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My Novel Week End - Part 1
[This needs some links in, which I'll do later]
I suppose this needs a little contextualising. A year last Christmas I decided that I'd been writing nothing but non-fiction for too long and - to borrow a line about Larkin in his later years - I was putting all of my creativity into minutes. Taking photos helped, but there was that bit of me that wanted to be a novelist. I'd written two novels in my late teens, which I probably have the handwritten forms of somewhere, and I'd even sent a chapter off to Gollancz. But since then I'd not got further than a few chapters.
So that Christmas I decided to get back to it, and draw upon some of my experiences, and go for it. Perhaps over ambitiously I wanted it to be four overlapping narratives - I'd just seen Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky - and I set myself a target of 500 words a day, which would take me up to mid-July. Of course I couldn't afford the time, but sometimes you need to do it for yourself. I also had someone who was enthusiastic to read it, and I ploughed through to finish in June.
I knew I wasn't finished with the setting and the characters, and I'd want to go back. National Novel Writing Month comes at the wrong time (I was deep in minutes) and things like Novels in Ninety felt too public. Someone suggested people wrote a novel in a weekend - in homage to Moorcock - but it was the wrong weekend. I rushed to get a second draft of The Four Loons complete by the end of the year, but I knew any sequel would impact back on it.
Write it at Easter, I thought, but I need an idea.
The basics were there within an hour. One of my four focal characters from Loons had spent a numbers of years away - perhaps in prison, perhaps on the run. I'd dropped hints about what he had done before he vanished, but I was unclear of the mechanics. From the hints that were there, it was obvious that there was a story to be told. I didn't want a single viewpoint character, and I didn't want omniscient, so I fixed on two story arcs, one in the first person, one in the third, but focalised on the first person narrator. I wanted the counterpoint between the two voices.
I jotted down twenty four chapters titles and a sentence for each one, and even wrote a first line - "I nearly lost my fingers in a till when I was seven." - then let it percolate for sixty days. I'm mad, but I did the sums. If I have four days to write 100,000 words that's 25,000 a day, and in three four-hour shifts, that's just over 2,000 an hour, 35 words a minute. I can type thirty-five words a minute.
A doddle.
Oh yeah.
No, but the point is to put down a marker that will take the rest of the year to be rewritten, and I can go back to the Loons and head off continuity issues, and even think about sending it off somewhere. But can I make it.
Good Friday
9.00 It's Starting
Coffee and music to hand
10.59 Chapter One
OK, 3580 words typed, which is most of the first chapter, and I didn't quite get to the end, but it seems to be a digressive voice I'm writing in. I'm wondering how heavy handed I want to be, and how much I can simply suggest as the character right now is remembering things from fifty years ago. Memory plays tricks.
Onto chapter two, which will in fact be chapter three of the book. First a coffee and a piss.
10.59 Chapter 2
Current mood: busy
Total is now 6762, short a couple of hundred on the first chapter, but I lost a few minutes at the start of the two hour block. I've gone a little metafictional, which was always on the cards, and I've discovered things about the main character I didn't know. In The Four Loons he was a focal character, but not first person, so I've had his voice but not his thought. But I need to go back and add stuff to the earlier novel so that I'm playing fair.
I seem to be hanging each chapter on a movie - the first had Brighton Rock, this has Rebel without a Cause, next it's Peeping Tom. Not to compare myself with anyone with talent, but just as film directors like Scorsese use music to reveal chronology, so I guess I'm using films. This is news to me.
I also assumed I'd be writing a skeleton of each chapter, but I've not completed this one. I will have to go back and tail each chapter. Of course, the whole thing needs a complete rewrite or six.
Lunch break until 2pm.
4.00pm Third Chapter
Only 2000 words written since lunch - a more realistic total, but it's felt a little like groping my way. I haven't quite got the power politics, and on the first twelve chapters I'm leaping through a number of decades, so I need to reframe each time. I hope the stamina isn't flagging though. Next chapter has the character closer to how I wrote him in the previous book, and introduces another character from that. Hoping this will be easier.
6.03pm Fourth Chapter
The end of the second session, so a break until seven to eat; I've broken through the 11,000 word barrier which is - bloody hell - 10 percent. This is looking possible. 2500 words or thereabouts. I still feel like I'm fumbling in the dark with some of the mechanics of the plot, but I've set up the means of betrayal which allows the "hero" to execute his best mate.
Pizza, and the second half of ER, then writing until 11pm.
9.00pm Fifth Chapter
Oh dear. The slot after eating seems to be the most difficult one, or perhaps I'm beginning to tire. Just under 1500 words, and rather summative. I need to dramatise more - but perhaps that's the next draft. One more chapter and then at eleven I sign off for the night.
11pm Sixth Chapter
It took me a while to get going, but I got upwards of two thousand words, taking me just short of 15,000 words. If I can keep this rate up, that's a substantial first draft to be completed.
I knew the start of this chapter was going to be difficult to write, so after a couple of hundred words I leapt forward to the murder scene. Quite how I can tip my hero to the pitch of murderous is yet to be established, but he has been betrayed (and this is Good Friday, albeit 1974). Tomorrow I get to write his revenge on the person who pushed him to murder, and that's the end of the first person thread. The remaining twelve chapters, which will cover ten years rather than just short of fifty, are going to be in the third person, albeit also focalised through him. I'm not sure I've preserved his voice in the prose, but this weekend is about putting down markers rather than polished sections.
The other thing is that I'll have to revise his section of The Four Loons, the manuscript to which this is the sequel, rather more heavily than I'd hoped. His past is darker than I knew, which perhaps explains his reluctance to refer to it.
Heigho. Time for some golf.
Saturday 11.00am Seventh Chapter
Today has not got off to a good start - with the fridge freezer being out of action my menu is limited, and I had to get to Tescos this morning. Distracted by an item on the Toady problem on PKD I was late on my way, and lost much of the first session. Then I was distracted by Having Thots which relate to the potential non-fiction commission. 325 words, which is not good for even the 15 minutes I had. Anyway, kettle on for coffee, and onto the ninth chapter (which will be chapter 15)
1.00pm Eighth Chapter
1900 words or thereabouts, and today is mirkier than yesterday, but that might just be stamina. The end of the morning session, and on the downward turn on the first person thread. This afternoon I'm covering the mid 1980s and 1990, and the hero gets a payback that inadvertently sends him into exile. I'll be glad when I'm less in his head, but I know there's material that he's not going to witness that he will need to know about. Show don't tell.
Saturday Afternoon
Further updates will be here - it may be Monday or evening Tuesday before I summarise the second half.
I suppose this needs a little contextualising. A year last Christmas I decided that I'd been writing nothing but non-fiction for too long and - to borrow a line about Larkin in his later years - I was putting all of my creativity into minutes. Taking photos helped, but there was that bit of me that wanted to be a novelist. I'd written two novels in my late teens, which I probably have the handwritten forms of somewhere, and I'd even sent a chapter off to Gollancz. But since then I'd not got further than a few chapters.
So that Christmas I decided to get back to it, and draw upon some of my experiences, and go for it. Perhaps over ambitiously I wanted it to be four overlapping narratives - I'd just seen Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky - and I set myself a target of 500 words a day, which would take me up to mid-July. Of course I couldn't afford the time, but sometimes you need to do it for yourself. I also had someone who was enthusiastic to read it, and I ploughed through to finish in June.
I knew I wasn't finished with the setting and the characters, and I'd want to go back. National Novel Writing Month comes at the wrong time (I was deep in minutes) and things like Novels in Ninety felt too public. Someone suggested people wrote a novel in a weekend - in homage to Moorcock - but it was the wrong weekend. I rushed to get a second draft of The Four Loons complete by the end of the year, but I knew any sequel would impact back on it.
Write it at Easter, I thought, but I need an idea.
The basics were there within an hour. One of my four focal characters from Loons had spent a numbers of years away - perhaps in prison, perhaps on the run. I'd dropped hints about what he had done before he vanished, but I was unclear of the mechanics. From the hints that were there, it was obvious that there was a story to be told. I didn't want a single viewpoint character, and I didn't want omniscient, so I fixed on two story arcs, one in the first person, one in the third, but focalised on the first person narrator. I wanted the counterpoint between the two voices.
I jotted down twenty four chapters titles and a sentence for each one, and even wrote a first line - "I nearly lost my fingers in a till when I was seven." - then let it percolate for sixty days. I'm mad, but I did the sums. If I have four days to write 100,000 words that's 25,000 a day, and in three four-hour shifts, that's just over 2,000 an hour, 35 words a minute. I can type thirty-five words a minute.
A doddle.
Oh yeah.
No, but the point is to put down a marker that will take the rest of the year to be rewritten, and I can go back to the Loons and head off continuity issues, and even think about sending it off somewhere. But can I make it.
Good Friday
9.00 It's Starting
Coffee and music to hand
10.59 Chapter One
OK, 3580 words typed, which is most of the first chapter, and I didn't quite get to the end, but it seems to be a digressive voice I'm writing in. I'm wondering how heavy handed I want to be, and how much I can simply suggest as the character right now is remembering things from fifty years ago. Memory plays tricks.
Onto chapter two, which will in fact be chapter three of the book. First a coffee and a piss.
10.59 Chapter 2
Current mood: busy
Total is now 6762, short a couple of hundred on the first chapter, but I lost a few minutes at the start of the two hour block. I've gone a little metafictional, which was always on the cards, and I've discovered things about the main character I didn't know. In The Four Loons he was a focal character, but not first person, so I've had his voice but not his thought. But I need to go back and add stuff to the earlier novel so that I'm playing fair.
I seem to be hanging each chapter on a movie - the first had Brighton Rock, this has Rebel without a Cause, next it's Peeping Tom. Not to compare myself with anyone with talent, but just as film directors like Scorsese use music to reveal chronology, so I guess I'm using films. This is news to me.
I also assumed I'd be writing a skeleton of each chapter, but I've not completed this one. I will have to go back and tail each chapter. Of course, the whole thing needs a complete rewrite or six.
Lunch break until 2pm.
4.00pm Third Chapter
Only 2000 words written since lunch - a more realistic total, but it's felt a little like groping my way. I haven't quite got the power politics, and on the first twelve chapters I'm leaping through a number of decades, so I need to reframe each time. I hope the stamina isn't flagging though. Next chapter has the character closer to how I wrote him in the previous book, and introduces another character from that. Hoping this will be easier.
6.03pm Fourth Chapter
The end of the second session, so a break until seven to eat; I've broken through the 11,000 word barrier which is - bloody hell - 10 percent. This is looking possible. 2500 words or thereabouts. I still feel like I'm fumbling in the dark with some of the mechanics of the plot, but I've set up the means of betrayal which allows the "hero" to execute his best mate.
Pizza, and the second half of ER, then writing until 11pm.
9.00pm Fifth Chapter
Oh dear. The slot after eating seems to be the most difficult one, or perhaps I'm beginning to tire. Just under 1500 words, and rather summative. I need to dramatise more - but perhaps that's the next draft. One more chapter and then at eleven I sign off for the night.
11pm Sixth Chapter
It took me a while to get going, but I got upwards of two thousand words, taking me just short of 15,000 words. If I can keep this rate up, that's a substantial first draft to be completed.
I knew the start of this chapter was going to be difficult to write, so after a couple of hundred words I leapt forward to the murder scene. Quite how I can tip my hero to the pitch of murderous is yet to be established, but he has been betrayed (and this is Good Friday, albeit 1974). Tomorrow I get to write his revenge on the person who pushed him to murder, and that's the end of the first person thread. The remaining twelve chapters, which will cover ten years rather than just short of fifty, are going to be in the third person, albeit also focalised through him. I'm not sure I've preserved his voice in the prose, but this weekend is about putting down markers rather than polished sections.
The other thing is that I'll have to revise his section of The Four Loons, the manuscript to which this is the sequel, rather more heavily than I'd hoped. His past is darker than I knew, which perhaps explains his reluctance to refer to it.
Heigho. Time for some golf.
Saturday 11.00am Seventh Chapter
Today has not got off to a good start - with the fridge freezer being out of action my menu is limited, and I had to get to Tescos this morning. Distracted by an item on the Toady problem on PKD I was late on my way, and lost much of the first session. Then I was distracted by Having Thots which relate to the potential non-fiction commission. 325 words, which is not good for even the 15 minutes I had. Anyway, kettle on for coffee, and onto the ninth chapter (which will be chapter 15)
1.00pm Eighth Chapter
1900 words or thereabouts, and today is mirkier than yesterday, but that might just be stamina. The end of the morning session, and on the downward turn on the first person thread. This afternoon I'm covering the mid 1980s and 1990, and the hero gets a payback that inadvertently sends him into exile. I'll be glad when I'm less in his head, but I know there's material that he's not going to witness that he will need to know about. Show don't tell.
Saturday Afternoon
Saturday 11.59pm Oh Dear - to chapter 12
Today has not been productive. Today has been click on the links. Today has been just have one more round of golf. Today has been explore You Tube and My Space.
Total word count is 18.000, which might mean that 50,000 words is feasible, 36,000 seems likely, 25,000 seems all too ... Eek. On Friday the words flowed, and I followed the characters, but today I was too damn easily distracted. Easter is rebirth day.
| |
17,997 / 100,000 (18.0%) |
Further updates will be here - it may be Monday or evening Tuesday before I summarise the second half.