkness, particularly after you've had a tough nine hours at the day job - that really give you the strength to carry on writing, to carry on trying, and - most elusively, most magically - give you the strength to occasionally consider the possibility:

"I can do this"

The Finishing Line. Or Paragraph. Or Even The Finishing Eight Chapters.

Right, here goes nothing. About 125 pages of nothing, to be exact. The actual finishing date for nanowrimo is tomorrow,at midnight in your local time zone. But because tomorrow night,I'll be doing my first bit of stand up in about a year for a charity gig,I'm going to have a damn good go at trying to finish the nano book tonight. This, however, might be a bit of a push,since there's still about 15,000 words left to make the word count.

You can tell that it's not a prospect I'm looking forward to, because I'm procrastinating by doing this blog. Writers are an idiotic lot sometimes. Very few other groups of people consider that the best way to avoid writing is to do some completely different writing.

What's odd is that it still feels like a short story, despite the fact that its currently running at 35,000 words. I mean, let's not kid ourselves here: it's very much a hack job, a situation that ain't gonna change when I cough out the last 15 thousand words in - I hope - less than seven hours. Nobody's going to produce anything of real quality in that night, not even if their name is Hemingway. But, frankly, that's not important - getting down the main body is, and I can come back in January to the carcass and pick over the bones. As terrible as this draft is - and it is terrible at the moment, it hasn't even got up to the level of first draft yet - I (even I, normally hyper self critical ) find bits of it readable. And here's the ... Encouraging/Depressing bit (delete as appropriate) ... This terrible, badly written, incomplete book, at least six drafts away from anything I wish to show to anyone. much less consider publication, is already better than some stuff I've seen uploaded to the kindle. This is something I very much need to keep in mind in the wee small hours of tonight.

NaNoWriMo: Time Is Running Out

Only a few days left - a few hours, really - until the deadline for NaNoWriMo hits, and I've still got nearly 17,000 words to complete. Time is running out. It feels like an episode of 24. If, you know, it was an episode of 24 that mainly concentrated on a man with scruffy hair and glasses hunched over a laptop. Now, I know that there are episodes that feature exactly that character, but they usually turn out to be one of the terrorists, and end up having all their fingers snapped backward by Kiefer Sutherland, and I don't want that happening before the end of the week. Of, indeed, ever.

I try and knock out a few hundred words while on my tea and lunch break at work. This morning, I fired up the PC, slotted in my memory card with the story on it .... and everywhere plunged into darkness. Now, that really was like an episode of 24. There had been some kind of major power cut in the town, but annoyingly, it wasn't major enough to facilitate everyone getting a day off. In fact, the power came back on roughly twenty minutes later. You know, at the end of my tea break. So I'd missed a chance that I really couldn't afford to miss to add a couple of hundred onto my word count, but I decided that I would appease the inspiration Gods by writing a power cut into my story. It'll actually work quite well, I think, and might even give me a couple of thousand extra words to slot into the climax. We shall see. At this point, every paragraph counts.

As I hurtle towards the finish line, mindful of the fact that most of my nights are going to be taken up with other activities (Ghostwalk tomorrow night, kids), what's interesting is the way a lot of people who know that I've taken on this ridiculous task have chosen to display their support. In the main, it involves them shrugging their shoulders, and beginning sentences with the words 'Well, of course, now, it's impossible ..', with the implication that no matter what happens now, there's no way that I'm going to be able to finish a 50k novel by the end of the week. The tone is pleasant enough (you know, 'nice try', and all), but I somewhat wish they'd at least wait until I actually came up short before telling me that it's ok that I've come up short.

Unless, of course, it's reverse psychology. Maybe they want me to take umbrage, to prove their expectation of my lethargy wrong. In which case, I resent being played so obviously. I've half a mind to simply stop writing, just to show everybody that I'm not so easily manipulated. Yes, that's the plan. Anyone can write a novel in a month. But it shows real strength of character to resist doing what everyone else on social networking sites is doing.

Oh, by the way, Facebook don't have any legal access to your status updates. Or something. Pass it on.

NaNoWriMo: What Happens Next? Cause I Don't Know ...

I suppose there's other stuff going on in my life that isn't NaNoWriMo related, but it's difficult to be sure. I had my first full day back at work today after a week away (I work in a school) so there was always a chance that my word count, on which I've been managing to keep slightly ahead of, would drop quite dramatically. Luckily, however, I managed to hack out a bit in my morning break,  and in the lunch break, and I'm still reasonably ahead. If I can serve up another 500 words by the time I fall asleep tonight, then I'll feel like I'm on the right track. 

Having said all that, the story's not quite working yet. I'm not too sure why all the major events are happening, why my main character is being thrust into the midst of it all. Obviously, I'm aware that I'm not going to be producing great literature here ('Bring Up The Bodies' this ain't), but I still want there to be a believable, logical narrative. I've got certain restrictions on my plot, such as the fact that my lead character can't leave the town, and somehow she's getting away with murder without the police getting involved. When I set out, these things weren't such a big deal, and maybe in a story that was done and dusted in, say, twenty thousand words, it wouldn't be a problem. You might not even question the logic until long after you've put the book down, by which time of course, it's too late - the job is done, the story has been told. But with an actual novel, you have time to get to know the characters, the opportunity to question their motives. Mostly, things can't simply 'happen' to them. Well, alright, that's not strictly true - in fact my 'in' on this story was just that, that things were happening to my main character, and she was surviving by simply reacting - think Harrison Ford in The Fugitive, Cary Grant in North By Northwest, Jodie Foster in ... uh, pretty much Amy Jodie Foster film. But, it made my main character slightly too passive, and that doesn't quite work for the plot. Which, as I've mentioned, has a contrivance meaning that she can't leave the town, and the police aren't getting involved in her clearly illegal activies. Obviously, I could just 'fix' those problems by not writing them in the first place - if it's awkward to have my main character restricted to one city, then seemingly the obvious thing would be to let her go wherever the hell she wants. But, that means an entirely different story, and risks spiralling  out to something a bit rambling. And .. well, here's the thing. Whenever I've worked on a story, and there's been some narrative problem I can't quite get my head around, I've always -emphasis on always - found that the problem is its own solution. Therefore, she can't leave town because she's following orders. And that in turn, begins to indicate why the police are turning a blind eye. But suddenly, my entirely innocent woman in jeopardy has to get all Liam Neeson on everyone's ass, and 'aquire a certain set of skills', indicating she's a professional .... something. I didn't know that when I started writing this. Hell, I didn't know that this morning. It's good, though, because it's beginning to give her a history and background which she didn't have previously. However, it might just mean I may have to start doing some research, which I had been intending to strenuously avoid. Damn. 

As I said, there's gotta be other stuff going on that isn't NaNoWriMo. 

Uh. 

I'll get back to you. 

Nanowrimo, Day 4: I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For

Whenever I'm not working on the Nanowrimo novel, it's defeating me. I can't see a way through it, the plotting seems simplistic, the characters badly sketched out, and, most crucially, I have no idea what I'm going to do to progress the story further. It's so easy to get a bit scared off, and run away. Gibbering. What tends to happen, however, is once I've managed to force myself in front of the computer, with the understanding that I really am going to write something, no matter about the fear that it could well be terrible. Writing without looking back is remarkably focussing to the narrative flow. 

However, I'm saying that on what's essentially my last day off before returning to work. It's not really, I was doing the youth theatre yesterday, and I had my improv class tonight, but that's not like a full day at the office. It'll be interesting to see what I come up with - if I can come up with anything - after 8 hours of an exhausting job. My parameters of what's acceptable about the fear of writing something that's terrible may well have to be widened. 

I've had a concern that while I know most of the events that occur in my novel, I don't really know why they're happening. There's not yet a logical catalyst to everything kicking off. Certain things have begun to slide into place today, but it's still doesn't quite make sense. I'm having to make. Y characters work against what they'd logially want to do in order to make the story work. That's not always a great way to work, but given the time constraints, I don't have much choice. Now, one of two things will happen: either my plot will simply snap, because it just doesn't want to go that way (which, despite what you might think, is actually a good thing, because it means that the characters are developing strong personalities), or that I will have forced myself to have thought of a good reason why my characters are doing things they don't want to do. In my downtime, I've been re-watching old episodes of 24, and quite often, Jack Bauer (or someone else) is acting under duress, being forced to act the the bad guy for a greater good. That's begun to stir things in my imagination as to why my main character is having to act the way she is. If nothing else, it's a good enough reason for me to claim that watching box sets comes under the banner of 'research'. 

I'm hoping to hit the 10k mark before the weekend, well, ends. In the very strictest sense, that's not going to happen, because at the time of writing this sentence, it's about three minutes from midnight, but I'm going to play the Christmas Eve defence, and say that it's not Monday until I've slept. I figure I've got about a hour before fatigue takes me like a six foot mugger in an alleyway. My main stumbling block this week is going to be finding my 'macguffin'. While it isn't - and shouldn't be - the actual motor to the narrative - the way all the characters act will inevitably be influenced by whatever it is. But, bottom line: in the past four days, I've produced nearly 10,000 words more than I would have done otherwise. By the end of the week, I'll have more words in this story than are currently in my entire short story collection. And for that, I can only be grateful. 

Nanowrimo Word Count: 9347

Nanowrimo: What Makes You Think You Know What You're Talking About?

Here's the other, really important thing about Nanowrimo, the international thing where thousands of people attempt to write a novel in the space of just a month: the simple fact that it's just about possible. The idea that I'm developing for my story, Set Up, Punch has been fluttering around my head for a couple of years now, but I've never gotten around to completing it, or indeed, even starting it. Too much effort for too little reward, I felt. Would it be any good? What if I didn't know what the hell I was writing? What if there was no real logical transition in between the scenes I was writing, and they clearly only followed each other in that order because that was the way that I, the writer, wanted them to be - but they didn't actually have any narrative coherence? What if my lead character was quite sketchily written, with no strong personality traits for the reader to latch onto?

Well. Two and a bit days in, roughly 5,000 words, and I'm guilty of all of the above. But, I'm two and a bit days in, and I've written 5,000 words of a story that simply did not exist on Wednesday. It's actually a giddily remarkable thing. This approach to just go blindly forward, telling the story in much the same way that you imagine 19th Century explorers to have gone hacking through jungle vines, is very freeing. I haven't even read back more than 100 words from wherever the last section I'd left off writing at any one time. I simply do a quick scan to remind myself of where I am in the plot, and then go forward. Always forward. 

Which brings us back to the opening line of this blog entry. If I wasn't doing this as part of a national event, my internal editor would have kicked in (and kicked me) ages ago. Probably within the first 100 words. More than that, whenever I'm not writing - when I'm not at the pad or laptop - the whole scale of the thing overwhelms me. It's a novel, for crying out loud. One that I have just 28 days to complete. And it's not even 28 days, not really, because life and work are going to get in the way. So I find, somewhat to my surprise, that I'm not actually thinking over plot problems when away from the computer. Usually, with other projects, I am. I will have written myself into a corner, and will spend a few days not writing, just mentally trying to untie the story knot. With this novel, I find myself incapable of doing that - my mind just shrinks away from the problem like a shell-shocked dormouse under a flashlight (no, I have no idea where that image came from either, just work with me here). So, as I say - if it wasn't for the fact that this is under the umbrella of nanowrimo, my panic and writer's block would have encouraged me to jump ship at the first hurdle. (ships? Hurdles? And you thought the shell shocked dormouse was a tortured metaphor). 

But I've found, forced with the idea that I have to hit a reasonable word count every day, that simply flexing the fingers and ... typing - actually provides the storylines that I haven't been able to think of when I've been away from the computer. At least, that's the way it's gone down so far. I very likely won't be quite as clear-headed in the middle of week three, when I find I've sunk 200 pages into my characters running on the spot. Perhaps literally, if I'm particularly stuck. 

It should be ok, though. In one of my other lives, I'm an improviser, and in improv, you learn to live in the present moment - just always moving forward, only reacting to whatever's going on at that precise moment. The theory is that you won't have to worry about coming up with a decent ending, because whatever story you're telling in the present will lead naturally to that ending. That's the theory, anyway. I mention the improvisation only by means of a tenuous link to the fact that to or row (Sunday), I'm holding the second of my improv drop ins at the DukeBox Theatre on Waterloo Street in Hove, which is as good a place as any to come up with a new story or idea. They're purely drop in, so newcomers are welcome at any time, regardless of what experience they do or don't have. There's all manner of different types of improv and skills that are looked at each week, so it's always worth coming along to see what we're doing. 

Now. As the more astute amongst you might have guessed, this entire blog entry was a delaying tactic, avoiding that fateful moment when I finally go back to the novel, and hack out the next couple of thousand. As ever, right now, I have no idea what happens next. Hopefully I will within the. Ext half hour .... 

Nanowrimo, Day 2: Heading For A Wall

All throughout today, I've felt exhausted. Like I just want to fall asleep. And it's not even as if I've had a long day at the office. I just met up with a friend who, incredibly, I hadn't seen since about Feburary. We chatted about that, about love lives, and about green eggs and ham (not because we were at a Dr Suess convention, but because it was on the menu, and neither one of us have had it before). And, of course, we talked about nanowrimo. It's inevitable, now. People are going to often ask me over the next 29 days how it's going, and if I've hit today's word count. This is what happens when you constantly put your word count up as your Facebook status update, or on your twitter feed. 

And that, of course, is the whole point. 

I'm about to hit the the first bump in my story. I know what will happen in, say, twenty, thirty or maybe even fifty pages time. At least, vaguely. But I have no idea how to get there. I have no idea ow my character is going to get from where she is right now to the next set piece. Now, given today's exhaustion, this would be the point at which I'd normally decide to sleep on it, and get caught up on some box sets that I still haven't gotten around to watching yet. And that's where the whole insanity of nanowrimo really comes into its own. There's no hiding place. There are thousands of people all across the globe all hacking out their little novels right now. As you read this, there's probably someone within ten miles of you who should be finishing chapter 3. There's every chance that that someone should be you. Normally, if writer's block (which is sort of what I'm about to hit) trips you up, then that can be as good a reason as any to throw in the towel for a couple of days. But then a couple of days can very quickly become a week. After all, real life is very good at getting in the way. But with nanowrimo, if you tweeted that you'd delivered a 1,000 words on day 1, and 700 words on day 2, followed by a storming 3,000 words on day 3 .... Well, people are going to notice if your word count suddenly goes quiet for a day or so. It's sheer ego and embarrassment that can galvanise you to keep up your count. Let's face it, the whole producing a novel in thirty days is a plan of infinite stupidity in the first place, so it can be quite chastening if, once you've committed to it, you then bail out after only a couple of days. Everyone will know. And from now on, whenever you respond to the question 'so, what are you doing at the moment?' with the reply 'well, I'm working on that novel', you will have to accept that your companion is going to smile politely, nod, and change the subject to something else. Like how they're getting promoted. You know, like a grown-up. 

I've already hit a minor bump in the story already. Same problem - I didn't know what my character should do next. That time, it was an easier solve, since I simply wrote my inability to progress the story into the narrative: in other words, I had my character realising that she didn't know what to do next. That clicked something, because she went to ask advice from an old friend (who turned out to be a burlesque dancer, which, a, is so something that wouldn't have happened if I hadn't had a mild case of writers block, and, b, probably indicates something about where my mind wanders if it doesn't have something to occupy it). I don't want my character to be constantly not knowing what to do next, however - that makes her passive, and she's certainly not that - so I can't use that trick again. One of the major challenges is that I don't yet know why the major incidents of the novel have occurred (there's some Big Bad in the background, but I don't yet know why my characters are mixed in events), but I'm trusting that I'll work that out as the month / novel progresses. 

As to what happens to my main character right now - or what she makes happen - I still have absolutely no idea. I guess there's only one way to find out .. 

Word Count: I forget. But currently I'm ahead of schedule ..

Nanowrimo: Day One Is Done

A reasonably productive day, and a surprising amount of it wasn't actually concentrating on hitting today's Nanowrimo target. That being said, I'm slightly ahead of schedule, which is somewhat to be expected, as I'm currently in the relaxed mind set of a Person Who Has Had Some Time Off Work. I fully expect my ability to form coherent sentences to reduce quite dramatically from next week onwards, so the further ahead I can get on my word count now, the better. Speaking of which, there was a moment a few minutes ago when I thought I'd managed to reduce my word count quite dramatically by the simple expedient of just losing everything that I'd written today (over three thousand words), but it turned out that I'd saved it in the wrong folder. It's the sort of mistake that would make you consider pulling the plug on the whole affair right from day 1. 

But, as I say, I didn't spend as much time in front of the computer as perhaps I expected to on Day 1 of nanowrimo. This was mainly because I got to spend some time having coffee and conversation (well, hot chocolate, too) with some very dear friends. Which is not to say that the subject of writing didn't come up. In fact, I found myself at a writing group. I've been meaning to get along to this particular writing group for the best part of the year, but something had always fallen on the same day which meant that I couldn't get along to it. There was one week in the summer that I was finally able to get along, and I turned up half a hour early, armed with pens and paper. Nobody else was there. It took me almost a hour to realise that I'd arrived on the wrong date. You'd think that if I wanted to join a writers group, I would have at least learned the basics. Like reading. 

But finally, tonight, I was able to make a session, and was glad I did. The group, which meets every first Thursday of the month on the third floor of the Waterstones in Brighton are a friendly and supportive bunch, and it seems like an ideal place to kick start new ideas into life. Certainly, I came away with the first draft of a brand new short story that didn't exist in any form whatsoever before this evening. Because that's just what I need this month: yet another story to complete. 

Of course, this month it's all about nanowrimo, and 'Set Up, Punch'. As I've probably mentioned before, it's a lot more grimy pulp fiction than I would normally write, with a great deal more violence and swearing than usually finds its way into my writing (it's only day one, and already two of my characters have met rather nasty deaths). Still, the whole pulp fiction feel seems to suit the hack-it-out  atmosphere of nanowrimo. I figure I've got a couple more days where I can continue to write pretty much free form association. And then I'm going to slam quite hard into a narrative blank wall. But for now: I think I've done as well as I could have hoped. Oh, and got another short story that I wasn't expecting. Nanowrimo might be an unashamed hack job, more about the word count than the actual quality. But there are moments when you are writing, unguarded and unconcernedly for the best part of a hour, when you actually feel like a writer. 

And that, of course, is the whole point. 

NaNoWrimo : Day 1

Had a Ghostwalk tonight (well, last night, now) that was particularly well attended despite the appalling weather simply due to the fact that it was Halloween. I was a little nervous because a couple of friends were in the audience (friends always seem to rock up to the Ghostwalk exclusively on the nights that the weather is bad), but it all seemed to go pretty well, people seemed to enjoy themselves, and there were enough skull shaped lollipops to go around. 

It being Halloween, the Ghostwalk was later than I usually do it, and by the time I got home, it was already past the witching hour - in other words, November 1st. While this meant that there was no immediate need for me to start shaving (more about that another time), it meant that before I was going to go to sleep, I could already get started on my NaNoWriMo novel. To have any chance of completing 50,000 words by the end of November, I need to be logging about 1,700 words on a daily basis, which I'm already fairly confident that I'm going to fail miserably at. But it's only the start of NaNoWriMo right now, which should mean that I'm more able to hack out a few hundred words than I will be ale to in, say, two weeks time, even if those words make absolutely no sense whatsoever. 

While I have a rough idea of what's going to happen when in my story, I haven't really thought about it too much in advance, preferring to write it out almost as free form association. Tonight, that was the right thing to do, although obviously it may not work that easily for the rest of the project. I'm already aware that in the 2 or 3 pages I hacked out tonight, there are some terrible turns of phrase, and occasionally (on more than one occasion, in a piece of prose that lasts less than 4 pages), I'm jumping rather too suddenly from one subject to the next in order to make a point. 

Refreshingly, however, none of this seems to matter. All the prep and pep talks on twitter right now, which are mainly on USA time (where NaNoWriMo won't kick in for a couple more hours) cheerfully remind you that whatever you've written in a month's time, won't be ready in any way for publication. This month is just to get the damn thing (in this case, the damn thing being a very first draft) down on paper. I'm fairly confident that there will be at least 200 times in November where I'll really regret signing up for NaNoWriMo, and that anything I write is truly dreadful. What's comforting, though, is that by hacking out a thousand words tonight, I've already had that reaction twice already. Which means I've only got to go through it 198 times more. 

NaNoWriMo Wordcount: 1,177.  

NaNoWriMo - Before The Start

This week, then, I'm going to attempt something stupid and pointless. Well, more so than any other week, in any case. As November begins to kick in, and the nights get darker and colder, I find, for about the first time this year, less things to occupy my time than at any other point in the last twelve months. Of course, now that we all live in the future, and that, there are various things to conquer and destroy any feelings of boredom I may have been considering having. There is, of course, the whole growing a moustache thing for a month, which isn't so much a boredom-thrashing activity (you'd have to be pretty damn bored, wouldn't you?) but a charity awareness thing, which I'll be coming back to later in the week. 

I'm holding some improv workshops, the first of which is tonight (Sunday 28th). I'm a bit nervous that nobody's going to turn up, if I'm honest. Facebook has long ago ceased being a reliable indicator of how many people are actually going to turn up to your event. I have had a few people saying that they'll be there, and I think it will be the sort of thing that simply needs to be going for a few weeks before it catches fire. Not literally, I hope. 

But none of this is the stupid and pointless thing. Every November, thousands of people around the world attempt something called NaNoWriMo. In case you're not already familiar with the concept, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. The aim is to do - to achieve - exactly what that name suggests: to hack out a novel in 30 days. The novel is a reasonably short one - the suggested aim for a word count is 50,000, which is - very roughly - the size of The HitchHikers Guide To The Galaxy, for instance, or Of Mice And Men. The real aim behind the whole enterprise is to get those people who are constantly telling themselves that one day they'll actually get around to writing a book .. to actually get around to writing a book. It doesn't even really matter about the quality, just getting the word count down. It averages out at about 1,500 words a day. This, I figure, should be just about manageable,even if we include the inevitable couple of days throughout the month where I only produce 500 words, or don't even get around to writing anything at all.

I'm deliberately only starting on November 1st, which is Thursday. Obviously, I could try and get a head start by starting now, but somehow it doesn't seem in the spirit of the whole adventure. I rather like the idea of starting this fool's errand at the same time as thousands of others all across the planet. I haven't even made any planning notes.

What I do have is a title and a vague plot line. A couple of years ago, a local publishing company was asking for submissions to an imprint they had, called Pulp Press. The stories they wanted were exactly that - pulp fiction, the sort of grimy 5 cent paperbacks you might have had in your back pocket in the 1940s or 50s. When men were bastards and women all wore Bettie Page bangs. Sex, violence and six inch heels. Needless to say, it's not exactly the sort of writing I normally do, but nonetheless, an idea did present itself. I was doing some stand up at the time (more than I do these days,anyway), and the stand up scene in Brighton, where I live, is sometimes quite insular. I began to have these ideas about various comics on the scene being bumped off in Brighton (it may have even been inspired by the old line about 'dying on stage'). However, as with many projects, I never actually got round to writing it, particularly as - even though I roughly knew who was going to die, and how (the last two deaths have been fairly fixed in my head now for the past two years), I've never really been able to work out why these deaths are occurring. Not being able to work out the reason for the catalyst has stopped me starting. Now, however: I'm going to put faith in the expectation that if I write enough of the story, a solution will eventually present itself. And even if it doesn't, it didn't stop other classic pulp writers. I think it was someone like Raymond Chandler - he'd finished The High Window, or maybe even The Maltease Falcon, which starts with a body being discovered. It's that death that's the catalyst for the entire story. But when the story ends, the murderer isn't revealed. It's the ultimate Macguffin. When asked by a fan what the deal was with the dead body, Chandler reportedly repiled: 'Oh, him. I forgot about him .. '

So, hopefully, as long as I can get a fairly entertaining story down, then logic can go hang. For the first draft, anyway. The story is going to be called Set Up, Punch by the way. I'll try to post a daily report on how it's all going, with a wordcount. Obviously, at the moment, the wordcount is exactly zero. I'm hoping it won't stay that way .. 

I'll Get Around To It

Something odd happened with my Facebook last night. I'm not sure why, but each time I left a comment, or updated my status, the little image that appeared next to whatever I'd written - in theory, my profile pic - showed an image of a different woman. The first picture was that of Ariana Huffington (of the Huffington Post, obviously), and I wondered initially if something had got into my system meaning that anyone that I was friends with, or whose pages I subscribed to, would now show as my profile picture.

It didn't seem to be the case, though, as the picture changed each time I refreshed the page, and the next few people I didn't recognise at all, but they all seemed to be the kinds of photos that you occasionally get on an unsolicited follower on twitter; the kind that follows 95,3977 other people, has never tweeted, has a disturbing sounding web address, and a photo where they're pouting from behind a tangle of tousled hair. And I don't actually know anyone like that. Well, no more than six.

Clearly something had infected my Facebook profile, but it was odd that all the images being touted as me were all female. I've never before picked up a virus from a variety of different women (oh, please; you should be ashamed of yourselves) and I didn't really know what to do. Well, actually, I did; I reacted to this problem in the way that I react to rather too many: I didn't really do anything, in the assumption that everything would probably sort itself out. You'd be surprised how often this is successful. Although if you've received a email from me in the last 24 hours claiming that I've got video footage of you doing something obscene, I'd imagine you can probably dismiss and delete it without too much concern about your personal liberty.

I guess there's one major reason why I put off doing anything about those things sent to try me, and it's the old demon procrastination. There are many theories as to why people procrastinate, but it does seem to be deeply ingrained into a great many of us. It's one of the reasons why I'm writing this blog; so that my writing becomes more habit than chore. I missed writing yesterday's blog simply because I couldn't think of a damn thing to talk about; and even just that single one-day pause was a real scattering of tacks in the road: it became stupidly difficult to get the groove going again to begin writing today's entry.

In order to further combat this continual threat of artistic lethargy, in November, I'm going to be taking part in NaNoWriMo. This is an annual event, which takes place each November, in which thousands of people across the world who don't know any better attempt to hack out an entire novel in a month (the name stands for National Novel Writing Month, see?). The main logic behind this is that many people who consider themselves writers speak at great length about this book that they're going to write, while never actually writing it, because life, jobs, family and love gets in the way. But of course, they'll always be in the way, and NaNoWriMo serves as a catalyst to actually stop coming up with excuses and get the damn thing done.

There are two particularly brilliant conceits with the success of NaNoWriMo, one somewhat unavoidable, but the second ingenious. The first simply comes from the fact that everyone is attempting to write a novel in a month; the same month. No matter that such an undertaking is insane, it combats the usual problem that most writers have to deal with at some point, insomuch that writing is a particularly solitary activity, there's not really anyone else around to feel your pain. In November, however, there are potentially millions of people online, all cheerfully ready to acknowledge that their efforts are worse than yours.

Which brings us to the second point of success: it's written into the rules of NaNoWriMo that you should consider it unimportant how good your novel is. This is one competition where quantity truly is more important that quality: all that matters is that you get those 50,000 words down in some sort of coherent narrative order. The polishing, detailing - many authors would say the actual hard work of the real writing - can come after November, once you've got past that first, almost always insurmountable hurdle of actually getting a story written. For a serial procrastinator like me, it means that all the usual excuses and logical reasons of why I don't get round to findings hong such and such a play, or completing that 20 minutes of stand up, have been ruthlessly swept away. There are no excuses to not write: you simply write.

I should point out, I have tried NaNoWriMo before, about four years ago. I lasted one day, and 600 words.

I'll let you know if I do any better this time round.

Icecream Sunday

A day off today. I'm not used to days off. I mean, obviously, I've just come off a few weeks holiday, but that's different. It's been a reasonable whack of time since I last had a regular, weekly day off. The two weekend acting classes that I run were combined into one easily manageable Saturday session, freeing up my Sundays. It means I'll take quite a hit on my monthly pay, so I'm going to have to spend less on things like, I don't know, fresh fruit and vegetables, but on balance, it's probably a bearable sacrifice to make for my mental health. And it's not as if I eat a great many fresh fruit and vegetables anyway.

So far, despite my all new work ethic, I haven't done a great deal with my day off, but I'm going to call that a good thing, since it's my, you know, day off. I've had to prepare for tonight's PPM (Pre-Production Meeting) for Three Kinds Of Me, and sort out what I'm doing in tomorrow night's Acting Class, but that's been fairly low impact, all things considered. Actually, all things considered, I probably wouldn't have found them to be such a low impact duo of tasks if today hadn't been a day off. That's the thing with wall to wall, relentless seven day week work .. Your mind (and emotions) aren't given enough breathing space to do anything,

I even found myself on the beach this afternoon. Only the second or third time this year, which is criminal, considering how close I live. I've been physically down there quite often, but normally only as a passage to get from the flat to town, very rarely as a destination. I think my boredom threshold is very low. It always seems like a grand idea, like the sort of thing I should be doing: sitting on the beach, reading a paperback, but quite often I'm getting twitchy after only ten minutes. I did ok today then; I was down there for about two hours. It helped that I went for a bit of a swim in the sea.

Now, I haven't swum in the sea for a couple of years. Again, criminal because the beach is only blah blah blah, but time and circumstance always seems to drive it away from me. Nevertheless, I'd decided quite early this week that I was going to commit to swimming in the sea on my new found day off. Once I'd checked the weather forecast, I knew there was no escape. It would be stupid not to. Once I'd done enough avoidance tactics of reading stuff on my kindle (it's true, you know, it really is easy to read in direct sunlight), I finally managed to get myself into the sea. Now, bear in mind this is the first time in about two years that I've been in the water, so I spent about two minutes doing a sort of paddle thing as I contemplated just how cold the water might be. As I did this, I was aware that was surrounded by loads of kids who clearly had no problem whatsoever with how could it was. So I (literally) took the plunge. And that's another truth often told: it's ok once you get your hair wet.

And it was actually quite lovely. I swam out further than I expected, not quite far enough to experience an Open Water moment, but far enough to almost lose the sounds of the crowd on the beach. The sound of the brass band on the bandstand did manage to float over. Another solitary swimmer splashed by. And suddenly, without warning and unbidden, an idea for a sequence for the novel that I hope to hack out during NaNoWriMo came to mind. Turns out I was working after all.