writing process – Page 9

An unbroken chain

15th April 201615th August 2016 pataitcheson22

Linking the past, present and future

What links the past, present and future?

How do we maintain a sense of self, when our bodies constantly change, our memories shift and evolve, and no dissection can reveal a core of selfhood anywhere in the brain?

Without getting into deep philosophical waters, I find myself pondering this question. I look at my novel, started two years ago, and it feels like the work of another hand and brain entirely. Which in a way it is, since I am not the person I was, nor the writer who wrote those words. The ideas belong to a different me.

I know more than I did, but if I were to change all those words it would be like trying to erase the past, retouching an old photograph to be more than it was.

We collect images to hold on to memories, and writers collect their old words. When we look them over they may seem familiar or alien, but they are/were us. Candid, polished, ugly or beautiful, they remind us where we have been and perhaps inspire us to keep moving forward.

It is comforting to examine souvenirs, but eventually we have to put them down and return to now. An artist must forge the next link, create the next work.

Each work helps to make sense of all that has gone before, and shows us how far we have come.

blog, writing process

Writing about love

17th November 201514th November 2016 pataitcheson22

I just read an excellent post on writing about romance on Kristen Lamb’s blog, written by Alex Limberg. It got me thinking about writing the bits that are more difficult, that are often done badly. How many times have you read something and rolled your eyes, while privately fearing you could do no better? A couple of things stood out for me.

The point about authenticity speaks to the fear of exposing ourselves on the page. Yet our characters sing when we infuse some of our own essence into them; our own remembered joy and pain. It hurts to dig these things up, to examine and dissect them for an imagined reader. Nobody said that truth was easy.

We have to acknowledge the fear and keep moving.

The other point that resonated with me was about different relationships. The best of them are all based on love, not the narrow definition of the word, but a wide and all encompassing description of the many ways humans care about each other.

We no longer have different shades of love written in our language in the way that the Greeks talked about eros, agape, philia and storge. We recognise them, but we often equate love with eros and are therefore uncomfortable applying the word elsewhere.

Thinking about my characters’ relationships in terms of love is helpful, both in how these connections develop, and how they go wrong and have to be repaired or abandoned. I hope a deeper understanding of writing about romance and love enlivens my characters, and through them, my story.

blog, writing process

Reading, writing, thinking

14th November 201514th November 2016 pataitcheson22

So, my WIP came back from the editor with hundreds of comments and suggested changes. I welcome all of it. It’s the benefit of another set of eyes, critical eyes, professional eyes which see what I can no longer perceive. I am going to revise in line with her comments…next month. Because this month, in a fit of madness, I started NaNoWriMo.

It’s mad because I tried last year, crashed and burned. Managed 17K on the NaNovel, and about another 8K on the stuff I wrote when the novel stalled. This year, my job is no easier, the hours are no shorter, the stress is more; yet I decided that aiming to write 50K in 30 days was a good use of my precious downtime.

Mad, eh?

So anyway, this year’s NaNovel is the sequel to my WIP. Figured I might as well move on with the story, which sending it out for editing released me to do. And an interesting thing is coming through. The need to write, and in quantity, led me to free write without censoring, something I rarely do. Get in a character’s head and write everything.

Last night, this resulted in a passage that has nothing whatever to do with my novel, but is definitely the bones of a poem about love. I have italicised it and moved on. I have no idea where it came from. The character is no sappy poet.

This is the power of writing without censorship; keep moving, keep it all, plan to sort it out later. I read somewhere that writing is like excavating, and editing/rewriting is learning what to keep. My poem bones are an unexpected find and they most likely will not be found in the novel, but they are useful and worth keeping. A scrap may still be woven into the story, who knows? I am a classic pantser so anything could happen.

Talking of writing without outlines- I have a bit of an outline but struggle with them- the other thing that emerged from my session is plot. Right after writing about L’s inner thoughts, a whole series of plot points and story solutions bubbled to the surface. Now I have the raw materials. Grapes are not wine. There’s a lot of work and effort to make that change. But finding the fruit? That’s the first step.

There are parallels here with the morning pages advocated by Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way, a fabulous book without which I would not be writing anything, much less a novel. To be doing morning pages without doing them, as it were, seems like a wonderful integration of idea and action.

Time to get moving again.