Deadlines
Peter Gabriel once said, “Deadlines are the things we move through on the way to finishing.” I should learn not to post a time limit here. In Blog-land, like in the Real World, time does not conform to its usual form. At least that’s what I tell myself. After all, Mr. Gabriel took ten years to finish a record. I always use that as my yardstick. If I take less than ten years, I’m already ahead.
Don’t tell me how to set the bar low.
Is it somebody’s birthday?
Was briefly interrupted by celebrations for the now two-year-old star of an earlier post. And, what do you know? I re-read the final draft of my old story and found a heap of errors i apparently missed on the forty thousand other times I’ve read it.
Should be pretty quick to fix though and then it’s off to the print shop to produce the agent’s hard copy.
The list awaits. I’ll try and post it up here this week so you can share in my doodles.
Read MoreWrite it down
One second, Sherry sits on the plastic chair looking a bit bored, kicking at the doughnut bag crumpled into a ball at her feet. The next she’s stomping around the room demanding that Lionel Brownstitch face her. Cameras swarm from nowhere and Flymo wonders briefly if the producers maintain crews on standby for any kind of ruckus.
‘Get ’im out here!’
Two big blokes with production crew t-shirts surround her. ‘Miss, perhaps you should lower your voice.’
‘Why? The cameras are running. I wanna see Brownstitch out here.’
Lenses peer in at Sherry and the security guards. They record Sherry’s anger from three angles. Each two-man camera crew consists of a boofy operator and a skinny sound bloke with headphones and a boom microphone, the furry kind. They busy themselves with shooting Sherry without getting each other in the picture. It’s a well-practiced dance from what Flymo can see. Choreography for the real world.
‘I’m sorry, Miss, Mr Brownstitch is very busy today.’
‘So is everyone else in this room!’
She gets murmurs of approval and a few claps at this. Around five hundred hopefuls turned spectators surround them, mobile phones either attached to their ears or held out to shoot their own footage of the event. Even the girl in the teapot costume was filming.
‘Why do you want to see Mr Brownstitch anyway?’
She rounds on the security guard. ‘Why?’ She lifts her legs and kicks the bloke’s shin in time to her argument, ‘Because my daughter went into that room two and a half hours ago and she ain’t come back out. What’s he done with her?’
‘Miss, I’m sure –’
‘And you can stop calling me “Missâ€! My name is Sherry Star Smith. My daughter is Amber Star Jones. Write it down!’
Read MoreThe importance of lists
Was up late last night making lists. Lists are an extremely important part of preparation. At least they will be this time. I’ve often attempted lists, chapter summaries, timelines, all sorts of crap, only to find that when I sit down to actually write something, I forget all about them and do the whole wild tangent thing anyway.
This time is different though. Why? Because I won’t stop with the list. From the list, I’ll make chapter summaries and from the summaries I’ll make more detailed summaries before then starting to turn summary into proper narrative.
The idea is already yeilding dividends. I’ve discovered that I don’t know squat about one of my main characters. She’s a young singer with a stage mum, but I don’t know what’s driving her and why she allows herself to be manipulated. This will probably prove to be important and I’m pretty sure the chapters that feature her will dip into the past more than deal with the present. Maybe that’s her thing – she carries a lot of baggage.
Let me ponder that a while.
Read MoreThe story so far
So, if this blog is really about the process of writing a novel, I should fill you in on what the story is so far.
This is not a brand new story I’m writing here. The idea has been bouncing around my head for a good couple of years and I have a draft in progress at about 10,000 words strong.
Only problem is, I think it’s on the wrong track.
When you’re facing a novel at over 50,000 words, it is incredibly difficult to keep the simple point of your story straight in your head. You get lost in endless mirror maze of tangents and ideas that seem really cool at the time, but end up an albatros: the “darlings” that William Faulkner urges writers to kill.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not throwing out all the work I’ve already put in. More than likely I’ll dip back into the good stuff I’ve already done as I need to, but I do want to make a fresh start free of the problems inherent in the existing text.
What’s wrong with it? I think that stuff will become apparent as I go. I’m happy with my characters, they seem pretty well formed and three-dimensional, at least the primary four or five do. The main problem I had was that my characters seemed to be making an awfully big deal over very little. The events and their consequences seemed a bit…flimsy.
That may sound like a big deal, but it’s not really. Story problems are easy to fix – just place your characters in more interesting situations. Characters that suck is a much more difficulty problem and one that affeects just about every existing word on the page. This is what happened with my last novel and I’ll be damned if I’m going make the same mistake twice.
Famous last words if I ever heard them.
Read MoreThe Books
