Explaining my process

Work in progress on the New Sheffield Markets, 2012
courtesy Wikimedia Commons

 So what have I been doing over the last week or so in regards to the WIP. (I only discovered today that companies use this same acronym for their Work in Progress meetings. Fair enough. I’m sure we writers are generous enough to allow them to pinch our writerly acronym.)

Let me say first that there isn’t a lot of forward progress, in the sense that no new chapters have been written, and chapter 8 remains at about 600 words, which is where it’s been for a week or two.

Is this a problem? No, because I’ve been consolidating, for want of a better word. By which I mean that chapters 1 to 7 have all been revised, and in at least three cases, substantially rewritten.

But wait, you say, Aren’t you some kind of a pantser when it comes to writing?

Yes, I am – but as I pointed out in this post, my approach to writing has been refined over four previous books, and seems to be getting refined still further with this one.

At this point I’m satisfied enough that the first seven chapters I’ve written are keepers. That still may not be the case ultimately. However they’ve got enough structure and detail in them to give me a good starting point. I’m not just writing an initial draft and moving forward until the last page, as a pantser might, but I’m going back over these chapters to make sure they hold together as well as I can currently make them.

As I say, they may not even turn up in the final book. It’s happened in the past. But what they’ve done is give me new characters whom I hadn’t even known existed until I started writing, characters who are taking shape and giving me surprises. And on top of that, they keep saying things that give me clues as to where the book might ultimately go, clues to the underlying plot, for instance. Already some of these ‘clues’ have been ditched – at least for the time being - because I don’t see them as being important enough, or having enough of a seed to take me forward.

Other clues, however, have opened up possibilities and surprises for me – and hopefully one day for the reader. I make notes about these in the comments column in my Word document (yup, Word is good enough for me) and also discuss them in a separate file which becomes increasingly chaotic as further ideas turn up and other things are rejected.

Is it a problem to have a chaotic file like this? I used to think it was, and would worry about not being able to find things in it. Occasionally I’d read a section through and discover something I’d forgotten I’d made a note about was now being used in the story. As though it was a new idea. Or I’d laugh at some of the thoughts I’d had as to where the story was going, and wonder why I’d given them house-room.

With my last book I began to use this file increasingly for structuring what was coming in further chapters because things - as they should - got increasingly complicated in the story.

It was also a good place to pour out my woes when I’d pushed one of my characters into a corner and didn’t know how to get them out again. If I went back to these notes now, I’d find that various solutions would have been tried and found wanting, and then out of the blue the ‘right’ solution had turned up.

It’s still a kind of scrapbook, notebook, or junk box even, where anything and everything finds a home.

I know many authors use writing programs like Scrivener and Atticus that have all sorts of places to fit things so that you don’t lose track of them. I’ve tried some of these, and found them more work than I want to do. By the time I’ve set everything up and followed the manual in detail I could have written a few chapters, plus added to my structuring/note-taking file.

I’m sure many writers find them useful, but they’re not for me.

So what’s to come? In the next few days I’ll take another look at chapter 8 in the light of changes made in the previous chapters, and see where my characters will take me from here.

Being interrupted

One of the great skills I learnt when I worked for the local City Council – a fairly minor cog in a large organisation – was that it was possible to be interrupted fairly regularly and still get my brain straight back onto the job I’d been doing. 

Interruptions of all kinds get in the way of writing. And our concern is that we’ll lose that impetus and that thought we were in the middle of. But the brain copes. 

I’m sure all would-be, fledgling, and persevering writers have all read stuff about setting aside a certain part of the day for writing and nothing but writing. 

Some suggest first thing in the morning. In my case that’s the best time for me to be spending time reading my Bible and praying for people. I don’t want to give that up, even for writing. 

But apart from that, early mornings aren’t good for many part-time writers: kids have to be got off to school, breakfasts eaten and lunches made, last minute ‘I forgot to do my homework!’ problems dealt with and so on. Both fathers and mothers are involved in these sorts of things to various extents. 

Someone will say, ‘I’m well past that time of life.’ Good, you’re fortunate, but even in retirement the most carefully-laid plans for spending time writing get interrupted for all sorts of reasons. Sickness, your partner’s health or another family member’s health; maintenance on the house that you have to do because it’s too expensive to get someone in; weeds in the garden need attention unless you think a wilderness is a good look. 

And most of all, if you’re still married, or have a partner, their needs also have a part to play in the daily round. 

And at whatever age you are, if you have a partner or spouse who thinks that writing gets done between the cracks when they happen to be looking in the other direction, you not only have the ongoing issue of actually making time for writing, but of justifying having time to write. 

I try to write every day, but it doesn’t always happen. Sometimes it gets into the evening and, being in my eight decade, or rather, closer to my ninth, I run out of steam altogether. 

There are spaces in most days. Take them when you can, and focus. You’ll still get interrupted, but you will, little by little, get the work done.

courtesy Nicolebrandi18

More benefits of writing slowly

 Originally written back in 2017 for a site that no longer exists, which promoted authors and their works.

In 2014, I published three e-books. That sounds impressive until you realise that the first of those books, Grimhilda!, had started out life as a musical produced in the theatre, back in 2012. In spite of having a script to work from, it took another two years for the book version to get off the ground. Procrastination took its toll, along with many rewrites. Turning a playscript into a novel wasn’t as straightforward as I’d anticipated. 

I finally published it in January 2014, by which time I was viewing it as the first of a series of children’s fantasies. 

However, the second book, Diary of a Prostate Wimp, was non-fiction. I’d had this book in mind for some time, planning to use a set of blog posts from 2009 as its basis. It wasn’t just a matter of publishing the posts: they had to be edited, an introduction had to be written, and more material added from other sources to complement and give additional breadth to my own experiences. 

Nevertheless, all that was done in a short time, and that book was finished and published in April 2014. 

The draft of the third book, The Mumbersons and the Blood Secret, took a little longer, but was still written at a fair pace. It became the second in the fantasy series under the collective title of Grimhilderness. The Blood Secret still had to go through a rigorous process with my editor-cum-beta reader, a person who’s like a dog with a bone; she won’t let anything go that she’s not satisfied with, or that reeks of inconsistency. 

Still, that book was produced far more speedily than Grimhilda! – it was published in early November, 2014. I was beginning to think I was a bit of a whiz at producing books. 

The third in the Grimhilderness series, The Disenchanted Wizard, turned my idea of being able to churn out books at a rate of knots on its head. I started it in late 2014, as soon as The Blood Secret was finished, writing the first (very disorganised) draft as part of the NaNoWriMo challenge. I had a good idea in mind, some thoughts about how it would end, and some well-defined characters. 

Yet another two and a quarter years passed before it was ready for publication. Did I do something wrong?

 Not really. Though procrastination and music work got in the way (I play the piano, mostly accompanying singers), the book’s original plan was sidetracked again and again. My co-author/editor/plot-consistency-overseer/script consultant and I discussed the intricacies of the plot endlessly, and again and again discovered loopholes that readers would see right through, or brick walls in the story that were apparently unassailable. Sometimes we’d sit in my house staring into space, wondering if all the effort was worth it, or if we’d ever find a way out of the maze. 

The first half of the book took long enough to get worked out, but once the writing process was begun in earnest the structure didn’t really change. The second half was a nightmare: much of it was rewritten several times over after going off in wrong directions. Whole scenes were abandoned, characters annihilated. I even wrote a piece of flash fiction at one point in which the lost characters railed against their fate. 

The grand climax I’d envisaged got chucked, leaving a great gap, and then later was brought back in. It too was rewritten over and over as various improbable things were removed. The biggest difficulty was that the main character, a girl with no defensive magical powers of her own, had to confront the villain – a wizard – and somehow lay him low. She’d already failed to do this earlier in the book, so it was a challenge to figure out she could deal with him in the climax.

Sometimes solutions turn out to be so simple that you think they’ll be seen as too easy by the readers. In fact, readers accept them. We spent ages figuring out how the girl’s father would be found after he’d been whisked away by the villain. I’ll let you read the book and see for yourself whether you think the solution worked. 

There were things I wanted to keep in, and fought tooth and nail over. In the end I had to let them go because they complicated the plot unnecessarily. Being willing to give up seemingly great ideas for the betterment of the whole book isn’t easy. It was another reason things took longer than anticipated. 

So, two and a quarter years of slog. Were there downsides to this slow process? Yes, of course. The frustration of feeling that it would never get finished, for one. The sense that I wasn’t really a very good writer because I couldn’t produce another book at speed. 

But the upsides were that the book was immensely better for its long gestation. Weak and unnecessary characters were left by the wayside, as were weak scenes. Scenes that did survive were continually strengthened, and, because I had time to think about details, the book was improved in a myriad of small ways. 

A number of authors promote the idea that writing at speed and producing two or three or more books a year is the ideal. Yes, there are authors who can work at this kind of pace and produce quality. I think they’re few and far between. I’ve read books by some of these prolific authors, and I wish they’d given more time to their work instead of to trying to add more titles to their bibliography. 

I’ve mentioned the word procrastination a few times here. There are an endless number of authors online who want to advise you on how to deal with procrastination. I’ve read endless advice on the subject. In spite of that, I’m currently procrastinating on a fourth children’s fantasy. Some of my reasons are valid, and more important than the completion of a book. Some of the reasons are pathetic and need to be dealt with severely. Either way, real life does get in the way of writing, and often takes priority, as a local author, a Mum with two children, has frequently noted on Twitter. 

But if we want to write, we need to try and find a balance between procrastination for good reasons and procrastination for bad reasons. Take every day as it comes. Take time to write (rather than make time to write), even if the creative brain feels at its lowest ebb. A piece of draft writing may seem like rubbish, but I find that it usually gets creativity moving again. That’s always a plus, and it moves us one more step on the road to publication day.

Taking hold of whatever the brain offers you

Had a great day yesterday rewriting and revising some of the chapters I've written so far for the latest book in the Grimhilderness series.  

At present I have around seven and a half chapters in draft form, and still no idea about some of the things the characters have mentioned, or how the whole story will work out. I have an inkling of what the end will be, but nothing more. 

This isn’t unusual. With The Disenchanted Wizard I only knew, from early on, that the wizard who’d escaped the map would be put back in it. Hardly a rousing climax, you might say. But by the time the book was finished, the climax took place in the middle of a football match in a stadium. The wizard had by this time caused chaos in the large crowd, and this wasn’t to change until he was dealt with. 

Equally, with The Counterfeit Queen, I always had a thought in mind that there’d be a Dragon involved in the final battle. The only problem was there was no Dragon in the book at all until year four of the writing! 

It pays to note down these wisps of ideas, even if you can’t work out in advance how that wisp is going to come to fruition.

I know most writing books say you can’t set out until you know how the book is going to end. If that was the case I’d have written nothing. All I knew about the current book was that there were three lead boxes involved somewhere. At first I thought they contained three corpses, including the supposed corpse of one of the main characters. That changed in a moment when the boxes turned out to be much smaller than I’d originally envisaged, and when opened, had something altogether different inside.

I don’t regard myself as a ‘pantser’ in the complete sense. Pantsers, to me, sit down and write the first draft without much thought as to how it will all pan out. Then they basically start all over.

In my case, however, I find that by writing a few chapters, then going back and making notes on them, picking up clues as to what might move the story forward, placing characters in situations that only occur to me as I write, discovering the significance of those places and more is what gives me – very slowly – a story. 

After a few chapters I can see one or two things clicking into place. Rewriting the chapters in the light of that helps me get a better picture of where we’re going. But dropping ideas into the draft that I haven’t given any thought to also propels the story forward. I have to take a step back and ask what these things mean, whether they’re truly of use, whether some other version of them will be more accurate and so on.

So, for me, writing a chapter or three gives me an impetus to keep going. Chewing over the things in those chapters gives me further ideas and connections. Carrying forward into the unknown again opens up new possibilities. Avoiding doing things I’ve done before also helps. 

What’s your approach to getting up and running?

Having a forward-moving rhythm

 

One of the things that helped me overcome the so-called problem of Writer’s Block was an idea I found in a book wittily entitled Around the Writer’sBlock. The author is Rosanne Bane.

 As with so many books on writing, one particular thing sticks with you. Bane sees Writer’s Block as a procrastination problem. It’s dealing with procrastination that’s important.

She talks about Process Time and Product Time. Process Time is basically about play, doing something creative you wouldn’t normally do. She suggested juggling as one possibility. Since I’d tried to learn to juggle some years ago I had another go at it. This Process Time is intended to get your brain up and running before you start working. (I’m no doubt simplifying here, but it is three and a half years since I read the book.)

 Once you’ve done your allotted amount of playing, stimulating the brain into working on something that is fun, you move to Product Time. As you might expect, this is when you do the creative work on your particular project. In my case it was aiming to complete the full draft of The Counterfeit Queen, as well as making lots of notes as I went along.

 The Process should overcome your procrastination by giving your brain something fun to do. Once the brain is into that ‘play’ mood, it will be ready to do the more complex creative process of working on your product.

 It probably takes a few weeks to really settle into a routine, but I found it did work for me. Check out my original Excel file below. 

 Using an Excel sheet, I write the date on each successive line. As I work on the book each day, I make a brief note about what I've done, as well as any other relevant comments. Somehow this instils in the brain the idea that it’s good to keep moving forward each day. The amount of work isn’t necessarily important.

I used Bane's layout for some weeks before simplifying it for my own purposes. It still works well. 

 There are days when nothing gets done: I might be away from my computer and notes, as has happened over the last couple of days. Something more important than writing may come up, such as a crisis in the family. Or it may be a Sunday, when I don’t tend to work at writing. I still aim to keep the dates consistent, rather than only noting the days when work is done.

 It's surprising that a simple line reminding me of each step forward makes an ongoing difference to my sense of progress.

Writing at your own particular pace

At the moment my 'work in progress' opens with the collapse of a house, something that came to me while I was out walking the dog one day. The house, which hasn't collapsed, by the way, is a specific house in a specific street in my hometown. Why the house in my story collapsed remains to be discovered. I certainly don’t know at this point. 

I think it takes time for any writer to find their own approach to putting a story on paper. That doesn’t mean they don’t get books written, but gradually they discover that other people’s methods may not suit their personality. 

I remember reading years ago that the Irish writer, Joyce Cary, (a man in spite of his feminine-sounding name) would write scenes as they occurred to him. Not necessarily in any coherent order; that came later. From memory, Anne Lamott used a similar approach with her novels. 

Other writers, often known as ‘pantsers’ because they write ‘by the seat of their pants,’ just sit down and write from the beginning to the end without having any idea where the story will go. In the book, Reacher Said Nothing, Lee Child claims that’s the way his books get written. 

Young writers are often told that the way to write something as large as a novel is to structure it all out before you start, to make lots of notes about your characters so that you know all sorts of details about them – how they dress, the colour of their eyes, what they keep in their pockets and much more.   

This is rather how the film director Alfred Hitchcock worked: he wasn’t ready to film until every scene, even every shot, was set down in its place. It’s not surprising then that he sometimes said that the process of making the film itself bored him.

I can’t structure anything until I have some idea where I’m going. I understand - now - that this is my way of working, and I’m happy with it, even if it’s slow. It’s an enjoyable process of discovery. However, I don’t write the whole book before thinking about what’s already happened in the early chapters, or who the people are and how it will all end. So my first draft is already littered with comments, and there's another file altogether in which I discuss with myself what's happening. 

I can’t write about characters until I see them in action, even if the scenes that get written eventually vanish from the book. Check out these two chapters from The Disenchanted Wizard, which were deleted very early on. But they were written as though they could be used if necessary. 

I can’t imagine a whole plot in advance and then write the words that fit it. I prefer to discover things that turn up while I’m writing and then work out how everything clicks together. This is a slow process, for me, because when it comes to plotting, I’m a bear of very little brain. Nevertheless I enjoy putting my characters in difficult, even impossible, spots, and figuring out a way to get them out again. 

So, with my current work-in-progress, I’ve now written six or seven chapters. I know something about who the characters are. I know something about the places they go to, and what happens in those places. So far. I have all sorts of unexpected possible plot points turning up, unbidden, and I have the ongoing ‘fun’ of figuring out what they mean and how they’ll fit to other events. 

Hopefully it won't take another five years...

Why it took me five years to write The Counterfeit Queen

 Why it took me five years to write my most recent book, The Counterfeit Queen. 

 Reason 1: Procrastination.

 Reason 2: Thinking it wasn’t going to be good enough.

 Reason 3: Having to work at it completely on my own instead of with the person who’d been my idea-helper and idea-processor, plot-hole-checker, proof-reader, dismisser of unworkable or silly ideas, as well as being someone against whom I’d sometimes had to battle in order to bring storylines I wanted to include.  

 In spite of these reasons for an overlong gestation, the book got written and is now published.

 In spite of not having someone to bounce ideas against, I was still able to use that same approach when it came to working on my own. Countless words got written as notes and thoughts and possibilities, so that I acted as my own thought-bouncer, plot-hole-checker, dismisser of silly ideas, etc. In fact I was confidently able to put two drafts aside completely, each consisting of several chapters, before finding the right approach to the story.

 And the book is twice as long as my previous three children’s fantasies, to my surprise.

 Were those five years wasted? No…

 I learned that I could manage to write a book on my own, by determining to do it.

 I found that the book was good enough.

 I found that procrastination can be overcome.

More about procrastination, and my approach to writing in general - kind of pantser, but different - in future posts. 

Painting of Russian writer Evgeny Chirikov - by Ivan Kulikov 

The Counterfeit Queen is now on sale

 I've had a busy few months since I posted that The Counterfeit Queen was finished. It's now available online at Amazon, in ebook and paperback versions. Here's the blurb:

Humdrum? That barely describes Polly’s life.  

She doesn’t come on stage till the last twenty minutes of the school play, she doesn’t feel at home with her adopted parents, and she knows deep down that her life needs to be more interesting. 

Then a good-looking boy on a skateboard turns up. And explains who she really is. 

Or rather, who she should be. 

Whisked off to a place she’s never heard of, she must compete with the devious Queen Consort for something that is rightfully hers – the Throne of The Ends of the Earth. Her subjects are dwarves, halflings and humans – and a Dragon that perversely never does what it’s told. She’s confronted with fraud, deceit and danger. 

Sure, her life has suddenly become more interesting, but is she going to survive long enough to enjoy it? 

This fourth book in the Grimhilderness series reintroduces us to the heroes of Grimhilda! They’re a few years older, and hopefully wiser. And hopefully able to stand strong in the face of death.

Wamps and crowls

Yesterday my wife, who's from Norfolk in the UK, was talking about words she still uses that are common to people in Norfolk, but not elsewhere. One of these was wamps, another word for feet. (It's pronounced in the same way as lamps.) One might say, Get your great wamps off the table, or You're dirtying my clean floor with your muddy wamps. We tried to find the word on Google, but there was  no sign of it. 

That led to me write to David Crystal, who's produced a number of books on the English language, including at least one on dialect words from around the UK called The Disappearing Dictionary. It has that name because many of the words in the 'dictionary' are beginning to fade out of usage. 

David didn't know the word and said he'd looked it up in Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary, which runs to six volumes. A digital version can be found here.  Unfortunately Mr Wright didn't include it in his book either, and now it appears the only ones who know the word are a scattering of Norfolk-born people. 

Never having come across Wright's dictionary, I clicked on the link, and, as you do, put in my name, since it's English in origin. There are two tiny towns in the UK called by that name - though their spelling is Crowle in each case. [Check out this travel blog which I wrote in 2007, and enter Crowle in the search box to find the references to it.]

We as a family had always believed that the meaning of Crowl is a curl in a river - in other words, a bend in a river. Where we picked that up from I no longer remember, but it's been the general view for many years. 

However, Mr Wright has other ideas. He claims its prime meaning is a dwarf; a stunted, deformed person or child. The word has a number of variations in the spelling, of course. 

He also claims it means to crawl, or creep. In the US it seems that a number of people mix the sound of crawl and crowl, and if you put crowl into Google, you'll get all sorts of people using the word crowl when they mean crawl, or crowling when they mean crawling. Check out this blog post on the subject. 

In a third meaning, Wright says that the plural of crowl, that is crowls, means dirt in the wrinkles of your hand. Whoever would have thought there was a word for this? 

Wright goes on to give meanings for words connected to crowl which I won't trouble you with here. You'll find them if you start with crowl in the online dictionary. 

Anyway, none of this side path stuff gives us any help with our original word, wamps. My wife is going to post on the Facebook North Norfolk site, and see if anyone else knows the word. Certainly it's well-known in her own family. 

Dwarf - or Crowl - by BrokenMachine86

Update 27.4.23. David Crystal came back to me this morning in an email saying: According to the Dictionary of British Surnames, there are two contenders for your surname's origin. One is from the Anglo-Norman surname de Crul; the other is a metathesised form of curl, 'curly-haired'. It might refer to a topographical feature, such as a river bend. ((Metathesis is the transposition of sounds or syllables in a word or of words in a sentence.)

Out into the world The Counterfeit Queen goes

 In my last post on this (not-used-as-much-as-it-once-was) blog, I wrote about the long journey of writing The Counterfeit Queen. 

Two or three weeks ago I finished it, in the sense that I'd gone through the entire draft and rewritten and edited and cut and pasted and did all the other things you do to a new-born novel before you send it out into the world. Well, when I say I finished it, I now had before me a draft that was pretty much done. 

A friend had recently read my three earlier fantasies, the first of which, Grimhilda!, gives the background to this latest book. She had enjoyed them, though she thought the third, The Disenchanted Wizard, was the least successful of the three. Which surprised me somewhat, since my co-author and I had regarded it as our best work up to that point. And I still think it's well worth reading, having re-read it again not long ago, just to see how it stood up. 

Anyway, this friend did make some useful comments about that third book, which I took on board in regard to the current one. I asked if she'd be interested in reading the new book, knowing it might put me into deep despair if she didn't like it (!)

In fact, she loved it. I was a bit overwhelmed, to be honest. This book has been in the works for so long I was surprised anyone could love it. Although it has to be said that the book's idea has gone through umpteen transmogrifications and isn't quite the book that I'd written at least three incomplete drafts of. In other words she loved the book that all those other versions eventually became. 

So the child - the book - has been to finishing school and is now almost ready to meet the world. 

I can move forward with some confidence again. There are one or two other people who might read it and give me their feelings on it. After that, out into the world The Counterfeit Queen will go.  

Five years on: Progress

 For something like five years I've been writing the next book in the Grimhilderness series. I've put it away, taken it out again, abandoned it, rescued it, and so on. I've had long stretches when I did nothing at all on it. 

It hasn't helped that my usual collaborator didn't like the basic idea of the book from the start, and consequently I haven't had her ideas and editorial overview for the first time since we worked together on Grimhilda! (the musical version) back in 2010-12. I'm having to do it all on my own. 

This has had its challenges, but has also allowed to me to change my mind about the direction and shape and point of view more than once. And find the best way of telling the story. 

In spite of that I had decided to give up on the project altogether last year. Sheer discouragement with what seemed to be a blank wall, and the lack of support meant I was having to find all the motivation myself. 

And then something made me drag the well and truly unfinished draft out again. It was a kind of annoyance that I'd done so much work on it and it still couldn't be brought to birth. It was a sense that I had to trust my own instincts on this one and do it anyway, even if my usual collaborator didn't like the idea. In the more distant past I'd written a good deal of at least three novels and never completed them for one reason or another, and I felt I didn't want another 'dead' one in my life.

Plus, I now have a stage musical (script and music) and four books under my belt. There was no need to regard myself as a writer who couldn't finish work. I knew I could. So, I re-read through the draft again, made more notes, did a kind of summary of each chapter and who's in it and where it takes place and much more, re-read the various outline notes I'd made to help me see where things were heading, and how I needed to bring those about. I wrote several new chapters. (This is another kids' book, so the chapters aren't long - usually around 1600-1800 words - but this is still an achievement.)

In spite of all this I had to keep on fighting to move forward, and still  have to. I look at these new chapters and think how thin and unexciting they are. But they're merely the first draft in each case. I need to remember  that the first time I tried to write the scene for Grimhilda! (the musical version) in which the toys had discussions about sending Toby off to get his parents, it was pretty awful. But two characters appeared who hadn't turned up before, and with them, and the rest of the material, it was the starting point for what was eventually an excellent scene in the show. 

My habit is to tidy up new chapters as I go along. It's helpful to get me up and running for the next day's writing. These somewhat skeletal chapters will come right in subsequent sortings-out. I've now finished the first draft, and I know how it all comes out. It's now a matter of going back and building these skinny chapters up, not just to make them interesting, but to make them fit the whole scheme of things.  It’s difficult to create much suspense when you’re not yet sure how the next stage of the book, or even the climax, will work. But once you've made your way through once, you can see the lack of tension more easily - and fix it.

Many chapters written for the previous book, The Disenchanted Wizard, got dumped completely. It’s the way I work (and I suspect a lot of writers work in a similar way) and it means that ultimately I get to the right way of telling the story. And to a book that has life. But it isn't speedy...!

I'd love to be able to sit down and write an outline without much previous thought, as some writers claim they do. And then I think of P G Wodehouse and how as he grew older he wrote longer and longer 'outlines' for his books - up to 400 pages in some cases. I can't start a book from nothing -Wodehouse could in his early days, but to keep the quality up he found he had to think the more complex plots through much more thoroughly. 

I have to get to know who the characters are, what sort of things they say and do, where the story takes place and what happens in it. And a lot of that is only discoverable by writing a draft. Just making notes doesn't cut it. Certainly there are an increasing number of notes as time goes on, and the amount of material written for the current book will exceed the final length of the book by thousands of words. Already there are two bunches of chapters that were dumped early on in the process, because they were right when the book was going in one direction, but no use when characters developed and changed and the person whom the story was really about became clear. 

Perseverance and determination. Nick Arvin, the author of Mad Boy, wrote in a tweet late last year: Writing a novel is like mowing a lawn with dull scissors while blindfolded and guided by the whispered promptings of a drunken Keebler* elf.  That's probably close enough to the truth. 

* Keebler is a biscuit (cookie) company in the US. The elves have been a part of their TV advertising for decades. 

Bringing the reader up to speed

One of my niggles that turns up again and again in cop shows on TV - the CSI type of thing - is when the detectives stand around in their office and spout exposition. I don't mean one of them telling the others what's happened, but four or more of them each telling each other what they already know. They're only doing this so the viewer knows as well.  

Character A knows exactly how much to say before character B takes over. Character B then gracefully gives in to character C who somehow knows which bit of information to supply before character D finishes the thing off. Occasionally they swap this approach around: BDCA, or the like. But it's not as if they're discussing it. Pity the poor actors trying to make this look remotely realistic.

Of course, we're not talking about real life here, but we are talking about drama. And how odd it is to find TV scriptwriters reverting to this type of exposition-giving. It was dealt the death blow in the theatre after audiences got tired of too many butlers and maids coming on stage in the first scene and cheerfully telling each other - and the audience - everything they needed to know.

Why this approach has come back into fashion in these cop dramas on TV I don't know, but it seems like lazy writing to me. Blake Snyder, in Save the Cat, talks about how exposition can be dull in a movie if you don't mix it with some action. He talks about the 'Pope in the swimming pool' - a scene in which exposition is given while the Pope is having his daily swim. The audience listens to the expository material while wondering about the fact of the Pope being in a bathing suit, or their surprise at there being a swimming pool in the Vatican in the first place. The scene gives exposition while there's visual action - even if it's mainly swimming. In Hellboy, a good deal of exposition takes place during a World War II battle. In other words, a visual event is going on while we're picking up what the story is about. 

It's necessary in novels too. No one wants to wade through a couple of characters bringing the reader up to date in an opening chapter. Inventiveness is needed. 

In my children's fantasy, The Disenchanted Wizard, a good amount of background information was given while the characters raced up the stairs and along the corridors of a mental hospital, all the while keeping an eye out for staff who might catch them being where they shouldn't be. In my current WIP, I have a helicopter playing a noisy and increasingly dangerous part as one character tells the heroine what she needs to know. They're in increasing danger of being wiped out of the sky by this very solid and noisy machine. 

Exposition can be fed to the reader in small doses over two or three chapters. If you need to bring in larger chunks of it, give the scene another element, something that keeps the reader's mind on its toes. The reader wants to know the background to the story, but will be more involved if it has to engage with other (preferably relevant) things at the same time. 

Photo courtesy of Pexels.com - one of the few sites that still offers free images that are free.

Odd English Words

 I've always loved odd words, and English is not only full of them now, but always has been. Sadly, a lot of the really fun-sounding words have gone into the mists of time. I used to get a regular email from World Wide Words, which the writer and etymologist, Michael Quinion, produced. Week after week, he and hundreds of his readers would add to our knowledge of the language by discussing new and old and crazy English words. Quinion no longer produces the regular emails/columns, but they're all still online here, are searchable, and fascinating to read. If you love words!

I'd like to keep the ball rolling a little by tweeting some of these words regularly under the hashtag #oddEnglishwords, and I'll reproduce the tweets here. 

16th March, 2022:

Though not a cow I have horns; Though not an ass I carry a pack-saddle; And wherever I go I leave silver behind me. The answer to this old English riddle is a hodmandod, a bumpy word we've replaced with the more prosaic 'snail.'

17th March, 2022: 

Next time a reporter tells us someone has been severely beaten in a street incident, perhaps they could use the phrase 'the victim was mammocked-up' instead.

Maybe the hospital emergency dept could adopt it too...

Dictating text...to a computer

For some time now I've been typing up old handwritten notebooks onto the computer so that I can have a digital record of them, and clear out some more stuff from the house. These were mostly notes about my ongoing work of being a disciple of Jesus Christ, a process that not only doesn't happen as soon as you become a believer but goes on until the day you die - and maybe into eternity. Who knows?

There were also other notes amongst the spiritual stuff; sometimes these supplement material in my other journals, and sometimes they repeat the same material in a different way. 

Recently, as a result of reading an email from Dave Chesson at Kindlepreneur, I decided to save my hands a little and try and dictate the handwritten notes into the computer. I had two options: Windows Speech Recognition, which came with my computer, or Voice Typing in Google Docs. 

The Windows version produced text that was barely recognizable as what I'd dictated, and I gave up on that fairly quickly. Google does a much better job, and I'd say it gets more than 95% of the text right first time. It's the other 5% that's a bit of an issue. 

You know when you ask your phone to find something on Google, it will usually only get anything complicated right if you speak clearly, and perhaps a little slower than normal. The same applies here: go too fast, and you'll wind up with some interesting results. This means that you'll have to tidy up the text before you can copy and paste it to Word. It's still faster than typing it, but there are certain peculiarities that I can't seem to conquer. Here's are some of them. 

When I say the word, Psalm, all sorts of words appear: song, some, sound, Somme (as in the battlefield). So far Google and I can't get an agreement on this one. 

It thinks my wife Celia is actually Siri. Which seems strange, since this isn't an Apple computer. When I say the word, Dad, which I often do, since I address quite a few of the entries in these notebooks to my Heavenly Father, it often appears as Dead. 

Some of the quirks might be the result of my accent, a New Zealand one. I don't have a strong NZ accent, and I've lived in England and so acquired a cleaner English sound at one point, but Google always thinks I'm saying and when I say in, and vice versa: in for and. It also has a tendency to catch the word yet as it. Plainly my improved NZ accent isn't improved enough. 

Not all the errors are misinterpretations of what I'm saying. It likes to capitalize random words. I couldn't figure out why, but I wondered if it picked up certain phrases as being the names of songs, and so capitalized them as though I was mentioning the song in the middle of my sentence. While it's good at making sense of some grammatical issues, it's not so good at making sense of things it just plain doesn't understand. 

It's also is a bit hazy about capitals at the beginning of sentences. These often go missing for no good reason. 

Punctuation is a bit of a problem too. Full stops and commas, in general, are okay. Saying new line will create a new paragraph. Even semi-colon works more often than not. But colon usually appears in the text as Colin, or something similar, while the programme can have off days with comma, turning it into all manner of things: gonna, comedy, colour! I've given up trying to introduce brackets; sometimes the closing bracket will work, but not the opening one. And as far as I can tell, there's no way to tell it to put quote marks around dialogue, which means it would be a bit painful writing a novel in this way. 

It likes to introduce numbers into the text. So far the word too has never appeared (though to makes it). Too is always rendered as 2. Sometimes for appears as 4. 

As you can see, there's always a bit of cleaning up to do after it's typed out your dictation. Still, this is easier than typing up old notebooks of hastily-written paragraphs. 

But if the errors are frustrating, they can also be inventive, and sometimes hilarious. 

Womb for room was a bit of a surprise, but definitely quirky were: dressed tickly for drastically, and metre fur for metaphor. 

Re-reading A Suitable Boy

After nearly three decades I'm re-reading A Suitable Boy, that vast (1500 pages almost) and detailed book of life in India not long after the Partition by the British. 

It's full of stories, all interconnected, and of people from all walks of life. In the following quote, a politician, L N Argawal, has just been questioned in Parliament about a the recent shooting of several Muslim rioters: a mob of some thousand were planning to attack the foundations of a new Hindu temple that was being built right next door to a Muslim mosque. (The mosque itself had been built on the site of a Hindu temple some centuries before.) 

With typical political-speak, Argawal manages to answer very little, particularly to a Muslim female politician who is fired up about what's happened. A little later, he speaks to one of his staff:

'...a good man will not make a good politician. Just think - if you had to do a number of outrageous things, would you want the public to forget them or remember them?'

Clearly the answer was intended to be 'Forget them,' and this was the MLA's response.

'As quickly as possible?' asked L. N. Argawal.

'As quickly as possible, Minister Sahib.'

'Then the answer,' said L N Argawal, 'if you have a number of outrageous things to do is to do them simultaneously. People will scatter their complaints, not concentrate them.' When the dust settles, at least two or three out of five battles will by yours. And the public has a short memory. As for the firing in Chowk, and those dead rioters, it will all be stale news in a week.'

The MLA looked doubtful, but nodded in agreement. (page 278) 

This may seem an obvious enough piece of politicking, but it's very relevant to the state of New Zealand politics at the moment: behind all the ongoing stuff about Covid that our Prime Minister spouts each day and which seems to have all her attention, have been a number of other Bills and changes to the life of New Zealanders, some of them snuck in under the radar almost. The idea of doing enough outrageous things to dissipate the attention of the voters seems to be enacted on an almost daily basis in this country. 

I finished this back in February 2023. Some further thoughts on it:

I'm amazed at how little I remembered of it, even given that it's nearly thirty years since I last read it. One or two things were familiar, but overall, the book was completely new. Which was a delight. 

It's extraordinary in the way it encompasses practically everything in life - the rich and the poor, politics, academics, religions, weddings, births, deaths - and does it with consummate ease. Seth is able to wander down by-ways and tell stories of people who are barely part of the main plot, he is able to offer us a large range of main characters and help us keep track of them all (in fact, characters who appear chapters before and suddenly turn up again are somehow brought to mind again with ease). There are huge disasters, horrifically selfish people, wonderful, generous people, foolish people, conniving people, arrogant people, deceitful people and all the rest. There are poems and songs and religious texts; there are sub-plots that play strongly into the main storyline in due course; there is a seemingly intimate knowledge of how so many things work, from shoe-making to medical operations, just to mention two. And so many characters are so vividly drawn. 

And the whole purpose of the book is never lost: the need to find a suitable boy for the main character, Lata. Or at least that's what her mother thinks. From the first page to the last, this is a constant theme. 

What a wonderful book!

Applying the Word

Dale Ralph Davis is one of my most read commentators, whether it's in his series stretching from Judges to Kings, or in his writings on the Psalms, or his books on other matters. I've probably read each of his books that I own two or three times. 

I was going back through an old diary this morning, and found this quotation from his commentary on 2 Kings, The Power and the Fury, page 205. As always, Davis is able to find ways to apply God's Word to our contemporary situation:

We might call ourselves evangelicals and yet there is little zeal after personal piety, little effort to teach and indoctrinate our families, not much passion to bear personal or public witness - or to raise our voice against unbelief in our church denomination. We don’t see why righteousness must be rigorous or godliness aggressive.

This is so true of my own personal Christian behaviour, and no doubt of many others who claim to follow Jesus Christ, at least in the Western world. We live in a world full of stuff, full of distraction and full of things that call us away from our centre. Yet God has placed us in this part of the world. He doesn't expect us to succumb to its lifestyle, but to make our lifestyle distinctive in the midst of it. 

Father God, help us to change, to be 'holy as You are holy.' 

Follow the science?

Next time we hear 'follow the science' or its like, it might be worth thinking about this statement:

"Science is a passionate search for always newer ways to conceive the world. Its strength lies not in the certainties it reaches but in radical awareness of the vastness of our ignorance. This awareness allows us to keep questioning our knowledge and thus to continue learning. Therefore the scientific quest for knowledge is not nourished by certainty, it is nourished by a lack of certainty."

Carlo Rovelli, in the Introduction to Anaximander.

(Rovelli is an Italian theoretical physicist and writer who has worked in Italy, the United States and, since 2000, in France. He works mainly in the field of quantum gravity and is a founder of loop quantum gravity theory. He has also worked in the history and philosophy of science.)

Photo: Jamie Stoker

The Law of Human Nature

This is another post of quotes from books I've read recently. These two occur early in C S Lewis' Mere Christianity, which I've certainly read a couple of times, if not more. It isn't always an easy book, and you wonder, when the first sections were broadcast as talks, how the listeners were able to keep up. Plainly they did, and the enthusiasm for the talks was such that they were very quickly published in the form of three separate pamphlets, and then into a single book. This book remains one of the top-selling Christian books of all time, and has been instrumental in changing the lives of many a reader. 

The law of gravity tells you what stones do if you drop them; but the Law of Human Nature tells you what human beings ought to do and do not. In other words, when you are dealing with humans, something else comes in above and beyond the actual facts. You have the facts (how men do behave) and you also have something else (how they ought to behave). In the rest of the universe there need not be anything but the facts. Electrons and molecules behave in a certain way, and certain results follow, and that may be the whole story.* But men behave in a certain way and that is not the whole story, for all the time you know that they ought to behave differently.

Notice the following point. Anyone studying Man from the outside as we study electricity or cabbages, not knowing our language and consequently not able to get any inside knowledge from us, but merely observing what we did, would never get the slightest evidence that we had this moral law. How could he? for his observations would only show what we did, and the moral law is about what we ought to do. In the same way, if there were anything above or behind the observed facts in the case of stones or the weather, we, by studying them from outside, could never hope to discover it.

A little later he says:

Do not think I am going faster than I really am. I am not yet within a hundred miles of the God of Christian theology. All I have got to is a Something which is directing the universe, and which appears in me as a law urging me to do right and making me feel responsible and uncomfortable when I do wrong. I think we have to assume it is more like a mind than it is like anything else we know—because after all the only other thing we know is matter and you can hardly imagine a bit of matter giving instructions. But, of course, it need not be very like a mind, still less like a person. In the next chapter we shall see if we can find out anything more about it. But one word of warning. There has been a great deal of soft soap talked about God for the last hundred years. That is not what I am offering. You can cut all that out.

I love that last sentence! Imagine hearing that while you were listening to the broadcast; it would make you sit up suddenly. 

The commonsense of ordinary people

A few weeks back I finished reading Jason Riley's biography of Thomas Sowell, entitled Maverick. It's a great book, and full of quotable things that are especially relevant to our current times. I'm going to go back through my Kindle highlights over the next period of time, and add some of the highlights to this blog. Here's the first:

His early struggles to make a life for himself meant “daily contact with people who were neither well-educated nor particularly genteel, but who had practical wisdom far beyond what I had,” he recalls. “It gave me a lasting respect for the common sense of ordinary people, a factor routinely ignored by the intellectuals among whom I would later make my career. This was a blind spot in much of their social analysis which I did not have to contend with.”

I know some fine academics, people who are attuned to commonsense of ordinary people. But of course, we all know and hear of academics who are not! 

Finding ideas

As someone who writes day in and day out, I sometimes have to stop relying on the muse and resort to a more pragmatic approach to idea-finding. One possibility is to work through the 10 tips in Howard Scott’s Finding article ideas without leaving your desk.  Mr Scott listed these 10 tips way back in a 1993 Writers Magazine, and I wrote them down for a rainless day.

First, he says, ask: What if? What if I did such and such? Hmm. There used to be a columnist in New Zealand’s Sunday Star Times who wrote just such an article each week. However, he actually did the things he wrote about, setting - or having others set - often absurd challenges which he then turned into a column. But since Scott talks of finding ideas without leaving the desk, I think we can put that suggestion aside.

The second approach is to consider your latest rants. Here's this week's.  Is it surprising that our society is becoming more violent when abortion is considered 'safe' as long as the mother is okay - even though the safety of the person within is violated?

Too complex for a short blog post.

Observe an object, says Mr Scott, or a process. Don't just observe; think about it.

Well, I've sat here observing my computer screen for several minutes while my wife and son debate the rules of draughts behind me. Gritting my teeth and turning my ears off hasn't helped. The whole point of this exercise is to assist me, not frustrate me.

Next. Read news stories; pause over something that interests; what further questions or reactions? Hmm. A cellist in a European orchestra due to play Peter and the Wolf quits her job because she feels wolves are being discriminated against in the story.

This ranks alongside the ill-considered removal of a Pinocchio mural from a children's hospital wall. Adults' screwed-up notions being foisted on children who think political correctness has something to do with keeping your elbows off the table. (Whoops, this sounds more like a rant.)

Mr Scott next suggests I should find a new angle on an old article. I have enough trouble trying to find an angle on most of the ideas I do have without going through the process twice over.

I once wrote myself an enthusiastic maxim. Every idea has two outlets. Sadly, my brain has found the effort of forever conceiving twins quite unsustainable.

Next on the list. Reverse the popular notion - what if the opposite were the norm?

This is rather like lateral-thinking Edward de Bono's creative notion of using the word 'po' when you

Edward de Bono

make a statement that's norm's opposite.  'Po - planes fly upside down.' In Mr de Bono's books this approach always works - within minutes. My lips say 'Po,' however, and my brain says, 'Pooh.'

Talking of Mr de Bono, have you noticed that as time went on all his books said the same thing? The only difference was they got longer.

Back to Mr Scott. Use your friend's experiences, he says. Though I have tried this, I think it's a good way to have no friends from whom to glean experiences, eventually. One of our friends, for instance, complained that the only time I mentioned her family was in relation to toilets.

On to the next.

Recycle old ideas, says Mr Scott. This is certainly very ecological, but I'm not sure if people want to hear my thoughts on slaters (or wood lice) again, even if I approach them from a different angle.  (Say, upside down.)

Mr Scott gets desperate by this time and recommends for number nine: Try to come up with an answer to a silly question. Hmm, what about: Why are some people so masochistic they try and write a blog post a day? Is that question silly enough?

And finally, he says, think of something you're curious about and ask questions. Okay…

What does it mean to poke mollock? Does anything rhyme with orange, or month? Why isn't there a word in the English language for the back of the knee?  Is there a word in any language for the back of the knee?

Well, well, these idea-inducing tips work after all.

This piece was originally written for the now defunct site, Triond, around 2007/8, at a time when I was 
writing blog posts much more frequently.