This week NaNoWriMo just won’t stop being a thing people talk about, so I join in and pimp my own NaNoRelated offering. Finishing stuff turns out to be important. But you might still suck. Characters should have their own voices, and keep out of each others brains. Unless that’s a plot point. It turns out not buying books can be a creative act, cyclists are bad and getting your bits squeezed can improve your eyesight. Now read on.
While I was over at Write It Sideways, I garnered a link to this superb post by Alexandra Sokoloff. The take away message? Focus on finishing, people. Don’t be discouraged if the quality isn’t there first time round. It almost never is.
At some point you will come to hate what you’re writing. That’s normal. That pretty much describes the process of writing. It never gets better. But you MUST get over this and FINISH. Get to the end, and everything gets better from there, I promise. You will learn how to write in layers, and not care so much that your first draft sucks. Everyone’s first draft sucks. It’s what you do from there that counts.
Which is one of the most liberating lessons you can learn about writing, isn’t it? That however dreadful your work seems to you now, it still might, in the end, turn out to be something rather wonderful. As long as you finish the draft. And then revise and rewrite, obsess and sweat blood. Of course, it might just be completely unsavably bad. Unfortunately you have to finish to find out either way.
Charlie Jane Anders of io9 looked at some tricks to give your characters different voices. This includes some lovely pulp SF imagery, with lots of scanty clothes barely clinging to pointy body parts. The post does not include a trick a teacher told me, though. Which is to build a vocabulary of words for a character. And to add to it as you write.
And while we’re considering the right words for our characters Stephanie Doyon had a reminder about point of view for us. It’s easy to slip from the mind of a POV character into thoughts and sensations only another character might have access to. Unless your narrator is omniscient, you’ll want heed Stephanie’s advice and watch out for POV creep.
One day author and publisher Susan Hill was searching for a book, Howard’s End, in fact, in her farmhouse. Her hunt took her past many unread or long neglected books. So she resolved to stop buying books for a year, and to explore instead the books on her own shelf. The result, Howard’s End is on the Landing was reviewed this week in The Guardian by Ian Pindar. The review conjured a sense of cosy literary Englishness, which to me is like one of those idylls that never were, but that cannot be killed. As I consider moving back to England, I have to remind myself that myths like this are just that. Pindar is also good at pricking the illusion, and reminding us that there is a certain insular safeness to it all:
This might have been a smug and indulgent book, but Hill manages to keep it charming, aided by the quality of her writing. Her legion of fans will love it; the rest of us might also enjoy its gently whimsical, self-effacing tone, even if, lurking beneath, are the steely prejudices of Middle England.
And to wrap up, two pieces in The London Review of Books caught my eye. The first is an enjoyably ambivilent review by Daniel Soar of both Sebastian Faulks’ latest novel, A Week in December, and the work for which he’s best known.
I find it embarrassing to admit that I can take seriously a writer who disguises inventive thinking in spy capers and gun-plots, or, like Patricia Highsmith, in the simplest murders, whereas I can only laugh at someone of comparable cleverness who’s into chemises and silk shifts. Formally, there shouldn’t be a difference. It’s a genre: games are played with it. But historical romance isn’t, on the face of it, the hippest of modes to be stuck with…
Incidently I was dismayed to learn, at least by implication, that Faulks must join the ranks (actually just Howard Jacobson, to my knowledge) of British authors who think that cyclists are a scourge (rather than the environment-saving, street-reclaiming force for good they actually are).
The second piece is a dark but fascinating tour by Colm Tóibín of Blake Bailey’s Cheever: A Life. If that sounds dry, I’ll leave you with this quote from the review:
Since Cheever took the view that sexual stimulation could improve his eyesight, part of Max’s function, once their affair began, was to offer the same comfort as a good pair of spectacles might have. (When driving at night, Cheever used to ask his wife to fondle his penis ‘to a bone’.) ‘Whenever Max submitted a manuscript,’ Bailey writes, ‘Cheever would first insist that the young man help “clear [his] vision” with a handjob; then (as Max noted in his journal) Cheever would ‘take my story upstairs and come back down with a remote look of consternation on your face and with criticisms so remote they only increase my confusion’.
UPDATE: I forgot to mention that Paul Anderson posted on the decline of Halloween. And I posted an uncharacteristically jolly comment that described some of the trick and treating here in San Francisco. If it makes you feel any better, I was duly punished for my holiday cheer when I almost immediately contracted an extremely painful ear infection that dogs me even now.
