Five things I've learnt about writing, by not writing

The last few weeks I've stepped up work on my next novel for Mills & Boon, after more than half a year away on maternity leave. Apart from a few hastily scribbled diary entries, all very emotional and largely nonsensical, there hasn't been much writing in my life for the past few months. So with the perspective that only a sabbatical can give you, here's what I've learnt about being a writer...

The cliches are true YOU HAVE TO GET BACK ON THE HORSE, because let's face it, this here book ISN'T GOING TO WRITE ITSELF. There are bills to pay, a contract in place, not to mention the fact that you have been desperate to get started again for months. That's not to say that it's easy to do. I'll admit there was a moment -- okay, more than one -- when I first started writing again and I honestly thought, I can't do this any more.  I got off to a creaky start, barely able to finish a word, never mind a sentence. The characters wouldn't behave, I kept finding huge gaps in my research. But luckily, it seems writing is LIKE RIDING A BIKE. If you push through it, just keep putting down word after word, then eventually you HIT YOUR STRIDE and before you know it Chapter Three is finished, your characters are getting steamy and it's all FALLING INTO PLACE.

But you can't use them Because clichés are lazy, bad writing, and not only do you need to write this book, you want it to be good. Which means coming up with completely new and never-before-seen combinations of words to show the beauty and the heartache of two strangers meeting, falling in love, and trying to work out how to build a life together. One original word has to follow another, until you have fifty thousand of them. 

Writing's lonely No one can do it for you. Because those fifty thousand words we talked about? You're the only one who can write them. No one else knows your characters like you do, and no one can love them like you do, which means no one else can tell their story like you can. 

But you can't do it alone In times past, an expectant mother would gather her women around her as the birth grew near -- her mother, sisters, maybe a local wise woman. You need to do the same, whether it's a local writing group, your publishing colleagues, your family and friends, at some point you're going to want someone who will tell you, 'You can do this!' (And for everyone who has told me this over the past few weeks -- you know who you are -- thank you, and I love you for it.)

It's the best job in the world God I've missed it! The thrill when the words start spilling from your fingers and you have no idea who's making it happen. The joy when you weave together disparate strands to fix a plot hole. The sheer, unabashed bliss when you start off writing an awkward kiss and then all of a sudden everything's getting hot and steamy and the characters are telling you they want more. These are the moments that make us slog through the first stilted pages. Why I'll overcome my mortal fear of rereading the first chapter and go back and make it beautiful. Why I do a job that frequently leaves me crying into my laptop, over people who exist only to me, whilst wearing yesterday's pyjamas. Sometimes it feels like the hardest job in the world, but I wouldn't swap it for anything. 

Have you ever taken a break from doing the thing that you love? I'd love to her how you found it. As well as getting the new book moving, I'm also back on Facebook and Twitter, and would love to hear from you. 

Ellie

x

Lovelife of Pi

Until last week, I hadn't written a poem since school. It's not that I've felt a mortal terror of poetry, more of a complete inability to know where to start. I enjoy reading poetry, I'm always overwhelmingly impressed when a member of my writing group brings a poem to share, but the thought of putting pen to paper and coming up with something that looks and sounds like a poem .... It just seemed completely impossible. 

But then, last month, one of the members of aforementioned writing group set us a challenge (a challenge that she herself had been set by a colleague at the school where she teaches).

Write a poem of forty words.

Easy! I hear you cry. Well, hold your horses. That's not even the half of it ... The number of letters in each word must correspond to the first forty digits of pi. Remember pi? The circumference of a circle = 2πr and all that? Pi starts 3.141... So your poem starts with a three-letter word, and then a one-letter word, and then a four-letter word. And so on and so forth until the fortieth digit.

Rather than striking fear into my heart, as this might with any sane person, I actually quite liked the sound of it. This was my somewhere to start. A structure that I could work with to try and expell my poetic demons.

So many hours, a glass of wine, and lots of letter-counting later, here's what I came up with:

Him.
I look, a glance, desperate.
He stands still, face drawn
Immobile, heartsick, broken.

Ridiculed are we.
The taunting fates denied us -
Denied love.

But now marriage.
And my husband loitering close by: deceived, trusting.
A dreadful mistake.

I'm the first to admit it's not a work of artistic genius, and that it doesn't make as much sense as I'd like. But I love it. I'm finally off the starting blocks, and next time I'm wondering where to start with poetry, perhaps I'll look back at this and remember it wasn't as scary as I'd thought.

Fancy having a go yourself? The first forty digits of pi are: 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197
Please share your efforts below!

Ellie
x

Hearing voices

I have Good News - my characters are talking to me again! I stuck out the awkward party, I made small talk, I listened and eventually  they started letting me into their conversation.

The excellent advice I had - to get my characters to explain themselves to a new character - was a turning point. I wrote pages and pages cringe-worthy info-dump dialogue, which will NEVER be seen by another human EVER, but which helped me to really understand them again. I began to feel their conflicts, rather than  just know them.

That's not to say that there aren't some ongoing issues. My characters are still making me work really hard for their cooperation. They will only speak to me if I'm writing longhand, away from my desk, for example. And they like to talk when they feel like it, not when I do. I remind myself I mustn't indulge them in this last point - it isn't the best way to get a novel finished, after all, and the more I talk to them, it seems, they more they'll talk to me.

So for anyone out there being given the silent treatment by their characters - please don't give up. They are still in there somewhere: keep writing, and they'll come back to you.

Ellie x

How to write a novel: Part three

Well, the best thing about this post is that (in my opinion) the hardest part is done! If you've finished your first draft - hit your word count, got to the end, given your characters their happy ever after, then you get to do my favourite part of the writing process - editing. I'm sure that there are as many ways to edit a novel as there are to write one in the first place, so the usual caveat applies: this isn't the only way to do it, but it is how I do it.

1. Step away from the novel. Yep. Ignore it completely, for at least a day, longer if you can. If you try and edit what you wrote this morning, chances are you'll make the same decisions and mistakes all over again, or be blinkered about where your writing can be improved. A little time and space will give you the perspective you need to do a good edit.
2. But not for too long. I am happy to hold my hands up and admit I've made this mistake. More than once. My 2010 NaNoWriMo novel has been sitting in a folder on my hard drive for nearly two years. It had grown so monstrous in my mind that I couldn't bear to even open the file. Well, this week I took the plunge and read it, and I have to say, it's actually pretty good! My point is, if you leave it too long, the doubt crows will start to win out over reason, and it's all too easy to convince yourself that your worst writerly fears are true. The only way to prove to yourself that they're not is to read through what you've written and make a plan for revisions. 
3. Read your book. All of it, preferably printed out, or on a Kindle, or in some other format that stops you fiddling with it. What you're looking at is the big picture. Does your plot develop realistically? What is the pacing like - too fast? too slow? Do your characters' emotions develop consistently and smoothly? Is there enough intrigue - either about the past, or the future, or both. What do you repeat and fall back on too often: a word, a description, an image, a point of view, a metaphor? You're looking to make a To Do list which will probably require you to make changes throughout the story. I know that what Hollywood needed at this stage was smoothing - there were too many details that hadn't made it from brain to manuscript, resulting in great leaps on the page.
4. Line edit. Now this really is the best bit. Go through line by line, making sure that every single word of your story is perfect, or at least as close to perfect as you can get. I actually do a little of this between steps two and three, just to make my reading experience more enjoyable, but this is when I really go to town. Play with vocabulary, tweak your syntax, sharpen your dialogue. Chances are, to make your book really sing at this stage, you're going to want to cut cut cut. Any adjective or adverb that doesn't pull it's weight should be deleted instantly. (OK, that's not a law or anything, but I do think it's generally a good idea ...)
5. Ask someone else to read your book. I know I said that the hardest part of writing a novel was done, but I'd forgotten the sweaty-palmed terror that accompanies sending your novel out into the world for the first time. But if you're hoping to be published, you knew this part was going to come eventually. Make it easier on yourself by picking your reader carefully, and most importantly - listen to what they have to say. More advice here.

So there you have it, the five steps to finishing your novel once you've completed the first draft. Rinse and repeat until you're happy with the result, and then it's time to make the big decision - what to do with it next.

Ellie x

How to write a novel: Part one
How to write a novel: Part two

Can I get a second opinion?

After weeks of planning, writing the first draft of my book, and then several more months editing it into reasonable shape, I started to look at it and despair. It could have been written in another language for all the sense it made to me. Every word was so familiar and so ingrained in my brain that I couldn’t see a way to change it. The only way to move forward from this point was to get a second opinion. What I wanted out of an early review, or beta read, was to know in broad terms which parts of the story, and which bits of my writing, were working and which weren’t.

When you’re looking for someone to review your manuscript, you have several options. There’s friends and family, of course, but be sure that whoever you ask is prepared to give you constructive criticism when it’s needed. Absolutely the most important thing in a reviewer is that they’re able to be honest with you - a review is no use if it doesn’t help you improve your book. If you don’t like the idea of asking a friend, then you have a couple of options. You could ask a professional editor to appraise your manuscript and make suggestions, or you can take to Twitter, blogs and forums to find beta readers or a crit partner. Chat with people who read and write in your genre, find someone you have a connection with, and ask! If possible, make yourself available to other writers who want beta readers – you learn so much about the craft by finding what works and what doesn’t in other peoples’ writing.

I’m very fortunate to have a brilliant friend, who also happens to be a brilliant editor (@SarahLou_Long – follow her real-life romance here: http://www.miningfm.com.au/ask-our-experts/the-miners-girl.html), agree to read my manuscript. We read and write in similar genres and I knew that her editorial instincts would be too strong not to suggest improvements wherever she could. I’d have been happy to have comments on just a few chapters, but, as I said, she is brilliant and agreed to read the whole thing.

When it actually came to reading this honest feedback and (plenty of) constructive criticism, I felt a bit ill. I’d not had anyone comment objectively on my writing since school, and had major attacks of the doubt crows (my current favourite phrase, courtesy of Maisey Yates). Mostly though, once I got into it, I found reading the suggestions for improvement more frustrating than painful, because once it was pointed out, every mistake seemed so obvious! Not only that, but a lot of the comments were requests for more information – often about the finer details of setting or subtext – that I had already thought about and written into my notes. It was absolutely crystal clear in my mind, but I’d somehow forgotten to get the words on the page.  By this point I knew my characters and my scenes so well that my brain was filling in gaps. But at least this meant that the negative comments were easy to tackle, and even the littlest positive ones (‘Love this J’ or ‘I love this whole page!’) made me do a little happy dance.

Of course, the reasonable part of my brain knows this isn’t the purpose of positive comments. What I need to do is pick apart these good bits, trying to work out what I’d said, or not said, that made Sarah smile, or gasp, or hate me (my favourite of the bunch was this one: ‘What? Don’t stop!! OMG, I have to get back to work now and I want to keep reading – you’re such a bl**dy tease!!’). And I will absolutely do this. Right after the happy dancing. 

But by far my favourite thing to come from this process is the homework – so far, I’ve been instructed to reread Marian Keyes, spend some quality time thinking about Jonny Jefferson, watch Entourage and listen to Matthew McConaughey’s voice. With advice like that, who am I to argue?