Unspoken Words

I’ve often heard people say that if you’re a writer you should write every day. If you don’t write every day, you can’t be serious. Set yourself a daily target and make sure you hit it. If you don’t hit it, you can’t be serious.

Do you write every day? If so, do you set yourself daily targets? If so, do you meet them? If not, how do you feel when that happens?

I ask because I meet up with a bunch of local writers every couple of weeks at the Goldfish Bowl writing group, and recently a local writer was invited along to talk to us. It was a good evening and I enjoyed listening to him talk about his writing and how he approaches it.

Of course, not everyone approaches writing in the same way. Different writers will have different approaches. The end result is the important thing and I doubt that you can tell what process the writer has gone through by looking at the final product, the published novel. I have a couple of books in which writers talk about their approaches. I find it interesting. But each of us has to find what works best for us, and what works for you might not work well for me.

I don’t know what works best for me yet because I’m just setting out to write my first novel. Maybe the process I go through will change as I progress, evolve until I find something I’m comfortable with.

One of the points the local author made I thought was really helpful. He said that he doesn’t have a daily target. He has a weekly target. He prefers a weekly target because if he has a daily target and misses it, it’s frustrating, whereas with a weekly target it doesn’t matter if he misses a day and he can always catch up.

It sounds simple, and it is. And I can’t help wondering how many writers out there are feeling frustrated because they’re setting themselves daily targets and failing to meet them.

Maybe you’re one of those frustrated writers yourself.

I like that simple idea. When I come to start cranking out the words on my own novel, which won’t be too long now, I’ll be working to a weekly target, not a daily one.

As it happens, the local author has posted a copy of his writing schedule on the internet:

http://www.snowbooks.com/Emson_schedule.html

You can see how he did as he wrote his novel, along with some notes that he added.

Are you a frustrated writer?

I played tag this week. Not the kind of tag where you run around and get tired. The kind where one person writes something, then another person adds to it, and so on. A tag story.

I know. It doesn’t sound like Writing For Grown-Ups, but wait a minute, hear me out. I’m almost ready to embark on writing my first novel, switching from writing short stories, so why do I want to waste my time with a tag story – even a tag novel?

The tag novel is something being run by the Goldfish Bowl writing group, which meets locally every couple of weeks. Each member gets one week to add a chapter, hopefully around 1500 words or more, then passes it on. I got to write chapter 6.

So, what did I inherit? Well, actually it was quite interesting. Five different people had each written a chapter. There was something running through from start to finish, but it kind of jumped around a little, and everyone seemed to have their own idea as to where the story should go. Which is pretty much what should be expected, unless something else has been agreed up front. Five different people, five vastly different styles, and five different directions, and a few ambiguities.

I printed out the existing stuff, which amounted to about 8,600 words (I think). My one week condensed down to 2 days, as I’d left it to Tuesday evening to get stuck into it and had to hand it on the next evening. No problem, I thought. 1500 words, a walk in the park.

I started out by reading the first five chapters, taking reasonable time to follow what the previous contributors had added. Then I sat and thought about where the story might go. It had a few threads that seemed contradictory, and I thought it might be a good idea to bring those together. Two main threads running through the story, and I wanted to keep those going. I also wanted to give it a sense of direction that the next contributor could follow, if he wants to.

I thought it needed livening up a tad, and I once heard some advice about sending in a man with a gun in these situations, so that’s what I did. Line one, door opens. Line two, man walks in with gun. Go from there.

And I started plotting.

Now, this might seem like a frivolous waste of time, but plotting is something I’m still getting to grips with for my own novel, very much in the planning stages at the moment, so spending time plotting from someone else’s foundation was actually quite fun. And creative, too.

When I had some plot to run with, I started writing. Cool. By the end of the evening I had about 1450 words down. And I wasn’t finished. No problem, I still had another evening to play with.

The next morning, driving to work – which for me is a 90 minute journey each day – instead of listening to the radio or CDs, I drove in silence …and plotted some more. By the time I reached work I knew where I wanted the story to go from where I’d left it the previous evening.

Lunchtime, I crashed in about 600 words – and shoved down a ham salad. Cool.

When I got home I had a break, bit of fresh air in the garden reading, then sat down to crack on. Couple of hours later, I was done. A bit of tweaking here and there, checked chapters 1 to 5 for continuity issues, and sent it on its way. Job done. Chapter 6 written.

By the time I’d finished, my Chapter 6 amounted to 3000 words almost bang on the button. Now, I’ve been writing short stories for 5 years, and maybe one, if that, has made it to 3000 words. Most have been 1500-2000, and much of my more recent stuff has been very short indeed. So, 3000 words is quite an achievement for me.

Not only that, but I did that in two evenings. My plan for completing a novel assumes that I will write only 2000 words a week. So, frivolous though it may be, I just did the equivalent of one and a half week’s novel.

The quality of what I’d written is very much draft standard, spell-checked and proof read, but not outstanding writing. For my novel I would expect to come back later and revise, and maybe spice up the writing a little. But gosh! I’d sat down and done some plotting, then crashed out 3000 words in two evenings. And it felt good!

Maybe playing tag is fun, and not altogether wasteful.

Hey Mister Contemporary-Science-Fiction-Writer. Yes, you. You know who you are.

I’m well stuck into reading as much contemporary SF as I can in an effort to find where the bar is set and understand what I have to compete with if I really want to get published. So, at the moment I’m at exactly the halfway point in the latest novel by a well-known contemporary SF writer.

I read his first novel a few months ago and it was a bit so-so, but I finished it. I know there’s a whole pile of stuff he’s written inbetween, and I’m sure some of it must be pretty good, but I’ve jumped forward to his latest because what could be better than seeing what’s out there now!

And it was going well. Approaching the halfway mark, I was thoroughly enjoying the read. It’s soooo much better than his first novel.

Then the story stopped.

It stopped for six pages of blah-blah-blah (in small font).

It stopped – in the middle of the action – while the author blabbed on in great detail about the history of a character. And I mean great detail. Long, boring paragraphs of overwritten tripe on pages that turned brown and curled at the edges.

Itswank.

I should thank him. I should thank him for showing me how not to write. I should thank him for being lazy enough to believe that because he’s made it he can churn out any old crap and get away with it.

I learned something about writing today.

I may never sell a novel, and if I do I may never sell more than one, and if I do the chances of me selling as many novels as this guy are teeny-weeny-weeny indeed. But the chances of me stopping the story in the middle of the action to bore the reader shitless by blabbering on about a character’s background is abso-cocking-lutely nil.

Itswank.

Earlier this week I went along to the local Neighbourhood Watch Annual General Meeting. I’ve never been before. I don’t really know why I went this time, but there wasn’t much on telly, and I did. I live in a quiet village. One main road goes right through, end to end, with a few small cul-de-sacs leading from it. I live down one of the cul-de-sacs. The village has a pub, a post-office/corner shop, a village hall and a green.

I arrived at the meeting five minutes before it was due to start. I had no idea how many people go along to this kind of thing and was surprised to find about thirty people inside. A quick look around the village hall confirmed that I was the youngest person there. I’m forty-eight, and I can tell you – I didn’t need to ask anyone their age to work out that everyone else was older than I am.

They were a friendly bunch, full of nods, smiles, tea-stained teeth. The local chairman asked whether there were any new people – as well as me there was one woman – and gave us each a free gift, a personal alarm. Nice.

Then the chairman introduced the local community policeman. Apparently this was a bit of a first. We used to have one come along to the meetings, but this was the first time in about four years. He seemed like a nice enough bloke.

While the community policeman was waffling on, I couldn’t help noticing that he was wearing the same uniform we’re used to seeing policemen wear all the time these days, which included one of those jackets that protects him from knife attacks and that kind of thing. I looked around the hall at all the grey-heads, nodding and smiling and hanging on his every word, and looked again at that jacket. You couldn’t hope for a less threatening event than a meeting with these people, and here was, protected up to the eyeballs.

Tell me: What does that say about the society we live in today?

When I was a kid the police never needed to dress like that, and certainly not for a meeting with a bunch of grey-heads. What on earth did this copper think was going to happen?

Anyway, it turns out that the crime rate in our area has dropped considerably since this time last year, and it wasn’t particularly high then, so there wasn’t much in the way of crime to talk about. The chairman opened up the floor for questions, and the grey-heads sat up straight.

It turns out crime isn’t the real problem around here. The real problem is parking. And speeding. We don’t get any problems with that in my cul-de-sac, but for those living on the main drag, and quite a few of this lot do, parking and speeding are very important issues.

One old boy wanted the policeman to agree that it was okay for him to park on the grass verge because it’s safer then parking half-on, half-off the pavement, and was peeved when he didn’t get the nod. Another old boy spoke at length about speeding in his part of the village. The policeman rolled out statistics demonstrating that, when measured, the average speed through the village (in a 30mph limit) was found to be 33 miles per hour. The grey-heads began to get restless.

Someone else lived by a bend in the road. They’d petitioned the parish council for some time to put up a warning sign about the bend, to warn speeding drivers of the danger, before someone gets killed. Or worse. A sign had been erected, but it was obscured by a tree and another sign.

The chairman, in response to several points made, said that most of these issues were for the parish council to deal with, and not Neighbourhood Watch.

It was around this point that I began to understand why the community policeman was wearing the jacket. You could feel the tension in the air. I half-expected one of the grey-heads to lead a charge on the policeman at any moment, the rest following with their walking sticks, ready to batter him to a pulp.

And so it continued. Blow after blow – verbal of course – from the grey-heads, while I looked on. It wasn’t hard to identify the militant ones. And I had to remind myself, these were the children of the generation that gave Hitler a kicking. Or maybe some of these actually took part, I guess that’s possible.

Suddenly, the meeting was over. The grey-heads relaxed instantly. Back to their smiling, nodding selves. They clapped the chairman, and the policeman, and agreed to turn up again at next year’s AGM.

I might go along myself, too.

The next morning, driving to work, I heard something on the radio about an initiative to give every home in Britain internet access. Apparently, the idea isn’t universally popular. In particular, grey-heads aren’t interested in the internet. I thought this was a shame. If they had internet access, they might find something of interest to take their minds off the speeding and parking problems, something to take them away from their lounge windows.

Of course, there’s a flip-side. Imagine if they all had internet access. Instead of meeting up once a year for a meeting they could organise themselves online, then who knows what might happen. I don’t even want to think about it.

Last night, driving home from work, I couldn’t help noticing – in my rear view mirror – the grey hair over my ear. More now than last year. By next year there might not be much of the original colour left. And as I drove into the village, I swear the car coming towards me was speeding. In fact, I’m sure of it.

We’re always being told that if we want to write well we should read plenty. So I am. Of course, the more time I spend reading, the less time I have for writing. So, is it worth it?

It’s not enough just to read. I can read an entire novel and not remember much about it a month later other than whether I enjoyed it or not. I have to educate myself to analyse. How has this author approached writing this novel? How does it compare with other novels by the same author? How does it compare with novels by other authors? How else could it have been written? Did the author succeed? Completely? Mostly? At all? What was done well? What was done poorly? Could I do better?

That’s the big question, isn’t it: Could I do better?

If I’m serious about writing a novel – and I’ve been telling myself for six months that I am serious – then I have to believe that I can do at least as well.

And I can’t. Not yet. But I have nine months of writing ahead of me, and a year to go before I start the revision of my novel. The draft doesn’t have to be wonderful, it’s the clay that will be used to create the finished article. I have a year during which I can bring my craft up to scratch, and reading is playing an important part in that. It shows me where the bar is set. It shows me how other writers have approached their novels. It shows me what publishers and readers expect.

Because I’ll be writing science fiction, I’m concentrating on reading as many contemporary SF authors as I can. As a teenager and into my twenties I read a lot of science fiction, from Arthur C Clarke and Isaac Asimov to Larry Niven and Robert Heinlein. As good as that stuff is, modern SF is different. The genre has evolved. Fragmented, even. So many sub-genres.

Since I began writing in 2004 I’ve read a great deal of non-SF. Indeed, since then I’ve hardly touched SF at all. That time hasn’t been wasted. It’s opened me up to authors and styles that I would never have encountered in the SF world, and we learn from everything we read (good and bad). Now, though, I have to focus exclusively on SF, understand the genre, how writing SF differs from writing mainstream or other fiction (and it does differ).

I’ve been reading Alastair Reynolds, Ian M Banks, Neal Asher, Ken MacLeod, Robert Reed, William Gibson, Eric Brown and Richard Morgan. Also in the queue are Ben Bova, Peter F Hamilton, Stephen Baxter, Kevin Anderson and Toby Litt, among others.

In the last few years I’ve probably read four or five novels a year (and a lot of short stories). At the moment I’m getting through a novel every couple of weeks or so. It’s quite an education, and by taking time after each one to analyse, I feel that I’m getting a great deal out of it. So yes, I think it’s worth it.

What have you read today?