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.  

Tuesday 29th July 2014

Going through the sixth / seventh / eighth draft of The Snow Queen. I don't even know anymore; the drafts have all sort of blended into each other; fixing the problems in one as I reprint out the next, printing out the next knowing already that such and such a scene has to be swapped with another, except that there's no real way of doing that yet ... and at least three characters haven't been fully sketched out yet .. All the usual stuff that happens around this time of the rewrites. 

At the moment, I'm far too close, scaling the sheer cliff face of the script to know if it's actually any good or not (I'm going to have to have another sweep of the original Hans Christian Andersen before I do too many more rewrites, that's for certain). But on one thing alone, I appear to be in pretty good shape. Currently, I have almost all the story that I need to tell down on paper - in about half the pages that I need. This is very good news. The last script I produced clocked in at over two hours. People didn't mind too much, but they didn't mind with the qualification that, yes, it was too long. Plus, this is a kid's show. There's no way that I'm going to be able to get those kids to sit still for a hour and a half, let alone over two. I was initially slightly concerned, because as well as all the actual plot and narrative stuff I'm writing for this thing, I'm also writing songs (yeah, I know. Shush). I thought that perhaps that once I'd come up with the songs, there would be room for only the lightest and flimsiest of plots. I've been watching a lot of Disney, to see how they get away with it. Turns out there's a lot of swinging from tall buildings. 

The other thing that's been a bit of a challenge this week is the casting for our next batch of short plays - for CAST IRON 3 - in September. We always knew that we would lose some of our regular company this time round, to the likes of Edinburgh, summer holidays, and 'a life' (yeah, me neither), but it's been a particularly tough call in terms of casting and the like. I think we've almost got it sorted, but it has meant that our various casts have significantly less time to rehearse their plays. 

Friday 12 July 2013

Last night I managed to finish writing a play that I’d been working on. OK, it was only a ten minute play, but I still have a pretty keen sense of achievement – even more so, since I’d managed to finish it (final draft, an’ all) a full two days before the actual deadline. Normally, I find myself hacking out the third or fourth draft just a few hours before the final submissions are being accepted. And while I do refer to myself as a ‘writer’ on various websites and twitter feeds, this is why I’m somewhat wary of describing myself as such in real life. 

You see, writers actually write things. They get things done. I can’t always claim that great honour. Sure, I have ideas. Some of them are pretty good ideas. Some of those pretty good ideas would make well received books and TV programmes; because I’ve seen other people have the same ideas, and write the books and TV programmes before I did. And that’s the point, of course: anybody can have ideas. Ideas are cheap currency; ideas are all around us, over-laden fruit on trees. I sincerely believe that writers who complain that they can never come up with ideas are simply not recognising that at least half of the thoughts they’ve had that day are in fact ideas that could potentially make a good story. But that’s a blog entry for another day.

This blog entry, however, is about the ideas that I do have, but never actually develop into a full script. Most writers will recognise this: a new and shiny, sexy and exciting idea that’s fun to write for the first thousand words or so, and then – well, then, it feels too much like hard work. Particularly if  writing isn’t actually your day job, and you have to fit in between shifts of your actual hard work. And then, horror of horrors, you end up having another new and shiny, sexy and exciting, brand new idea that suddenly seems a helluva lot more alluring that the crappy old idea that isn’t cooperating with you right now. So you drop that idea, and move onto the new – until the cycle repeats itself, again and again. I’d argue that, even if you’re writing two thousand words a day, if you’re not actually finishing anything – if there’s nothing produced at the end of the day that has a beginning, middle and an end – well, then: you don’t actually get to call yourself a writer. I say this, and yet I’m still figuring it out for myself.

Even that’s being overly romantic about it. That line about it seeming too much like hard work? That’s uncomfortably near the truth. A lot of us so-called writers don’t actually write (or, more specifically, re-write, edit and finish) our work because of sheer laziness. That’s it, nothing more noble or mysterious than that. Oh, yeah, sure, there’s other stuff , like fear of success (not fear of failure, you’ll notice. But the crippling fear that somebody will like what you’ve produced, and expect that you can come up with more of the same). But there’s only one way to get past that: just get the stuff written. Now, some of you might have a sneaking suspicion that I’m writing this much more for my benefit than yours, and in that you would be entirely correct (let’s face it, the only reader who bumps up the hit counter on this blog is me myself when I’m trying to check if anyone else has wandered past).

And stuff gets in the way of your writing. I mean, literally. I started this blog on my way to work, and had to break off from writing when real life got in the way. I had a whole eloquent point to end on, that I could write up in my lunch break. Well, it’s now my lunch break, and the eloquent point has entirely vanished. No idea what the hell I wanted to talk about. Now, the other option would have been to junk this blog altogether. But, what exactly would have been the point of that? Now you, who have invested two minutes in reading this might have something to say about that. If I hadn’t committed to  actually writing and completing this blog, then right now, you’d be two minutes in credit. But let’s face it, what would you have done with those two minutes? (Don’t answer that. If anything you’re thinking of right now could be completed within two minutes, you probably don’t want to advertise the fact)

Sometimes – often, in fact – you’re going to have to write the crap in order to get to the good stuff. Maybe a hell of a lot of crap. But maybe, just maybe: you end up writing something decent. As long as you understand that it will almost always in that order.