HearWriteNow

A while ago I wrote about setting myself the ridiculously tiny goal of 100 words a day on my WIP, with the view that an extremely achievable daily goal leads to a momentum of success. I’m not exactly sure what went wrong: I suspect it was a combination of a two-year break between setting the book down and picking it up again; of not having an established voice for the second protagonist yet attempting to continue the story in her voice anyway; not having a deadline and goal to work towards that I could see being ticked off daily; and not recording my progress.

Discovering I was pregnant again led initially to a panic over how much I had to do before the end of the year, especially since I’d just pre-launched my Storyteller project. Then came the shedding of all work that was not owed to people who’d already paid me or was otherwise essential for some reason. And finally the realisation that what I wanted most of all was permission to shelve the “trilogy-into-standalone” headache and achieve something completely new before the baby is born.

Sixty-five days ago I worked out how many days I had available to me and calculated how many words I would have to write per day in order to complete a first draft of around forty thousand words. It came out at a seemingly do-able 270 words per day – but only if I wrote every single day until the end of November. Weekends usually prove tricky, as do various days during the week due to activities or other reasons. I realised I would have to make a small amount of writing a priority early on in the day, rather than count on my toddler’s nap time after lunch, when I usually felt keen for a nap myself.

I started with 100 words, with the “rule” of no Internet or email until I’d hit that target. On a few occasions that meant only turning on Firefox at 10PM. Soon I was reaching my bigger target of 270+ words at least a few days in a row. Right now my stats are: 65 days in a row of writing at least 100 words on my WIP; 290 words average across all 65 days; 20 days in a row of hitting my bigger target. I’m two-thirds of the way to the apparent habit-forming 90-day mark. It already feels like a habit. The nicest part of it was when I gave myself permission to make this work important enough that it trumped almost everything else. It makes morning thinking very easy: not “should I do X higher-paying work first or Y work that I am really behind on”, but straight to the same novel every single day, with a slight frisson of guilt over the reckless luxuriousness of it. It feels a bit illicit, like I shouldn’t be enjoying it this much.

The other side-effect is that Internet fora, blog commenting, Facebook, email newsletters, and Internet marketing videos have all gradually lessened their appeal and addictiveness. Previously I would risk morning sickness because I simply had to check email/ Facebook/ Forum responses, etc, before anything else, including breakfast. I developed that habit because it was easier to sit and read or watch something while breastfeeding than to write (although pecking out a blog comment or forum response with one hand became second nature). Now I enjoy breakfast with my toddler first, while watching the birds in the garden, and then I sit down to write – and my child’s now old enough to (sometimes grudgingly) accept that I’m doing something that’s important to me and he will get milk after I’ve written my minimum hundred words. It’s not a big ask of him, but it makes me feel like I’m more than “just a mum”. I feel in control again.

I’m finding the new “walkthrough” feature of the writing career development course I’m doing extremely useful and enlightening, in particular the student “Hotseats” where a student of the course gets to brainstorm through a particular problem they are having. Recently someone had the exact same issue I’ve faced multiple times: you’ve got a great idea for a story – perhaps you’ve even started writing it – and then, whaddya know, you read someone else’s book, or watch a movie or TV show, and there’s your story smirking back at you.

I’m convinced my so-called muse got fed up with me a few years ago and packed up and astro-travelled to Hollywood where she’s happily providing the scriptwriters of the StarGate shows with all my ideas. I’ve scrapped a good half-dozen ideas after seeing them realised on that franchise.

Now I know I needn’t have hit delete after all. As disconcerting as it is to discover that other writers have a similar thought process to you, it’s important to realise that almost all of our ideas are derivative. There are only thirty-three thirty-seven dramatic plot strand definitions around which a plot-based story can be constructed.

The solution to the dilemma of writing something that turns out to be similar to another story that you may not even have read or know about is characterisation. It is your characters who make your story unique. Give your characters strong, convincing motivations and allow your plot to move fluidly based on the actions of the characters. It is your unique perspective that shapes your characters (even if they’re nothing like you) and therefore your story will be unique if you put character first and plot second.

Luckily I saved some of my favourite characters from the stories I scrapped and found a new story for them to drive. But going forward I’ll be less inclined to panic and delete when I discover someone else has already used my idea.

Sometimes, with the sheer amount of procrastination I manage to fit into each day, I wonder if the universe will have to resort to extreme measures to get me to take action. I hope not. Yet, I can’t help but be inspired by people who have been dealt a raw deal and still manage to get up (figuratively only, for many of them) and push (literally) themselves to success.

A few weeks ago I wrote about a silly reality TV show I was watching called Britain’s Missing Top Model. The show was silly, but the lovely women competing for the title were anything but. I was convinced wheelchair-bound Sophie Morgan would win the show, sitting as she was head and shoulders above the other contestants in terms of perspective and political ambition. She didn’t win, unfortunately, but she didn’t let that stop her.

What the show didn’t reveal about Sophie is that she is an artist, with, I think, an enormous amount of talent. She’s used her stint on this reality show to launch her career in fine art and design.

But it was the pictures of Sophie trekking the Himalayas that really floored me. Here’s a woman who’s prepared to try and accomplish anything she sets her mind to, and somehow she’ll find a way around the obstacles. And have a fabulous time doing it.

At the end of this post I’ve embedded a video of Sophie speaking at a TED event in Canada.

Another remarkable person I’ve come across recently is Sean Stephenson, author of Get Off Your But. At that first link you can watch a video of one of Sean’s motivational talks and it’s well worth it. Sean was born with osteogenesis imperfecta, is three feet tall, and in a wheelchair.

So. My “But” at the moment is having to wait until after lunch, when my son has his nap, before I can really get stuck in to any writing. You know that time of day – slump time. The last thing I feel like doing is concentrating; that nap is looking good. A few years ago I made an accidental discovery that a really excellent time of day for me to write is first thing in the morning, before I do anything else, before I’ve even properly woken up. I’m finding it hard to let go of that now. I’m woken up by a bouncy toddler every morning and that’s my attention taken up until lunch, and as much as I would love to sit down and write it’s just not going to happen in the morning.

So here I am sitting bleary-eyed at nearly 11PM, going back to my previous “best” time to write: late at night. But I’m also hoping I can embrace the midday writing hour more fully and find some way to be really productive during that time that my child magically gives me to myself each day. After all, I’d really like to be sleeping right now. Good night.

Please welcome David Baboulene, author of The Story Book, to HearWriteNow. Over the past few days David and I have enjoyed a very interesting email conversation about some points that his book raised for me. We’ve now formalised our discussion, and we’d both be delighted if you’d comment and share your perspective on any of the issues here, or ask any questions you may have.

Elle: Some stories, and propaganda in particular, have been used to shape the opinions and cultural identity of one group at the expense of another, or, vice versa, to teach one group to accept their (inferior) “place” in the societal hierarchy. Do you think it is possible to write new stories to readdress these ideas, and eventually replace the old subtext, or would society as a whole first have to reach awareness and rejection of old stories?

David: The short answer is yes, absolutely, new stories can and do engender new behaviours, values and social dynamics (not simply reflect them) and no, society doesn’t have to reject the old stories first. It’s a natural and ongoing evolution, and it’s pulled forwards into the future by writers.

Most people think stories reflect our society, but they do a much, much greater job in driving our society. If you envisage the story teller as the teacher, who has been through a learning experience and wishes to communicate it, and the reader as the pupil, learning a life lesson from the protagonist’s experience, the opportunity is there for the author to have a profound effect on the readers’ understanding of life and his or her subsequent behaviours. And the most common and significant of the moral messages and metaphors that are important to society are repeated many times and in many stories and in many guises, so they become reinforced throughout our lives. That is why stories are always about human values – safety, family, friendship, economic security, a sense of belonging, status, sex and relationships, societal success and so on.

Stories are the most powerful tool of teaching and learning, because we learn both emotionally and analytically at the same time when we absorb a story. Our brains work in story structures and story processes, so a well told story can deliver experiential messages we think we thought for ourselves. This is extremely powerful – that is why all religions are delivered in story form (and thereby align communities in values and behaviours), and why the pen is mightier than the sword!

Elle: To me, this really hits home the importance for an author to take great responsibility for her or his writing. So many messages could be passed on inadvertently simply due to the author having certain opinions and beliefs. As I mentioned, my current project involves offering alternative fairytales to a group of parents who are appalled at the subtext of the Brothers Grimm and Disney versions. But I have to be certain that my “agenda” here is something I’ve looked at critically and objectively and taken responsibility for. It’s not a decision to be made lightly.

Thanks to Grimm and Disney, the concept of a character successfully completing certain expected behaviours and being “rewarded with a princess” (in fairytales and adventure stories), or “the man of her dreams” in romance novels and chick-lit, seems to be very entrenched in our society. Do you think this makes it difficult to sell stories that don’t follow this “rule”, or even actively try to break this rule?

David: This is a great question. The stories that resonate most powerfully with a reader/viewer are the ones that address the conflicts in the mind of the individual at that time. That is why a children’s story can leave a child breathless and yet bore the adult reading it, and a vampire romance that has the teens swooning leaves the parents rolling their eyes. That is also why stories that are ‘of a time’ often fail to grip when the society generally no longer has any dilemma with the core conflicts being addressed.

Cowboy movies are about the basic safety and security of a town and community. We no longer fear on a daily basis that our towns and villages will be taken over by bandits, so these stories tend not to engage and have all but disappeared. In the 1940s and 50s it was all war movies, of course, as these stories resonated with the generation who were trying to contend with these issues. In the 60s and 70s it was all about love stories, coupling up and a sense of belonging in groups and couples; often resolving with the happy couple off down the aisle to live happily ever after. Marriage is no longer the pinnacle of relationship achievement for the modern generation (indeed, it is generally seen as the beginning of a conflict rather than the end these days!) so Love Story doesn’t chime like it did. Today’s generation are obsessed with personal status, recognition, prestige and 15 minutes of fame. Star Wars was the first story to resolve on this new dynamic: Luke Skywalker didn’t get the princess (shock horror) – he paraded gloriously before his cheering and admiring peers and received status, recognition and prestige as a Jedi Knight. This dynamic heralds a new world. In recent stories, such as Harry Potter, he doesn’t get the girl either – he ends his stories parading gloriously through Hogwarts Banqueting Hall receiving the recognition and adulation of his peers.

You can see that today’s writers aren’t satisfied by having a hero win a Barbie princess, or a heroine define herself by finding the man of her dreams. Plotlines are often about the battle of the sexes, but they tend increasingly to resolve through active demonstration of mutual earned respect. This said, we have a long way to go before women are represented appropriately.

There will ALWAYS be a place f