Clamouring to be heard

Some days characters are stubborn and unco-operative. When that happens the author has to step in and take over, become the master puppeteer, making these uncommunicative characters walk, talk, feel, live. It's painful at times. Yet, there are days when even long silent characters start yelling 'me, me, me!' AND at the most inconvenient times.

Why have they all suddenly decided it's time to make their presence known? Jealousy, I reckon. One lot of characters have been getting a bit of attention in my head lately as a result of my eldest daughter reading my 2009 NaNoWriMo novel and asking questions.

As I've mulled over Hal and Harry's unlikely friendship, where each would die for the other, Garth, an enigmatic yet reticent hero who literally stepped out of the past has nudged me to remind he's here. He's still not talking to me though - the rotten tease. Then there's Fergus a taciturn man whose past is about to catch up with the present still where I left him - on a farm in the picturesque countryside of Glen Tara. All of them are vying for attention with the heroes of two current WIPs - Alexander, another Scotsman who's never forgotten his first love, and Leon, a sexy Spaniard with turquoise eyes.

What is a girl to do with all these men shouting at her? <ahem> And should I be worried that it is only my male characters that want to be heard? A thought for another day, I think.

A bit of a ramble about writing

What do you think of the new look Blog? I love the serene colours and of course I had to use flowers as my background as I do love floral photography. Sadly, the stunningly gorgeous background image is not one of my own.

This last week has seen quite a few of my writerly friends struggling to write whether it is finding the time due to other demands in life, fear of committing to the page because of shaky confidence, fear of committing to submitting work, or like me the feeling that whatever I write is not good enough and never will be. All these reasons take on an enormous soul destroying grip, and there are many times when it would be easy to say 'enough' and give up altogether. But if writing was easy, everyone would be doing it. So, we plod on doing our best to shut out the demon that nips at our confidence. 

Social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter make it easer to share these woes and to bolster each other's flagging confidence, without it I think I would have given up a long time ago. I have been very lucky to find three like-minded romance writers and we have formed a very close working relationship to critique each others' work, exchange writing information and to be there when we hit the highs and lows that inevitably come with the writing territory. It doesn't make the writing easier but it is good to have the support network.

My work-in-progress (WIP) is sitting at just over 14k. It was growing in wordage but there was something very wrong with it. A lightbulb moment revealed that I had backstory, conflict - both external and internal, what I didn't have was a story. I had a set of circumstances but I had no idea how to bring these circumstances and my hero and heroine together. This moment of revelation was all very well but the problem of sorting it out hung over me like a black cloud. I couldn't see beyond it.  

It was a truly awful moment. Every word dragged its feet on to the page, some good, some bad, some indifferent. I had lost my connection with my characters. I was getting bored with my own writing. Not good. Something needed to be done before the damage was irreparable. Okay, it was a first draft and first drafts are allowed to be bad but sometimes instinct needs to be taken notice of.

Close to tears and heading for bed the answer presented itself. Voice. It was the voice that was wrong. I had been too busy trying to make my story fit to certain specific guidelines and technicalities, trying to emulate what I'd read in the genre I'm aiming for, that the essence of my writing style was lost therefore making it harder to write my hero and heroine's story.

The rewrite began the very next day with a lighter, less intense tone, and hopefully my real voice.

It's been a while...

It's been a while since I've Blogged. I've begun a few but couldn't quite get the tone right so they sit abandoned in the Drafts folder.

What do I want to say? To be honest I haven't a clue which pretty much sums up my writing at the moment. I entered the Harlequin Valentine themed Secret Baby competition. For this competition all you had to do was to write the first 1,000 words of a longer story. This I did and was surprised at how easy those 1,000 words came to me. With some editing it was ready to go. My entry didn't receive many comments but the comments it did receive were very encouraging and positive, so I decided to go with the story for a while and develop it.

When I wrote the initial 1,000 words I hadn't given much thought to what happens later. So, it has been a frustrating few weeks trying to work out a conflict that is believable and can be sustained for the length of the book. The details aren't all there yet, not on paper anyway. It could be that they are lurking somewhere in the murk of my brain just waiting for the trigger to allow them to spill themselves onto an eagerly waiting blank sheet of paper.

Thankfully, I have the support of my critique group. They have questioned the reasoning behind why my characters behave in certain ways, and it has really made me think deeper about their motivations. It's not all clear yet, but it is getting there. 

Regency Romance

Over the last wee while I've re-read quite a few Regency romances by contemporary authors and thoroughly enjoyed them and I've toyed with the idea of attempting to write my own.  However, writing historical romance has always terrified me.  There is just so much that you can get wrong and there is so much out there to research that I could get bogged down in the amount of information available.  Despite the fact that I have a degree which includes history subjects and I should have an idea of how to go about checking my sources it is still a frightening thing to attempt.

One of my writers' groups set a challenge of writing 5k a week during January just to get us writing after the Christmas slump.  It was a challenge that I accepted all too eagerly, and have failed spectacularly - in production terms, at least.  In my first week I produced the awesome total of 182 words.  BUT these 182 words were of a genre that is completely new to me as a writer.  They came at me out of nowhere.  I have no idea about the characters or even how the story will progress, but the beginning, those measly 182 words surprised me.  My fellow writers were very encouraging and I thought perhaps I should take it further.  The story I began is a Regency romance.  I've only ever written contemporary romance so attempting to write Regency is way out of my comfort zone. 

I've spent the last week researching on-line and discovering that sub-consciously at least I do know more than I credited myself with.  A writer friend also suggested a book entitled "Georgette Heyer's Regency World" by Jennifer Kloester.  It arrived through my letterbox yesterday morning and I've already read quite a chunk of it.  It is an excellent read, very readable, and a superb reference source for anyone interested in the period.

Another suggestion to get into the period was to read Georgette Heyer's books.  I have a boxful of romances that have the princely sum of 2'6 marked on the covers.  They are quite old and the pages are yellowed with age.   I've started reading "These Old Shades".  I'm about to start reading chapter 5.  I can't say that I love this book or its characters at the moment.  The hero, a Duke, is about 40 years old by my calculations and the heroine just 19 - it's a huge age gap.  There's nothing wrong with that in the scheme of things, but I do feel a little uncomfortable with it at the moment.  The hero himself dresses quite flamboyantly, sniffs snuff, has a quizzing glass, and so far, apart from rescuing the heroine (who he thinks is a boy) is not very nice.  The heroine, who I think believes herself to be a boy, has a severe case of hero worship to the point of abasement.  I know there are class distinctions in the period and that the lower classes are expected to fall over themselves to serve their masters in the higher echelons of society, but again, the heroine's behaviour leaves me feeling a little uncomfortable.  The only decent character so far is a chap named Hugh.   At the moment I have no idea what his role is or even why he is friends with the Duke as he appears to disapprove of the Duke's behaviour.  I can only think that at the moment Hugh is a means to an end for the author to show the Duke's character development.

I hope my impression improves as I read through the book.  Georgette Heyer is a much loved author of Regency novels and for that alone I really want to enjoy her work.

A Hectic Time

Well!  The last post on here by me was 29 October - we're now halfway through December.  Not a great start to blogging.  However, it has been a hectic six weeks.  

NaNoWriMo took up the whole of November - 50,000 words in 30 days.  Break that down and it is 1,667 per day.  Doesn't seem much but it's not as easy as it seems.  Apparently, out of 200,000 applicants only 37,000 actually completed the writing challenge.  I'm proud to say, I'm one of the 37k.  I finished my 50k on day 29.  I would like to thank my friends on "Up and Coming Writers" and on "First Class" for the wonderful support, especially on the last two days when 10k was committed to screen.

The novel, begun before Nano started (for Mills & Boon New Voices competition), and completed during the writing challenge, is now emerging in its second draft, and I'm much happier with the way the story structure is working out.

Now Christmas is almost here and I'm feeling decidedly harassed by it all.  The work on my attic conversion is complete (bar the bathroom), and the children are looking forward to moving into their new bedrooms.  Thankfully, there will be no workmen in the house for a while.  The tree needs decorating, presents need to be bought, and a decision has to be made about whether to stay home for Christmas or go to my sister's.

So, for the foreseeable future I doubt that very much wordage will be committed.  BUT I can say that the experience of having taken part in the Mills & Boon New Voices competition and completing that novel during Nano has re-ignited my interest in writing, and it's quite an exhilarating feeling.

The Decision

This time last year I had no inkling of what to write for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and it wasn't until 2 pm on 31 October that the idea came at me in a rush after prompting from a couple of friends who said they would like to see more of a particular character I had written about.  And although Nano 2009 was a joy in comparison to the year before, I was behind with my word count until day 20.  Right back in the early days of the writing I'd come down with the cold and for three days not a word hit the page and afterwards it was a daily struggle to keep going.  However, the friendly (but completely bonkers) rivalry/support of a group of Nanoers on the Open University network kept my spirits up and by day 24 the 50k target had been reached.  What a buzz that was!  I'd beaten 2008's finish date by four days.

This year I have no inkling of what to write for NaNoWriMo.

My current W-I-P was put on hold last year whilst I took part in the slightly insane rush to write 50,000 words in 30 days.  I don't relish the thought of putting it on hold again.  So The Decision has been made.  I intend to Nano the rest of the current novel.  I'm not entirely convinced that this is such a good idea but it's the one I'm going with for the moment.

Not All Bad

Last week was not the most productive for writing.  In fact at times it had been downright disheartening.

I'm not a meticulous planner but I usually have an airy fairy idea of where the story is going with certain actions that will definitely take place at some point along the way.  However, the getting to "some point along the way" has been a bit bothersome.  This is what I call the "in-betweeny bits" and they are proving elusive.  

My favoured method of writing is chronological and methodical - I plod on starting at the beginning and work my way through the middle and on to the end.  Simple?  No.  It's like a dot to dot puzzle - all the pieces need to be joined together to create a whole but getting from one dot to the next is a hazardous journey - one slip of the pen and everything alters.  This I have discovered in a couple of ways.  (1) complete mind blank on what to write next, which is common enough, we've all been there and it's darned frustrating when it happens, and (2) when research knocks your story out of kilter.

Let's deal with the research first.  Thanks to a friend who has a background in science I discovered that my preconceived notion of proving paternity wasn't as straightforward as I had thought.  This put an interesting slant on my story and how I was going to get out of the very tight corner I'd written my characters in to.  I still haven't resolved this problem although I have some ideas, but the worry is that whatever solution I choose may come across as contrived.  However, on a positive note, the lack of a definitive answer to the paternity issue adds to the theme running through the story of betrayal and trust.

The mind blank is the biggest problem at the moment.  The dots are all there just waiting to be connected.  Giving myself permission to write sloppily to get something down on paper hasn't worked, nor has writing random scenes, although these efforts have increased my word count and my novel is sitting at just under 14k.  That gave me a bit of a boost - at least I was getting somewhere even if it felt otherwise.

Matters were not helped by the inner editor heckling from the sidelines, sniggering at the stilted prose and the many, many word repetitions.  With this to contend with it made it difficult to want to read the terrible words that had been committed to paper.  And if the inexcusable assemblage of words across the page was ignored, how was one able to judge whether there was any potential in the work that had been pulled kicking and screaming into existence?  The deed had to be done.  And there they were - the diamonds of the dustheap (to quote Virginia Woolf (1953), A Writer's Diary, London: Harcourt).  And me being my fiercest critic, to be able to recognise the tiny wee gems glittering amongst the dross has got to be a good thing, has it not? Something worth working with?

Despite the problems and the on-going blankness, I'm slowly coming round to thinking that although my writing is far from perfect, it's not all bad.