Andrea, I've not heard that line from John Braine, but it strikes a chord with me, funnily enough, because I remembered last week that I wrote a novel when first pregnant, and it got sent out and the agent I'd gone to received a reply from Carmen Calil, who was a big cheese at the time, saying it was a brilliant first novel and if she had an editor who could put some time aside to go through it with me, she'd take it on, but she hadn't!! The agent shortly afterwards returned to the US, I gave birth to Nushy, we bought a new computer and threw out the old one on which the book was stored, and I forgot it ever existed. Then last week I got an email from a pregnant writer I know saying how enthused she was, and how much creative energy the pregnancy had unleashed and I suddenly had a flashback to that novel - thirteen years later!! I honestly had no memory of it until that moment. Isn't that weird? It sort of ties in with what John Braine said, except perhaps it only works if there's a big gap between the contemporaneous book, and the one afterwards that's worked on more carefully.... Strange:-) Shyama

Dee, thanks for that Fab chacklist - I doubyt tI know the answers to all of them for me, let alone my characters, but it'll be fun finding out!

bj, I think you hit an important nail: "fear of committment". It IS like a fear, and I never thought I'd be afraid of putting words on paper since that's been the thing I've been the best at throughout my whole life. But for me even the idea of a novel is a big committment, maybe because for the first time I'm facing the truth. I've always thought "I'll write a book one day", friends and family have told me I could do it - now I'm going to try, and in a way after all this the only path is toward failure if I CAN"T do it....

BUT, after all this soul searching, and brilliant advice, you'll be pleased to know I've written 727 words today!! And I'm quite pleased with all 727 of them!

Shyama, are you advocating pregnancy as a novel-writing technique/ creative stimulus?! Hmm, wonder if Other Half will go for it...?

x
tc

Shyama,

Pregnancy as the creative impetus ... if I thought my body could stand another pregnancy, I'd be onto it right now ....

tc,

"maybe because for the first time I'm facing the truth. I've always thought "I'll write a book one day", friends and family have told me I could do it - now I'm going to try, and in a way after all this the only path is toward failure if I CAN"T do it...."

I wonder if it's failing to meet other's expectations that's really scaring you? (Hey, Andrea amateur psychologist!) My Dad took up painting in his retirement - and to, I have to admit, everyone's astonishment he was really good. After some very encouraging agent feedback to an earlier novel, I suddenly began to tremble at the idea of writing anything further. I confided that to my Dad. He told me that when everyone suddenly told him how good he was at painting, he felt burdened by the weight of other's expectations and, scared he couldn't meet them, packed up his brushes for good.

So are you scared of failing yourself, or the expectations of others? Maybe both?

Either way take failure out of the equation - to write anything is an achievement. If you start a novel but don't complete it, then you'll have learned a great deal (which you can no doubt use in your poetry). If you do complete it, whether it's absolute rubbish or not, that's still a huge achievement.

Maybe a solution is not to see the novel in it's entirety (personally if I contemplate the totality of a novel from the beginning, I get vertigo; I've learned to write it in thirds, detailing carefully everything of significance said or done in each chapter as I've finished it; then going back and revising that third until I'm happy; then I write the next third, detailing carefully ... something about feeling confident of the ground behind me gives me courage to experiment with what lays ahead of me. Can't say it would work for everyone, but it works for me).

Or see each scene as a poem, complete as a whole; then the next scene as another poem, then the next ...

Whatever, you've 727 words behind you ... you've already begun!

Andrea

Yikes: I wasn't advocating pregnancy for the female members of this site. It may well provide a creative impetus but what follows after, kills it stone dead - hence my not even remembering I'd written the damned thing until last week!! I can only write this because the youngest is at girls' football, and therefore I get an extra hour at the keyboard this afternoon, though it is not being put to good use beyond popping in here to give the synapses a shake up. TC: we have all laid our methods before you, but you've clearly found your own. As Andrea says, that's pretty impressive output for a day, and if you keep on like this, whatever was causing the block will have been pushed out of the way. Graham Greene only used to write 500 words a day, and I have a very dear science writer friend who limits himself to 1000, so you're bang in the middle. Pour yourself a glass of red and celebrate (Dee's bound to have a few spare bottless if your stocks are low...) sxx

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And may even have a bottle:-)

Shyama as WW's own Pope?

500 words doesn't seem much, but it certainly got Graham there. I know Philip Pullman writes three pages a day, no more, no less.

Which reminds me of a tip I really liked, from Ernest Hemingway - "I had learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it".

(He also said - "Scott [Fitzgerald] took LITERATURE so solemnly. He never understood that it was just writing as well as you can and finishing what you start".)

Andrea

Yup, Andrea, I'm sure there's something in all that 'expectations' stuff.
I've learned recently about myself that I got my esteem when young from being academically successful - in a world where just being 'me' wasn't enough for a myriad of reasons - being
'Me, The Clever One' went a long way to giving me some much needed, if misguided, sense of self worth. And that academic sucess came on the arts/literary side of things and through my abitlity to write well. So putting it on the line like this goes back to very early struggles and impulses and, I'm sure, there's a fear of being found 'a fraud' locked up in this.
Odd how the same sort of "stuff", (expert psychological term, there) goes round and round and just puts slightly different hats on...
Hey, I pay £30 an hour for this elsewhere!! I reckon that's you owed at least £13.50, Andrea!

Shyama, the red wine suggestion is certainly one I'll take you up on - and hurrah for girl's footie. I once had it written in my School Preport for PE "Helen's constant plea's to play fotball have made her difficult to please this year".....only 'cos they said kept saying No....
x
tc


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Preport?
And 'fotie' tsk, how girly...here's hoping IB isn't reading...
hic!

Eek! Spooky - "I've learned recently about myself that I got my esteem when young from being academically successful - in a world where just being 'me' wasn't enough for a myriad of reasons - being 'Me, The Clever One' went a long way to giving me some much needed, if misguided, sense of self worth." I have finally found my alter-ego. That's where I got the little self-esteem I could muster. My English teacher wanted me to try for Oxbridge. I wouldn't. Why? Because I was sure there I would be discovered as the "fraud" I knew I was.

And the feeling lingers.

Somewhere there's got to be a way for us all to reconcile what we believe ourselves capable of, and what others see in us.

Whatever, down that glass of red and tell that fraud feeling to go f**k itself.

Andrea

PS You owe the £13.50 to my wise old Dad

That Hemmingway quote made me laugh out loud. I was emailing a friend yesterday (writes vampire novels, tried to get her on the site but she won¡¦t)¡K anyway, I was trying to explain the difficulties I¡¦m having with TWH at the moment and the only thing I could liken it to was squeezing a spot¡K I can squirt a bit out but then I have to wait for it to fill up again¡K wish I¡¦d thought of the well thing¡K where¡¦s that bottle¡K

Dee
ļ


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What the hell??? that was supposed to be a green smiley...

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ohhh nooooo.... I've got the glitches!
:(

Woewee, Dee, I'll have a glass, or several, of whatever you're on!
x
tc

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Have to admit to still being a bit shellshocked by your confession that you just forgot about then threw away a whole novel Shyama!
there's confidence for you!
x
tc

It is fairly bizarre, TC, I have to admit. I think maybe, because I wasn't a creative writer at the time (beyond tidying up quotes for news features) I saw it as a a bit of fun, and when it got rejected, albeit very generously, and I lost the agent, I just thought 'sod it'. To be frank, and I don't know if this is common, but whenever I'm really preoccupied (or stressed), my mind seizes up and I can only hold a limited amount of information. I once went to a birthday party where I thought I was talking to two complete strangers. When I asked them who they were they were, they were really insulted because it turned out I'd had lunch with them and the hostess a year earlier. I remembered the lunch: I just hadn't remembered it was with them!! So... my amnesia isn't so surprising in context:-( sxx
BTW my youngest is taking her HBS exam (part I) this morning and I thought of you librarianing away somewhere in the vicinity and sharing your love of words with the disaffected youth of north west London.

tc.

If it such hard work for you to write your novel then don't bother. If it is within you then you will write and you will find your own way through the many exciting challenges.

Forget all these 'checklists', in my opinion these are for people without confidence, forget all the 'good' advice kindly offered, forget what well-known writers might say for there are always other well-known writers who would give you opposing advice, forget all the commercial books and courses on how to write a best seller.

Remember that you have creative imagination plus a realisation of the value, impact and effect that words and their linking together can achieve. You have a gift that many writers would envy... you are a poet and a damn good one.

It is not an easy path for you will experience all the holdups, the brick walls the doubts and so on. But you will DO IT!.. provided that you want to do it! If you don't then give it up before you start.
Go for a different writing challenge like short stories, scriptwriting and so on... or stick with the art of Poetry.

The need is for DETERMINATION.

Len

Gosh, thanks for the praise of my poetry, Len!

I appreciate it's a tough undertaking to write a novel, but under all the uncertainty and hassle about getting going I do REALLY want to do it. So we'll just have to hope that translates into the determination you speak of - I think it might.

Beginnning to realise there's lots of practical, wordsmithy technique-y things that I'm not very good at, but I know there's no short cut to that, it's just hard graft, and help from other WW-ers, hopefully!

Last night I got my dictaphone and tried reading what I've done so far into that and playing it back. Found it was good to see how things flowed, how sometimes my sentence construction wasn't too clear. Made a fair few alterations as a result.
Anyone else tried that?

x
tc

Hi tc,

Not tried the dictaphone trick - but reading stuff out loud certainly highlights the weaknesses in my writing. It shows where the sentences creek - and the rhythm of the piece falls apart - and rhythm is as important in prose as it is in poetry. (Read some Shakespeare to confirm that. Oh, sorry. You've probably done taht already!)

I stopped suddenly at wordsmithy technique-y things that I'm not very good at, !!!!!!

Having read your poetry nobody (not even you) could accuse you of not having wordsmith-y skills.

It's just that, maybe, they need to be applied in subtly different ways.

Somewhere back in this thread you asked about the need or otherwise to plot out the whole of your novel. As always, there is no rule here. Stephen King started many of his shorter stories - and a couple of his novels with a simple situation into which he dropped his characters. (eg From a Buick Eight) And he just let it go from there. I've tried that, and had mixed success. I've tried the alternate - carefully mapping out the story right to the end - and found myself revamping the final chapters two or three times because I couldn't quite get the characters into that final scene, as I had initially imagined it.

Probably none of this helps, but if it does just send the bottle to the normal address. But please hurry as the xmas red wine stock is looking dangerously low!

Good luck with the writing - and I look forward to reading the chapters of your novel as they appear.

All the best

jumbo xx

I've only just found this thread, but it's fascinating, and I recognise so many of the problems and solutions! I may just be repeating what others have posted before, but here goes.

I used to beat myself up about not getting on with my novel (and I'm not a poet, nor until recently a short story writer, so if I wasn't a novelist I was NOTHING). When I had one day a week to write, I wasted most of it beating myself up, and not writing. Then I realised that there was a part of me - a demon - that was in charge of stopping me writing. Call it a protective demon. Writing a novel is a bit like lying down in the middle of the road and offering the first passer-by a disembowelling knife, well, emotionally speaking, anyway. Not only are there all sorts of weird and embarrassing bits of you in there that you wouldn't want your mother to read, but you're pinning your colours to the mast that this is the Best You Can Do, and you're doing that for a year or two. The demon's the part of your soul that school trained so well, to stick to the question you know you can answer, to keep your head down, not look a fool, the part that learns not to ask 'do you love me?' because the answer might be no, the part that doesn't want to go freelance because the phone might not ring. That demon will use any reason it can think of to stop you writing, whether that it's that you really must do the wash, or you'll be neglecting your children, or that you're a useless writer anyway and always will be. Or why not just stop for a quick coffee now you've got that first sentence down? And a couple of phone calls?...

I did two things: I changed my practice, so that I write first drafts full-tilt (keeps up the momentum - I'm a blitz person), in long-hand (much harder to go back and have terrible doubts and fiddle with it instead of getting on), and I sit in front of the page for my set time whether or not anything gets written. If I've done my 1,300 first-draft words before my 4 hours is up, then I can stop - except that on a day like that, I don't want to. That's my practice: it wouldn't work at all for others. But I'm sure the trick is to have a meta-awareness AS you write, of HOW you write, to find out what aspects of your practice work, and what to change.

The other thing I did sounds terribly cheesy, and I wouldn't admit it anywere but on WW, but I spent a few minutes examining this stop-writing demon - he's rather fetching really, about 3 feet tall with greeny-blue scales and a pleasing tail - and then I imagined a big terracotta pot in the corner of the room where I write, and put him in the pot and put the lid on. When he protested in a rather echoey voice that I absolutely had to go shopping that minute, I said, 'thank you very much for that information, and now I'm going to write'. And did. After a few weeks I moved the imaginary pot out of the room to the foot of the stairs. Now I think he's left home, but I'm too busy revising my novel to check.

OK, it's daft, and twee and cheesy and anything you like. But the one thing I do know is that I can finish a novel. Good or bad is another question. (But my latest is inching ever closer to a contract. Keep your fingers crossed for me!)

Jumb and Emma, thanks for your thoughts.
Dunno 'bout the stop-writing Demon, today I've got the What a load of Crap Demon. I've read through a what I've done over the past couple of days and decided its utter tripe! OK, I'm sure you prose experts have all been there before, (sorry, don't mean that like it sounds!), but its a funny feeling.

Should I post it, anyway? This afternoon I thought not, now I think I gotta take it at some point, may as well start now! Be gentle with me, though not too gentle...

Oh, best of luck with the contract, Emma!
x
tc

Right, off to post it now before I chicken out.


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Please cast your expert eyes over the following:
The Symmetry of Dreams : June 1978