The two fundamental building blocks for writing a novel are Scene and Summary.  All exposition is a kind of summary to get you from one scene to the next.  That's not to say the scenes are more important than the exposition, but they are somehow more vital, alive.  And this novel seems to want to tell itself through a great deal of Scene.

This is a variable.  Roddy Doyle often tells his novels exclusively through scenes.  I don't know whether to be concerned or not, and any imbalance will have to be rectified later, but that's how it's working out right now.

The nightmare is the reverse scenario, when your characters have nothing to say to each other.

Though I'm definitely of the school that says dialogue must move plot along.  The more "literary" novel might allow characters some languid chat.  La la la.  Nope.  Can't be bothered with all that la la la.  If I want la la la in my life I'll sit in a café wearing a beret, nursing an espresso and pretending to be a film-maker.

Today is a teaching day.  I'll be very strict with my students about la la la.

Short ante-meridian burst offers up a wordcount of 1020

(For previous blogs in the Quarantine Project click on "achives")

That's the trouble with this blogging game.  You hit a smart 3000 words in one day, post the information here, and then you get people challenging you - nay taunting you - to see if it was a fluke.

            Day 16 started in sluggish style but gathered energy as the sun climbed higher.  I think time was wasted when I was suddenly hit by a perfect idea for a title for this book.  Titles are odd and I certainly don't spend too much time thinking about them (see RAFW No. 442).  Titles either emerge mysteriously during the process,  like a pirate's chest suddenly breaking free from the sea-mud and floating to the the surface, or you are reduced to making long, frustrating and dispiritng lists of candidates after the event.

            Anyway I had a marvellous aha-Jim-la!  moment early in the day, so pleasing and apropos that I almost abandoned writing for the day and climbed into those loose garments I mentioned earlier.  But a short while later I found myself trying to swat the buzzing sensed that the title had already been bucaneered.  A quick search on the interfangle confirmed that a Hollywood film had been made not so long ago with the same title.  My title.

            So back to work, ye dogs, ye lubbers.  No title and no sight o' land for the likes o' you just yet, so haul those sheets, ye less-than-men.

            Okay that's enough pirate talk, thanks.  Sometimes I have to click my fingers in front of my own face and say: you are now Graham Joyce again.

            Challenge me would you?  Today's wordcount tally is 3220.  How do you like that for a shanty?

Well I don't think it derailed me to take that break I was talking about yesterday - if giving a talk to 200 people can be described as a break.  Because today rolled out my best count yet.  In fact I can't remember when I last wrote over 3k in one day.

A friend asked if it doesn't make the act a little mechanical by counting up the words.  All I can say is that I've always done it.  Always.    I also suggested that you create the books with one part of your brain and count up the words with a completely different part. The two places don't speak to each other; don't use the same language; don't even know that the other sector exists.

            In fact it's even a useful act of decompression.  Something you can do while you are riding the lift or the cage back up to the surface. 

            Conrad Williams has taken up this novel-in-progress madness, and he reports that Graham Greene hated writing so much that he would count as he went along and stop as soon as he'd reached a magic tally of 500 words.

            We need different words for the act of writing, just as we do for reading.  I don't read a poem in the same way that I read a newspaper.  I don't write my novel in the same way I write a post-card.  (Postcard?  Do they still exist? Okay, email.)  But I daren't start thinking what those neologisms might be, even though it would be fun, because I wouldn't get back to working on my novel.  Would I? Those of you becoming expert at spotting RAFW (see earlier blogs) will admire the tempting powers of this demon. 

            Wordcount rings in at a tuneful 3161

(For previous blogs in the Quarantine Project click on "achives")

So this promising run of verb-reckoning and noun-tallying had to come crashing down in a wrecked abacus, and day fourteen has nought to offer but a swan's nest with one egg in it.  There is however a good reason for the zero.

I was invited to give a Keynote Speech at the Writers Industries Conference.  So I dropped all work on the novel to focus on that.  The conference attracted a lot of writers, many known to me, many not, and I ended up spending quite a lot of time thinking about what I did - and didn't - want to say about the industry.  (The speech will shortly be available in a podcast soon for anyone who is interested in what I did say.)  The wordcount for the speech was 6000+ (not just done on this day) but I can't count it in the Quarantine Project.  Can I?  No, guess not.

The Conference came and went over the week-end.  There was a crackle of  energy at the event and I don't know about everyone else but it left me feeling optimistic.  Big thanks to Damien Walter and Aly Stoneman and their crew for organising a busy and compacted day.

So here's your first egg of the series.  Wordcount 0.

(For previous blogs in the Quarantine Project click on "achives")

Yesterday I was talking about time and timing.  The word time is the number one noun in terms of usage according to the Oxford English Dictionary.  That means the subject is on the human mind more than any other subject, discounting of course the ones which are limited by any kind of taboo.

There's an interesting thought for a writer.

Blogging like this is having a strange result.  It's surfacing some issues, doubts or challenges that I would normally keep the lid on.  I've already said I tend to hammer on until the end of the novel in the hope and expectation of fixing everything in a subsequent draft.  But these things are surfacing because I have to have something to talk about on this blog.

On the other hand, chalking up my word score every day has made me realise how Fatwatchers ^TM  works.  Public declaration is a great motivator.  And so far... so far.. it hasn't had any adverse effect on my output.

I do have a serious structural issue that may explain why I'm generating material quite well - material I may have to dump or rearrange later.  But I won't talk it about right now because I don't have the time.

And anyway today I can trumpet a musical 2066 words.

(For previous blogs in the Quarantine Project click on "achives")

Day 11

Now there's a chronological issue that has popped up.  I've located an event when the bluebells are thick and strong and pungent, and that decision has clearly anchored the story in time.  If I don't conform exactly to my time-line now a copy-editor will pick up the inconsistency later and there will be swearing and wailing and gnashing of gums.

But there is also a pregnancy to reckon with.  I'd dearly love to make this pregnancy last a full year, but that doesn't seem fair on the mother, nor likely to slip past your average reader either.  Because time and its passage is a vital force in storytelling and in two different ways.  Firstly there is this question of sensible chronology.  Then there is time in a musical sense.

Often when people think about novel writing they imagine a kinship with the visual arts, because you can spend a lot of time visually describing a scene; similarly in screenwriting everything happens (unless you go in for voiceover) on the exterior.  But whether it's film or story, the art is temporal far more than it is visual.  Both in the selection of the mechanics of time and the fact that there is a drumbeat behind the story. 

Narrative is a temporal art like dance.  You can blow it by being out of step, or breaking the pace.  There are many moments when you need to be light of foot; scenes where you have to slow down and make rather obvious, heavy-steps; expository bits where you need a sudden acceleration.

Oh shaddup, you don't know the first thing about dancing.

Let's just say that this day offers a quickstepping 2066.

(For previous blogs in the Quarantine Project click on "achives")

Quarantine Project Day 10

Day 10 was also slowed down, this time by a school visit, where I was invited to talk about my career as an author.  I never know whether to call myself a writer or an author.  Clearly I'm both.  I guess a journalist would have a hard time calling himself or herself an author.  The etymology of author is "one who causes to grow" or "to increase".  I dunno.  It seems a bit rich to try and deny that to journalists.  Anyway when I'm being an author, visiting schools, talking on a public stage, I feel like I'm being an author not a writer.

"A writer is a person who writes" John Braine said with faultless logic.  It was his book about writing that encouraged me to be a word-counter long before you could total up with a single stroke of a key.  Each word is a brick in the edifice you are building, he said, so count 'em. 

So things like these school visits - being an author as opposed to a writer - slows your productivity, but you wouldn't want to be a writer chained in the dark, never going anywhere.

I can read Kafka's fiction until my eyes bleed, but when he starts talking about writing you realise, like a lot of fine writers, he was also a twit.  Here he is:

"I have often thought that the best mode of life for me would be to sit in the innermost room of a spacious locked cellar with my writing things and a lamp. Food would be brought and always put down far away from my room, outside the cellar's outermost door. The walk to my food, in my dressing gown, through the vaulted cellars, would be my only exercise. I would then return to my table, eat slowly and with deliberation, then start writing again at once. And how I would write! From what depths I would drag it up!"

Ugh!  How can such a prat have written Metamorphosis???

I wish I hadn't dragged up that Kafka quote.  It's seriously putting me off writing this blog.  We've got an election coming up.  I'd vote for a governemnt prepared to enact draconian legislation against actors and writers setting down their thoughts about their work.

Anyway, I got to talk to some schoolboys about the fun of a writing career and thankfully I got by without mentioning either my dressing gown or life in a locked cellar.  So a slow day, but because of schoolboys with shining eyes, a good one.

Words: 1272

(For previous blogs in the Quarantine Project click on "achives")

The Quarantine Blog Day 9  

Well day 9 has inevitably thinned productivity since it was a teaching day.  I teach on an MA Creative Writing course and the day was spent looking at students' work in preparation for an evening workshop.  I managed to snatch about half an hour to rip one or two shiny, dark words out of the coal seam, but obviously I couldn't get anywhere near the previous numbers.

Though I wouldn't have done any writing all today if it hadn't been for this blog.  I feel driven to avoid offering you a Duck's Egg on this virtual scoreboard.  There is something very satisfying about hitting the word-count button, something wonderfully anti-literary.

And at the moment the Quarantine target is not unreachable, since a few good days will balance up low scoring days like this.

The Quarantine idea was completely accidental since I'd decided 80,000 words was a solid first-draft target and 2,000 words a day was a stretch (for me, not for several writers) but realistic.  But a friend offers the following interesting information about the Quarantine period: 'Why 40 days? Because the number 40 holds spiritual significance in the realm of transformation. Jesus wandered in the desert for 40 days in order to come to a greater understanding of himself and his mission. Moses and his people travelled through the desert for 40 years before arriving at their home in the holy land. Noah preserved the sacredness of life by sailing his ark for 40 days and 40 nights. According to the Kabbalah, it takes 40 days to ingrain any new way of being into our system.'

"Look at him, he's comparing himself with Jesus and Moses now".

But maybe not such an accident, then. The point is that for any writer this is a sensible time-lock, and one which the psyche already seems primed to understand.  Go on.  You know you want to.

A modest but respectable 689.

(For the previous Quarantine blogs click on "archives".)

I mentioned social class and names the other day and there is another issue presenting itself.  I don't like stories where I don't know how a character is making his or her living.  If they are on state benefit or they are a media tycoon I need to know that, if only because I know that someone somewhere had to work to put food, clothing, shelter and warmth into my character's life.  That means I have to give my characters a job (or specifically no job).  The job will shape their days and, very often, their picture and apprehension of the world.

The job will also very likely reveal the level of education they have experienced, or at least the kind of education they have had, and both those things in turn will shape the language they use.  This is felt most acutely when you use first-person narrative.

The problems start when you want a working-class person to exhibit a use of language and levels of perception that some people might regard as beyond their range.  It's a great source of irritation to me that, predicting this lazy response, I have to make sure there is a line in there somewhere to suggest that my character is an autodidact or some such rationalisation of the fact that they might use or understand a couple of words of more than two syllables.  A reviewer took me to task in the Times Literary Supplement for crediting my working class character with too high a command of her language.  This was galling because the character was both visionary (Fern in The Limits Of Enchantment), poetic and self-educated.  I know she was all these things cos I made her that way and I even put a line in to the effect that she had read a lot of books.  The reviewer of course wanted her to mumble like a bumpkin, with a straw in her mouth, things like Oi, the red cow dint doi by accident tha'  knows.  And all that.

I've meet hundreds of people who could have gone to university - and who are certainly brighter than many who did - but who didn't because of their background and/or parental expectation.   The electrician who came to deal with a fault in my house noticed all my books and instantly wanted a literary discussion, but if I put him in a novel the only thing I'm supposed to let him say, according to the TLS,  is Nights are fair drawing in I see.  And all that.  If the Oxbridge grads who review for the TLS don't ever actually engage in conversation with working class people, you can see how the misconception persists.

Anyway (which is what I say here when I want to change the subject) I want a farrier in my book.  He has to be a farrier for reasons that will become clear.  But I'll cuss like a sonofabitch if I have to say again that he's read lots of books.

Then I met a plumber at a party.  He'd got a degree in graphic design but had re-trained as a plumber because he could make more money.

You beauty.  I think I'll give my farrier a first in Politics Philosophy and Economics.  And a straw in his mouth.

Today the slide-rule offers a jaunty 2259.

Back in the saddle.  Clip-clop.

Week-ends I don't work (if I can help it) so let's call this Day 6 and the bread is rising again.  We is happy.

Now I'm talking on here as if all this stuff is being consciously sifted and analysed as I go but it's important to remember that a lot of is a post-rationalisation after the event of writing, trying to look back at issues as they arose.  Writing is an act - or it is for me at any rate - that is a species of thinking but which does not proceed entirely from the front brain.  It's a level of focus somewhere between concentration and dreaming.  You do have to "lose yourself" for the origination of material.  In the later drafts the work gets surfaced and corrected more and more by the front brain, but in these first-draft stages I'm trying to reach my hand down a bit below the surface of consciousness to bring up some rather more chaotic material.

There might be plenty of writers who have everything figured out before they go to it, but I'm not one of them.  I have my very thin and misty narrative line and I don't know until I work at spinning silk from that mist exactly what scenes or characters or language it might generate.

Or to use a different silk metaphor, there's a parachute and it's only the act of writing that makes it drop through the air; and it as it does the details and character of the parachute and its load become clearer and clearer.

So everything I say here is a post-rationalisation of some moment when I've sensed a block, a doubt, a reflex, a quickening, an issue that needs muddling through.  I'm not saying take it with a pinch of salt: I am trying to be completely transparent about this process and I understand that most writers hate to do that.  But the point is that a lot of it happens in the dark, and I'm making guesses about what's happening, based on the experience of writing several novels and even more short stories.

The interesting thing about this dark source is what I characterised as RAFW in one of these blogs.  Why do we run away from writing?  It's because of an unconscious hatred of the game.  The conscious mind does not like us to dwell in this space between concentrating and dreaming.  It's a dangerous place to be; or was in the psyche-forming days when a sabre-toothed tiger might have been creeping up on you.  And as any fule nos, writing is as much about what is going on behind you as in front of you.

Today my whizzing abacus reveals a cheeky 2151 words.

Bummer, as we used to say in the seventies, when the world seemed young.  After accelerating my way to a consistent 2000+ words it all slumped on day 5.  Every time I tried to write something either interesting or irritating happened, starting with the postman wanting me to sign for a recorded delivery item just after I'd penned, with a confident flourish, the first sentence of the day. 

It was hard not to fling Porlock and Kubla Khan in his smiling face.  But my postman is a very literate bloke and it would have been: 'Eeeewwwwww, hark at him!  Comparing himself with Coleridge now!  Getting a bit above ourselves aren't we?'  And all that. 

Anyway the phone kept blasting away with no film deals and when a telesales geezer from Mumbai asked for me by name I told him it was very sad but I was dead and would he take me off his list?  Then there were some squeaking administrative piglets that had to be driven to market, as it were.  Things that were time-sensitive and had to be taken care of. 

            Then BBC Coventry & Warwickshire radio rang me, with reference to my book Simple Goalkeeping Made Spectacular.  The Sky Blues keeper had made a stunning save that had been compared to the oft-proclaimed goalkeeping save of the century by Gordon Banks from Pele.  Would I talk about it on air?  You must be joking, is what I didn't say.  I've got a novel to write.  There are people who read my blog.  How would it sound if I tell them I spent the next hour or so running through Youtube footage and football podcasts just so I can talk drivel on a football programme, when I've publicly stated my intention of completing a first draft in forty days. How vain do you think I am?

(Go on: insert here string of further excuses to explain where the rest of the day went.  I mean, no-one forces you to pick up the phone or answer the door or check your email.  Or analyse grainy flickering Youtube images.)

Then the day finished slightly early because I wanted to go to Nottingham to the launch party of novelist Maria Allen, one of my former creative writing students who has her very fine first book Before The Earthquake published by Tindal Street press. Good to catch up with a lot of old friends there it was, too, but I was a bit deflated to hear my old mate Nicola Monaghan - another very fine Nottingham novelist - tell me that she's currently turning out 6000 words a day.  Worse, she offered this information quite casually.  What?  I said, I've been bragging on my blog about doing 2k per day and I don't want to hear about your 6k.

So maybe I should start to sound a little less pleased with myself.  I'll see if I can crank back up to the 2k target tomorrow.  It could be worse.  Oscar Wilde is said to have swung into a bar and declared to all his writer-pals, 'Today I wrote a sentence!'  When the applause had died down he announced, 'And then I crossed it out again.'

A sheepish reckoning on day 5 can't make it any more than a deflationary 702 words.

There's already a worrying expansion of subordinate characters going on.  This is okay and it lets the logs roll and dare I say it generates more words.  But some of that will get junked later.

I know why this is happening.  I've seen it before.  It's because I'm holding back - deliberately - on some major information about my protagonist so that I can reveal it exactly when I want to.  This means that the characters around her are plumping out, fattening on the space made available by this strategy.  The vacuum pulls 'em in to centre stage.

They announce their intentions by demanding more back-story than perhaps you'd intended.  All good and healthy but it needs to be kept in check.  Down, you wantons, down!

There are two problems.  One lies in the temptation to have characters reminisce this back-story into being.  If this becomes weighty your story can get unbalanced or it can derail forward momentum.  The second problem is a personal one in that I have a ready habit of over-complication, This is fine for a complex novel like Memoirs Of A Master Forger, where you want lots of plates spinning at the same time. But here I want to keep the red line of the narrative clean and simple.  I do eventually want to write another William Heaney novel, but it's not this one.

So these issues arise when you allow subordinate characters to grow overfat, and if that happens they get hungry for - and even start to earn - their own stories. 

This business of withholding stuff about the protagonist might cause early-engagement problems.  Right now, apart from muttering about these things right here, I'm hammering on.  Big fixes can and must come in draft two.

I get the impression some friends are actually reading this blog, so that encourages me to get a good word-count.  Thanks for being here! It helps.

Look you: a smug 2003 words today.

I'm enjoying this, and the blog is encouraging me against an early switch-off of the  glowing valves and tubes at the back of the computer.  Sometimes writers can be in too much of a hurry to call it a day so that they can go off and relax in loose garments.

So, day three and the sublimely irritating issue of names of characters.  This is a bed of nettles.  I don't give a damn what their names are just so long as I can get on with the story.  It's really not important to me.

Except that it has to be right.  Dammit.

It's no good having a character called Tom or Dick if he keeps saying Harryish things.  And it's no good suggesting a brain surgeon called Daisy, even if in real life I actually know one who is.  But to be frank (oh, frank, right) I'm not going to get it all worked out upfront because I'd spend the next three months writing down a grim and tedious list of names, and consulting hideous dog-eared baby-name books to see that X is Hebrew for "A Great Showing In The East" or Y is a Celtic name for a "Little White Hawk With One Brown Feather".  And that would be another three months spent Running Away From Writing (otherwise know as RAFW).  This names problem is actually number 72 in the list of 999 reasons for RAFW, which comes just after (71) Hoovering Your Study and just before (73) Finding Pictures Of Your Proposed Location On The Internet.

There are all sorts of things that can make a name plain wrong for a character.  Some names are just locked into certain strata of the social classes.  American readers might not believe this, but it's sadly very true of the British caste system.  You'll be hard pressed to find a plumber called Tarquin or China, but there are more than one or two working for the Foreign Office right now.  On the other hand having a Wayne as high-court judge just won't cut it.  (It might have changed now but when I was doing relief supply teaching in the early 90s anything in front of you called Wayne, Clint, Cody or Stetson yes! I taught a kid so tagged! meant that High Noon would always be arriving well before ten o'clock in the school day.)

And that's another thing.  Names are time-loaded and often evoke a particular decade.  I went to school with a nice girl called Gay.  I've no idea what she calls herself these days.

So I'm not wasting time on getting it right upfront.  Right now the characters are getting lumbered with the slight deformity or nose-wart of names they will surely not want to keep.  There's the wonderful technology of search and replace to make Peter a Peregrine later in the process.  Experience tells me that by the time I've completed a first draft I'll know exactly what their names are, by the way they gulp their lager or spit in the collecting tins of street beggars.

And no, Madam, my daily word-count does not include this blog!  Today boasts a cheerful 2284.