Back In The Saddle...

 

I came out to my she-shed for the first time in eleven months this morning - to write. There were Miss Havisham like cobwebs all around my desk and chair. I did battle with them and evicted the spiders before I cleared the desk of ten months of detritus and unread books. Yesterday a visit to my brother and his beautiful family brought me a character –Erica Gilhooley. She is fully formed with a great back story and she has a marvellous tale about An Extraordinary Thing that happened to her family during 2020’s Covidy Christmas. It’s a middle grade book and it is flying out of me.

This is why I write.

This feeling - the buzz you get when a character comes and takes you by the hand on a merry walk. There is NO feeling like it.  It’s better than driving. Better than sex. It’s even better than chocolate! I call this feeling freedom and I think most of us experience it when we do something we love. Something we know we’re good at.  

I laughed out loud twice at my narrator’s cheeky sense of fun in Chapter 1 and the love she shows for her family is second to none. I know no-one else might laugh but I'm having fun with her. This part of the writing process has nothing to do with me and I think many writers will agree. I just sit here and give my characters permission to arrive, to dance from my fingers to the screen. During my eleven-month drought of words I dabbled in picture books and crap poems. My adult prose had dried up completely. I was 35k into a novel and I hated ( understood but hated) one of my characters for his weakness. I’m writing  in various voices and writing his chapters really depresses me. I get so angry with him. I started this novel three years ago and I know it’s not as bad as I think it is. But neither is it as good as I want it to be! I loved writing picture books, they are very hard to write as they are for THE most discerning audience in the world – under 6s and their parents. I have three picture books out circling the globe looking for the right publisher and illustrators. If they ever get to print yiz are all invited to the book launchs!

I started to write around the time my husband took up golf. That is two decades ago. We both needed something to replace pints in our lives! Writing just ‘clicked’ with me – it was liking walking into a room and finding people who finally understood me. Jemser loves the camaraderie of the golf course and being out in the air but he gets totally disillusioned with his game.

 ‘It’s a whoor of a game’ he’ll claim after a bad back nine, tossing his golf clubs aside. This happens regularly. 

I pointed out that even Rory McElroy allowed himself to cry when interviewed about The Ryder Cup 2021. He had a bad day. I bet Ann Enright, John Boyne and other brilliant writers have torn her hair out at times with their characters, having bad days. I read Liz Nugent giving out to her character recently on Twitter when she had written several thousand words and the bitch was still alive!

Writing is a whoor of a hobby. I genuinely feel for published professional authors -each book they launch has to be as good as their previous book. Nothing else (barring kids) has given me so much pleasure and so much frustrated pain. Like The Jemser with his golfclubs I throw writing that isn’t working (I have four half written novels) along with my laptop, pencils, and blank creamy paper aside and wander off to pastures new. 

Mind you it would help if I finished things!

 Losing heart in a project and procrastination are as much a part of writing as rewriting is. It’s certainly true for me. I’m a bit like the Mayo GAA team. At my core I don’t believe in myself – and I HAVE to. If I don’t like what I write then neither could anyone else. The boredom will show on the page. The moments of inspiration and euphoria are brief (and exhausting) and do not replace hard work and application to the craft. I’m easily distracted too and the WorldWideWeb is a curse. I go to research something and end up down a rabbit hole with shag all on the page to show for my day.

 

So.  I’m setting myself targets on this middle grade novel – a minimum of 6000 words a week. If I can do that I will have a first draft in six weeks. Then it’ll go into a drawer. Then rewritten by me and sent to an editor. I use purplecrayonediting for my children’s work and Storyline Literary Agency for adult prose. Both editors are excellent and I highly recommend them.

To aspiring writers -it is worth paying to have your MS edited by a professional before you start submitting. There are millions of books already in the world and every story must earn its place. When I write Erica Gilhooley's world I will read mainly middle grade or YA fiction. It taps into the work. Close reading of the genre you are writing is essential as is reading widely. I have two middle-grade novels on the go at the moment – reading one and listening to another. Reading poetry helps me with the rhythm of sentences and paragraphs. Reading crime is great for plot. Reading other well-written fiction takes my mind off my own characters once I have my word count for the day done. Writers learn from other writers and most importantly from readers. Forget about the market. Write passionately in the voice of your characters. See 'Shuggy Bain', 'Iron Annie' and 'The Catcher in The Rye' for brilliant narrators.

Above all never ever give up. BELIEVE!!

And we're off...

NaNoWriMo and me fingers are blistered from rattling out words already. NaNoWriMo for those of you not in the know is National Novel Writing Month. A couple of students in the States (where else!) started it some years back and you sign up for it and attempt to churn out the bones of a book in a month. So there’ll be no blogging, surfing or Facebooking from me for a while.

November is a great month for it. The clocks have changed, the dark and dismal evenings are in and if you have access to a computer and can carve out a few hours for yourself most days the target of fifty odd thousand words in the month is attainable. Of course a lot of what you write is tripe ( or mine is) and will never last edits. But it is a great way of kickstarting that novel you knew you always had in you.

The bulk of the first draft of my first novel was written during NaNoWriMo 2007, I didn’t sign up last year as I was committed to ghostwriting a book and although I started in 2008 I fell off at the first hurdle!

The commitment to put your behind on a chair and write for a few hours does pay off. I felt a great sense of achievement that first year and went on to finish the novel and polish it up and send it off. It died there but I did it, I wrote a book. Maybe this year’s attempt will pay off. I think this novel may be better as I have two under my belt at this stage and understand narrative flow a little better. I’ll be churning it out anyway and it may join other stuff under the bed or it may not.

If you never write it it’ll never be published so it’s worth a try.

Help! I've lost my mojo.....

Except I don’t actually know what a mojo is and the urban dictionary definition is dodgy. But if I have or had a mojo, a literary mojo, it has gone walkabout without me.

Since I finished the ghost-writing project I was working on I have hit a brick wall. Maybe it’s like the marathon runners ‘wall’ and I just have to grit my teeth through mile 22 and keep on moving. But lads, it’s scary. Sometimes I sit and stare at the blank laptop screen or page of doodles and - nothing - absolutely flippin’ nothing.

The thing that puzzled me most when I started writing was where all the words had been all the years I didn’t write. I felt they were pouring out of me in a torrent, flowing out onto page after page after page. It made me feel invincible; for a little while.

I was in for a wake-up call. Step one was getting over assuming everything I wrote was brilliant and funny and wise and warm and new. Step two was stopping obsessively checking my e-mail for word of competitions I had entered or submissions I had made to publishers who were just waiting for me to grace their establishments with my genius. I still felt invincible, just realistically so. There are thousands of people out there writing, just walk into any bookshop anywhere in the world and see the wide variety of books available. Each one of those books is by an author as committed to their work as I am to mine, most of them suffering the same pangs of doubt as I do.

I look at friends I’ve made over the last five years who have been writing for decades and will probably never see publication at this stage. But they never, ever stopped and never will – because they can’t. They may dry-up as I have for a while but this writing bug seems to be like a virus. Once it’s living in your system it can survive despite being starved on occasions. So all I have to do is wait, doodle, write snippets, journals, blogs anything - just keep giving myself the chance to write.

I’ll let yiz know if when I get my mojo back………

Detox

Just back from a week in the lovely Tyrone Guthrie Centre and although I got a lot of work done I also drank a lot of wine. It is really a very special place and there were lots of wonderful artistic lovely people there, but we were 15 women to one man at one stage!The poor fella - he only turned up to dinner once. I guess there's only so much female babble anyone can handle!

So I'm in the self-inflicted pits of detox - will I ever learn? Rhetorical question of course.

Ghost writing project going well but into panic time now because only 40k words actually down and the rest is on tapes and in notes and may not all be usable. Its due to publisher end of March and I will be glad to see the back of it.

I'm sticking to fiction in future - it's easier to make things up than to try to accurately portray someone's life from their own perspective etc, while still making it interesting for the reader, especially as you can't physically get inside the subject's brain. Does that make sense?

Mind you sticking to fiction will probably mean never being published. Made the longlist for Fish so in top 20% (used different name) but not the shortlsit about 8%. A shortlist of 140 seems a little excessive - I hope they're paying the judge well!!

It is a hellish market out there, particularly in fiction - of which short stories are definitely the poor relations -and I thank God for the day job, because my kids wouldn't eat otherwise. But it is the writing at night that keeps me sane.

Yes I am!!!