graham joyce: February 2010 Archives

My Mate Moses

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".)

Day 7  

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.

Day 6

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.

Day 5

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.

Day 4 2003

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.

Day 3

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.

Day 2

The second day has been as productive as the first and would have tumbled out faster but my pick struck an early doubt about my chosen location for the story.  I had decided to locate the novel in Shropshire, right on the Welsh borders.  I'm interested in interstitial places for the book and this seemed to me just right.  Plus Shropshire has some extraordinary landscape, and like much of the English Midlands is almost overloaded with myth, lore and historical dispute.  It also offers some fantastic rock formations and weird geographical aberrations.

But although I know the landscape pretty well I started to doubt whether I know it well enough.  It made me realise how much I need a definitive, concrete land or space to shape the character and mentality of the people who inhabit it.  I've often thought that sometimes stories are portable: you can simply relocate if you need to.  Today I'm not so sure about that.

I seem to spend a lot of time in the writing process in fighting back the abstract interior.  The more that I can externalise the happier I can feel that I'm saying what I want.   The land broods, breathes, blesses, relaxes, talks.   Landscape can speak for your characters in all kinds of way, and is more poetically understood - intuitively - by the reader than some abstract introspective formulations designed to reveal interior psychology.  Says I.

So I faltered.

Early in the process of making a novel you encounter a whole thicket of objections.  Wrong choice of setting, wrong time-period, wrong bloody silly idea altogether.  But I've been doing this long enough to know that this is the ventriloquial voice of the rational anti-demon that just doesn't want you to write anything, ever.  The writer is a great self-saboteur.  My own way of dealing with it is to just quack back at it all.  You know: shaddup!

"Who you talking to up there?"  (I work in a converted attic.) "Oh just the usual thicket of objections.  I'll be alright in a minute."

I thought about recourse to Warwickshire, which I know best, and would do well.  But no, it has to be a borderland, I decided at last, and so persisted with the gorgeous Shropshire mysteries.  Once I'd got past that it was fine.  Sort of.

Word-crank on the second day says: 2227

Forty days you wish.

Day 1

This may be the stupidest idea I've had in a long while, and a yawn to most sensible people; but it might also be of interest to my readers and to other writers.

I've begun a new novel and I'm planning to chart its progress day by day on this blog.  I'm not sure about this wizard wheeze; I've always felt like blogging is a distraction from what I really should be doing, which is cracking on with the novel.  On the other hand if I include my wordcount for the day, every day, it's a public admission of what I've done or failed to do, and that in itself might be a spur for me to crack on.

So, some days might just offer a wordcount in figures, or the reason why there's a duck's egg on show for that particular day, or some musings and analysis about what's happening while the novel is emerging. 

I don't intend to discuss the subject-matter of the book, just the process.  Technical matters.  Structural stuff.  Creative issues.

So I made a start and I hit 2055 words on the first day which is good for me.  A decent day for me would be 1500 words, and though I  often dip below that figure, I don't usually settle for less than 1000 words.  So I'm off and running.  In theory for an 80,000 word novel that's just 40 days to turn out a first draft.

I wish. 

In any event the end of the first draft is just the beginning of the early-middle. 

I don't work at week-ends, and some days the peripheral and administrative business of writing takes me away from my keyboard.  But generally I work in a routine.  Some days it comes easy; some days I feel like I'm busting coal from rock with a sledgehammer.  So we will see.

As for the wordcount, I made a false start and backtracked, so the opening figure might be more like 3000 but I only count what's on the vine for me to look at the next day.  I don't count tinkering as I go, only the end-of-the-day tally.  In general I tend to hack on to the conclusion of a draft without finessing, noting as I go big fixes to be done later, but in truth there is always some minor rapid-fire fixing along the way.

The most difficult question is how long you should spend grooming and saddling up your pony before getting on its back.  It's always different.  Some ideas germinate slowly in the dark backbrain for years before they get dragged into the light.  This particular idea has been fairly lucid in my thoughts for a good few months now, but I suspect its origins go back a lot longer than that.  You can't second-guess your own unconscious mind.   Anyway the idea was there and a piece of music coming at random gave me the ignition.

What's more I'm free from a lot of clutter and things that have been soaking up my time and the way ahead for this idea seems - at the moment - very clear.

I want to avoid being mysterious in this account but I can't get away from the fact that some of my novels seem to pop out like loaves of bread from  a baking tin and some have to be scraped out from the back of the oven.  I don't know why.  I always pray for the former; I often get the latter.

Forty days.  That's a quarantine period isn't it?