First Draft – done

After a massive great push over the Diamond Jubilee weekend where I literally locked myself in the flat for four days and wrote nearly 70 pages, I have finished a first draft.

It’s long and needs trimming and I can see where themes haven’t been developed as well or as fully as they could be, but it’s something to work with.

The characters come across well, but there is still much work to be done. But the bones of it are there, the skeleton. There are good lines and less good lines, long conversations and short as well as unnecessary ones.

But the important thing is that the hardest part is done: the first draft.

Now, a bit of a rest, some distance. Start editing in August.

For now, a bit of research, a bit of consideration, and a much needed break.

Chapters vs Scenes

A strange thing has been happening as I work on Heather and Robin. I normally write fairly short scenes, so that the end effect is that the novel is storyboarded. But with this book, the scenes are more like chapters.

And instead of having constant dialogue between characters, this time it feels like there’s more of the inner monologues, more thinky bits as I am want to call them.

It’s perhaps turning out to be a slower paced book this one. Though, as I’m not yet finished, I can’t say for sure. It’s nice though for the form to inflict itself on the work as opposed to the other way round. Maybe this is the way the story wants to be told. Possibly though, I think the pace will speed up once Robin starts stalking Heather properly.

Which will be nice for him – he’ll be able to start taking pictures. Right now he’s frustrated, stuck for inspiration and his dating life isn’t going well either. But once he meets Heather, I think they’ll have a nice effect on one another.

The other thing I was wondering this past week was if I might be writing a sort of love story. Not a romcom type thing, but something more true to life. Whereby two people just click with one another, regardless of how different they may be.

Only time and a finished draft will tell.

Time and more of it please

I knew getting a fulltime job would have drawbacks, one of them is of course, less time to write. But I didn’t realise how much less time.

Two hours or possibly three of an evening isn’t enough. I leave my imaginary friends on the street corner well away from my office. They wait there for me. I pick them up on my way home every night. They wait there, rain or shine, until after five in the evening. Patiently or not, I don’t know. I don’t know what they get up to in the day anymore.

And I miss them when I’m at work.

But they’re here now, sitting here on the bed next to me.

And so, to work. Real work. Important work. Work that isn’t dull, not subject to approvals, and above all, work that is not boring.

And so, at long last, to work.

Conflict

As I was working the other day, I ran out of steam. I thought perhaps a rest might be a good idea. Took two weeks away from the book only to find that actually, a rest wasn’t the problem.

Not enough conflict was holding me back.

There are so many things to keep track of in a novel when you’re building it that it’s hard to remember to ensure the characters hardly ever get what they want. So now I’m going back in and doing a little surgery, putting in a bit more conflict. Which is also helping me feel closer to the characters.

To work, to work.

Time

And more of it please.

Right now, the major complication is this: is Heather coming across as a normal over-worked, stressed out woman? A woman who can’t sleep because the world around her won’t let her? A woman whose mind is always somewhere else?

Are Heather’s ailments doing a good enough job of representing the things our culture could improve upon?

Heather needs to be average and above average at the same time. Which is tricky. And she needs to be sick in a way that’s familiar to people. A low grade fever, nagging illness but nothing that ever really feels worth seeing a doctor about, until it’s too late. Not in a cancer way, but in a sort of Pandora’s Box way.

Heather is sick, the world is only adding to her problems, but she can’t see it. She can’t see that the ways in which she’s told she’s meant to communicate and the amount of communication she’s meant to be doing (in order to live a happy and fulfilled life, mind) aren’t working. She doesn’t communicate in a way that has value or meaning. Which leads her to hospital. Which leads her to Robin.

Climax

I had thought that I would be able to avoid what happened yesterday. I felt that I’d put the climax of the novel in the right spot and that what I’ve been writing the past several months was the novel that I wanted to write, with all the things in their rightful places.

And then yesterday happened and I realised that actually, I’ve put the climax in the wrong spot again. But what I’m starting to understand about myself is that this is what happens. I work on the plot until I’m sick to death of it, and then I start writing but it’s only after I’ve written two thirds of several drafts that two things occur to me. The first is that the climax is in the wrong spot. The second is where the climax ought to go.

By climax I mean the thing that starts the novel off in my head. The little moment or incident that I build the plot and story around. In this case, it’s when Heather hires the stalker. I thought that should happen at the start, that it was an action. But now I’ve come to see that it’s a reaction – she does it because of several factors. It comes later in the novel, and the thing I want to write about (that I didn’t know until yesterday) is the build up to her hiring the stalker.

I came to this conclusion in a way I now recognise as the usual way. At about two thirds of the way through a draft, I get to a point where I’m losing interest in the novel, in the writing. And this novel was exactly the same. Not enough dialogue for me, too many repetitive thinky bits…

So yesterday, I wrote down the new plot. It came so quickly, and included details like actual dialogue, that I know this is the one. I say that every time, but I think now I’ve cracked it.

I suppose only time will tell…

Back to Flashbacks

I know they’re considered weak, flashbacks, but I don’t want to show all of Heather’s previous work life, just the important bits. To show why she’s quit her job and gone inside and also partly why she’s hired a stalker in the first place.

Plus, if she’s just sitting around her flat, not doing much of anything, I reckon that’s what she’d do. Analyze her previous life, her old life, her bad life. Maybe she’s reminded of something during her work-free life, something whilst she’s out, or maybe a smell reminds her, or a phrase, something. That would then bring her back to her old life, remind her about something key or important.

I wonder if style somehow can allow me to avoid the flashbacks being flashbacks? What I mean is instead of having the flashback happen right there, in the present tense story line, what if, almost as a secondary story line, there’s her old life. Divide it up by chapter or section instead? So that the story becomes non-linear in a way, in parts.

Would I then need to include some of Robin’s old life in a similar fashion? What would happen if I gave him a future story line, a third story line?

Something to ponder for the weekend…

Sensory comfort

It’s great when ideas just pop into your head – the free associations we make every day. The key is to figure out how they might work in a novel.

A co-worker gave me an idea this week. Well, he didn’t give voice to it, but rather, he sparked it in my head. Cologne. Smell. What if Heather, when Robin isn’t there watching her/stalking her, needs comfort? What if she has a panic attack and Robin isn’t there, over the road, and needs to feel comforted? What would she do?

Maybe Robin wears a particular kind of cologne, or perhaps his anti-perspirant is distinctive. Maybe Heather goes out in search of it, smelling everything in Boots. So that when she’s freaking out, she can have something – a cloth, handkerchief, whatever – that’s doused in something that reminds her of Robin.

Something to consider over the weekend when the writing gets done…

Carbunckle's Flight

There are average, bog-standard tutors, and then there are the kind of tutors that turn into proper mentors.

I had the good fortune to be mentored by Antanas Sileika. He’s a fantastic novelist with a dark sense of humour – the perfect person to have helped me with my first novel. Antanas was much more than a tutor – he challenged me, championed me and encouraged me at every turn.

Antanas worked with me on the first novel I wrote, Famous By September. In the intervening years, I’ve written a few more and the other day I asked him if he had enough time to take a look at Carbunckle’s Flight (or as I like to call it, my pigeons).

Here’s what he had to say:

Gillian Best’s Carbunckle’s Flight is dark, witty, dyspeptic, and hilarious. This preposterous novel posits a father whose love of pigeon racing trumps all family bonds, a mother seeking solace elsewhere, a son reaching for a film-making dream and a mechanic daughter living an overweight nightmare. There is nothing predictable about this zany novel, whose unlikely characters share a taste for cutting repartee, and a tendency to end up in the most unlikely situations.

Thanks Antanas. It means a lot.

Reading does help

For anyone who has ever studied creative writing, this will sound familiar: you have to read in order to be able to write. Blindingly obvious, isn’t it? But as with many of the old saws issuing forth from writing classes, I’ve always struggled with understanding exactly what it means, or rather, in the application.

I’m one of those people who gets told, at least once a year, that I should really read Flaubert. As if the professor can just take a Flaubert bandage and apply it to my literary aches and pains. I’ve read my Flaubert and it didn’t help.

But I felt that I’d been over-doing it with the non-fiction lately; something just wasn’t working out properly when I opened Heather’s document up. The sentences weren’t flowing, the words were small and uninteresting – a very base vocabulary was in play. And then I went to the library and forced myself to visit the fiction section. I decided I would like to read some Margaret Atwood. She is one of Canada’s finest; I felt she might help.

I used to have a strong dislike of Ms Atwood. I read The Handmaid’s Tale at the wrong time. It didn’t click for me, in fact, I found all the feminist talk in class (yes, it was for a class) incredibly off-putting. I wanted to talk about the story, how it worked, what was going on there, and everybody else wanted to draw grandiose conclusions about the world at large. Anyhow, this time around, I got Oryx and Crake. And it was quite funny. The language is also quite funny.

But the important thing is, I finally saw the proof for the whole read to improve your own writing thing.