Getting back in the writerly zone

Well, here we are again, a little over a year since I last blogged. Every now and then in the last several months, I contemplated taking my blog down altogether. Various things stopped me – inertia, other preoccupations and, occasionally, somebody from across the world stumbling across an old post and making comment. So more than a year after my last post, those words are still… live.

Long-time readers may remember, I published Singled Out in February 2015 and began writing Novel Number Two five months later. It was a faltering and ultimately false start. Life intervened over the next three years or so. Work kept me busier than I’d anticipated, then my mother fell terminally ill and needed all the care I could give. What came next, the clearing-out of her lifetime of paperwork, passions and possessions, was time-consuming and emotionally exhausting. By then I needed life to give me a boost. It chose to deliver a disruptive payload of gallstones instead, and surgery and hospital stays effectively wrote off the next few months.

But since then, things have picked up quite a bit, it’s fair to say. Life is good and positive again, in many ways. One outcome of this is that I’m at last making time to get back into this funny business of… writing stories.

I write all the time. A self-employed marketer and copywriter for 20 years, I know I’m privileged to be one of lucky ones who is paid for their words. Those commercial writings, these days mostly for corporate blogs, event promotions and websites, have kept me in paper and ink and I’m not in the least ungrateful. But as I’m in a position to scale back a bit on the jobbing copywriting now, I want to reconnect with the joy of fiction and get started (again… again… again…) on Novel Number Two.

As a result of that faltering early start, I have seven short chapters, about 7,000 words. But they’re in not-bad shape – for a first draft. I have a whole, entire story outline too – and now I’ve read it through, I realise… I still like it. The theme is very in vogue and the story has legs.

So I’m going back in and alongside this endeavour, I’m turning this blog around and setting it back on its original track as A Writer’s Notepad.

My original writerly posts have been knocking around for upwards of six or seven years and they’re buried at the bottom of a deep blogging black hole. I reckon there’s life in a few of those old dogs, so I’ll be updating and reposting the odd one as well as penning a few fresh words too, on the second-time-around experience. I venture most of those early posts weren’t seen by more than a handful of people anyway.

Will it be any different this time, I wonder?

After that, we’ll just see how it goes.

Birth of a Book: Week 2 #amwriting

To plan, or not to plan, this is the question

I’m more of a planner, than a pantser, which means I can’t get very far into a new novel without putting a bit of flesh on the bones of my scraps of story outline. Those three or four pages need to evolve into a chapter-by-chapter summary before I begin to feel even a little bit comfortable about where things are going.

I’m not obsessive about it. I won’t end up with 10,000 words, perhaps 3,000 all told, in table format, so I can juggle the chapters around. (And no… so far, for those who are interested in this kind of thing – no Scrivener, just MSWord.) I write a few lines about what happens in each chapter, plus – and this is very important – a note of qualification; an answer to the question… what is this chapter doing in the story? That means either (i) how is the chapter moving the story forward, or (ii) what is it telling the reader about a key character. If it doesn’t do one or the other, it has no business being in the story.

So planning has taken up what time I allocated this week, and I’m satisfied that things are taking shape. I’m about half way through, and I’m pretty sure i know where the rest is going – that’s for next week. When I’m done, I can pick my way forward through the chapters, knowing what I need to write.

Do things change as I go along? You bet they do. Things I think will work, don’t. Things I’ve forgotten, emerge. Characters evolve in ways I hadn’t anticipated. New ideas arrive. So I’m certain I’ll be re-engineering my chapter-by-chapter as I go along. That’s a given. But wherever it goes, I have to begin with a plan.

Planning aside, I’m determined to keep up with my minimum 500-word commitment (I can’t allow myself fail after just 2 weeks). So Saturday saw me out in the garden with my laptop, bashing my way to 800 words. Hardly a stellar performance, but the plan came first this week; that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

Oh… and one other thing – a happy motivational moment. Singled Out hit that magic 100 sold copies milestone this week. It got there with the aid of a promoted post on Facebook of which, more later, once the promo is over and I know whether or not I broke even or got ahead by a few quid. Still… One. Hundred. Sold. Copies. Break even or not, it was worth it.

I’m a minnow in an ocean of self-publishing fish, but I confess, I feel chuffed. It’s a start. Onward and upward.

Birth of a Book: Week One #amwriting

Hardly an auspicious start, but I broke through my first 1,000 words this week and named two characters. I’m off the ground at least.

Here are three things which are already blindingly obvious to me:

I may like to think I’ve learned from writing my first book, and that I can bring those learnings, newly acquired writerly abilities and Book One experience to bear; but at this point, I feel like a child who’s been given a pencil for the first time, and isn’t quite sure which is the business end.
I need to re-read all those posts I’ve written on ‘show not tell’. Two pages in, and I’m already stating the bleedin’ obvious, line after line. A bit of self-flagellation is in order.
Inciting incident… conflict… what?

This is going to be tough. But I promised short-and-sweet, so that’s it for tonight.

Birth of a Book: Day One #amwriting

Today is an auspicious day – a good day. It’s the day when I finally begin actually writing my follow-up to Singled Out. Tardy but resolute, I’m starting work on my second novel.

I thought, as I’m going to be spending more time writing and less time blogging over the coming months (see what an optimist I can be), it might be interesting to chart the progress and (see what a pessimist I can be) the pain.

This is Ground Zero. There is nothing here except a pair of opening paragraphs flapping about in the breeze (a derisory 255 words), along with two pages of typed notes on the original idea (two years old), and two pages of handwritten notes (scribed whilst I waited for my my old PC and my new iMac to play nicely) on the updated idea. That’s it.

I’d intended to be so, so much further on by now, but, well, life… has got in the way. I call myself a writer, but I haven’t written anything new for two years (for the purposes of this blog, I’m not counting marketing blurb, which I write pretty much every day). I’ve edited – that means the odd paragraph and a lot of pressing of the delete button – but not actually written. Those two new opening paragraphs surfaced in March, but since then… nothing. Not a word.

I am ashamed.

But I will do better, and this is where it starts.

Whilst I wrote Singled Out, a writing buddy and I had a modest commitment to one another – that we would exchange 500 new words each week, on a Sunday evening. We reasoned that anybody, no matter how preoccupied or how busy they were, could manage 500 words a week. And we did it, both of us, with almost no fails, for month after month, as both her first novel and my own took shape. What happened of course was that we both wrote considerably more than 500 words on most weeks, because that 500-word commitment opened the floodgates. So we would either pick a choice 500 words to send, or send the lot. Difficult weeks would find me bashing out a desperate page late on a Sunday afternoon, but most weeks weren’t that dire.

My writing buddy and now very dear friend has invited me to take up the 500-word challenge again and I’m going to do it, because I’m tired of being a Writer Without Portfolio. Stand-by, Suzanne. Shit-or-bust, you will get words this week.

The idea is, I’ll report back every week – short and sweet though, because I want to spend more time writing and less time blogging. Forgive me, but I want to get that next book out of my head and on to some paper. Either that, or stop calling myself… a writer.

Wish me luck.