COLOURING IN THE STERKARMS

                Last week, on Saturday 4^th, I put aside all the pressing things I felt I had to do, got out a large felt-tipped pen and a pack of index cards, and sat at my kitchen table.  I had with me the rough notes I’d been scribbling for ‘the next big thing’.

                I took cards from the pack and scribbled steps in the story on them.  The first one I wrote reads, ‘Rich man talking to genetic engineers: wants clones for immortality.’

                After scribbling several more, I had a thought and wrote, ‘Is it only UK Pirate State that will allow this?’ – and put that card at the head of all the others.

                More scribbling and shuffling, and then, ‘Throughout, mention of UK as ‘pirate state.’ I placed that card on top of and overlapping several others.

Our winter arrived last week

                After a while, I took coloured pens and added coloured squares to the cards, to show how characters and incidents linked.  I invented some new characters and also some new twists that hadn’t occurred to me before.  In less than an hour, I felt I’d made progress, and things were clearer in my head.  So I already think this method of working out a plot – which I learned from Roz Morris’ Nail Your Novel – is a success.

                I shall leave the cards spread out on the table and return to them, shuffle them, add to them, and see what happens.

                LATER. While I was upstairs changing the bed, and other household chores, ideas came, out of the blue – ideas that would connect up right through the plot, from beginning to end.  So I went back down to the kitchen, wrote out more cards, and put them in place.

                Right!  Now for the Sterkarms.  I emailed my rough draft to my kindle, but wasn’t sure how  to manage the note-taking and mapping, as my kitchen table was covered with index cards.  Decided to use large tray on which I usually carry breakfast up to bed when my partner stays over.  That means the cards can stay on the table undisturbed, and I can do beat-sheet work on my sofa, with tray.

                LATER.  Am knocking off work at 8pm, but have reached chapter 8, having great fun writing in different colours for different characters and – as Roz Morris suggests – drawing little happy faces for happy parts and little shocked faces for shocking parts, and exclamation marks to show surprises.  Have drawn little red hearts for romantic bits.  Have already noted places where chapters should be divided into two, or joined together.  Am beginning to get head round the time sequence – a bit.  But so far am working with the fairly well worked first half of book.  Later on it’s going to be much harder.  But that’s for another day. 

          Tomorrow will have to answer emails, do admin for Authors Electric, cook and other boring things.  But the cards will still be spread out on my table, for shuffling; and it will all be mulling and brewing in my head.
          I'm glad to have made a start at last.

NAILING THE STERKARMS

coloured pens bought especially to nail my novel

          Now February is here, I have to start thinking about rewriting Sterkarm 3.

          Throughout January I’ve been able to think: Oh, rewriting is the best part!  Rewriting is fun!  The wearisome slog of trudging through a first draft is over!  Rewriting is where you make real progress with a book.

          Yeah – but soon I’m going to have to DO it, which is something else again.  I shall have to confront all those clumsy, clichéd, or unbelievable passages which make you want to go out into the garden and bury yourself.  But, instead, I shall have to try and decide what to do about them.

Just to annoy Madwippet

          I shall have to hunt out all those scenes which I really liked and where I really captured something or other – but which don’t do anything for this book.  And make myself get rid of them.

          And I’m up for it, I absolutely am.  I’ve done it before.  I’ve even enjoyed it.  I’m keen to start, honest.  But dreading it too.  It’s equal and opposites forces – as much as I’m jittery and dancing with eagerness to start, there’s an equally powerful feeling that says: Not yet, not yet.  Wait for it, wait for it!

          I want to wait until I just can’t NOT start.  That’s always worked for me in the past, whether rewriting or starting something new.

          I’m keen to start rewriting for another reason – though wait for it, wait for it – and that’s because I’ve decided to try something new.  New to me, anyway.  Partly out of curiosity and partly out of desperation, I’ve been reading Roz Morris’ 'Nail Your Novel', as I mentioned last week.  I've finished it now, and I remain impressed.  So impressed that I’m going to try the methods she suggests, both for rewriting Sterkarm 3 and for outlining ‘the next big thing’ my agent wants.  I’ve already bought the cards and coloured pens.

Roz Morris

          Now quite often, when I’ve read ‘How-To’ books on writing before, I’ve thought, ‘What a load of faff.  I’ve never done anything like that in 35 years of writing, nor am I ever likely to bother.’ 

          And to be brutally honest, I more than half expected to think the same of Nail Your Novel.  Instead, I was impressed by the down-to-earth practicality of its advice.  I read it thinking: ‘Good idea!  And, yes, I can see the sense in doing that.’  It doesn’t  tell you to complete the exercises at the end of each chapter (does anybody,ever?), or spend twenty minutes each day writing about nothing, or to meditate.

          Instead Roz offers a very clear method – she calls it a ‘beat-sheet’ – of mapping your books strengths and weaknesses, evaluating them, editing them, and shuffling what's left into the best possible order.  Instead of thinking, ‘What a faff,’ I got excited because I could see very clearly how I could make practical use of her method.  It was a sort of super-charged, better thought-out version of methods I’d already stumbled into myself without ever giving much actual thought to what I was doing.

          So I'm going to use Roz’s ‘beat sheet’ approach to tackling the Sterkarms.  See her book for details, but it involves the afore-mentioned coloured pens and sheets of paper.  And a time-line, which I feel in desperate need of.  I shall report back on how it goes.  And also on the plotting of ‘the next big thing’, for which I shall use the cards and another of Roz’s methods.

          I am feeling quite excited to be trying something new.  But
I’m still not quite ready to start.  Wait for it, wait for it -

          Roz Morris' NAIL YOUR NOVEL can be found here.

          Roz blogs here, and on Authors Electric.


          And I've just published HEAD AND TALES as an e-book, revised and with notes added.

          In ancient myth, the severed head stood for Wisdom.  In story after story, the severed head speaks and gives counsel.

          A sick man, a story-teller, dying in a work-camp, fears for the children he’ll leave behind in a harsh world.

          His last wish is that his head be cut off, and carried by his children on their long walk home to the grandmother they have never seen.

          When they are tired, despairing, threatened, the head opens its eyes – and tells stories.  Words have power.  Stories can be spells.

          Here are the stories the head tells…

          And here's Blott  - 

     

IN SEARCH OF ZOOT

un-zooty looking spider-kids

          In between books is not a good place to be for a writer.

          I’m glad to have finished the first draft of Sterkarm 3 at last, but I have to let it brew before I start rewriting it, and in the meantime I don’t know what to do with myself.

          So I’ve started to think about the next book, and, because it’s going to be set in the future, I’m in search of zoot.  My brother – the cover-artist brother, not the Blott-drawing brother – introduced me to Zoot.  He’s a science-fiction reader (and writer) and zoot is something he looks for.  If a sci-fi book or film doesn’t have enough zoot, he’s disappointed.

The latest cover, in rough

          What is Zoot?  It’s one of those things that’s quite hard to define, though you know it when you find it.  I gather that it means something outrageous, surprising and imagination-stretching.

          It’s a science-fiction thing.  Now, I love fantasy and ghost stories, but they aren’t zooty.  Even when they’re scary, even horrific, they’re not zooty.  There’s a hard-edge to zoot.  It has circuit boards and shiny cases, perhaps even wi-fi.  It’s often astonishing, but not mysterious.

           Space-elevators are zooty.  Huge mirrors orbiting Mars, to reflect sunlight onto the planet's surface and terraform it - they're very zooty.

          The up-dated Dr. Who is often quite zooty.  The BBC’s wonderful, modern day ‘Sherlock’, with its text messaging and forensics, brims with zoot.  It’s not just the science and gadgets: it’s the audacity and panache.  In fact, zoot may be a kind of science-flavoured chutzpah.

          So far, I’ve got a few characters, and a future setting.  I’m going to set up some notes files for characters,backgrounds and ideas (because my head-space is already getting crammed.)  I shall use navigation pane (or document map) so I can leap about in the files, from note to note.

          And I’m on the hunt for zoot.  I aspire to it, though I don't know if I can bring it off.

A genetically engineered, flourescent cat. I want one!  It wouldn't get run down in the dark!

          I watched that Horizon programme the other night, the one about the spider-goats.  Spider-goats, I feel, definitely have a touch of zoot.  As do yeast colonies that produce diesel fuel. From, if I understood correctly (I was thinking of spider-goats at the time) the grease on the surface of apples.

          I’ve also been reading Roz Morris’ NAIL YOUR NOVEL.  She has nothing to say about zoot (at least not as far as I’ve read), but she has some great ideas for working out and shaping plots.  I’m always willing to give something new a go.

      Last week’s suggestions for the rewrite of Sterkarm 3 were gratefully noted. If anyone has any zoot - ?

          And, as I reach the end of January as fat as I began it, here's a timely Blott -