Not At All Like a Husky

If it’s Friday, then it’s time to confess. Thus: this week I wrote 3,000 words, bringing the total achingly close to 60,000. I imagine the final total of this first draft will be somewhere between 80,000 and 90,000 words. I am without doubt in the last third of the story.

I am reading Anne Lamott’s superb Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. One of her chapters is entitled Shitty First Drafts, and here she says:

Very few writers know what they are doing until they’ve done it. Nor do they go about their business feeling dewy and thrilled. They do not type a few stiff warm-up sentences and then find themselves bounding along like huskies in the snow … We all often feel like we are pulling teeth, even those writers whose prose ends up being the most natural and fluid.

Well said, Anne. This week, my writing didn’t bound like a husky; it plodded like a tortoise.

Another useful thing I found in this chapter, is this:

Almost all writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something - anything - down on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft - you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft - you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it’s loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.

A third tip in the chapter is about quelling the voices. I’ve been doing that, shutting out the “How can you presume?” and the “This is shit” and the “Who wants to read that?”. I’ve been ignoring them and plodding onwards.

My goal for this week is to finish Chapter Nine - whatever it takes, husky or tortoise.

Addendum: Two important birthdays today - my stepbrother M, and Madiba. Happy birthday to both of you! M, you don’t appear in my novel, but Madiba you do. Thank you for being an inspiration to millions - you are definitely a husky.

Photo from AFP

I Confess

Last night, I watched eight episodes of Sex and the City back-to-back, ending at Charlotte’s marriage to Harry. I also ate three packets of chilli rice cakes, one packet of chocolate rice cakes and a helping of choc chip ice-cream.

Sorry, wrong kind of confession.

I wrote the first 1000 words of Chapter Nine this week, as well as a whole lot of free-writing trying to get into the head of the narrator whose chapter this is. Last night in the haze of telly and food-that-comes-from-packets, I decided that the scene with which I began Chapter Nine is not far enough down the action timeline and will have to parked in the “Extra Stuff” file for use at a later date (how did writers manage before word processors?). I am heading into the last third of the novel now and am looking for big, dramatic, climatic scenes that beg for resolution.

Part of the problem is that I don’t have a story outline, so each chapter has evolved rather than been written from plan. I am starting to realise that this first draft is the outline, albeit one that has taken six months to write. When I start the second draft, I will be in a much stronger place, ready to polish, intensify and clarify. I am looking forward to that.

Other things I have done this week:

1. Made a shortlist of agents to approach once I have finished

2. Had a blogger date with the lovely Ms Martini

3. Almost managed a free-standing headstand in yoga

4. Made basil and lavender ice-cream, which was oddly good

5. Ran three kilometres in 20 minutes (my goal is 10kms in an hour)

6. Imagined myself tottering around Manhattan delivering bon mots when I visit New York in November. “I am a lady!”

My goals for the coming week:

1. Establish the appropriate action for Chapter Nine, and write it!

2. Exercise, exercise, exercise

And that’s all, folks.

Confessing

Being back in the riches of my family life has meant my writing output has slowed down again. Having a monster migraine didn’t help either (have scheduled visit to Frauenarzt to talk about the headaches because, frankly, they are getting old). This week has not been so successful in terms of writing, but what I have managed is this:

1. I plugged the gap in Chapter 8, using some material I wrote three years ago. This new scene contains a character who might not make the second draft, because she’s kind of light and funny, but I like how her lightness contrasts with all the Sturm und Drang that the other characters are suffering. This character makes me think I should be writing chick lit, or farces, because her throwaway lines came easily to me.

2. I have acted on my idea for my second novel, which is going to be a historical novel set in Kimberley, South Africa, during the diamond rush, and wrote to some people about how to go about researching it. Both my contacts came back with brilliant ideas and I am suffused with energy for this second project. One of them suggested rereading The Story of An African Farm by Olive Schreiner, just to get a feel for the period, and this weekend I am going to brave the Keller (which is undergoing a renovation project, turning two storage rooms into two offices, one for me and one for my husband) and seek it out.

So my writing goals for this week are:

a. Get seriously stuck into Chapter 9.

b. Source and read the Olive Schreiner.

c. Do more sport! Sport = energy = creativity = words on the page. This week I ran 8kms for the first time. It took 65 minutes. As a non-sporty person who had asthma as a child and couldn’t run 300 metres without wheezing, this was a huge achievement for me. Any accolades you feel like sharing will be warmly welcomed, since my husband is getting tired of telling me how wonderful I am. My goal is to run 10kms in an hour so that I can participate in a local fun-run in October.

What are your writing goals for the week? (Feel free to share any exercise goals you may have too - I’m keen on those!)

Friday Already?

Here be my confession:

This week I have been addressing the sponginess of Chapter Six and trying to give it some backbone. I realised that I have been inadvertently giving the character to whom this chapter belongs watered-down reactions. She was being fuzzy, not true to herself, and far too reasonable. So I spent a bit of time writing about her in my notebook. I find that writing with pen and paper helps me to be more intuitive and free. Writing on the computer is good for shaping and arranging, but most of my best creative ideas come with pen in hand. (A chai latte helps too.) I wrote in the first person, trying to find the lies that she tells herself. That helped me rescue the first two-thirds of the chapter, but I am going to have to do it again in order to raise the level of crisis in the last third.

Why do I want my characters to be likeable? Two of my three main characters have been deliberately chosen because they are struggling with ego, and that means that they can be selfish, thoughtless, cruel and hurt people around them. This character is being too damn nice. I need to free-write again tonight, find the hooks and barbs in her personality, her limitations and boundaries. I also need to flesh out one of the secondary characters, who is being a bit bland. His nuances need to shine.

Next week, I leave for my six-day writing retreat in Berlin. It is now booked into the family calendar, and my unofficial writing cheerleader, my husband, has signed on for duty. He will have secondary back-up in the form of Grand-dad. I hope the five of them will have fun while I am gone.

The current word count stands at 40,601 and I plan to be able to tell you in two weeks time, when I confess again, that that number has increased significantly. I’m hoping that six days dedicated to writing, with no Internet access, will mean great chunks of writing.

Good luck with your writing, Friday ‘Fessors, and other writers out there. I hope the next two weeks bring you inspiration, energy and above all, time to write.

Note to Self - the Friday ‘Fess-Up

OK, ’twas bad. I only wrote about 500 words of my novel this week (but I exercised a lot). What I wrote was okay, but made me realise that I need to go back and tweak something in Chapter Three. I am constitutionally against going back and tweaking - forward, ho! being the motto - so this post stands as a note to self. 

I had the first five chapters up on Authonomy, but have taken them down again. Authonomy is an experiment by Harper Collins where unpublished writers can showcase their work with the hope of attracting agents and publishers. The site is in beta at the moment, and is mostly being used by writers with works in progress to get tips and advice from other writers. After a week there, and one or two useful tips (thanks, Litlove), I decided that I am not ready to have unfinished work in the public eye. I would rather put something up when I am satisfied that it is complete, or follow the standard route of finding an agent.

I am planning my writing retreat in two weeks’ time. A dear friend has offered me the use of her flat in Kreuzberg, Berlin, and I think I am going to take her up on it for a long weekend towards the end of the month. Just the amount of time I will have free for writing on the train alone makes me shiver, let alone mornings, afternoons and evenings with nothing to do but feed my body with food and my soul with writing. The thrill is almost too much to bear, dear readers.

I was very moved this week seeing a group of farm workers (probably strawberry pickers), clearly shipped in from somewhere east of here, spending their hard-earned euros in Aldi on cheap chocolate and coffee to take home as presents. The chapter I’m working on deals partly with someone hoiked out of her culture and thrust into another, and the alienating effect that has. I was touched by the pleasure and the excitement that these gifts brought the gift bearers, and amused by one guy being unable to wait till he got home to taste the Aldi Amaretto (I like it myself: an interesting combination of almonds and petrol) and having a big schluck right there in the parking-lot. So many societies depend on people from other cultures arriving to do their dirty work, much like the way white South Africans used to depend on black domestic workers to do their dirty work (and still do) - a topic also raised in the novel.

I am still stunned by the grind of novel-writing, and today stared at my bookshelf at the names of authors ranged along the spines of books. Every single one of them, I thought, from Joseph Heller to Margaret Atwood to Jane Austen, went through what I am going through right now: creating the strong architecture of a novel on which can rest characters, situations, themes, emotions, conflicts, resolutions, inspiration, all of which need to be brought together in a coherent and satisfying whole. I feel simultaneously exhausted and thrilled.

Let’s hope this next week will be a better one in my writing world. Good luck to all the other writers out there. I also hope your week is inspiring and productive.

Friday ‘Fess Up

I have to confess it’s Thursday. It’s not even Friday. But I’m writing this post just in case tomorrow gets ahead of me and in the mad rush of kindergarten dashes, ballet delivery and grocery retrieval I forget to post my Friday Writing Confession. Here it is. It’s brief:

Chapter Six now consists of 2,500 words.

Some of these words were written in Berlin, some this week, but I have managed to coalesce them and I know where we’re going. There’s a bit of South African election madness in this chapter, a car accident in London, a bit where a mother meets her son’s male friend over his hospital bed and becomes convinced this is his lover, and another bit where she realises that home, however much it has her heart for its beauty, will always be a laager for her, a place where she is trapped. Does she go back to being trapped? Of course she does.

Now that I’m beyond the sticking point of my novel, beyond my own trap of 30,000 words, and heading into the meat and bones of it, I’m stunned by how workmanlike the process is. Word after word after word. Move the action on. What to put in. What to leave out. I have had soaring moments of inspiration before, but not this week. This week I’ve been loading my wheelbarrow up with bricks and carting them one place, getting them out, then loading them up and carting them somewhere else. It’s been a slog.

I need to get both my writing and my exercise routine back on track, because the two seem to feed off each other. The more I exercise, the more I clear my head and the easier the words seem to flow. This week, with no exercise (thanks to a massive migraine and hayfever, followed by laziness), they’ve been clogging. But at least I know where I’m taking them.

How was your writing week?

‘Fess Up Friday

Today is the day that writers confess how their writing week has gone, thanks to the lovely and very Literate Kitten. Mine has been both good and bad - some highs followed by some lows, followed by highs again. I felt my fiction writing terror this week, but also a calm confidence that I can keep taking this novel forward. My story died at this same point - 30,000 words - three years ago, so this week it has been crucial for me to break through the obstacle and keep going. And I did it - it now stands at 36,000! My goal for now is just to keep going: I’m not after a major piece of literary fiction, I just want to get to the end and see what happens. The burnishing and polishing I will save for the second draft.

This week I finished Chapter Five on Monday night. Full of confidence I submitted it my writing cheerleaders (dear friends, who are also writers and readers, and whose job it is right now to be completely encouraging) immediately, then slept. When I woke in the morning, I read it again and realised I had been over-confident. It was wrong, all wrong. I was too far forward in the story and needed to reign it back in.

That’s when the fear and the doubt started, those mean little thoughts that say, “You are going to fail”, “It’s never going to happen”, “You’re going to die a bitter old woman who never finished a novel.”

Last night, inspired by this challenge, I faced my fears and completely rewrote Chapter Five, all 7,000 words of it. I submitted it to my cheerleaders at 2am. There are parts of it I like and parts of it I’m iffy about, but the main thing is that it keeps the story going forward. And that’s my goal: onward and upward and ever forward, with no looking back.

This week I plan to have some thoughts about Chapter Six. I plan to go to gym and then to the Cafe with the Chais, and write in my notebook with a pen about a woman whose son has left and who wakes up to realise he took her joy with her.

Project FGN

Before I give you a brief update, let me just note that after a talking-to from my husband, the project will no longer be known as Thin, Grey Novelist but Fit, Grey Novelist. Being thin is not a good goal, but being fit is.

Being Fit

I ran five kilometres for the first time last week. I liked it so much I ran the distance three more times during the course of the week. The key to my running success: an iPod! Having pooh-poohed them, I was surprised at what a huge difference music of my own choice made to my stamina and enjoyment. Thanks to the above-mentioned husband for a wonderful present and my fabulous gym playlist. You are a superstar. I also attended a yoga class and a fitness class with Tommy “Teletubby” Fitness Instructor. Today, I have a sick child and a nauseous headache so no gym attendance happening.

Being Grey

I went for my annual haircut on Saturday and refused highlights. Very empowering.

Being a Novelist

I’m stuck on Chapter Five. There’s not much more I can say about that, except that this novel is exactly at the point where it died three years (the 30 000 word point) and I’m having a mini-crisis. However, my lovely writing cheerleaders stepped in and said inspiring words to me about Chapter Four, so as soon as I post this, I’m heading off to face the unlovely protagonist of Five.

I’m having some very entertaining email contact from the 70-year-old father of a friend of mine. He (the father, not the friend) lives on a yacht in Malaysia and is a writer. We are sharing information about agents and publishers, but he is much further down the line than me, having had a novel published in the Seventies and with a completed manuscript now. He asked me if Commonwealth writers can approach US literary agents and while I saw no reason why not, I mailed an agent in San Francisco just to check. His response was:

You’re not under obligation to query British agents
exclusively.  I would take a close work at your work to see where you
think its natural home market lies, since each market has different
tastes, and then query based on that.

So watch out, all you US agents. You’re going to be hearing from me and my yacht-living writer friend! I may be grey, but I’m getting fit and I’m coming at you, unpleasant protagonist and all. Now I really must go and drown her, or something.

Project: Thin, Grey Novelist

So my goal for this year, my 39th as it coincidentally happens to be, no smack of a midlife crisis in this corner, is to get fit, learn to accept my grey hair and finish my novel. I thought you might like an update.

Getting Fit

I am attending the gym regularly (three to four times a week), despite having been called a Teletubby by a fitness instructor. I’ve attended two more of his classes since then and he tore a strip off someone for being five minutes late, and the next time gave someone else a lecture for chewing gum in class (admittedly a dumb thing to do in an aerobics class). I clearly got him on a good day. I also do my circuit and am getting stronger, and can go for longer and faster on the treadmill and cross-trainer. I have only attended one spinning-class and I loved it, but have not gone back. I must because it’s a brilliant fat-burner, but I do get sore nethers.

Writing a Novel

I have just submitted my difficult and by no means perfect Chapter Four to my writing cheerleaders. Their job at the moment is to say “Yay! You did it! I love this bit.” Later on, when there is a full novel to read, they will be allowed to provide critique. I am now starting Chapter Five, which in theory should be a breeze because it’s a part I wrote three years ago, but we no longer have the computer it was on and I’ve lost the print-out, so there’s a chance I’ll be reimagining it from scratch. Also, I am planning a writing retreat on my own, probably in the Black Forest, sometime in June and I am very excited about that.

Going Grey

This part is going well. My hair is doing the job all by itself with no input from me. I had a moment in a department store in Karlsruhe when I saw a lady with multi-coloured hair like mine fixed into a rigid helmet with a pouffe-like thing going on front, and my mother-in-law had to forcibly restrain me from running into the nearest hair salon and shrieking for highlights. A couple of days ago I heard an insert on my favourite source of information, Woman’s Hour, that as more and more women of a certain age are refusing to go grey and are dyeing or highlighting their hair blonde, that blonde is becoming seen by the young (see how that ages me) an older woman’s colour. Young women now favour chocolate brown red and black as their hair colours of choice.

Well, mine is neither blonde, brown, red or black. It is, as you see below, stripey:

But, because I am growing up, I am happy about that:

Sharing the Love

I have to celebrate the fact that three of my blogging friends, none of whom I have met I must add, but one can hope, have had good news recently with regard to forging relationships with publishers and literary agents. This is so exciting, not only because I have been on the blog trail with the three of them for two years now, not only because I have shared the ups and downs of being a writer with them, but also because all three are superb writers and deserve to be published, lauded and admired for their efforts. Unlike some, who become famous for blogging and then write unremarkable books, but who am I to quibble?

First up is Nova, who lives in New York, and who writes about writing and her struggles to be published with wincing, gut-wrenching frankness in her blog Distraction No. 99. Nova pitched her tween novel to an editor at Simon & Schuster based on “30 pages and a plot summary” and has received an offer. She is now busily writing the rest of the novel, while still holding down her day-job, also in publishing. Nova, your dedication to and love of writing and books inspires me.

Then, there’s the incomparable Litlove, a UK academic who blogs at Tales from the Reading Room. Litlove has created a wonderful salon for people who love to appreciate, think about and discuss books. She is kind, inclusive and writes beautifully and incisively about the books she reads. Litlove’s idea for a book on representations of motherhood in literature has been accepted for representation by an agent in London, and I can’t wait to read it once it is finished.

Flushed from hearing that news, I wondered over to another favourite and long-term blog-pal of mine, BlogLily, to hear that her thriller set in Germany during the Cold War has also been accepted for representation by an agent. Lily is a mother of three energetic boys and is a full-time lawyer who wrote her novel in the cracks and interstices of her life, and she is my hero. She has just made herself a writing-space at home, and look what happened! She found an agent!

If you haven’t already, please visit these three writers and shower them with congratulations. I am so thrilled and delighted for them, and also for us, knowing that there are going to be three superb new books on our Christmas lists in the next couple of years. Who knows, I might even get a signed copy.

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On the topic of sharing love, I was bending down in a late-spring snow storm this morning zipping a six-year-old’s coat, when she whispered tenderly to me, “Do you know what, Mummy? In your ear, you have lots of little hairs!”

Hairily yours,

Charlotte