Sigh

My writing still seems to be stuck – so many other things to do that somehow seem more important. At least now I have an idea where I’m going with the novel. For a long time I had lost even that. I’ve done a lot of thinking about what I write and how I write it, and I think there’s been a huge change there. It was coming anyway – the current WIP is quite different from things I’ve written before, but has been precipitated by things going on in RL. I have confidence I will get there eventually, just not quite yet.

The other reason there has not been as much activity in this blog as I would like is that recently I’ve been reading a lot of books for review elsewhere, and I can’t publish the reviews here, yet. That pile is at last getting smaller. I have also now finished all the brand new library books that were on Mount TBR, so I may even get back to the sort of books that were the original impetus for this blog in the near future. There are some interesting ones in the pile – another Ian Hay, a couple of Louise Gerards, a Cosmo Hamilton and many more.

Editing never stops

I’ve decided to start on a re-edit of the beginning of my previous novel, rather than try and continue with the current one at the moment. Inspiration is still far away for that. I wonder if this is a form of procrastination?

At least I will be doing something constructive, and I’ve been growing increasingly uneasy about the beginning of the previous novel. It needs to start with more of a bang I think. I can’t think what possessed me to write a prologue. Well I can – I wanted to set the scene, provide the catalyst for the story. But set-up is set-up, and immediately slows the pace. And pace, it seems is everything. If the story doesn’t hurtle along to its conclusion, it won’t stand a chance. What I need to work out is, which bits of information given in the prologue, need to be inserted elsewhere in the narrative.

All tensed up. Present or Past?

What is it with tenses these days? I picked up a book this morning at the library that looked extremely promising – all sorts of accolades in the blurb and it was a debut, which I try and make a point of reading. But on flicking through it, I realised it was written in the present tense so I put it down. I’ll admit I’m old fashioned – I like my narratives in the past tense and while I’ve written a couple of short stories in the the present tense I can’t imagine sustaining it for an entire novel. I deliberately chose present tense for effect, to make it more immediate, given the types of stories they were (ghost stories).

And yet present tense narrative in fiction does seem increasingly popular with writers. Choice of tense doesn’t seem to be something that’s necessarily related to genre – the book I put down today was a contemporary crime thriller, but I’ve seen present tense narrative used in historical novels, but mostly ones I gave up on I have to say.

Is it a thing of personal taste in the same way that I’m not over fond of first person narrative, or is there something else to it? Indeed does it reflect a change in the language where we can relate events that occurred in the past in the present?

Stories and tales

Apologies for the hiatus, but I have been away. Normal service should now be resumed.

I spent part of yesterday afternoon listening to my eight-year-old niece doing her homework. She is doing myths and legends at school just now, and her homework was to write a story telling the tale of how the snail got its shell. It was fascinating – she told us what she was going to write beforehand, a little bit at a time, and the story that evolved before our eyes, was full of elements from all sorts of things.

It was a quest story. Our hero, who begins life as a slug, is cruelly orphaned in a savage attack on his family by thrushes. And yes, it was a hero, and not a heroine. He then runs into a friendly goddess who conveniently has had her crown stolen by magpies. Our hero agrees to retrieve it for her in exchange for her granting him a wish. There then follows an episode, which I commented bore more relation to Dungeons and Dragons than any traditional legends I knew. It involves trapdoors secret passages, grabbing the stolen crown, and escaping detection in the nick of time – thrilling stuff! Our hero has gained two sidekicks by this time, although only he gets a wish from the goddess, which seemed a bit unfair to me. For some unexplained reason he asks for a house on his back, like a tortoise, and so becomes a snail.

I think my niece may make a writer – she has a powerful imagination. She does read quite a lot of fantasy and there are clearly derivative elements to this story, but the way she has strung them together into a workable whole is interesting. The story had bits that could have come from Aesop or Ovid, as well as Tolkien or CS Lewis – she loves Narnia, and yet the choice of a slug as hero was good even if she did have to remind herself that it doesn’t have any legs.

I look forward to reading her more mature work.

Getting better

I was reading a recent post on The Writing Life, and I got to thinking about improving one’s writing.

I probably don’t devote as much time to writing as I could – I do have to spend time in the real world earning a crust after all. I still write a lot – it may not always be my current WIP, it may be a work-related report, a blog entry, a blog comment, a forum post etc, or it may be something related to editing what I have previously written. A long time ago, when I started writing my first novel, I fondly imagined that having completed it, that was it finished. Needless to say I’ve learnt a lot since then. At the moment it takes me about a year to complete a first draft. I need at least a further year to get the novel into an acceptable state, and even then there may be further tinkering depending on feedback. After all, I’m under no illusions that my writing is perfect, or ever will be. Thus reports of authors who have been so successful that they are able to negotiate contracts that prohibit their publisher from editing a single word of their illustrious prose fill me with amazement at the wilful self-blindness of these authors. I recall a notorious review on Amazon where a certain horror writer who shall remain nameless, demonstrated to perfection in her response to criticism of her recent bestseller just how badly she did require editing. But in her eyes, her writing was perfect.

I am more likely to suffer from the opposite problem – thinking my work is far worse than it really is. That’s the trouble with writing – so much of it is subjective and down to the reader’s perception.