what I've learnt in the last few months
So I now have a rough, working draft of the pig story. It is of course mostly rubbish. It's my first completed work of original fiction -- it'd be odd if it wasn't rubbish, really.
The beginning is good. The middle is bad. The ending is not quite as bad as the middle but nowhere near as good the beginning. The badness manifests itself in various ways: characters that are merely stick figures, speaking and moving as I direct them but with no apparent volition of their own; characters that vanish for several scenes in a row, simply because I either forgot about them or couldn't be bothered giving them anything to do; jokes or situations are set up at the beginning of the book and not resolved by the end, because I couldn't remember them all; and so on.
So, what have I learnt from this whole process? (This includes the ill-fated first draft that I wrote last year)
1. I write better when I have a definite idea of where the story is going. I am not an inspired writer, sadly. I hoped I would be, that I could just sit down and let the story pour out of me, but this is clearly not the case. In last year's draft I spent 20,000 words on the first scene simply because I didn't know what the second scene was going to be. This draft does at least move along more snappily.
2. The middle is by far the hardest part to write. I spent 40 days altogether writing this version of the pig story: 30 days last autumn, and 10 days this Lent. I wrote just over half the story last autumn, and a third of it in the last week (a tenth of it last night!). It occurs to me that the middle of any creative endeavour will be the hardest part. Enthusiasm and novelty will get you through the beginning. Excitement and a sense of almost-completion will get you through the ending. The middle feels like an unending slog where all hope is lost and you might as well stop trying to be a writer and just do the easy thing, which is to not write -- and that's essentially what I did, from December to March.
3. I need to spend more time getting to know my characters. This is my biggest problem, from what I can see.
Okay. And I now have a new arbitrarily-set deadline: I must have this story finished and polished and lovely before the final Harry Potter book comes out. I already know that it's broken in about a dozen places, so here are a few things that I have to keep in mind on the re-write:
-- it needs to be broken up into chapters. At the moment it's one continuous narrative, which is not ideal for a children's book. Plus, breaking it into chapters will help me sort out my pacing.
-- there are flabby scenes near the beginning that can be squished and compressed into one dense and chewy scene. I suspect there will be several opportunities for this kind of fix all through the book.
-- there are scenes that I thought of after I'd gone past the appropriate part of the story. I decided at the time not to go back and stick them in, thinking that it would only slow me down and stop me from getting the whole thing told.
-- I still need to sort out how Montgomery's going to sound. He should have an old-fashioned speech pattern, and I never bothered getting to grips with it.
Being positive, the spelling, punctuation and grammar are all right. It's just the writing that sucks.
But I'm not going to do anything with it at all until May. Lots of things to worry about for the rest of this month: music festival rehearsals, allotment, teaching, spending time with family (to make up for being so antisocial during the last couple of weeks), starting the next book...
Yes, I've learnt a lot from writing this draft, and the main thing is that I do actually enjoy it, when I sit down and make myself do it. So on we go with the Paradoxical Liar story!
The beginning is good. The middle is bad. The ending is not quite as bad as the middle but nowhere near as good the beginning. The badness manifests itself in various ways: characters that are merely stick figures, speaking and moving as I direct them but with no apparent volition of their own; characters that vanish for several scenes in a row, simply because I either forgot about them or couldn't be bothered giving them anything to do; jokes or situations are set up at the beginning of the book and not resolved by the end, because I couldn't remember them all; and so on.
So, what have I learnt from this whole process? (This includes the ill-fated first draft that I wrote last year)
1. I write better when I have a definite idea of where the story is going. I am not an inspired writer, sadly. I hoped I would be, that I could just sit down and let the story pour out of me, but this is clearly not the case. In last year's draft I spent 20,000 words on the first scene simply because I didn't know what the second scene was going to be. This draft does at least move along more snappily.
2. The middle is by far the hardest part to write. I spent 40 days altogether writing this version of the pig story: 30 days last autumn, and 10 days this Lent. I wrote just over half the story last autumn, and a third of it in the last week (a tenth of it last night!). It occurs to me that the middle of any creative endeavour will be the hardest part. Enthusiasm and novelty will get you through the beginning. Excitement and a sense of almost-completion will get you through the ending. The middle feels like an unending slog where all hope is lost and you might as well stop trying to be a writer and just do the easy thing, which is to not write -- and that's essentially what I did, from December to March.
3. I need to spend more time getting to know my characters. This is my biggest problem, from what I can see.
Okay. And I now have a new arbitrarily-set deadline: I must have this story finished and polished and lovely before the final Harry Potter book comes out. I already know that it's broken in about a dozen places, so here are a few things that I have to keep in mind on the re-write:
-- it needs to be broken up into chapters. At the moment it's one continuous narrative, which is not ideal for a children's book. Plus, breaking it into chapters will help me sort out my pacing.
-- there are flabby scenes near the beginning that can be squished and compressed into one dense and chewy scene. I suspect there will be several opportunities for this kind of fix all through the book.
-- there are scenes that I thought of after I'd gone past the appropriate part of the story. I decided at the time not to go back and stick them in, thinking that it would only slow me down and stop me from getting the whole thing told.
-- I still need to sort out how Montgomery's going to sound. He should have an old-fashioned speech pattern, and I never bothered getting to grips with it.
Being positive, the spelling, punctuation and grammar are all right. It's just the writing that sucks.
But I'm not going to do anything with it at all until May. Lots of things to worry about for the rest of this month: music festival rehearsals, allotment, teaching, spending time with family (to make up for being so antisocial during the last couple of weeks), starting the next book...
Yes, I've learnt a lot from writing this draft, and the main thing is that I do actually enjoy it, when I sit down and make myself do it. So on we go with the Paradoxical Liar story!