Last night, as I was making dinner, I got an email from the Homestretch radio programme in Calgary. They wanted to interview me about the essay that was published in The Globe & Mail. Who could say no?
You can listen to it here.
Today, an essay I've written has been published in The Globe and Mail.
You can read it here.
Not everything I write is fiction.
After I finished my PhD, I was dead broke and unemployed. While I figured things out and looked (desperately) for work, I went home to live with my mother. I'd planned on staying the summer, but it took me a year and a half to get back on my feet.
While I languished on her couch, she and I started writing a blog together, called Hey Ma, I'm Home.
I'm very pleased to announce that we'll be guest-blogging on Mslexia.co.uk from February. We're interviewing each other on what it's like to write a blog together, the challenges we face and how we keep doing it, even though I finally moved out.
I'll post a link to our first post once it's up, so stay tuned...
After a massive great push over the Diamond Jubilee weekend where I literally locked myself in the flat for four days and wrote nearly 70 pages, I have finished a first draft.
It’s long and needs trimming and I can see where themes haven’t been developed as well or as fully as they could be, but it’s something to work with.
The characters come across well, but there is still much work to be done. But the bones of it are there, the skeleton. There are good lines and less good lines, long conversations and short as well as unnecessary ones.
But the important thing is that the hardest part is done: the first draft.
Now, a bit of a rest, some distance. Start editing in August.
For now, a bit of research, a bit of consideration, and a much needed break.
A strange thing has been happening as I work on Heather and Robin. I normally write fairly short scenes, so that the end effect is that the novel is storyboarded. But with this book, the scenes are more like chapters.
And instead of having constant dialogue between characters, this time it feels like there’s more of the inner monologues, more thinky bits as I am want to call them.
It’s perhaps turning out to be a slower paced book this one. Though, as I’m not yet finished, I can’t say for sure. It’s nice though for the form to inflict itself on the work as opposed to the other way round. Maybe this is the way the story wants to be told. Possibly though, I think the pace will speed up once Robin starts stalking Heather properly.
Which will be nice for him – he’ll be able to start taking pictures. Right now he’s frustrated, stuck for inspiration and his dating life isn’t going well either. But once he meets Heather, I think they’ll have a nice effect on one another.
The other thing I was wondering this past week was if I might be writing a sort of love story. Not a romcom type thing, but something more true to life. Whereby two people just click with one another, regardless of how different they may be.
Only time and a finished draft will tell.
I knew getting a fulltime job would have drawbacks, one of them is of course, less time to write. But I didn’t realise how much less time.
Two hours or possibly three of an evening isn’t enough. I leave my imaginary friends on the street corner well away from my office. They wait there for me. I pick them up on my way home every night. They wait there, rain or shine, until after five in the evening. Patiently or not, I don’t know. I don’t know what they get up to in the day anymore.
And I miss them when I’m at work.
But they’re here now, sitting here on the bed next to me.
And so, to work. Real work. Important work. Work that isn’t dull, not subject to approvals, and above all, work that is not boring.
And so, at long last, to work.
As I was working the other day, I ran out of steam. I thought perhaps a rest might be a good idea. Took two weeks away from the book only to find that actually, a rest wasn’t the problem.
Not enough conflict was holding me back.
There are so many things to keep track of in a novel when you’re building it that it’s hard to remember to ensure the characters hardly ever get what they want. So now I’m going back in and doing a little surgery, putting in a bit more conflict. Which is also helping me feel closer to the characters.
To work, to work.
And more of it please.
Right now, the major complication is this: is Heather coming across as a normal over-worked, stressed out woman? A woman who can’t sleep because the world around her won’t let her? A woman whose mind is always somewhere else?
Are Heather’s ailments doing a good enough job of representing the things our culture could improve upon?
Heather needs to be average and above average at the same time. Which is tricky. And she needs to be sick in a way that’s familiar to people. A low grade fever, nagging illness but nothing that ever really feels worth seeing a doctor about, until it’s too late. Not in a cancer way, but in a sort of Pandora’s Box way.
Heather is sick, the world is only adding to her problems, but she can’t see it. She can’t see that the ways in which she’s told she’s meant to communicate and the amount of communication she’s meant to be doing (in order to live a happy and fulfilled life, mind) aren’t working. She doesn’t communicate in a way that has value or meaning. Which leads her to hospital. Which leads her to Robin.
I had thought that I would be able to avoid what happened yesterday. I felt that I’d put the climax of the novel in the right spot and that what I’ve been writing the past several months was the novel that I wanted to write, with all the things in their rightful places.
And then yesterday happened and I realised that actually, I’ve put the climax in the wrong spot again. But what I’m starting to understand about myself is that this is what happens. I work on the plot until I’m sick to death of it, and then I start writing but it’s only after I’ve written two thirds of several drafts that two things occur to me. The first is that the climax is in the wrong spot. The second is where the climax ought to go.
By climax I mean the thing that starts the novel off in my head. The little moment or incident that I build the plot and story around. In this case, it’s when Heather hires the stalker. I thought that should happen at the start, that it was an action. But now I’ve come to see that it’s a reaction – she does it because of several factors. It comes later in the novel, and the thing I want to write about (that I didn’t know until yesterday) is the build up to her hiring the stalker.
I came to this conclusion in a way I now recognise as the usual way. At about two thirds of the way through a draft, I get to a point where I’m losing interest in the novel, in the writing. And this novel was exactly the same. Not enough dialogue for me, too many repetitive thinky bits…
So yesterday, I wrote down the new plot. It came so quickly, and included details like actual dialogue, that I know this is the one. I say that every time, but I think now I’ve cracked it.
I suppose only time will tell…
I know they’re considered weak, flashbacks, but I don’t want to show all of Heather’s previous work life, just the important bits. To show why she’s quit her job and gone inside and also partly why she’s hired a stalker in the first place.
Plus, if she’s just sitting around her flat, not doing much of anything, I reckon that’s what she’d do. Analyze her previous life, her old life, her bad life. Maybe she’s reminded of something during her work-free life, something whilst she’s out, or maybe a smell reminds her, or a phrase, something. That would then bring her back to her old life, remind her about something key or important.
I wonder if style somehow can allow me to avoid the flashbacks being flashbacks? What I mean is instead of having the flashback happen right there, in the present tense story line, what if, almost as a secondary story line, there’s her old life. Divide it up by chapter or section instead? So that the story becomes non-linear in a way, in parts.
Would I then need to include some of Robin’s old life in a similar fashion? What would happen if I gave him a future story line, a third story line?
Something to ponder for the weekend…