Lucky 7 Scan

I have three children. I'm not talking about my daughters here, no, the children I refer to are my paper ones. The ones that have a beginning and an end and about a hundred thousand words between. 

Number One, I am sad to say, I'm greatly ashamed of. In fact, I'm so embarrassed by her I can't even bring myself to look at her. I had her when I was much younger, when I was naive and clumsy, when I wrote before I thought. I wasn't really ready to have her, and well, she wasn't quite right: poorly formed, over-excitable, a bit simple, and on occasion deathly boring. I had to shut her in the attic and lock the door. As the old adage goes, out of sight out of mind. Don't feel sorry for her, for all our sakes, it's best this way.

My second child, Number Two, I love very much. She's special to me. All my hopes were once pinned to her and for a while I thought she was 'it'. My glory girl. The one who'd look after me in my dotage. Finally, I thought, after all those years spent nurturing her and her attic-bound sister, I would get some reward. She was my X-factor auditionee. She did well in front of the panel of agent-judges. One was particularly taken with her and picked her for her team. After a fairly extreme makeover (a head-to-toe edit, two rewrites, and a lot of spit and polish) she was perfect in my eyes. Sadly, she didn't make it through to the live final. Now she lives under my bed, her beauty gathering dust, her voice ignored. I know, I'm a dreadful, neglectful mother, but what could I do? By then I had a new baby and I didn't have time for both.

I'm not supposed to say this, but Number Three is my favourite. We shouldn't have favourites, should we? It's just this one is that much more successful than the other two, and well, I find it difficult not to love her the best. Her debut is in August and we're both terribly excited. I'm nervous too - though I would never say this to her face - and every now and then (in fact, more often than not) I panic: I worry she's not that great after all, that, perhaps, when paraded in front of the world she might let me down. But my fingers are crossed. 

I'm right behind you, baby! 

Good luck, poppet!

 

And now I'm pregnant again. I know. I know. What was I thinking?! Don't I ever want to sleep? I've just got my life back and, BAM!, I'm doing it all over again. What can I say? I'm a floozy. I can't keep my pen in its lid. I just love the creational process. (And innuendo, I love innuendo, too.)

So when my friend, and talented writer, Cathy Dreyer tagged me with the Lucky 7 meme, which asks authors to provide an extract from their current work-in-progress, I thought, what better opportunity to share the first peek of my infant child. This is the equivalent of a twelve-week scan: 50,000 words in, narrative structure in place, and if you look carefully you can see a tiny heartbeat.

[The rules of the Lucky 7 meme are:

Go to page 7 or 77 of your current manuscript

Go to line 7

Post the next 7 lines or sentences, exactly as they are - no cheating

Tag 7 other authors to do the same]

He drew his eyes away from Jess and locked them on Will. Will's heart thumped, the heat of the midday sun beat down on him; he felt faint. It couldn't be him, could it? But there he was, standing right front of him, infecting this easy Sunday lunch with that darkest part of Will's past. Marcus smiled and held out his hand. Will didn't move.

"What a coincidence!" Amelia said. "When did you last see each other?"

I know, she looks like an alien mush - there's a lot of growing left to do - but I hope (fingers crossed) that she'll be pretty and healthy when she arrives. 

If not, there's lots of space in the attic with her older sister...

Husband v King

I've just reread Stephen King's On Writing. I've now read it four times start to finish. It's simply one of the best books I've found on the writing process and being a writer. King chats with his reader, as if over a coffee and slice of Victoria sponge, generously imparting his immense knowledge and encouragement. It's an inspirational kick up the jacksie for all of us - writers or otherwise - highlighting the importance of persistence and hard work in achieving your goals. His own dedication and tenacity is impressive. He started sending bits and pieces he'd written to magazines when he was very young, and by the time he was fourteen, he says '...the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of rejection slips impaled on it. I replaced the nail with a spike and kept on writing'. You might be the most talented writer in the world, but without graft (and the hide of an elderly Italian socialite) you'll struggle.

In his book Stephen King discusses the 'ideal reader'. This is the person you write for, who you imagine reading your words first, before they go anywhere near the harsh judgement of an agent or editor. In any creative pursuit it would be unrealistic to expect to please everyone simultaneously. There is huge disparity in how individuals react to a film, book, or piece of art, etc. Is Titanic the best film of 1997? Or an over-sentimentalised load of tosh? Blimey, even professional critics disagree (and generally vociferously). If you write (or indeed live) with a trying-to-please-all mentality you will not only short-circuit your brain with the effort, but risk losing your vitality. My ideal reader is my husband. I know. Isn't that sweet? (Puke, puke, cringe). But it's true. It's my husband I try to shock or move, make laugh or shudder. It's he who can tease my writing from sub-standard to acceptable, push me, stretch me, pose questions, raise doubts. He makes me a better writer.

Unusually, perhaps, he reads as I go along. I need him to vet the first draft as it unfolds. I need to know I'm on track. That I'm not shooting off on ridiculous tangents. The moment he walks through the door from his long day and longer commute, I'm there, leaping around him like an irritating spaniel, waving pages of printout beneath his nose. Poor thing. There'll be no supper, the kids have turned feral, the kitchen's a bombsite, and there I am flapping around, as good as shouting forget you, forget them, it's all about ME, ME, ME!! I wish I didn't do this, but I physically can't control myself. So I wait for him to read, biting my nails with nervous energy. If he thinks it's good, I'm over the moon. If he thinks it's crap, I'll tear the words up.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not some kind of namby-pamby '50's housewife [chokes on tea at the thought]. I don't do whatever he says. In fact, mostly I tend to do the opposite of what he says. We can argue about anything and everything. Tired or bored enough, we could have a full-blown-smash-the-plates argument over who likes chocolate more (obviously, it's me). We've had many memorable (and risible) arguments. Once, whilst on holiday in a Spanish apartment, we had a particularly pointless, vicious row, the subject of which is of course forgotten. He'd had enough, and mid-shout marched off to the bedroom. He appeared with a blanket wrapped around his stroppy shoulders.

"I've had it with you. I've had it with this. I'm leaving!"

"Don't be idiotic," I snapped. "It's dark. Where are you going to go? We're miles from anywhere. It's a bloody forest out there."

"I'd rather sleep in a forest than here! With you!" 

And then spitting with rage he flounced (this is literally the only word I can use for it) out of the the door. I grabbed at the remote and snapped through channels, ending up on a French shopping channel where a plastic woman with neon-pink lips tried to sell me a turquoise Velor tracksuit. Then I heard him at the door. I set my mouth into a grimace. Narrowed my eyes and fixed on the television. As he stomped past me on the way to the bedroom, he announced, with a totally straight face, chin in the air: "It is actually VERY scary out there."

And this is the man with editorial control.

Which is why I read Stephen King's On Writing...a lot.

Bum glue

Two days ago something bad happened. My husband got to say ‘I told you so’. These four words form perhaps the single most irritating phrase known to marriage, irrelative of whether that marriage is happy, unhappy or indifferent. It carries a trite smugness about it, designed to make you want to drive a butter knife into your beloved’s heart. So what prompted the heinous utterance? The computer died. It blew up. Literally. Except it didn’t blow up, rather it ppfftted, pathetically, into permanent dormancy, its demise made all the more tragic when I realised I couldn’t remember when I last saved my work.

Cue husband: "I told you so".

Nearly ten thousand words were lost in that wishy-washy ppfftt. Ten thousand words equates to about three weeks work. Not months or years, admittedly, but traumatic nonetheless. Mustering the energy to rewrite those words is strenuous. Even if managed, there’s always that nagging suspicion that these new words aren’t as good as the vanished ones. That somehow the literary genius (oh, how we dream) will never be recaptured, that the one canny observation that might lift my prose above the others has gone for good, in a ppfftt of computer smoke. Losing words feels like walking to the summit of a sizeable hill and rather than finding the view-to-die-for, you find a sign that says Keep walking another ten miles, then do a jig and forty press-ups. View will appear on left. I’m not sure I can be arsed. Sadly, unless I want to curtail my fledgling career at this point, I have to. And this is where that smug I-told-you-so bites hard. He must have told-me-so a hundred times: “Have you backed up your work? Why don't you email it to yourself each night? Here, I’ve bought you a memory stick just for you to save your work.” The more he told me to save my work, the more I thought, bloody hell, stop telling me what to do the whole time, and didn’t. And then, presumably sick of hearing me ignore him, my obviously-male computer, in the spirit of brotherhood, decided to teach me lesson in common sense and pegged it. My word count slipped from 30 something thousand to 20 something thousand. Electronic, suicidal git.

Now, word counts are to some writers (like me) what calories are to some dieters (like me). It can get obsessive. I can live by my word count: 1000 words to lunchtime, 250 before I leave for the school run, 150 while the kids are watching the Simpsons, if you don’t hit x words by 7pm you’re not having any wine. (Shudder at the thought). My ideal would be 1500 words a day. That's quite punchy, but on those days when words spill out of me like water from a tap, when I’m immersed in the book, with my characters sitting in the room beside me, it’s not hard. I’ve been known to laugh out loud or cry real tears when I’m in this place; it’s a glorious place to be, when I write for the joy of writing and the words clock up without me noticing. But then there are the dark days. The blood-from-the-proverbial-stone days. Days when I’ll write ten words then make a cup of tea, march myself back to my desk, write another fifteen, check my emails, force out another twenty, check Twitter, tweet two or three times, tell myself off, close Twitter, stare at the page, start to reread the page, then, evil of all evils, begin to edit, and then discover I’ve reduced the damn word count by a hundred words.

To keep me on track on days like this, I have a few inspiring quotes stuck to the walls around my study. One of these reads: When asked the secret to finishing his 500 page masterpiece, The Power of One, author Bryce Courtney growled, ‘Bum Glue’. I love this. Firstly, I love the ‘growl’. Writing can be a battle, drawing out sentences, bending them into shape, searching for the ideal turn of phrase, avoiding clichés, killing unnecessary words. And though I’m not proud of this, most of the time the growl is how I address anyone who speaks to me while I’m writing. “Mummy, where’s my history book?” In your room, I growl. “Would you like me to lay the table for supper?” Yes, I growl. Of course I would; I’m writing. Phone rings. For crying out loud, what do you want? I growl. You get the picture. The second thing I like about Courtney’s line is the bum glue. I need bum glue. I love the imagery. I love the thought of not being able to stand up to put the kettle on for the fifth time in an hour because I’m stuck to the chair with bum glue. Please, someone, invent bum glue!

Another scrap of paper stuck to my wall is advice from Leonard Bernstein: You can sit there all tense and worried, freezing the creative energies, or you can start writing something. It doesn’t matter what. In five or ten minutes the imagination will heat, the tightness will fade and a certain spirit of rhythm will take over.  

In other words ‘just get on with it’.

This advice, of course, can apply to most things. Staring at the sea, wanting to swim, but worried it looks cold and grey? Come on, man up, jump in. You’ll feel great. Want to get fit? Stop moaning, put your trainers on, and get out there. You’ll probably be signed up for a marathon before the week is out. (Not me, obviously...I’m glued to a chair). The long and short of it is, if you want to finish a book you need to write some words. Then don’t lose those words. So from now on I will be saving my work every day. I advise you to do the same thing. But if you don’t, I promise that when your computer goes ppfftt, I will try very hard not to say those shameful words.

I told you so.