Time – Page 47 – Deborah Makarios

June 1, 2013

Do You Believe?

When did you start to believe in yourself as a writer?

I always knew I was good with words (ok, I can still remember asking my mother if sentences ended with a capital as well as started with them, but that was decades ago now).

There were the occasional pieces in school publications, but that’s hardly conclusive evidence. You don’t necessarily have to be good to be published in a school mag, you just have to be better than the competition.

I think the first time I can remember seriously thinking of myself as a writer was a bit over twelve years ago now – it was supposed to be one of those school things where you tag along with a grown-up for a bit of work experience.

Trouble was, we lived in the back of beyond where almost everyone was a hunter-gatherer (and distinctly averse to taking along annoying little white kids who might do something stupid like hurt themselves or scare the food away). The exceptions were my parents, and I was sufficiently formed as a person by then to know that their line of work was Not For Me.

So we had to Make Do and Make It Up.

My mother asked me what I would like to do, and I said I liked “writing, but-” and she said, well then, you can write an article. I will be your manager, you will have fixed hours (bit of a foreign concept in my life at that point) and you will write an article which you will then submit, etc etc. (Or words to that effect.)

I sat. I wrote.
I submitted the piece to my mother for her editorial approval, and the piece was eventually published in the in-house magazine of the organisation my parents worked with. Compliments ensued (I’m fairly sure they were intended as compliments, anyway), a cutting was made, and that was that.

But the writing bug had bit.

In one fell swoop my mother had moved writing in my mind from being something enjoyable but regrettably limited (rather like time spent lying about daydreaming) to being something that happened in the real world. Being a writer went from pie in the sky to an actual possibility. Yes, there were the hours, and the editor, and the annoying people calling you cute, but there was the writing!

It was like telling a kid they could get a job as a professional ice-cream taster. Money for jam. (Well, jam, anyway. Negligible money.)

Mind you, my mother doesn’t hold with telling children pretty little lies – Santa Claus, for example. My parents never tried to tell me he was real, and this was a good thing, because living in a country with ‘security problems’ does not shape a child into the sort of person who takes ‘strange man is watching you and will creep into your bedroom while you’re asleep’ at all well.

So she wasn’t going to tell me that writing jobs were easy to come by, and I did flirt with other ideas over the years – medicine, law, landscape architecture…

But I kept thinking of myself as a writer. I kept writing, here and there. I even earned a bit of money by my writing (slightly awkward when I was sent a cheque and had no bank account to deposit it into).

Throughout my life, my mother has been the one who has taught me to question my assumptions that I can’t do something, that a particular course of action is not open to me.
Often it is, but at a price I am not prepared to pay.
But sometimes it is a price I am prepared to pay, and the world opens out before me in a way I didn’t believe it could.

So if I never said it before: thank you.

May 25, 2013

Number Crunching

Sometimes progress is slow.
Sometimes it is very slow.
Sometimes it is so slow you don’t actually want to admit to yourself just how slow it is.

Imagine these:

stampeding through this:

and you get the idea.

But sooner or later you have to be brutally honest with yourself. The WIP isn’t going to write itself.
If things do write themselves at your place, you’ve got problems.

I have, over the *cough* years since I started working on Tsifira, accumulated about 18,734 words. (Including some of the excerpts I’ve removed for now, and some of the notes, but not all of them. Basically, I’m counting anything that was worth typing up.)

A novel is, of course, as long as a novel is long, but taking geographical distance as an indicator of word count (it’s a road story) I’m about a quarter to a third of the way there. Not knowing, of course, how many detours might occur.

Say 80,000 as a guess.

In the just-over-two months since I started keeping a word count, I’ve written 1,651 words for Tsifira.*

80,000 – 18,734 = 61,266 words to go.

1,651 words ÷ 69 days recorded = 24 words per day (average, obviously).

61,266 words ÷ 24 words per day = 2,553 (to the nearest day).

So at this rate, I will finish the first draft in just under seven years.^

There are only two alternatives.
One: give up.
Two: speed up.

I’m going to go with Two.

It is far easier to write that than to execute it (rather like Rasputin in that respect, although probably not in many others). How do you change gears in your mind and in your life? Is there a human equivalent of a clutch pedal?

I found an interesting exercise on A Cat of Impossible Colour – she got it from The Relaxed Writer.

Basically, you take ten minutes to write down one side of a piece of paper everything you don’t want your writing life to be like.
Then you write the opposite of each thing down the other side, and you figure out how you’re going to make that happen.

She recommends it as a beginning-of-the-year exercise, but I think we can all agree I shouldn’t wait that long, so I did it today.

I wrote the first column out by hand on folded paper, as instructed, but then I went off-road a bit, ending up with three columns instead of two, all typed up in a spreadsheet.
Column A: I Don’t Want
Column B: I Want
Column C: I Will

It was a bit disturbing to get such an insight into my own mind and misgivings. Apparently I struggle with self-doubt and fear the waste of time. I also fear guilt from doing/not doing, don’t take myself seriously enough as a writer, and tend to defer hope til tomorrow.

That’s rather a lot of personal insight to arrive at in ten minutes.

So, what will I do?
I will increase my writing time, guard it from erosion, and focus on my new-hatched target: finishing the first draft of Tsifira by the end of 2013.

By my calculations, I’ll need to write approximately ten thousand words each month. Two and a half thousand each week.
Half a thousand each working day.

I can write over four hundred words in an uninterrupted morning half hour. Increase that to twice a week: eight hundred. Two hours, one evening a week: sixteen hundred. Total of 2,400, and the other hundred can be dashed off almost any time a moment presents itself.

It will require discipline and dedication. But it can be done.
I can do it.

And keep up a blog on the side 🙂

* I know this is pretty pitiful for a Work In (supposed) Progress, but over the same period I have also written roughly 6,000 words in Morning Pages, 8,000 words of blog post (not counting this one), 1,187 in a journal, 1,114 in letters and over 5,000 of Other. A total of nearly 23,000 words (that’s equivalent to 332 words a day, 7 days a week).

^ By which time publishing technology will have leapt beyond my comprehension and Neil Gaiman will be the only one who knows that the thing in my hand is called a fountain pen.

May 11, 2013

Living the Story

Well, after Thursday’s dramatic line in the sand, reality turns out to be not so heroic.

After a few days (nights) of reduced sleep, I struggled on Friday morning. The weather forecast was unexpectedly nasty. I had to replan the multiple layers of my wardrobe for the day, and in the end I didn’t get any writing done at all.

But I did get up. I thought about piking out and sleeping in, but I didn’t.

It makes me wonder: how much of what I do is because that’s part of the narrative I have determined I will live? How much is that helping, and how much hindering?

Surely, I can’t be the only person who weaves narratives around themselves to ameliorate the mundanity of their life?
Anyone? Anyone at all?

Having cast myself as the dedicated but struggling writer, I can’t very well turn round and sleep in past seven. It ruins the story. And living the story helps me keep going.

Of course, this can turn against you (no, I mustn’t have the heater on! the starving garret-writer wouldn’t have that!) but for the most part, it helps.

Being true to the rôle is more fun than following the schedule or the regulations. It’s more creative. It’s more like play.

So, now that I’ve put my internal child quivering in the spotlight for playing make-believe at the age when other people are doing Serious Adult Things like having mortgages and career aspirations – who wants to join me?

We can be prisoners of war, plotting escape (thank you, Professor Tolkien); knights under siege (merci, Monsieur Buhet); or a misunderstood girl on a heroic quest (thank you Terry Jones).

Sometimes it even helps to pretend things are worse than they are. Sara Crewe may have pretended to be a princess to escape the drudgeries of domestic servitude, but how many people since have pretended to be Sara Crewe?

I don’t mean to suggest that I spend my days thinking I’m someone else – I have grown up a bit, after all. But when I find myself in adverse or tiresome circumstances, it can be enlivening to think: what characters (fictional or otherwise) have been this way before me? What would they do? What did they do? What if -? (And incidentally, would it not be very cool if I was a superhero?)

I can be efficiently domestic with Lucy Eyelesbarrow (this is more productive when at home), persist to the bitter end with Cazaril, or be quietly indomitable with Jane Eyre.

So what narrative eases the flow of your days? “Stories etch grooves deep enough for people to follow.” Or do you do it the hard way, scratching the beginnings of a new groove with each succeeding day?

Is it just me?