NaNoWriMo 2007 - Day 27

Well, tonight ought to see me complete the first and rough as hell draft of Pieces, and it's been a curious journey. I had started out with a rough idea about a love triangle, and notions about characters being complicit in their own victimhood and to their own ends, and some nebulous stuff about a dangerous mumbo-jumbo taking over the United Kingdom included only to serve as some kind of backdrop to the present day events. By the end of this draft, though, the backdrop has stepped very much into the spotlight (broken metaphor, there) and all sorts of other business is now at work in the narrative - small actions having massive repercussions, the meaninglessness of freedom of will, disconnections between intent and effect, and more and surprising occurences of the jigsaw puzzle motif. Very late in the day I decided that if a weird brain-melting cult had taken over Britain, then there ought to be a resistence group, and given that the disbanded love triangle involved the narrator, who had nothing to do with either, it was pretty obvious where the other two ended up.

I'll be sitting down to chart out what I've written, see how it can be massaged to bring out and emphasise the stronger aspects of the story, and what other parts of the story need telling. So many of the late emergent elements need to be introduced earlier. Also, I'm going to have to cut the thing into 102 pieces that will each make a sort of sense on their own (though I have the beginnings of a strategy for that), and build a hideously bloated bit of JavaScript to put the whole thing together. I was tempted earlier today to devise 100 subtly different endings for the story, but that might be a bit too much. And as if to egg me on, I was in a bookshop the other day and saw Perec's Life: A User's Manual in the bestseller's section. Ah, nice.

Oh, and if the whole mess isn't too ghastly once I'm done, I shall be approaching a certain fictional anthology with a view to getting it published. I envision a box including a jigsaw puzzle and 102 bits of paper. Now that would be something. Oh, and a disc for the disinclined.

The Today Programme

For some reason the Today programme decided to run an item on NaNoWriMo this morning, but as a debate between a NaNoWriMoer and a publisher. The latter's main thrust seemed to be that she was down on NaNoWriMo because it threatened to make her slush pile larger, as if she wasn't already inundated, and everyone she speaks to seems to be writing a novel, yah boo. And although we have heard writer after writer say that the hardest thing about writing is sitting down and writing terrible stuff when they're really not in the mood, she cautioned against the idea of people using NaNo as a way of turning off their inner-editors. Ironically, it was she and not the NaNoWriMoer who seemed to be confusing a first draft with a finished manuscript. And this just three days (and 1800 words, chiz chiz) before the finish-line!

The NaNoWriMo done us proud, though, standing her ground, explaining it was about writing, not about getting published, and that it was a tool used by some writers to develop early drafts of works they then go on to develop into full novels.

I can't help but bring up Kerouac's On The Road here, and whereas the odds are against NaNo ever producing or discovering a Kerouac, it does demonstrate that NaNo-like writing stints are a valid and important part of, if not the development of literature itself, certainly the development of the writers themselves. The publisher suggested that if people were serious about writing then they wouldn't need NaNo to motivate them, but sadly those people are the people to be found in her slush pile. I suspect that NaNo might serve the world better in giving people who, maybe, you know, can actualy write, the excuse and the motivation to get down to it, and adopt the discipline that will actually allow them to fluorish, with or without publication.

Oh, and you can plan your story all you like, but you never know your story 'til you sit down and write it, and NaNo, again, is a great way of doing that.

But anyhew, for all I know the publisher doesn't really give two figs about NaNo, and was just playing devil's advocate at the behest of the Today Programme. This conflict was probably fiction.

NaNoWriMo 2007 - Emergent Themes

1. Non-verbal communication
2. The diffences between intention and effect
3. Betrayal
4. Small acts with large consequences
5. The acquisition of a moral highground by casting oneself as the victim
6. Choosing captivity
7. Delaying progression to maintain a less-satisfying but sustained status quo.

NaNoWriMo 2007 - Day 10

NaNoWriMo 2007 - Day 9
Originally uploaded by Simon Scott

I'm off to Dan's today for as much scribbling as I can manage. The last time we did this was day 1, where I made a fantastic start, but had all my plot before me which makes it rather easier. This time may be different. As I think I've said elsewhere, I have realised my plot is far too thin for 50,000 words and so have had to embellish it, which is something I find tricky in that it has to be embellished in a way that contributes to the story as a whole. I think I've managed it, and made it much more interesting and exciting as a result. I've made the decision to have the end of the recounted story's chronology come right slap bang up to the start of George doing the jigsaw, which I hope will function well enough. I love those moments in novels where two different situations suddenly inflict themselves on one another. What this means, though, is that (come December) I will have to rework my opening. At the moment it sounds as though George has just come in from somewhere, which isn't quite right now. Easily changed, though, and what better way of convincing oneself that one is serious about revision if the first thing one is going to dicky around with is the opening!

Last night, as I left work, I felt a small amount of discomfort in one of my two feet (you know I have two feet, right?). I put less pressure on it and waited til I got home, assuming I had something in my shoe. Said somethings, and the discomfort, vanished when I removed my shoes so I assumed that whatever it was had fallen off and gone to join the kibble. But padding barefoot across the kitchen the pain returned, so out came the tweezers and a strong light and from mine own flesh I extracted a tiny tiny sliver of glass, no bigger than a piece of glitter.

Behold the serendipity, for glass is broken within the novel and here I was fishing a piece of the stuff out of my body. Coincidence certainly, but the act of removal has somewhere to go in the novel, and brings in some of the weirdness that is finally starting to creep into what I'm writing. I have a character called Elsa who to whom I wanted to give a maintenance task involving my main character, George. Initially she was to shave off the salt and pepper moustache he wears that adds a country decade to his face. This I may keep in, but I realise that the removal of a piece of glass from his foot is much stronger and, because of certain resonances already set up, will add to the suggestion that George and Elsa's friendship is healing him of something. One of my favourite things about writing, and NaNoWriMo specifically, is the way in which you are forced to play magpie with your own life. There is something almost transformative about taking the events that happen to you or to those around you and placing them in a story, to load the chaos that surrounds us with meaning and structure, even if it is an illusion, and its beneficence is merely temporary.

What? I'm Not Allowed A Night Off?

Horrible journey home, got back much later than usual, and the blank screen was too much to bear, so instead I am going to lie around the flat in the clothes I just bought from Uniqlo and read Donald Barthelme stories. I only wish Barhelme was available in Japanese. And that I could read Japanese.

(and don't worry - I have been through my schedule and bumped up my Sunday targets, so all should still be well)

That'll Be The First Wall Then.

It's been an odd couple of days. Despite having much of the plot mapped out, I started getting to stuff that I hadn't thought about in any great level of clarity. Some of this was stuff I didn't really want to write about any way. There was a trial which I ought to have relished, but it was one of those complicated year-long trials and covered stuff I wasn't prepared to look too deeply into considering how incidental to the plot it was. It's paramount that one of the characters goes to prison, but the means by which that occurs is immaterial, and might as well be a footnote for all I care. Anyhow, I was beginning to find real difficulty in getting the words out without leaping forward to stuff I really didn't want to write about just yet.

When I started out I had hoped for four major strands to work on, so I could flit about between them to keep the wordflow going. However, only two of the strands have survived such scrutiny. I had put off the school strand because it was a bit clouded in my mind and I wanted to give it more thought before I got to it. The joy of writing about a character thinking back over his life is that he needn't do so in order. However, after a lunchtime spent brainstorming (or whatever the word we're supposed to use now is) I felt I had a strong enough storyline to get started on. That night I managed to eat up half of it in about 1,700 words, meaning one of the four strands it aint. With a fair bit of jiggery and pokery, however, I believe there is enough meat in the main two to keep me going, and some dainty vignetting around the edges that will hopefully come in handy when I start on the December work. Also happily, the next section of the school story took longer than I'd expected. I've still probably only another 2,000 words or so to get out of it, but it's a little less bleak than the first 1,700 words suggested.

What has been fun, though, is trying to establish the motivations of the characters. It seems virtually the entire cast is a shower of arseholes! But in that frail human's picking their way through moral mazes in the pursuit of a happiness that is all too fleeting kind of way. Also there's an enjoyable repeating patterns of behaviour thing happening, and that should help along the December machinations when I get to them.

And I've still not got to any of the sex yet!

NaNoWriMo - Day 3

Well, I've not started on my day's output yet, but after a marathon day on Thursday and a coasting-along-quite-nicely-thank-you Friday I am at 8,217 words. Last year my approach was pretty much to scribble out 1,667 as best I could each day, with the occasional wobble and panicked catch up. This year, I'm basically trying to capture as much slack as I can going along, so I'll have room to maneuvre when the terrain gets trickier later on. My secondary target is to take the 30th off, but to have already finished by then.

The ultimate destination for what I'm writing is helping me a little in forming the structure of the story, and allowing me to not take too seriously the peculiar order in which I'm telling the tale. There is a distant past childhood memory section that I have no intention of starting on till I've got the dreadful part about love and betrayal out of the way. My worry is that I'm assuming the childhood section will stand up to the same level of scrutiny as the stuff I'm writing now and it may well not. Plenty of time to find more story to tell, though.

I've brought in a state-run cult for the "present day" vignettes, the challenge of which is to blur the lines between something we would recognise as a cult and something that is the feasible unintended outcome of a government drive. But that kind of problem solving is what NaNoWriMo is all about. Not it's not; it's about words.

I'm also having some fun taking the metaphorical ideas about jigsaws and coupling them up with the narrative, which helps a great deal in rationalising why the book is about a guy doing a jigsaw puzzle, beyond the structure alone. There are also some straggly bits that I want to include but I'm not quite sure yet what they're for. I worked for a day or two at a commercial espionage company as an audio typist. The job involved transcribing phone conversations between agents posing as clients and various people such as sales staff, or scientists, or whoever. I wasn't told that's what the company did, but it really could have been the only purpose of the recordings I worked on. I desperately want to give this job to George, my main character, and use it to crank up his paranoia a bit. Can't write about it too much here, though, because as we all know, you only get so many words a day to use, and I don't want to put them all in here. It's not true, but it does feel true.

I have uploaded the opening to Pieces to my NaNoWriMo profile. Please note that the first few sentences start with "And". I did this firstly to suggest that events happen prior to the start of the "action", which seems fitting for a story that is memory; secondly I did it to annoy English teachers the length and breadth of the nation (pretty big guys, some of those English teachers).


And on. And on.

NaNo Draws Smellable Near

Well it's nearly here, and I wish it was already. I've been terribly naughty and scribbled down a few sketchy notes for Pieces, and have started to seek out the voice for the main character (it's always my voice, so I don't know why I'm bothering, really).

Last Saturday saw the London NaNoWriMo Kick-Off Meeting, which was a frightfully well-attended bacchanalia of ale, soft toys and fizzing creativity. I had forgotten how great it was to know that so many folk try for it every year. Even though, when one gets down to it, there isn't always a great deal of communication between participants, even at the write-ins, the fact that there are a bunch of crazies willing to put themselves through hell alongside you is wonderfully encouraging.

Another bit of prep what I have done is to dust off the Excel wordcount progress doohicky that I drew up last year. I've made it more flexible than 2007's strict 1,667 words a day model, and will be looking at adapting the daily targets to my social calendar as we go along. Get it here!

You can key in different wordcounts for each day, and the dates are automatically filled in following the first entry. You get a neat little spike on the graph showing you what today is. Always handy!

I shall hopefully be posting at the end of the first.

Damn You Technology!

Every so often I call to mind some device or other that I would like to have. I call it to mind not from having seen it in a shop, or advertised in a magazine, but the assumption that something at such and such a price, with such and such a function ought to be feasible in this capitalism paradise in which we live.

So, having become fed up of the stupid, sound-leaking earbud headphones that came bundled with the horrifically badly designed Samsung E900, I sought out a teensy box with an audiojack on one side and a mobile phone cable on the other. Simple, thought I! Plug the box into the phone and then any old pair of headphones (such as the nice white RAB ones I got from work) and bob is very much your mother's brother. So off I trot to my grand-father's chest and bought me a box of the very very best. No of course not, because a device of such simplicity, that I would happily spend 10-15 pounds on does not exist. What does exist is the biggest pair of headphones in the world at the price of £199 that uses bluetooth. If I'm going to spend two hundred quid on a pair of headphones, I'd be pretty insistent on them being tethered to something, making their cablelessness very much a two-edged sword.

And now, with the calendar ticking away to the next NaNoWriMo I fancy that there must exist something in the £20 range that allows one to compose something akin to a txt file with a minimum of fuss - either with a stylus and touchscreen or a dinky qwerty keyboard that I could wrap my big sausagey fingers around - and then let me slot into a USB to transfer them across. This would allow me to write on the hoof without worrying about all the typing that might ensue. More to the point, when one is supposed to be writing and not editing, it is very difficult to take written work and type it up. Well, having beavered away at Kelkoo, Amazon, Play, FireBox et al, it would appear, again, that no such device exists. The Palm Zire comes close, but it is £30 which seems a lot to pay for what you're getting.

I suspect I shall have to try using dead trees and squid blood in its stead.

Precocious Advice for NaNoWriMo

I thought I would go through what I felt I learnt last year, as much for my benefit as anyone else's.

1. Plan

Planning is a real necessity if you want something other than "just" 50,000 words by November 30th, but be careful. If we imagine a line, and at one end of the line is Slaughterhouse Five, and at the other end is, say "A man's concept of time is shattered and he revisits all his experiences in a jumble, from the bombing of Dresden to being abducted by aliens and kept in a zoo" at the other end, then that line becomes a kind of spectrum of planning from "idea" all the way through to "novel" (which is a kind of absolute plan, if you like) . The plan that you want at this stage is probably about a tenth of the way along from the idea. You want to keep it loose, little more than a structure with maybe some details for the opening and the finish. You will probably have some major plot points already, but for the plan you just need to know when in the 50k they happen.

2. Don't chain yourself to your plan

This seems like a contradiction to point 1 but it reallys isn't. Once you get your characters going you may find that you can't quite maneuvre them into position as easily as you'd like. It's at moments like these that you have to abandon aspects of the plan, or revise it. Sometimes you will find you have to set up the environment in which a character exists in order to get the response you need. All of this is much easier if you don't invest too heavily in the planning stage - that's why you want to keep the plan nearer the "idea" end of the spectrum. Thos plot points I mentioned earlier are best thought of not in terms of things happening, but as a set of effects that you wish to befall either your characters or your plot - keep the details loose, and think chiefly of what you need out of the plot point to get you to your big finalé.

3. Enjoy your characters

Seems obvious but you're going to be spending a good deal of time with these people, and you're counting on other people spending a good deal of time with them too, so even the bad guys have got to be the sort of bad guys it might be fun to hang out with.

4. Vignette Vignette Vignette

A down and dirty trick I pulled a couple of times in Bad Aji was to utilise cut scenes, picking up fairly minor characters and giving them a few hundred words or so on their own. This was mainly for cut-aways so I could hit the ground running on subsequent scenes, so very useful not just for the word count but for pace. I also tried to make sure that the vignettes bring something to the table - try and tell more of the central story through them.

5. Leave Work For Tomorrow

Not to be confused with procrastination, it is really really benefitial if you have something you can start tomorrow, which invariably means not finishing up a scene the night before, or it can just mean knowing what's coming next.

6. If you're bored, make a leap

I'm loathe to raise any qualitative points, because quality is something that happens in December, but some, like "enjoy the characters," have as much to do with making your writing journey pleasurable as with the quality of your first draft. From a critical point of view I would say that if you are bored writing it, people will be bored reading it, and as this is NaNoWriMo, this is where you should feel free to jazz things up a little. At a lull in Bad Aji I decided to strip a couple of the main characters, pretty much just because I could (though it helped tie the two of them together) (not literally). Sudden events, twists or turns are a great way of catching your second or third wind and can often take your plotting into whole new territories that you never knew existed. Which brings us to...

7. Develop themes along the way

Bad Aji started out with the idea that someone who believed themselves to be a temp going from job to job was actually working the same job over and over again, but had their memory tinkered with every couple of months. The title and the key aspect of the novel, the influence that dead characters have over the living, all arose along the way. If you can discover themes in your writing and emphasise them as you go along, it will give you further sources of inspiration, and better tools with which to solve problems and make decisions about your writing.

8. Grab everything you can from life even if it is nailed down

All writing is autobiographical, which is not to say that C S Lewis ever went to Narnia, but that we can only write about what we know about (which sometimes means finding out about what we want to write about). Whereas lifting characters and events wholesale from real life carries with it dangers (but smoke 'em if you got 'em), do not be afraid of taking the beefsteak of reality, mincing it up, and coming up with some tasty burgers. Although time is short try to embrace the experiences and events that have taken place in your life recently or are scheduled for November. Bad Aji's showdown at the Tate Modern was there because I'd visited the gallery and was taken with the slides that were installed at the time. Stoole's trip to Marlow was more or less my own (my school, thankfully, had existed after all).

9. The epilogue - Productive cheating

I realised with a few days to go that I was going to run out of story before I hit 50,000, which would have been a better realisation to have had on the tenth, say, than with the finishing line in sight. I had two choices, which was to fill before I got to the showdown (and ruin the chase that had been set up) or to cheat and come up with an epilogue. I chose the latter, which led to one of my favourite sections from Bad Aji, and allowed me to give my central character some kind of resolution after his tragic demise. It can be useful to pull characters temporarily out of the narrative and give them some headspace for them to make the big decisions.

10. Don't be led by round numbers

Or any kind of structure or order that doesn't spring organically from what you are writing. I've seen people ask things like "how many chapters should I write" but if you're going to write 50,000 words, then the number of chapters oughtn't be a factor. You've got your story, let that be your guide.

11. Narrative can be vertical as well as horizontal

If you're running out of story, don't just think in terms of lengthening the plot; try bunging in a subplot or two. It sounds really obvious but if you send some characters off to do some business, either aiding the central narrative or as an aside, then you get more words out of it with little replotting. And with business happening away from the main action, you'll have more cutting points to choose from which ought to help you get round the stuff you don't want or need to write about.

Signs & Portents

I'm not overly superstitious. I believe coincidences are just coincidences; but I also believe that much of our intelligence is based around trying to discover or otherwise work out correlations between the various chaotic events that surround us. To that end, I can explain away coincidence quite merrily with probability, yet still enjoy the visceral thrill of noticing them when they crop up.

So I was thrilled when I got my fairly unexpected stickies through from NaNoWriMo in exchange for services rendered. This year's novel will focus on a central character doing a jigsaw puzzle (for 50,000 words! Crazy!) and lo did the thank you postcard feature a design involving a jigsaw puzzle piece! This in the same week that an old story of mine caught up with me. The good lady husband and I have a mouse-shaped visitor and have laid down traps, which is at slight odds with my hilarious "don't kill anything, but continue to condone the killing of animals by buying rather large quantities of dead flesh once a week, which is fine really because at the end of the day the planet wouldn't be able to support a vegetarian humanity so really what should concern us is the manner in which the animals are bred, raised and, ultimately dispatched, so take that evangelical vegetarian; your moral highground is a luxury my sausage guzzling pays for" position.

Um...

That's all I have, really.

Adjusting My Jacket Tails

I'm still not thinking of elephants.

I've waved NaNoWriMo about a bit amongst friends and forum buddies, and managed to convince a few to have a stab at it, which will help me immensely with my own work.

Also, the plot of the novel is beginning to emerge out of the mists of my unthink. I'm torn between writing in the first or third person. The story involves someone sitting in small apartment doing a jigsaw puzzle, while ruminating about his distant past, a less distant Terrible Thing, recent developments, his world view, and his immediate situation. Because of the focus on a single character, I feel a first person narrator would be more appropriate, but I don't want the character to be an open book. Also I need to write 50,000 words in a month, and I feel a third person narrator would allow for the inclusion of things that I wouldn't be able to bother with in the first person. But then there's a lot of reminiscence that I don't want to broach by a spray of harp strings and the picture going all misty. I did have the idea of fudging it and have the third person narrator be revealed as the central character talking about himself in the first person which would be a great deal of fun, but might be too distracting considering what the December dissection will be about and what little I have of a plot doesn't quite go with it somehow. If I were to use the device, it would have to be in a story where the revelation actually meant something. I think the first person narrator is getting the upperhand...

As to the plot, it seems to be evolving into a confrontation of guilt, with lots of ambiguity thrown in, and malevolent darkness burning the edges of the paper. One of the other things I want to do, which I did to some extent last year, is weave in the current events of November (in various scales) into the story. The realtime of the novel takes place at the end of November, with immediate reminiscences taking place throughout the month, and leading up to the end. There's a fair amount of unreality that's likely to occur, though, so the November events might fall by the wayside. What has also been interesting is the way in which this new rendering of Pieces is comparing to what I had of the original. I'm totally starting from scratch in terms of set-up and story-line, but there are distinct thematic links which I'm sure can only be a good thing.

Oh, and I have my ending, but I'm not sure what it means or how I'll get there. Should be fun finding out though.

Also, I have just this second decided to write a couple of 1,667 word stories, just to remind myself of what I'm letting myself in for. Nothing too strenuous, though - just a couple of stretches at the starting line.