first draft – Page 2 – Deborah Makarios

October 6, 2013

I'm Diving In

This is me.

Figuratively speaking, of course. I’m not crazy enough to jump off a cliff – looking at you, Bella Swan.

What is it with young women named Swan/n and plummeting off cliffs, anyway? Bella Swan does it. Elizabeth Swann does it. All right, it was more accidental in her case, but really, if you’re feeling faint, must you stand so close to the edge?
Do people named Swan(n) have natural urges to do swan dives?

Readers’ replies appreciated, especially if they’re named Swan(n).

The Inksteyne name, I am happy to report, does not come with cliff-diving tendencies, at least so far as actual cliffs are concerned. I can live without the feeling that my entrails are about to be squeezed out through my nose by the invisible hand of the sea.

Rather, I intend to dive off a cliff of blank pages into a sea of ink. (Let us hope I don’t get sliced to ribbons by paper cuts on the way down.)

Which is to say, tomorrow I begin my “first” draft in earnest. To finish something novel-length by the end of the year, I need to write about 6,000 words each week. That’s about 25 handwritten double-spaced A4 pages.

Can I write that many thousands of words in a day? Will my story plan hold up? Will I still have the use of my left hand by nightfall? Only time will tell…

…and your correspondent, who will report back within the week, even if she has to turn right-handed to do it.

Until then, dear reader, I remain
yours on the left,
Sinistra Inksteyne

June 22, 2013

The Seven Lessons of the Week

And I thought last week was rough!

It’s the middle of Saturday and I’m still short 1800 words. I don’t know if I’ll be able to make that up (in both senses of the word) in just one day.

But I’ve learned from this week, hard as it has been to fall so short.

Lesson 1: don’t try to cook something new the night you’re supposed to be breaking the back of the week’s word-count. I got beat by the beets (and they dyed my hands pink).

Lesson 2: when ‘persuading’ a catweasel to release the bird in his mouth, wear gauntlets. Otherwise he may plug a bit of bird-feather into your hand and the wound will become infected, lessening usefulness of hand. (Supplementary note: make sure all pieces of now-deceased bird are removed from hand wound, or pain and swelling will be ongoing.)

Lesson 3: storms happen (literally and figuratively). If you need to spend extra time in the morning figuring out what you’re going to wear when walking to work in 200 kph winds (that’s 125 mph for the imperialists), take the time.

Lesson 4: know where you’re going. Roughly. I get bored if it’s all nailed down, but it turns out I can’t pull stuff out of the air for any length of time. I spent my two writing mornings this week trying to nut out some dramatic needs for the characters – once I know why characters do things, it’s easier to figure out what they’re going to do.

Lesson 5: it’s just numbers. You can’t let them scare you. Dig down deep, find your motivation, and write. Remind yourself why this story should be told. Then tell it, as best you can. No one else will tell it for you.

Lesson 6: when you don’t know what happens next and it all seems to be palling on you, throw in something unexpected. This was part of my I Will column.

Lesson 7: There’s only one way to do it. Pen in hand…

June 4, 2013

Bird By Bird

by Anne Lamott.

This is so not your usual book on how to be a writer, but I did find it enormously encouraging. (Don’t take my word for it, read it yourself. Really.)

For example, that feeling you get when you finish your first draft (at last! hurrah!) and then look back and realise it’s so bad you now live in terror of dying before you can fix it, because people might think you honourably disembowelled yourself from the shame of producing such putridity.

In short, Anne Lamott says it’s ok to be pathologically self-doubting and insecure as a writer. She even suggests that this is quite common among writers, along with such traits as hypochondria and melodramatic tendencies. (Moi?)

She’s witty and funny and erudite and casually well-read (“I scuttled across the screen like Prufrock’s crab”) and really easy to read.
Most of all, she is encouraging.

The flailing first draft, she says is “the child’s draft… let it romp all over the place”.

No-one will see it. Unless you die before the rewrite. (Try to avoid this.)

And as for all the shouting and hissing in your head (not the characters, but the voice Julia Cameron identifies as the Censor), Anne Lamott recognises this can be more than one voice. And here’s what she suggests you do with them:

That’s right.
Shrink them down to mouse size and plunk them in a jar. Let them squeak as much as they please in there – you’re not listening.

Another interesting suggestion: “write a book back to V.S. Naipaul or Margaret Atwood or Wendell Berry or whoever it is who most made you want to write, whose work you most love to read. Make it as good as you can.”

Who would that be for you? On the most-love-to-read side for me would be perhaps P.G. Wodehouse, Agatha Christie and Terry Pratchett. (Sir, Dame & Sir. What does that tell you?)

Have you ever experienced that anguished jealous ache of reading the perfect sentence and not having written it? Who did?

Crucially for those of us who frequently enjoy the writing less than the having written, Lamott points out that you do actually have to want to write – wanting to be published is not going to cut it. (Publication is not the answer, whatever the question of your life.)

Perseverance is tremendously important: “God is not a short-order cook”. She quotes E.L Doctorow: “writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

I wondered a while back whether each step we take, momentous as it may seem, is only to pull us up to where we can take the next.
I wonder it now more than ever.
I wonder what’s just beyond the headlights.

[Disclaimer: once again, I borrowed this book from the library – nobody paid me and I paid nobody. I consider this makes me a maximally unbiased reviewer. Others may differ.]