Writing on the Wall...

My copy from Uni.
Still on my shelf, slightly
yellowed with time.

In Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut's semi-autobiographical novel of the firebombing of Dresden - Vonnegut describes how he organised his story.

"I used my daughter's crayons, a different color for each main character. One end of the wallpaper was the beginning of the story, and the other end was the end, and then there was the middle part which was the middle. And the blue line met the red line and then the yellow line, and the yellow line stopped because the character represented by the yellow line was dead. And so on. The destruction of Dresden was represented by a vertical band of orange cross-hatching, and all the lines that were still alive passed thought it, came out the other side."

A roll of wallpaper that neatly encapsulates the entirety of the Dresden bombings as well as the narratives of fictional characters? If only I had a spare roll handy. I could come up with my own semi-autobiographical work of genius. Except it's not really that simple is it. Even if Vonnegut did unroll wallpaper and get crayoning, I don't understand how he moves from something so visual and graphic, to forming sentences, paragraphs and chapters. The leap is too great for me. I don't get it.

It might be crossing your mind why I'm concerning myself with this now, particularly as I last picked up Slaughterhouse 5 in 1998. (What a memory I have for detail!) It's because I was reminded of it last weekend. Nothing to do with Vonnegut himself, but because over Saturday and Sunday, I binged Michaela Coel's I May Destroy You. 

I May Destroy You. 
Sigh. I miss them all, especially Terry.

There is so much to say about that show but I'll be succinct. It is a masterpiece. I'd seen everyone buzzing about it online before I jumped in, and they were all 100% correct. It felt both revolutionary and utterly relatable. There were scenes depicted onscreen that I've never before seen enacted fictionally. It showed, with careful nuance, the aftermath of sexual assault and rape, in various guises, as well as the trauma existing around them. I held my breath for large sections of episodes, whilst wanting to punch the air in triumph, at others. TLDR? It's well worth your time. 

But this isn't what today's blog post is about. Let's get ourselves back on track. This is about writing. Because Arabella, the protagonist in I May Destroy You, is a writer. We see her write at various times. She gets out her laptop in a taxi, in her bedroom, in her agent's office - all over the place. But she is stuck. She has looming deadlines and rising debts. She is struggling to complete the draft of her book that her contract demands. (The reasons why are clear. It's no spoiler to say - and with greatly understated euphemism - life got in the way.) When Arabella is shown to have a writing breakthrough, she does the thing that writers always do. She writes plot points on postcards, and arranges them on her wall. 

Exactly how Shakespeare worked.

This is where Vonnegut and his wallpaper comes in. Writers in fiction always have these methods. I assume that some writers in real life do too.  Having a visual map of the plot or structure, must work for some people. Otherwise why does it get bandied about so much? Whenever you see a wall covered in Post Its, onscreen, you know immediately that the character is a writer. It's universal shorthand for the creative process. Either that, or they're trying to solve a murder under the police's radar. Except the murder wall is usually in a basement and always involves string. Let's be clear.

But back to the writer's wall. I have tried. Really I have. At the start of the year, when I set up my work area in the pharmacy office, I had a clean white wall in front of me. It seemed a shame not to use it. Perhaps as everything else was pharmacy-based, I was trying to stake out my territory, and metaphorically piss on the environment around me. So I tried to make a writing wall. No really, I did.

Not up to scratch. 

You can see from the photo it isn't up to scratch. It came after I had completed the first draft, so it was nothing more than tokenism. But I tried. I split the book into three sections and then focused on each of the three characters in those sections. This gave me a grid of nine squares. Then, I added some notes about the mood of the characters in those sections. I recorded which chapters were from which character's POV, and I blue-tacked it on the wall at eye level. The upshot was, it was semi-useful. Most of the time I edited, I ignored it, but every so often I would look up. I'd see the summary of how Tilda was feeling in the chapter I was working on, and it would focus me a little. Occasionally, I would take the square down from the wall, and stick it next to my keyboard, as I typed. Like I said, it was semi-useful.

It's not like I don't plan. I have a bulging notebook, thank you. It's full of crossings-out and sweeping arrows, with every double page containing a plan for a chapter. I still carry it around now, even though I've finished writing the draft, just in case I want to check or change something. I've come to realise that wall or no wall, I'm still a planner. Just not a very visual one. Back in my teaching life, I spent far too long on courses being encouraged to Mind Map my ideas. Mind Maps - those colour coded spider diagram things - look beautiful. They contain lots of bullet points spread out over the page in a non-linear way. For people who learn or retain information in a non-linear way, they must be fabulous. For me, in order to revise, learn, or structure my ideas coherently, I need the lined pages of a notebook. Anything else tends to distort my clarity. Not that it's ever fully clear at the beginning, but you know what I mean.

So, what have I learnt this week? Well fictional writers use planning walls and that is OK. I like notebooks, linear thought-processes and lists, and that is OK. I remembered a detail in a book I haven't read for twenty-one years, and that is OK. And Michaela Coel is a writing genius, and her show - I May Destroy You - has raised the bar for everyone. And as I carry on ignoring that, I'll continue to focus on the more irrelevant stuff like walls and wallpaper, whilst panicking that everything I write is nonsense. And that is OK.

Have a lovely week, folks.

 

Up with the Beauticians!

I mean, there was probably more than
 two. But there's only two in my head
now I've come to write it all down.

The past week has contained two stand-out moments that prompted an extreme reaction from me. Just two? Well, two that spring to mind now. Two unrelated incidents about the same issue. Two that caused completely opposing emotions. So, yeah. Two. Let's break them down.

Firstly, I saw a tweet from an unknown woman. I shouldn't have paid it any attention, but I did. It got under my skin. In a comment following the news that beauty salons could open although still be banned from offering facial treatments, the woman commented, 'I'm struggling to get on my feminist high horse in order to save the beauty industry.'

Here's my feminist high-horse
tea towel. Please note 
additional screwed-up tea
towel in the background. (Also
feminist, but less vocal)

I fumed. Being someone with their own feminist high horse, I couldn't understand her link between being a supporter of women's rights, with the demise of an industry that employs largely women. I mentally composed my incisive reply back - Fuck your feminism if it means women lose their jobs - but stopped myself. No point. Twitter can be toxic enough without me swearing at a stranger first thing in the morning. But it really bugged me. I get that some people choose not to avail themselves of the services of a beautician. That is absolutely fine. But other people choose to do so. And those that do, support an industry where 94% of the workers are female. Regardless of whether you want your eyebrows threaded or not, it seems like a reasonable issue about which a self-proclaimed feminist should, not only get up on their high horse, but gallop about at speed, dragging with them a banner that says, 'The Beauty Industry Is Worth Saving'. Maybe it's just me. I do enjoy a bit of horse-galloping when the moment requires it.

Oh Gloria! I hear you.

The partial reopening of beauty salons (although Friday's announcement has since made clear they can open fully from August) prompted quite a lot of feminist rage online. The other kind of rage though. The kind that was incredulous at the sexism of the government's 9th July announcement. (Where maskless beard trimming was allowed but someone getting their eyebrows done whilst wearing a mask, was not.) Beauty guru, Caroline Hirons, posted a seventeen minute video on Instagram, where she highlighted the misogyny at the heart of the cabinet's lockdown-easing priorities. To be fair, most of it could be summed up with the phrase, WTAF? But she also pointed out the not-too-unlikely leap from there being no one in the Cabinet with an understanding of facial beauty treatments, to the eradication of reproductive rights. If no one in the room has had an eyelash tint, they'll have no clue of the procedure, imagining it's more dangerous than it is. If no one in the room has a uterus, there'll be no consideration of the needs of those that do.

The coaster of discussion!

In related news, I've just finished watching Mrs America. (It's on BBC2 and is the reason why the Gloria Steinem gif above is actually Rose Byrne, who plays her in the show.) It's the story of the 1970s fight between the Women's Liberation movement and the group of conservative women who protested against the Equal Rights Amendment. It's a fascinating watch. Not least because it's brilliantly acted, scripted and directed, but because fifty years on, the same fights are still being fought. I wouldn't thank you for an unwanted pregnancy anywhere, but Texas in 2020 seems like a particularly challenging place to be. It was only nine months ago that the UK fully decriminalised abortion, when Northern Ireland's law changed. At the weekend, my six year old niece asked me what my 'Votes For Women' coaster meant. I explained that in the olden days women weren't allowed to vote in elections, or have jobs, and that the men had the money and power. She asked me how it had changed. So I positively spun it. I told her about the suffragettes and how today, women have choices. They get to have careers and have babies. Or they can have careers and not have babies or vice versa. Ultimately they get to choose how they want their lives to be. And I meant it when I said it. I mean, things have got a bit better. We've got the vote and everything! But when the same arguments from the seventies about bodily autonomy are still having to be made, it's really quite hard to spin positively without lying. 

We're almost back, baby!

But let's move on. I said there were two stand out moments this week. Let me share the happier one. On Wednesday, my phone rang. It appeared I'd got to the top of the waiting list. My beauty salon was ringing to tell me they could do my nails again! This was excellent news. Not only because I was being relieved of my attempts to contort into freakish positions in order to do my toes, (bigger chests do not help!) but because they were still in business. The woman that does my short, black, square finger nails every now and then, was still in a job. I had worried about her over lockdown. She is ace, funny, and young, and also working for a business that's less than five years old. I've had my messily-painted fingers crossed since March. But now she and the business she works for, are back. I couldn't be more relieved. It might not seem much in the grand scheme of things, but after COVID inserted itself into our lives, we're all finding joy in the small things, aren't we? And in the absence of anything bigger, I have a plan. Next time I'm watching PMQs, or the News, or anything where the misogyny of the government is showing, I will have two perfectly painted black-nailed fingers to stick up at the TV. It's the least I can do. 

Quick Wit's a Drag...

There was a story in the New York Post last week that got some attention online. The headline was OREGON MAN DRIVING STOLEN CAR CRASHES INTO WOMAN DRIVING ANOTHER STOLEN CAR. My timeline was full of tweets from people sharing the news story, all with a similar perspective. 'No one would commission that', 'I'd be told my pitch was too far-fetched', or, 'It's the perfect meet-cute!', were typical comments. It has to be said the majority of my timeline are writers and creatives so I smiled along at the shared joke and carried on with my day. Until I scrolled past the winning tweet, that was. The one that made me LOLZ for whole seconds of my life. After someone had shared the story with the comment 'Okay here's my pitch we open on...' someone rather witty had replied, 'Please call this "Bonnie and Collide." BOOM. I know, right? That was proper funny. I PMSLed and ROFLed and everything. 

I know now that Ed Solomon
doesn't need the exposure,
but hey, a gag's a gag.

The person with the 'Bonnie and Collide' zinger was unknown to me. Their Twitter name was @ed_solomon and I lamented on how marvellous their reply had been, before giving their profile a quick look. Yeah, so anyway, it turns out that Ed Solomon is a big-deal screen writer, responsible for films like Men in Black and Bill and Ted. I doubt he needs me to tell him he's good with words, but hey, I'll say it anyway. Amongst other things, Ed Solomon does a belting one-liner.

Of course there's a reason behind all this. You know me by now. I always have a point, even when I hide it behind pointlessly long paragraphs of build up. My point is, I am terrible at one liners. I am terrible at quick-witted puns, clever word play, and being playful with phrasing. I just am. I know my writing weaknesses, and the things I've just listed come under that category. Now before you get out your violins and offer up a heartfelt string accompaniment to my pain, it's all fine. I'm good at other stuff. Stuff like describing locations and settings in enough detail to awaken the imagination of the reader. Creating engaging characters that are flawed but likeable. Writing dialogue that feels authentic and hooks you in. I'm happy that I've got enough going for me to keep on with the writing. I just know that pithy phrases and one line zingers take me ages to dream up. This is why I would be a terrible political slogan writer. They rely on precisely this type of skill. Yes We Can. Deeds Not Words. I'd have been no use to Obama or the suffragettes. (Although even I would have spotted the obvious flaw in the Eat Out to Help Out campaign. Maybe Rishi Sunak's a bigger feminist than we all realised?)

All shit.

So, I'm no good at word play or slogans. We can accept that as a given. But I'm approaching the point in the writing process where I need to be. Why? Well, put simply, Book Three needs a title. It's time to work out what to call my current labour of love. And as I know from past experience, I find this bit really hard.

Book naming is a pain. It's a longwinded, ball ache of a job until you find the right one. And when you do, it's suddenly lovely. The unnamed project has an identity. You can label the folder on your desktop with something more personal than BOOK. I am not at the lovely stage yet. If I were, I'd be able to crack on and commission a cover, but I'm not so I can't. I'm in a bit of a fog about it all. The thing is, I've been here twice before (three times if you count my first unpublished practice novel.) I've written about finding the specific titles for both my previous books*, but that doesn't help me now. There are no short cuts. For me this is a process, and one that takes as long as it takes. The good news is, I have started. Here are my thoughts so far

1. This book is from the perspective of three characters. So I've gone through all the Rule of Three, Three's A Crowd, Best of Three style phrases. The thing is, they all sound naff and dated. My book isn't either of those things. And plucking a known phrase with the word 'three' in it, isn't really word play. It's just using a phrase that has a tenuous link to one aspect of the set up. So I've moved on.

2. The three characters are all dealing with something big. Divorce, bereavement, a mid-life crisis, getting older - that sort of thing. And they are all, in their own way, looking for change. So, I've got another short list going with things like 'Getting There, Any Time Soon, One Day Soon, Almost There' etc etc you get the gist. The trouble with this is the perfect title already exists. It's a Men At Work song called Waiting For My Real Life To Begin. This is a problem as it perfectly encapsulates the period before the characters have their breakthrough. But it's been done so I've moved on from that too.

3. I thought I had it. A paragraph at the start of the book details the difficulty of making new friends at a later age. One of the characters realises she needs some wing people. (Not wingmen. There's no need to limit herself.) So I searched my brain and came up with Hunting For Wingpeople. I thought that was it. That was the winner. Then I realised, about three minutes later that I had simply bastardised Taika Waititi's 2016 film, Hunt For the Wilderpeople. I mean, I know all of art is based on something, somewhere else, but that felt a little on the nose.

There are worse titles for Book Three than, 
Girls, Totalitarian Regimes and Other Steps to Madness.

The upshot is, I'm still looking at, and mulling over options. There are other things to consider, of course. This book will follow on from Carry the Beautiful, so ideally it should also be a three word title. I spent quite a bit of time listing other appropriate adjectives that could follow from Carry the... for this one, but it's harder than you think. Well, harder than you think to come up with something that makes sense to the book. Listing adjectives is easy enough. Carry the Scary, Carry the Ginormous, Carry the Powerful... I could do that all day. Maybe I'll keep it simple. Armistead Maupin called his follow up to Tales of the City, More Tales of the City. And then he wrote Further Tales of the City. As his words and his books are as good as they get, it's not a bad plan. I might just go with Carry the Beautiful II. Or Carry the Beautiful Returns. Or More Carry the Beautiful. Look, I told you this wasn't my forte. Just be glad I'm not a political slogan writer, or quick wit on Twitter. I know my limits.**

Have a lovely week, folks.

*Carry the Beautiful's naming process, from 2016

 Leeza McAuliffe Has Something To Say's naming process from 2018

**My greatest one-liner moment in recent times came last week. (Bear with me, I have to set the scene. It'll be worth it, promise.) My brother and I had driven into Wales in order to visit our parents who had been locked down since March. Because Wales had been stricter in its COVID procedures, we'd made jokes on the family WhatsApp group about border control, trench warfare, and breaking through barricades. (Because we are children.) That evening, I was typing about our successful return to England from the Chester services carpark as my brother got an emergency Maccies. My Dad, in reply to something I'd said about snipers said, 'Sounds like a war book is planned.' And QUICK AS A FLASH, I replied with 'All Quiet on the Chester Front?'

BOOOOOOOOM. MIC DROP. THANK YOU AND GOODNIGHT.

I can't lie, I was made up with myself. When Dom got back in the car, I told him how funny I'd been in the actual moment. Despite this being an obvious fact to those on the WhatsApp group, when I got in an hour later, no one had replied. No one had responded in any way, not even a laughing emoji. The chat had moved onto the best date for a post-lockdown BBQ. When I got in to bed that night, I checked again, and only Dom, the brother that had been with me at the time, had given my joke a few hand claps. He didn't mean them. He just knew I needed the affirmation when I'd been so chuffed with my EXCELLENT PLAY ON WORDS.

(I don't think they knew the book All Quiet on the Western Front. That must have been the reason. The problem must be them, surely?)

Soooo.  Anyhooo. I'll probably stop going on about my family WhatsApp grievances now. But you can see why I'm so concerned about my book naming abilities? Can't you??

(Seriously though. ALL QUIET ON THE CHESTER FRONT! Frigging hilarious.) 

One Day I'll See the Wood...

OK folks, it's book update time. You're joking. Not another one? Please insert your inner Brenda from Bristol voice where applicable. 

In the editing chair, not seeing the wood.
(To be fair it WAS a hot day.)

Back on March 2nd, I wrote my definitive guide to the novel editing process. I say definitive guide, but it was mainly a ranty howl about how horrific a time I was having. Feel free to refresh yourself by clicking the link above, or alternatively catch up in my TLDR bullet points below. Basically I decided that the three stages of editing are...

• The first stage - loads of fun, including the first big reread of the initial draft, with all the time in the world to make it better.
• The second stage - the grim, can't-see-the-wood-for-the-trees stage, where no amount of confidence or delusion will convince you this has been nothing but a big fat waste of time.
• The third stage - where it's all polishing and tweaking, ignoring the content and scouring for typos, spacing issues, and punctuation errors. 

At the start of March, I was just embarking on stage Two, and at the time of writing I am firmly entrenched in... Stage Two.

I know! I'm STILL AT STAGE TWO. The humanity! How can I get up every morning when I have that terrible experience waiting for me? Yeah, it's not the most fun part of the process, I can assure you. But it's getting better. Not being stuck in Stage 2 that is, but the actual text. It's getting better. I'm dispensing with waffly sentences every time I pick it up. I'm rewriting whole paragraphs to give a better flow. I'm making sure the character traits I give hints at in the early chapters, develop into fully fledged parts of personalities by the end. It's a long winded process, not least because a pesky little global pandemic rocked up in the middle of it all, and shut my brain down for the best part of six weeks. But it's a process. A long one. And I'm still cracking on and working through it.

A lovely person commented at the end of the March post but every time I try to
 reply, it never comes up on the screen. So, to the mystery poster, 
thank you for reading, and I hope your own editing is going swimmingly.

Sometimes I think I take too long with this stuff. When I poke my head into the indie-writing world now and then, I see other authors manage to crack out new books every few months. I have no idea how they do it. What about their research? Their beta readers? Their thinking time to create new ideas? I don't have a clue. For me, even though this feels long-winded and - at times - really frustrating, I'm still on schedule. I want to get the to the end of the second stage before the end of the year, give out Advanced Reader Copies after Christmas, then get polishing and tweaking, as well as commissioning a cover, in the first part of next year. Then it'll be released sometime in 2021. As that will be my third title since 2017, I feel all right about the hassle of rereading it 53684930 times before that. It's just part of the gig.

All the magic happens here. And all the
grinding, headache-inducing frustration 
 too.

You might be wondering, if you've made it this far, why I'm banging on about editing again. Well, mainly, because it's all I'm doing right now. I have nothing else to say! But when I look at the data for this blog, I can also see that the most read post in recents times, is my definitive guide to editing from March. This could be the case for several reasons. Perhaps people feel sorry for me in my deep distress of Stage Two. (Because drinking lots of tea and sitting in a comfy chair all day is probably just like working down the mines. Poor me? Boo hoo? Yeah, maybe not.) Or perhaps I've struck a cord with other writers out there who are experiencing equally frustrating periods of work. That post got picked up by a couple of other websites and was shared about a bit, and so far no one has told me they fundamentally disagree with it. So that's good. It just proves my point. Stage Two is awful. It's horrible, long-winded, demoralising, positivity-crushing, and needs to hurry up and leave me alone. And on that note, I have some more editing to do. If I want to stop being blinded by trees, that it.

Have a lovely week, folks.