Old Friends: An update

Hello!

What a crazy couple of months. NaNoWriMo has come and gone, and I'm only now finding my way out from underneath the annual December laundry mountain.

But, and here's the happy news, I won!

My first draft of my first historical novel is complete, all I need to do now is finish my stack of research books, add more details about setting and atmosphere, check all my facts, check the dialogue is authentic ... OK, so I'm not going to think about all that just yet (otherwise my head might explode).

But in case you were wondering what was going on between my two old friends, here's an introduction to my story.

When Bess's childhood sweetheart arrives with the news that her husband has died, she's shocked, and overwhelmed by the attraction that still sparks between them. But her delight in seeing her Tom is tempered by the reminder of the promise she made him long ago - that she would marry him if she were ever free of her arranged match. 

After years of separation these old friends must learn to love and trust one another in order to find happiness as man and wife, before one - or both - of them decide that their marriage was an irreparable mistake.

So there you have it - that's where I've been for the past few weeks, with my head stuck firmly in early-sixteenth-century Warwickshire. Now ... back to my books.

Ellie x

Two days to go...

NaNoWriMo is nearly upon us!

With just two days to go the annual NaNo nerves and excitement are building, and I'm itching to get started. Whether you're new to NaNo or an old hat, here's a checklist to make sure you have everything you need come the 1st of November:

1. An idea If you'e falling at the first hurdle, try one of the story prompts on this blog, the ones at Writer's Digest, or trusty old google.
2. A plan It doesn't need to be enormously detailed, if that's not the way you like to work, but some idea of where you want to be on the 30th November makes the 1st to 29th so much easier.
3. Write or Die An amazing writerly tool. Set it to kamikaze and it'll start deleting words if you stop typing. Not for the faint-hearted, but brilliant for stopping procrastination.
4. Plenty of tea Or coffee, or orange squash, or mashmallows, or wasabi peanuts, or ... You get the idea. Something nice for when you've hit your target, written your way out of a corner, or done something else reward-worthy.
5. A NaNo buddy If no one you know in real life is writing this year, take to the forums and twitter to find someone like-minded for mutual support and encouragement. A little friendly competitiveness never hurt the word count either. 

Just a short post this evening as I'm hitting the books, trying to fit it as much research as I can before the madness begins! Please (no, really, please) share your NaNoWriMo tips and tools in the comments :)

Ellie x

How NaNoWriMo is like knitting a scarf ...

No, really, stick with me here. It is.

When you start knitting, it's pretty hard. Finishing a row with the same number of stitches you started with is an impossible task. Extra stitches appear from nowhere; even though you could swear you'd knitted every single stitch, holes appear at random and with disturbing regularity. Unless you are some sort of knitting prodigy, your first piece of knitting will probably resemble a bedraggled and sorry-looking dishcloth.

For me, learning to write was exactly the same, and I guess I'm not alone.

Chances are your first draft of your first chapter of your very first novel will look equally bedraggled, with holes and diversions and a strange mess in the middle that you've no idea how it started and no clue how to fix it. So what do you do? How to remedy this mess? You keep going, because by the time you've knitted long enough to make a scarf, your stitches will be even and you won't have dropped a stitch for days (OK, maybe hours).

When you finish your first scarf, the only way to improve it might be to rip it back and start again. There are only so many dropped stitched that one can fix. Your second might still have a few holes. You might want to rip back some sections and put them right. Find all the dropped stitches and repair them. But by the time that you make that third scarf, it might just need a good blocking, and it's good to go.

I think of NaNoWriMo as a sequence of scarves. The first was/is a big, holey, patchy nightmare, which one of these days I'm going to sit down and rewrite from scratch (I love my characters and setting too much to waste - much like a lovely yarn). My second was better, but still full of scary moments. It'll take a lot of work to fix, but I don't think I need to pull the whole thing back. And the third? Well, it needed more than blocking. It needed rewrites and edits and critiques and more edits, but now, I have to say, I think it's a really rather lovely scarf, sorry, novel.

So, who knows, maybe scarf number four will just need a quick spin in the washing machine and be good to go... watch this space!

Ellie x

Five reasons to sign up for NaNoWriMo

As November is rapidly approaching, and the research for my new novel is gearing up, I thought I'd take a minute today to remind myself of why I love NaNoWriMo. And because I hope that some of you out there are thinking about doing this mad, crazy, brilliant thing with me, here are five reasons to sign up this year!

1. It helps you find time for your writing. It's the one piece of advice you'll find in almost every book, lecture and blog post about writing: you have to find the time to write regularly, every day if you can. The intensity of the NaNoWriMo month with help you to work out where your writing can fit into your life, and what your writing's more important than. Is it more important that that extra hit of the snooze button? Is it more important than EastEnders? The washing up? Hot food? Basic personal hygiene? Obviously (I hope) your writing can't be more important that all of these things, but it's surprising the time that you can find if you really want to.
2. It gets you past the first chapter. I've written before about the possible dangers of writing and editing simulateously - namely having a drawer of perfect first chapters, but never having got further than that. Break the habit with NaNo. It may not suit everyone. There may well be a middle ground between editing too much and not editing it at all, but trying a new way of working could be just what you need.
3. The pep talks. They're brilliant. When you're having one of those days where it feels like every word is being dragged kicking and screaming from your brain, a email will pop into your inbox reminding you that we all have days like that, that tomorrow will be better, and that you can do this!
4. It makes your writing better. Okay, I don't actually have any scientific proof of this, but having finished NaNoWriMo three times, and having edited one of those drafts into an actual, proper, finished novel, I can tell you that the writing at the end was an awful lot better than at the beginning. It's like anything, yoga, baking, knitting, if you practice it for two hours a day, every day, you are going to improve.
5. Because you love to write! What other reason do you need?! Every day, for a whole month, you'll sit down, start typing, and create people, places, smells and sights that didn't exist before you thought of them. You'll make your characters, and yourself, laugh and cry and probably, at some point, very cross. Frankly, what better way to spend a cold, damp dreary month (apologies to those of you in the southern hemisphere, I can't think of November in any other way) than in front of the fire with your notebook on your knee?

So there you have it. That's why I'm signing up this year. Will you be?

Ellie x

P.S. Have you read the first chapter of Hiding from Hollywood, and the other entries for SYTYCW yet? Voting's open for two more days!

Big Hollywood news

Exciting news on two fronts this week:

Hollywood now has a title (drumroll please...) Hiding from Hollywood. To me, it sums up the emotional conflict at the heart of the story, and sounds pretty snappy with some nice alliteration - what do you think?!

In the other major news this week, Hiding from Hollywood is officially entered into Harlequin's So You Think You Can Write competition. This means that you can read - right now, for free - the first chapter of the book :) You can click here to go straight to my entry, and here to go to the competition homepage. (By the way, you're not going mad, it is showing a different author name - the rules of the competition state no pen names, so there you go! You'll still find me on twitter as @EllieDarkins though.)

I really hope that you enjoy this first look at Abby and Ethan, and I hope I can share the rest of their story with you soon. Good luck to all of you who have entered your chapters in the competition too - please send me links to your entries so I can read!

Love, Ellie
xxx

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

Story prompts 2

Still stuck for a story idea? See what you can do with one of these. Try using one as your first sentence. Explore the motivations of one of the characters. Ignore these completely, but use the random idea that popped into your head when you were reading them. Basically, use them in any way you wish. But if you'd like to turn it into a novel, try reading How to write a novel parts one and two.

A frisson of excitement ran through her as she sipped a cold glass of white wine. Her flight was due to leave in under an hour ... 

A UFO crash lands on earth. The site of the possible alien incursion? Slough. 

She licks her lips, squares her shoulders, takes a deep calming breath and heads over ... 

Let me know how you get on!

Ellie x