A Few Pages After the First

 

No.  Not quite.  Nearly.  Tomorrow.  I know I said that yesterday.  Well, I'm more caught up than I was yesterday.  It still seems to me going well.  I can risk saying that (I hope) because I know there will be days between now and the rmmph of March when it is not going well, when I am not a writer, I never was a writer, and I'm starting my retraining as a mechanic* in the next uptake.**  Which is to say I know I'm going to be paying for good days whether or not I admit to having them so why not admit it?  See:  wrestling alligators, below. 

Stardancer

I learned how hard it is to make a story. . . . I did learn to take something in the range of horrible/okay and shove it around into okay/pretty okay, even if I didn't think it was anything I'd want to read. It's HARD. I'd never realized before how much work it was, even for those gifted people in my classes who did "hear" their stories right off. Drafts and voice and tweaking and word choice and why is that character there again? 

Thank you.  Yes.  It's HARD.  This is why The Urge to Kill people who offer to split the money with you if they give you their Great Idea and you do the dull stupid labour of writing it up because the idea is the hard part and besides you already have the name and the publishing contacts, is pretty overwhelming.  Fortunately most of these offers come by post/email.  Back in the days when I went to more live things and people used occasionally to offer this blithering asininity to my face civilised restraint was more difficult.

            But.  Yes.  It's like wrestling alligators.  WHY IS THAT CHARACTER FOLLOWING ME AROUND?  GO AWAY.  YOU DON'T BELONG IN THIS STORY.  Er.  Do you?  What have I missed this time?  Writing is also brilliant and fascinating and enormous fun . . . but those alligators bite hard.  And the regeneration of major body parts is tiring and demoralising and takes time, which you probably haven't got.  

EMoon

It's downright scary sometimes how much your process is like my process…the whole thing about each character's voice, each book's voice, each book's vocabulary, so sometimes I can't hear the word I need–none of the first/second/third choice words works in that sentence and I can spend hours digging through dictionaries hoping to find the one right one. The stuff I have to write down (revolving door, uniform, etc.) that has to come out later because who cares, it doesn't matter only some of the details DO matter and I don't know which ones until the book's done or nearly done. 

Scary?  Hmm.  I find it exactly the opposite—this seems to me so obviously the way stories must break into storytellers' brains, get heard/figured out, get written, that I find it far more unsettling when I hear about some other writer's entirely different process.  Those people who write out complete outlines—story arcs, what happens in each chapter, characters' names, descriptions and relationships—people who create files on different aspects of story and characters before they ever settle down to write the story part of the story—that's scary.   I went through a period when I was a teenager of (mostly) secretly reading everything I could get my hands on on how to write—secretly as one pursues any vice, or any unadmitted longing—and some of the advice clings round me still in cold, sticky, cobwebby sorts of shreds.  I absolutely believe in 'whatever works' but . . . brrrr for the file-keepers.

            I mostly don't write down stuff that will come out later.  I tend to have faith that if I've left something out it'll clamour to get into the next draft.  Certainly stuff does come out, but not usually the revolving door and the doorperson's uniform.  But I do keep some notes as I go, and sometimes the marginal notes to the notes to the notes (to the notes) get a little cramped.  

* * *

* jaccairn

Also, MOT – I think I remember that yours is due sometime this month, It's the sort of thing that might slip your mind when you're so busy. 

Snork.  The things some people's blog forum members remember.  Thank you.  Yes, Wolfgang is due this month and I've already booked him in.^  I hope you're impressed.  I'm so impressed I can hardly bear myself.  (I think this is the first year I've ever remembered before the last minute.)  Now I just have to implore the weather gods to be kind since the remains of the bus system between here and Warm Upford is not worth discussing.  Hellhounds and I can perfectly well walk home one day and walk back the next, but not if we're having gales and hail and winged monkeys and so on.  Which we're apparently going to have overnight.  This is all because Peter had planned to go to Oxford tomorrow and have lunch with one of his cousins.  No, no! said the weather gods, shaking themselves out of their long winter slumber, we can't have promiscuous peregrinations!  Where is that blizzard, we know we put it somewhere!  —It hasn't got up to freezing the last three days^^ and now we're supposed to have SNOW.  Ah . . . frell.  Well, my yaktrax have been lonesome so far this winter . . . and snow will certainly keep me at home where I have nothing better to do than work. . . . ^^^ 

^ And he has to pass.  Has to.  In the first place I can't afford a new car this year.  In the second place . . . I still don't want a new car.  I want a new car less and less as I hear friends with shiny new cars talking about the way the computers in new cars run their lives.  And go wrong, of course.  You can learn to ignore that little flashing red light on the dashboard after the third time you've taken it in and paid £100 to be told there's nothing wrong.  Not so much the robot voice continuously telling you to fasten your seatbelt/add grinchflobby fluid to the ziggury system/placate the trolls with ham sandwiches. 

^^ And my chocolate cosmos hate being indoors, so they'll probably frelling croak this year too.  Arrrgh.  Furthermore, my gladiola bulbs arrived today.  Gladiola bulbs are tender.  Mail warehouses are rarely heated.  At least mail warehouses where tender plants are held are rarely heated.  Arrrgh.  Don't these mail-order bozos ever, you know, listen to the weather forecast?  Hey, guys, we're supposed to get three foot of snow tomorrow!  Let's ship all the banana trees!  

^^^ Ajlr

I also wondered what the reaction of the hellhounds had been to the new Amazingly Loud Voice? 

Chaos has always found my singing . . . disturbing.  Darkness has always assumed that it's just another daft human activity.  It is perhaps hard on hellhounds that both at the mews and the cottage their bed is next to the piano/cheap electric keyboard.  Chaos gets up and moves toward me cautiously, staring at my distorted face for clues.  GO LIE DOWN YOU WRETCHED DOG. 

            I'm more worried about the neighbours.  Do you remember—probably nearly a year ago now—I was fretting about singing at the cottage, where my office, with the keyboard in it, has the common wall with my semi-detached neighbour?  (The keyboard itself, plugged into headphones, is silent.)  The wall is floor-to-ceiling with bookshelves, but I can still hear my neighbour climbing the stairs on the other side.  Don't worry, said Nadia, you don't make nearly enough noise.

            I think I probably do make enough noise now.  Ah, the disadvantages of success.  I can still sing while I do the washing-up—it's on the far side from the common wall.  I also sing out hurtling, while hellhounds pretend they don't know me, and my impression is that people are starting to move to the opposite pavement (I used to think this was just a reaction to rampant hellhounds).  Hey, this probably happens to Deborah Voigt too.   I wish it had any effect on aggressive off lead dogs.     

** The GUARDIAN is running a publicity draw to win a full degree Open University course.  Details tomorrow.  The OU is highly thought of so I, who don't have nearly enough to do, had an idle look through their course list.  Their language department is terrible.  French, German, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Welsh (Welsh?^) and Latin and (classical) Greek.  That's it?  

^ Yes, I know, good for them, Celtic languages are struggling for survival, but in the context of only six modern languages offered it seems to me a bit startling.