Write Fast (er)

Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

My last two posts have both basically been about procrastination. It's a word you'll find a lot if you search this blog.

When procrastination (a word I apparently can no longer type at the first attempt which may indicate that I'm trying to avoid it in yet another way) is the modus operandi then you go looking for all sorts of ways of overcoming it, in a kind of back door fashion.

Perhaps I should really, really try outlining. Reads books on outlining.

Perhaps I need to write and write around all sorts of ideas and see where they take me. Lots of ideas and an inability to put them in any order. (Though this is more helpful than the first approach, and does at least let the creative side of the brain do some work.)

Perhaps I need to rewrite what I've already rewritten at least once (or twice). Yup. Just forestalls any progress in the section that I haven't written at all.

I should introduce a dragon!! Wow, great idea, and the dragon takes off and takes over all the other ideas and still doesn't seem to have an actual role to play.

Wait! Here's a thought. I could just get on and write. Phew! Radical. While trying to work through the Save the Cat beats approach (and running into a huge blank spot in Act II) I noted that Jessica Brody, who has written Save the Cat! Writes a Novel says that she can't even look at sorting out the STC beats until she's actually got to know who her characters are and what they're doing. And the only way she can do this is by writing an awful first draft. (A 'shitty' first draft, as Anne Lamott always calls it.)

Kristen Lamb in a post called Is your story stuck? says basically the same thing. She cries "STOP!" and adds, "I am a HUGE fan of fast-drafting because then we simply don’t have time to over think every step we’ve made."

She suggests three ways to move forward out of the quicksand.
1. Refuse the urge to edit. 
2. Learn to Fast Draft
3. Kill someone

I'm great at the ignoring the first suggestion, am able to do the second (although not as quickly as some writers) and haven't tried the third - in this book. Nasty, horrible people who are harming my hero/heroine have been killed off in the previous three books. And it's probable it will happen to the current antagonist. But killing off someone random? That takes a bit of guts. 

Meanwhile, here I am blogging. Instead of writing. Fast - or slowly. Procrastination is beginning to set in again (it's past time for lunch; you've got to go and see a sick uncle; the dog needs a wash - no wait, I've already done that today).

Time to wind this post up and make some progress...

Death and Mr Pickwick

I’ve started reading Death and Mr Pickwick, which I’d heard about from the author himself (Stephen Jarvis) some months ago. It’s 800 pages long or so, and it’s proving to be an absorbing but odd novel; novel may not be its best description. It’s like a bunch of stories, handfuls of them, many of them based on fact and then dramatised. It also delves into the underbelly of the Victorian world, where there are many things that Dickens never wrote about ˗ thankfully ˗ or wasn’t able to be because of the climate of the time. Homosexuality seems to be a bit of a theme, though it’s hard to know quite why this is so important; so far, at least. 

Jarvis has a great skill in being able to evoke the world of the people involved, but by ranging so far and wide it becomes harder to keep track of everyone. It helps if you know more about Dickens than the average person, perhaps, and some of the names are familiar, but quite what their connection is to the main story, and to Dickens and Pickwick, is a bit vague. Grimaldi, the great clown, gets a lot of space early in the book, as does his equally famous but very short-lived son, who, according to this book, never got over having to live in his father’s shadow.

There is a story lurking around in the middle of all the stuff, but at the moment it’s like dozens of strands are being drawn together very slowly; you can see why one critic wasn't sure of it as a novel. It’s more like an immense collage, with a kind of overarching theme (who really created Pickwick?, I suppose). 

However, it has the admirable quality of being very readable. So onward and onward. I'm only 17% of the way through so far, according to Kindle, so I have a ways to go, as they say. (I'm also wading slowly through Christina Lamb's Farewell Kabul - which runs to 600 pages or so. Must be the year for long books.)

Garden matters

Back in late September I posted an item about the lamb that we looked after for a weekend.  And the video I took of him playing with our two-year old dog (it's now reached a phenomenal 99 views!  LOL).  We've got the lamb once more this weekend, because my daughter and her family are away again, and we've spent the last couple of days (on and off) putting together a temporary fence in front of the vegetable garden(s) so that the lamb doesn't eat all our carefully-planted seedlings, some of which are only just getting started.  The place is beginning to look like a gardener's version of Fort Knox. 

At one early point in our planning as to how we were going to stop Rocko the lamb eating everything in sight, we were debating whether some of the garden furniture would keep him at bay, but we ditched that idea early on. (Perhaps we could have utilised some abandoned student furniture instead, but we wanted to keep the place looking reasonably tidy...)

This is the second time we've had to provide fencing: since the dog became part of the family, whenever we've planted potatoes we find he's gone out and dug them up again - because of the blood and bone mix that we put in the hole with the seed potato.  So the last year or so we've grown potatoes inside a fenced-off area.  This works well, even if it does frustrate the dog a little. 

Evenly matched

Last weekend we had a lamb staying with us.  A two-week-old lamb.   It had been abandoned and wound up living with my daughter and her family.  We had to babysit it while its new family went off to a birthday party that had been planned for some time, in Gore - a couple of hours drive away.

The lamb, Rocko,was surprisingly good, really, considering that it didn't know us, and might have felt abandoned for the second time, by its new family.  He bleated a bit the first night, but once it was dark he settled down on his mat in our glasshouse without any further problem.  Didn't even wake us up the next morning.

Our dog Marley, a two-year-old, was very interested in it.  We thought it was the usual dog curiosity which can turn a bit sour if you don't watch out, but in fact Marley just wanted to play.  The lamb was just the right size for him (the dog, as you'll see, is pretty small) and on the Saturday they got on like a house on fire.  We caught some of their long-lasting game on video.  It involves Marley chasing madly around, exhausting himself (he tries to have a little rest in the middle, but the lamb doesn't let him), and the lamb practicing his head-butting skills.  I think there's a moment of contact, but it's hard to tell, and obviously Marley wasn't troubled by it if there was.

Exam, cats and dogs, correct views

Exam at 9.30 this morning. Enough said.

I think my head must be so full of 'stuff' for the exam at the moment that even though it was rather scary, I found I couldn't remember the name of one of my grandchildren this morning when I woke. There was this odd 'hole' in my brain where the name should have been. Having had two blood relatives who had Alzheimer's, it made me a bit uneasy.

I've been reading some of Alister McGrath's Mere Theology. In the book he mentions a writer Leszek Kolakowski, who was a Marxist but now writes from a much more philosophical point of view, as far as I can gather. (I must admit to having read this book with a little less than concentration, but I'll come back to it when I've got more time.)

The title of one of Kolakowski's books appealed to me greatly: My Correct Views on Everything. That's the way to go. It has some connections with the subtitle of this blog....

We now have a cat and a dog in the house, as I've no doubt mentioned before. I think we had that picture of the lion lying down with the lamb. Not quite. At first the cat was very wary of the dog (she'd arrived first as well), and he wanted to play...and chase!

Then there seemed to be a patch of mutual respect (it helped perhaps that the cat had cuffed the dog sharply enough to make him squeal.) They'll kind of circle each other, neither sure who's going to make the first move. And the cat has to be hoisted up and out of the dog's way on more than one occasion in order to 'rescue' her (although we don't use that word; she'd find it insulting). In time they may come to be mates. It isn't looking like it'll happen tomorrow.

Nature, green in tooth and claw

Ever wondered what that Biblical expression about the lion lying down with the lamb might look like in real life, and just how wonderful it would be to see a video in which 'nature, red in tooth and claw' wasn't the modus operandi? Have a look at this ad, which comes surprisingly close to achieving just such a concept.

More unearthed treasures

'Treasures' might be a bit of an overstatement, but back in the early 80s sometime, I wrote a 'musical' for my church - the Assembly of God in those days. (It's gone through several changes of name since then; seems to be that the Pentecostals no longer want to stick with their original nomenclatures for some reason. Not trendy enough, perhaps. They've been called Southern Hills, and, Nations, at various times over the last couple of decades.)
Anyway, the musical was fairly short; probably twenty minutes at the most. I scripted it and wrote the music. It was just one of those times when everything comes together without huge effort.
I've had the music to hand pretty much ever since then, because I spent some time at one point putting all my church songs in one manuscript book. But the script had gone missing.
Until today, when it turned up in the stuff that had been in my piano stool. Obviously I haven't been through that stuff for a very long time!
The musical had its roots in the Lost Sheep parable, but that was only part of what went on in it. The only words that I set to music that I didn't write were those for William Blake's poem, Little Lamb, Who Made Thee? This is also the only song that's had a life outside the staging of the musical.
The musical was rather curiously staged: we had people playing the parts, but their songs were sung by other people. Perhaps it was because the singers didn't feel confident acting. And there were dancers involved too, particularly in a song called, There is more rejoicing over one lost sheep (than the ninety-nine who never go astray). At that time in the AOG history, banners and long pieces of material were in, and the dancers often used to use these in the services. So we incorporated some of that in the musical.
We even had a tiny orchestra: yours truly on the piano, along with a flute, a violin and some other things which I can no longer recall.
Anyway, it was a great effort and came off pretty well, all things considered.