NaNoWriMo 2010

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It's November 30th, the last day of NaNoWriMo, and I'm pleased to say that I broke the 50,000 word mark on Sunday evening. Boy, am I glad! After being really excited by my story back in those halcyon days at the start of the month, I rapidly grew bored with it. Doing my daily words became a chore, and I was finding that I was writing as much as I could, not to meet the target or because I couldn't stop myself, but because I wanted it over and done with.

We Should Be Heroes is set in Vertigo City, my fictional metropolis that has already spawned a steampunk serial, The First Tale, and a mini-serial, Quantum Steam Theory. I decided to move 130 years into "the future", putting Vertigo into a twilight world akin to 1940s noir. Superheroes stalked the streets of the city. Sadly they didn't do much with their powers and it turned into a detective story.

Now, I'm proud of myself for having written another novel, and in the process I've found out a lot more about my characters. Two of them are actually from the steampunk era (there is a reason why they're still around over a century later) and they've given me a lot more back story through We Should Be Heroes. The problem is, I don't really want to use the novel as part of the Vertigo City universe.

There are three major problems with it. I could probably fix them, if I wanted to, but right now I don't. I want to focus on other things (an announcement about one of them is coming soon). The first problem was that I'd written myself into a hole by choosing to write it in first person present tense, which was annoying as secondary characters had far more interesting things to say. The second problem is linked with this, in that I couldn't maintain the "voice" of my main character beyond the opening scenes.

The third problem is perhaps the biggest, since no amount of rewrites would solve it. Basically...I don't like writing noir. There. I said it. The steampunk tales are like adventures stories, and they've a lot more fun to write. Liss gets to shoot things (or beat people up) and the automatons get more to do. Vertigo City is a more interesting place to write when it's a spiritual descendant of Victorian London, as opposed to 1940s New York.

So while I'm proud of myself for having written it, I'm not going to use it. I'll be keeping Vertigo City for my steampunk work, so there will be more adventures from Liss and the gang over the coming months. Just not any superheroes.

Waging War on the Editing Demon

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Back in November 2008, I finished writing my first novel. I already had two unfinished novels to my name, but I have to give some credit to NaNoWriMo for impelling me to actually get to 'The End' - without the daily 'deadlines' required to make the minimum 50,000 words by the beginning of December, I doubt I would have been able to maintain the impetus to get the story of Fowlis Westerby out of my head and onto the page.

The intervening time has seen me flirting with short stories, flash fiction and now a web serial, as I procrastinate like hell so I can avoid the dreaded 'rewrite' process. All of the writing manuals advise you to leave a manuscript to 'breathe' before you return to it, so as to develop some kind of distance from your own work and revise with a more objective eye, though I think eighteen months might be pushing it! Eisley Jacobs kindly wrote a guest post about her own editing process back in March but today I'm going to discuss my own process, and how it relates to my first novel.

Step one is easy - it involves printing out a hard copy of the whole manuscript. For the environmentally conscious among you, I did this using single spacing, a size 10 font and printing on both sides. (Helvetica was designed to be readable as small as 6pt, simply so that the writing in the New York phone book could be small enough to read, and thus stop the book being about a foot thick). I simply read through the manuscript, making comments and notes as I go. So far, it looks like I've scrawled 'expand' across most of it - NaNoWriMo is great for motivating you to get the words out, but in a lot of cases that's all I was doing; a general brain dump of ideas. Many scenes require expansion, or explanation. Even during this initial step, no matter how much I am tempted, I do no actual rewriting - not until I've read the original manuscript in full.

It is very tempting to rewrite as you go, but you can only get a 'bird's eye view' of the story as a whole when you read it 'as is'. You may fix what you think is a problem in the opening chapters only to discover you've created another one later on - by re-reading the whole thing, you may realise that what you think is a problem on page 10 is actually necessary for the events of page 98 to make sense.

This is the point at which I now find myself, with a hard copy covered in multi-coloured notes, comments and even doodles. The next step is go back through the work and actually do an initial rewrite to incorporate the comments I've made, including those dreaded expansions. I'm expecting the word count to shoot up, although the addition of new material will probably end up simply balancing out the elimination of the frequent adverbs I've found (I try hard not to use adverbs in my fiction these days, but apparently I still thought they were a good idea in 2008).

The thing that strikes me the most is that although there are passages that make me cringe, or sections where I can tell what I was getting at but now find the writing clunky or uninspired, I still enjoy what I've written. It's clear the point at which I really got into the story as the flow improves about a third of the way in, and the number of comments drastically reduces. I've even re-read these sections twice, to make sure I'm not just skipping the 'bad' parts in my desire to get it out of the way.

The writing is quite clearly 'mine', even though it has obviously both improved and matured in the course of almost two years. This does raise the question of whether or not my writing will change again by the time I've rewritten this draft! Could I get stuck in a cycle of always rewriting a draft, only to put it away, and come back to it to rewrite it again? This raises my final question, that I throw open to all writers (or even editors)...

Would it be possible to endlessly revisit the same manuscript and never declare it 'finished'? Furthermore, how many existing books could have been improved by just one more editing pass?

Strange things are afoot at the circle K...

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Hello, all. Apologies for the absence - many things are afoot in the crazy world of Icy at the moment. I just got engaged to my fabulous other half, I've gotten involved with the very excellent Chinese Whisperings project, I'm trying (and succeeding) to keep up with my reading (I'm onto my second book of February - first was John Marks' Fangland, now it's Jasper Fforde's Lost in a Good Book), and I'm learning Russian.

Still, I am a writer, and you'll (hopefully) be glad to know that I'm actually writing again. Not only am I redrafting my beloved novel, Fowlis Westerby, I'm also going to be doing something slightly new. At the end of January, I posted a flash fiction called Still Running, and it got a lot of people asking questions on Twitter. It seems that people wanted to know more, so I've decided to write an online serial, using my flash as a starting point! I'll be starting a new blog purely for this purpose, and I am to post a new installment every Friday...starting tomorrow!

Call back, won't you, and check it out...

(In lieu of any relevant stock imagery to accompany this post, I decided to go with a photo of my own, purely because I like it. It was taken inside Dover Castle last summer...)

I write, therefore I am...or something.

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Receptionists will tell you they are receptionists. Solicitors will tell you they are solicitors. Yet writers will tell you they're "trying to write", or they're "working on being a writer". They rarely own up to what they actually are. If you write, then you're a writer. It's that simple. (For a better explanation of this concept, see C.N.Nevets' post here on the same subject).

Funny thing is, I'm no better. I talk about being a writer, and I've even had work accepted, and yet I still have problems nailing my colours to the mast and saying "I am a writer". I'm not sure why. It's probably something to do with the difficulty in reconciling something most people see as a pasttime with a profession, and it's also something a lot of people say they're doing when, in actual fact, they're not doing anything. Still, I've sold a few of my stories and I write most days, which satisfies most criteria, but yet still the doubts remained unquenched.

Still, I've decided to redraft my first novel, and 2010 will be the year when I try to find it a home. With this in mind, I'd better learn to call myself a writer!

So I thought I might tell you a little about my book. I suppose it best comes under the young adult/middle grade umbrella, sitting squarely in the 'supernatural' camp. It's about a teenager named Sarah, who is growing up in the western Highlands under the far-from-watchful eyes of her socialite mother and scientist father. Sarah not only discovers that ghosts are real, they are also organised. She befriends the castle's ghost, a cavalier named Fowlis Westerby who has been assigned to her family. When things go wrong at the ghostly HQ, Sarah and Fowlis have to team up to straighten everything out.

I'm really proud of it as it stands, but I know it needs work. Luckily I think I know how to solve the few plot niggles, and once I'm done, Sarah will be getting her own blog. I may even given Fowlis his own Twitter feed. Before you scoff that spirits can't use computers, I shall direct you to watch Ghost!

Right, I'm off to do some editing. Have an excellent day, people!

At last! An idea!

Tweet I now have my NaNoWriMo idea. It's not the one I was previously brainstorming, particularly since I think that idea better lends itself to a short story. No, the Big Idea is one I've had rolling around in the back of my mind for a while now, but which I finally think I can do something with. I'm excited about it, and thus excited about NaNoWriMo. I last felt this excited about writing last year, so with any luck it'll pan out well and I'll have another finished book by December!

NaNoWriMo again!

Tweet Further to my last post, I've been having a long, hard think about this year's NaNoWriMo competition. I think it's a fabulous idea - most people work better under pressure with some sort of deadline to work towards. Without an end goal in sight, it's all too easy to procrastinise, to get lost in the idea of writing without actually doing any. Alternatively, you can get too caught up in the editing process, so keen to get what you've written right that you continue to edit what you've already written, but fail to produce anything new. NaNoWriMo encourages you to simply get down a minimum of 1667 words a day - the re-writing comes in December. What you might write be rubbish, but at least you'll have produced something.

But how do you choose exactly what to write? Last year, I knew what I was going to do. My lead character walked into my head one glorious summer afternoon while visiting Glamis Castle in Scotland, and refused to leave me alone until I'd written about him. A short vignette followed, but he continued to pester me until I decided to write his story. NaNoWriMo seemed like the perfect opportunity, and 50,000 words later, I'd written a novel.

However, this year, I'm not sure. Do I write a follow up to the book I wrote last year, despite the fact that I still haven't finished redrafting my 2008 effort? Do I write a collection of interlinked short stories that will still take me over the 50,000 word limit? Do I work on an entirely new idea? If I choose the last option, which idea do I pursue?

Decisions, decisions...

NaNoWriMo

Tweet How did it get to be October so fast? I can't believe that we're into Halloween Month already. Just a few weeks to go until November, and we all know what that means...NaNoWriMo! I did it last year, and actually managed to bash out my first novel. I'm quite pleased with it, although it's still languishing in the rewrite process as I've been distracted by other projects. Still, I'm going to do it again this year, and anyone else who's doing it can find me on the NaNoWriMo site as 'Icy_La_Grande'. Good luck!