REVELATIONS AND REVELRY

As anyone who follows me regularly on twitter will know I have started writing Manuscript Number 3! It does have a name which I will keep to myself for a while; suffice to say it is one of my favourite words in the world. As the title of this blog says it is the beginning of a very long road so I thought I would write a post about each stage of it because I find the creation of a book a fascinating process. You can never predict what will happen or how it will happen, and right now I am at the very, very start of it all.

If I have one aim every time I start writing something new, it is to plan better than I ever have before. The number of times I look at my screen and just wish that I had detailed notes about what’s going to happen written down next to me is huge. But that would be a massive luxury and I am slowly learning that this isn’t how I work. And when I say slowly, I do mean very slowly  – it’s taken me approximately 440,000 words and six years to learn. I should have realised before, really. I aspire to be an organised person and I’m not. I would love to have set routines every day, but I don’t, I behave very much as the mood takes me. And my writing is no different. I spent about three solid days planning this manuscript and poured hours and hours more of thought into it. As I commented to someone on twitter I felt like I never stopped ‘working’. No matter what I was doing I found myself shifting ideas around in my head, peering through the tangles of potential plot lines, ruthlessly scything away anything that was superfluous and seizing upon all inspiration. It had to sort itself out. Once I had the bare outline of a plot I wrote it down. But I struggled here too; I mean, how do you create one, coherent document of what is going to happen in your book when it necessarily involves relationships between all the characters? I found that I couldn’t. So these are honestly the tags I have taped to my planning notebook (in order):

1. ‘to remember’
2. ‘main female character’
3. ‘random details’
4. ‘main female character and secondary female character’
5. ‘main female character and main male character’
6. ‘secondary male character’
7. ‘plot construction’
8. ‘secondary female character’
9. ‘main male character’
10. ‘PLOT’

And in between all of this well-behaved preparation the only thing I wanted to do was to start writing and bring the characters to life. And of course once I did the whole thing was out of my control anyway. I will never cease to be amazed by just how much a book constructs itself. Within a very few hundred words I had changed the POV which was a huge gamble for me but it seems to have paid off. I always email my sister chapters of my manuscript as I write it and she critiques it for me.  When I did so this time I deliberately didn’t mention the fact that I was writing it in the first person rather than the third person  and she didn’t  mention it in her reply so I’m assuming she didn’t notice and if she did she felt it worked. I sent her on this occasion the prologue and the first chapter and her comments were: “What’s the character’s name???? And what does she look like, I have no idea what she looks like! And the conversation between X&Y is too long and too boring.” Which wasn’t exactly what I wanted to hear but it did make me realise that I had made a grave and fundamental error which I instantly corrected and rewrote the chapter which she much preferred.

The characters do honestly bring themselves to life, decide their own names, where they live and so on and so forth. I have but the barest influence on them. I know that sounds delusional but it’s true. I’d named my characters before I started, nice names I thought, but whilst I was writing the correct names presented themselves to me and of course they were better. And once I had the correct names the characters themselves leaped and flared to life and once they’ve done that they start telling their story far more accurately than I can. It’s an amazing process. And it does feel like having a secret world to creep into. The best analogy I can think of is when you go camping, crawl into a tent and zip it up behind you. That’s what it feels like when I start writing in the morning.

And obviously now the girls are back at school I have plenty of time for writing. My manuscript currently stands at 5,211 words. Most of which was written in one day. I can’t keep that output up, my brain feels exhausted, but I hope to produce an amount of writing every single day. Apart from the weekends, maybe. I haven’t decided about those yet. My eldest daughter has Saturday school so technically I shall some free time but perhaps it would be better to try and stick to a traditional working week? My husband doubles over with mirth every time I tell him that I am ‘working’. But I am. I am sitting down and applying myself and not being distracted by Jeremy Kyle or Radio 4. Disparate potential distractions, I grant you. But I do feel like I’m constructing a new life for myself, I have never had this sort of time before. I’ve either been at school, Uni or had one or the other of the girls at home with me. This solitude and space to write is an absolute novelty to me – and I am loving it. I’m still wondrous every night when I put my younger daughter to bed that in the morning she’s going to get up and go back to school. Every day. I do miss having her around sometimes, but on the whole I feel everyone is going to be a lot happier with this new arrangement. She is thoroughly enjoying school and having a lot of fun, and I am able to be very creative and produce a lot of words, which is great. I wonder how long it will take me to write this book? Another interesting point is that I always feel that the current manuscript I am working on is the best thing I have ever written. I always feel that, and I don’t know why. Is it because I am filled with enthusiasm for the current project? Or is it really the best thing I have ever written because my writing is improving with time and practice? I don’t have the answer yet.

I have no more publisher news.  Which is partly nice because it means that I have no more rejections. It’s an odd feeling to be so far removed  from something that is so personal to me. Out there, somewhere, in some editor’s inbox my manuscript is sitting. And when it is commented upon it won’t be me that receives the news, it will be my agent. There’s a whole step between me and it. Which is nice in some ways; I can get on with writing the next one without having to worry about dealing with the previous one.

See! 1,272 words and it isn’t even ten o’ clock in the morning. I said I was being productive 🙂  xx

Yet again I must open this blog post with apologies – it has been an absurdly long time since I wrote anything here. However in my defence this was because I was extremely busy first of all writing thousands of words elsewhere and then extremely busy deleting them again. Read on to find out why…….

I’ve been busy in an unprecedented way finishing my second manuscript. This was actually a manuscript that I had part-written about three years ago and abandoned because I just couldn’t seem to get it to go anywhere. A muddled plot, too many characters and not enough substance didn’t help matters. So I closed the file one day and left it, choosing instead to write something else which became Things He Never Knew.  Then an agent whom I vaguely knew and liked described what sort of work she was looking for and I suddenly realised that my muddled bundle of words might just be that thing. So with that in mind I went back to my poor abandoned manuscript (think in terms of rusting car with no wheels) just before Christmas and upon re-reading it was staggeringly obvious where I’d been going wrong. Seriously obvious. Embarrassingly obvious. It had potential – but cunningly disguised. So I ruthlessly cut huge swathes of text, updated, re-wrote and re-focussed on where I was going. The ease with which I was able to do this showed me just how wrong I’d been going. The only odd moment came when the writing changed from re-hashing what I already had to continuing the story without being led; not unlike jumping off that infamous precipice. But once I’d got over my traumas about whether what I would write from scratch would match up with what I had already written, it was fine.

Now I’ve never been the most disciplined of writers. I would love to be like dear old Enid Blyton with her 6,000 words a day or whatever it was, but if I did that my fingernails would be ruined, my eyes would fall out and my family would leave home, (those are ranked in order of priority). I can produce 40,000 words in a week but then I won’t touch the manuscript for a month. It’s in line with my all-or-nothing personality. But it isn’t conducive to steady progress. And when you add into this my two daughters and their complicated school timetables (during this term alone I was required to be at their school on twenty-six separate occasions; EXCLUDING drop-off and pick-up) I found it hard (all right, impossible) to have a regular working pattern. Plus I am very much one of those writers who rely to an extent on being in the right mood, which is an indulgence I know, and actually I think I may have trained myself out of it, but I hadn’t when I was writing manuscript number two. It does have a title by the way but I’m not sure I like it. Anyway, so I made progress over the spring, never quite meeting the deadlines that I was setting for myself, and all of a sudden I found myself in the last half of the summer term and I knew I had to get it finished. With the best will in the world I would have achieved very little over the eight week summer holiday that the girls have from school. And this is when I seriously focussed, reduced the frantic socialising that I am fond of and made Finishing The Manuscript my sole priority. Unfortunately this coincided directly with a severe crisis of confidence. I was very pleased with what I had produced so far, it was exactly what I had wanted and the manuscript was coming together very nicely. But instead of appreciating all this, my brain just said “Well what if what you need to write now isn’t as good as what you’ve written already? The whole book will be ruined. Months of effort and thousands upon thousands of words wasted.” And this insidious message was ever-present in my mind; it was something I had to get through to be able to carry on writing. The irony of course was that when I did get through it and produce another few hundred words they were always up to standard. The lesson therefore being that I need to trust in myself more, and if anyone wants to know how you get through that feeling the answer is that you start writing and you just don’t stop and it might take one hundred words or it might take five hundred but in my experience if you just keep going you do eventually become attuned to the story once again. Anyway, that’s not the important bit. The important bit was that through blood, sweat and tears I did eventually Finish The Manuscript. I did this under the encouragement of a very nice agent (different agent) with whom I had been communicating on and off for about three years. When I was very close to the end I sent her some chapters which she read and liked and that in turn gave me some of the impetus I needed to write the final words. It’s a real boon to know that someone is actually going to read it.

I did find it difficult to finish the manuscript, I really did. It was a combination of wanting to, needing to and not being certain that I could make it all the same standard as previous chapters. Oh insecurity thy name is Sarah. But over the course of a week or so I seriously applied myself and watched my word count climb and climb until I reached 142,000 words, including the best two: ‘The End’. I printed it and sent it straight to the agent. To discover that she was out of the office for a week; which was both nice and awful. It meant that I didn’t have to be on tenterhooks immediately and I had a lovely few days shopping and drinking wine, thoroughly enjoying the feeling of having actually Finished The Manuscript.  But it also meant I had a longer wait to see what she thought. I also knew that good news would be via a phone call and bad news via an email. Of course I was also wracked with self-doubt over that week and experienced the strange juxtaposition of knowing that I couldn’t have made the manuscript any better – but what if my best wasn’t good enough? But there wasn’t anything I could do about it, and as my great-grandmother used to say: “Do your best and the rest don’t worry about”. Sterling advice. The following week however I literally jumped every time an email popped up on my (pink) BlackBerry and my heart would race as I looked it, praying that I would not see that name. I really, really wanted her to like the manuscript; she’s someone whose opinion I value very highly indeed.  And eventually, in the middle of one afternoon, my phone rang. She liked the manuscript. But I had no time to absorb this rather incredible news before she was also telling me that it was too long. 42,000 words too long to be precise. I needed to cut it down. However she also said I didn’t need to rush, it was holiday season. Well sod that. All-or-nothing. The phone call was Thursday afternoon and despite a heavy weekend’s entertaining to do, I metaphorically rolled up my sleeves and got working again. By Monday morning the revised manuscript was in her email inbox; I’d reduced it by over 20,000 words. Once I looked at it, it was glaringly obvious what I needed to do. I hoped and prayed that it would be acceptable. It obviously was because by 12 midday I’d been told that it had gone to various publishers and that now we had to wait. Wait! I hate waiting. I’m not good at it. But I suspected in this case I would have to. And actually, against all the odds, it’s not that bad. We’re three days away from the end of term and not having to worry about the manuscript means that I get to relax and enjoy the summer (summer? Ha!) with the girls. And I still have four of those twenty-six occasions to attend. And Saturday is Sports Day which means I need a dress and it has to be red because that is my eldest daughter’s House colour; I don’t own anything red, I need to go shopping. And I have to organise end of term gifts for the teachers, and cards. And I have to make sure that I have all the uniform they need for September, and I need to confirm playdates and I need to see if we can squeeze in a holiday among the already-packed summer schedule….and….and….and…..so no, I don’t think waiting will be that bad.

Finally! I have time to write a blog! Apologies for my lengthy absence; I have been very unproductive for the last few weeks on all fronts, and I’d love to blame this on my children. But I can’t, it wouldn’t be fair. Because it’s my husband’s fault. He’s just had two weeks off work and although it’s been lovely to have him around (childcare is so much easier when there’s two of you) it has meant that my routine has rather gone out of the window, and especially as far as writing is concerned. I’m at a particularly delicate bit of the manuscript at the moment, my characters are in terrible emotional distress, the scenes are highly charged and it’s taking quite a lot out of me to write. In many ways I wish I didn’t have to get involved with their difficult and complicated lives, but there we are. So picture this scene if you will: there I am, focussing and concentrating, trying to think how I would feel if it were me going through these difficult emotions, and as any writer will know when you’re writing this stuff you are actually there with your characters. The scene will absorb you, you are living their lives. And then in wanders my husband and on goes the cricket in the background. And from that point on I am subjected to a running commentary of the game; who has thrown what ball, how many runs have been made by whatever player. I quickly become very familiar with the state of Kevin Pietersen’s limbs and how many spectators the ground can hold as my husband gently chatters away. All fascinating stuff, I’m sure, but not when I’m in the process of wrecking my characters’ lives. And interspersed with the essential cricket updates he’ll also discuss any interesting news articles that he’s found, “Darling, have you seen they’ve discovered a new type of worm?” etc. And then when he’s run out of ways to try and have a conversation with me, there’s the questions:

“I’m going to have a coffee, do you want one?”

“No, thank you.”

“Are you sure? Do you want anything else?”

“No, I’m fine, thanks.”

“Really? Not even a cup of tea?”

“YES. I’m sure.”

“OK.”

So then he bangs about making said coffee, he might flick the radio on for a minute and as he idles his way back to the cricket he might stop to glance over my shoulder or give me a kiss – all lovely but it does make me grit my teeth when I’m trying to write. So the sum of this is: I got absolutely nothing done when he was off work. Today is the first day in about three weeks that he has actually left the house to go to work and I am quite enjoying the peace, a whole day stretches before me with no cricket……or worm news.

Sophie Raworth was in the headlines yesterday on a rather interesting topic – how much time should we be spending with our children? And by spending she means actually focussing on and engaging with, not merely being present in the same building. It’s a very interesting question. The issue has come up because many parents are forced to work long hours and therefore some form of childcare is a necessity. In most families both parents work, and even more so if they want things like private education, foreign holidays, second home in Gstaad, Jaguars, boats – whatever it is. Sophie talks about the American concept FAST – Families and Schools Together – and experiments with spending a solid fifteen minutes focussing solely on one of her three children whilst her phone beeps with emails and texts that she cannot look at and her other two children vie for her attention. She finds it harder than she thinks. I imagine this is because she is a working parent and is used to being able to attend to her work duties freely. Fifteen minutes I could manage easily because I don’t have a 9-5 job and I’m used to being a stay at home mother, but therefore no-one understands better than me just how boring it can be sometimes to spend time with your children. There are times when I am deeply grateful to have my BlackBerry by my side so I can check Facebook while I pretend to watch Angelina Ballerina. It is all about balance. And so, the question really becomes – if you are working so hard to afford a nice lifestyle for your children that you barely see them, when is it better to forfeit some luxuries in exchange for simply spending time at home with them? I don’t know anyone who has an ideal balance, most of my acquaintances are feeling their way through life tentatively trying to make the best decisions that they can, whether they have one child or four or are just considering having a baby. I have a friend who has just begun a year’s sabbatical from her very successful career, enabling her to spend more time at home with her daughter, and from speaking to her there were a number of factors, not least that she felt that she could afford to at this point in time. I imagine a decision like that is a difficult one.

For me, I do consider myself a good parent. I make sure my children eat the right food at the right times, I make sure they’re in bed by 7:30pm each night; I make sure they drink lots of water and get plenty of fresh air. I take them to school and I pick them up. I watch school matches and swimming galas. I help  with homework, I ask my eldest daughter about her day in school and listen as she tells me about her lessons and her friends. We discuss the things that she enjoys and the things that she would rather not do. I help her make decisions about things she finds difficult or scary. I watch for signs that something is wrong. I read my younger daughter endless stories and help  her craft princesses out of plasticine (no mean feat, let me tell you). We bake cakes together and go for walks. Currently, I spend much time listening to her eulogise about the Ice Age films. BUT – this aside – I am very, very bad at playing with my girls. I can do all the above willingly and happily, but ask me to get on the floor and be a cat and I simply cannot do it. Neither can I do role-play with Barbies, Disney princesses or farmyard animals. Games of hide and seek – yes, a game where we all have to pretend to be a character from Peppa Pig – no. Absolutely not. In these situations I pass the baton to my husband, who is much, much better than I am.

Does this make me a bad parent? I have no idea. My natural sense of confidence in my parenting ability makes me think not. Again, I don’t know anyone who considers themselves a perfect parent, ultimately we learn as we go along and we hope not to make too many mistakes. But as Sophie ultimately concludes, I believe that if I give my children my time, love and attention they will want for very little else. Except perhaps a mother who can be Cinderella or Mummy Pig at the drop of a hat. Although I must be honest and say I don’t know any mother who has those particular skills.

My debate today will be: do I let my youngest daughter watch her new DVD twice in a row? Good parenting sense dictates no, my need to write dictates yes. If her father were here they would be watching cricket together. So there we are – I may not be subjected to interminable facts about Andrew Strauss and Freddie Flintoff today but I will have to entertain my four year old alone. Suddenly a whole day without her father being around seems rather long……..

Sophie’s article: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12664259