the time it takes

There’s this moment in the writing of a story, when you’ve written and rewritten, revised, edited, taken out all the extra words, and given your characters a few more things to do other than nodding their heads, shaking their heads, smiling and shrugging; there’s this moment where you think you have finished. Yay, you wrote a story! So you give it one more go over, correct your spellings, and send it off into the world.

About a year and a half later, you read your story again, and see all your clumsy sentences and all your mistakes. You realise that there is a way to resolve that nagging plot problem. You suddenly understand why that character does what she does. You see how easy it would be to rewrite that section of prose and make it say exactly what you failed to say the first time around.

Unfortunately, by this point, it’s very likely that you are reading your story in some magazine or book, which you have also encouraged all your friends and family to buy. Cringe-a-rama!

If you’re still holding on to that story – perhaps you couldn’t sell it, or maybe something didn’t feel quite right, and you never tried – you are now the luckiest writing piglet in the world. You get to revise the hell out of it, make it beautiful, and correct all those terrible mistakes you had no idea you were making at the time.

As much as we want to get published NOW and have people reading our stories RIGHT NOW, patience and slowness make stories better. I suspect this goes double or triple for novels, where there are so many more elements to fuck up, and so much more impatience to get the damn thing over and done with.

It’s reassuring to know how much we improve as writers, simply by continuing to turn up and write as often as we can. Even when you feel completely stuck, you are processing all that experience into wisdom, so that one day you can say to yourself, wow that is really a crappy story I wrote. I could write it so much better now.

death and taxes and death

I really want to moan about doing my tax return: how hard it was; how utterly clueless I am; how I berate myself for not keeping neat and tidy records; and generally BOO HOO HOW I HATE MY LIFE YOU INLAND REVENUE OINKS. But I suppose complaining about doing your tax return is the same sort of thing that makes people laugh/spit when writers talk about ‘hard work’ and ‘labour’ and ‘toiling in the hot sun for hours on end with no water and just a crust of stale bread to chew on’. Which is more or less what I put under the earnings column.

I’d love to get an accountant to look after my tax return for me, but given the paltry amount of money I earn as ‘Georgina Bruce: Writer’, an accountant’s fee would probably sink me into some kind of reverse negative income debt spiral which ends with me, ten years down the line, arrested for outstanding payments of thousands of pounds, and carted off to the clink in tears whilst cardboard cut-out faces of tax accountants spin around my head in a hallucinatory circle, mocking smiles on their faces, the sound of their fiscally competent laughter ringing in my ears.

I did my tax return online. Every time I entered a number in one of the little boxes, no matter how I had checked and calculated and added it up, my heart was in my mouth. It seems eminently possible that one could commit some kind of grand fraud simply by clicking the wrong button. Really, they ought to add some extra options – as well as ‘yes’ and ‘no’, there should be ’50:50′ and ‘phone a friend’.

Her Majesty’s Customs and Revenue makes the process just that bit more terrifying by providing ‘help’ pop-ups which are written by the same people who do the instruction booklets for self-assembly furniture. On Betelgeuse. When space-beings from another dimension recover the remains of our civilisation sometime in the distant/parallel future, the ‘help’ information from HMRC online filing will be used as evidence for some smug space-historian’s thesis that human beings were MONSTERS who completely deserved the terrible fiery destruction of their planet.

 

words words words

I’m a few thousand words into the second draft of my novel. It’s amazing to me that it has taken approximately 100,000 words to get to the point where I am ready to start actually writing the story. I’ve realised that the first draft was more or less just a very detailed outline. From that, I got a structure and plot. But it wasn’t until I started rewriting that I found the voice of the story.

Even apparently basic decisions, such as what tense and pov to write in, eluded me until now. And basic aspects of characterisation and  setting were also very muddy. It’s made me realise that the first draft is really just to get the bones of the story down, and it’s this draft where I feel that I am actually writing.

When I wrote the first draft, I was churning out thousands of words every day – I think about 10,000 was my highest word count for a single day. But now my words per hour have dropped drastically to about 600 – 700. That is about half what I would normally expect to write in an hour on a story. But I can see why it’s so slow: I have to be careful now, to stay in the voice of the story. Every word must speak the story.

I still don’t know some basic things, like whether or not it’s going to be worth reading in the end. I don’t think I’ll be able to know that until this draft is finished. I still want to write it, and I am still interested in it, so I’ll take that as a good sign.

And so to work!

damn the dark, damn the light

Writers love to talk about writing. More than that, they love to talk about writing with other writers. Most of all, they love to give other writers advice about writing. I have some opinions about that.

First, writers who take other writers seriously are fools. All writers are full of shit, especially when it comes to writing.

Secondly, writers who give advice are usually only doing so as a way to avoid the problem of not taking their own advice.

I don’t give advice about writing, mainly because I think it’s pointless. The only knowledge worth having is that which you’ve gained through your own effort and through the long slow process of writing practice. Nothing else will make a difference to you, no matter how wise or insightful it may be. Therefore, in my opinion, seeking and giving advice is a waste of time.

So my advice is to ignore advice and just do whatever suits you, whatever fits in with your routine, whatever works for you personally. As long as you are developing your writing gift, in whatever way you can, then you’re doing all right.

And… that’s all.

they’d have to open a window, to let out all that light

Interesting times, my friends. Interesting times. The first few days of 2012 have been full on, to say the least. (And can we please call it twenty-twelve, rather than two thousand and twelve? This is the future, after all.)  I am here, as promised, fulfilling my blogging duties. This week I have four and a half mini reviews for you to ponder, and one long one linked at the end.

The first is a bit of a cheat, as it is a review of a story I wrote, which is published in Fantastique Unfettered 4. I don’t know if you can get this zine in the UK yet, but if you want a copy (why wouldn’t you?) let me know and I will see what the score is. (ETA: NO IT’S TRUE IT’S ON AMAZON, PEOPLE.) Lois Tilton reviews FU4 for Locus Online, calling the zine ‘a labour of love’ and generally showering it with (completely deserved) praise. Here’s part of what she wrote about my story:

Weird, fractured narrative may take some work to follow, but there is a real, nightmarish story here.

Okay, it’s not exactly effulgent praise, but compared to previous reviews I’ve had from this source, this is LOVE. Read the rest here.

So far this year, I’ve read three novels. The first of them was Genevieve Valentine’s steampunk-apocalypse-circus story, Mechanique.  It was strange in beautiful in all the right places. I loved it nearly as much as I loved her Circus Tresaulti spin-off short story in Fantasy Magazine last year – really, if you like fantasy/steampunk/sad beautiful things, you should read this writer.

Beside the Sea is a much hyped novella by Veronique Olmi.  I’m sorry to say I found it kind of grim – too much desperate sentiment and not enough real emotion. The translation seemed a bit dodgy in places. Some turns of phrases were awkward, idioms used incorrectly here and there – could have been intentional but I suspect not.

I enjoyed Next World Novella, by Matthias Politycki, very much. It was even amusing in places, which I did not expect. I did wonder what more he could have done with the material had he been willing to stray into fantasy a little more – something quite wonderful, I suspect. But the writing itself is beautiful. Consider this, from the opening paragraph:

From the far end of his room autumn sunlight came flooding in, bathing everything in a golden or russet glow – the chaise-longue in the corner was a patch of melting colour. They’d have to open a window to let out all that light later.

Even the author knows that’s a good line – he finds an echo for it later on. Gorgeous writing.

I am currently reading Visitation, by Jennifer Erpenbeck.  It’s so good. It’s hypnotic and brilliant. I love this novel. I wouldn’t normally recommend a book I hadn’t finished reading, but this is so good, even if the rest of the book is rubbish, it’s worth spending your cash for the first few chapters alone. They are exquisite.

Oh, and finally, here’s the review I wrote for The Future Fire of Maureen McHugh’s story collection After the Apocalypse.

I’ve started rewriting one of my novels from last year, so expect to hear a lot of moaning and complaining from me next time about how a writer’s life is so terrible and blah blah blah.

How’s your new year reading and writing going?

 

 

 

i can smile about it now but at the time it was terrible

Yeah, bye 2011. Apart from the last couple of months, you were rubbish.

I don’t really do New Year’s resolutions, because the truth is that I’m constantly resolving to do better and change things in my life. But this new year has fallen at an auspicious time for me, a time when I am already in the process of making big changes. So that whole ‘fresh start’ thing is a nice boost.

Amongst other things, I resolve to blog more often. I mean, at least once a week. If you don’t blog once a week, then you can’t really call it a blog, can you? So there’s a public declaration of intent… feel free to kick my butt if I fail on this one.

I’ve got a load of writing goals this year, the main ones being to finish what I start, and to get these damn novels written. I have three, in varying states of unfinishedness, and I need to whip them all into shape. Apart from that, there are various other goals, some of which will remain secret, and some which are just too pedestrian to recount here. But 2012 is going to be the year when my writing career starts kicking into gear. At least, that’s the plan.

My word for the coming year is COURAGE. I often lack it, and I need a lot of it. Sometimes it takes courage just to sit down and write something, ignoring the terrible voices that seem to have a lot invested in the idea that I can’t, or shouldn’t. It takes courage to do simple things, make big decisions, ignore petty people, stay focused. I know I will have a lot of challenges this year, and I hope I’m courageous enough to do what I need to do.

And as for you in 2012? May your neurons fire without fail; may your dendrites be stimulated; may your chemicals remain balanced; may your body support all your mind’s plans; and may the mysteries descend upon you.