Torn Between Four Novels

 Wendall -- every other Thursday

I’m stuck.

 

For 35 years, I’ve believed that you have to write every day. And I have. Not always well, but I realized early on that if I showed up every day, then every third or fourth day I might write something worthwhile. I couldn’t just wait for the worthwhile days—they didn’t come without the worthless ones.

 

I even wrote every morning while I was traveling. Here's my favorite spot in Brisbane.

 

I’ve always tried to start every morning, early, to be sure I got my writing done before I started in on my full time job—teaching and lecturing on screenwriting and helping other writers figure out their voices and their stories.

 

Finally, I guess the burden of trying to think for myself and help so many others at the same time has gotten the better of me.

 

It feels a little bit like being on the tea cups ride at Disneyland, spinning around and dizzy in the same place. . .

 

I seem to be paralyzed with indecision about what to write next. So, I am trying to get my mojo back by doing my favorite part of the writing process—research. Of course, since I am researching four projects at once, it’s also possible I’m making the problem worse.

 

I love research, probably too much. I remember doing my first research project ever, in fourth grade, on the history of Hawai’i. I can still remember how much I loved learning about Queen Liliʻuokalani and, as my education continued, and the libraries got bigger and more beautiful, the delights of learning about things and places that were new to me has never really gotten old.

 

The Wilson Library and Archive at my alma mater, The University of North Carolina.

 

I can honestly say I have spent some of my happiest days ever in libraries, and my particular delight in working in the Humanities Reading Room in the British Library wound up informing two major subplots in my novel, Fogged Off.

 

The exterior of the "new" British Library.

 

The Humanities Reading Room.

Even though we are lucky to have the internet for research, I still prefer doing it in person, with primary sources, surrounded by real books, documents, and photos and making at least some of my notes by hand, in a proper notebook. Of course, all my old notebooks don’t have a convenient “search” function, but I always learn something by going back through them.

 

Some of my favorite Edwardian headlines.

 

A real life trial I'm drawing from.

 

My "inspired by" real life advocate's office in the Inns of Court.

 

Here are a few more documents, books, and photos for my current(?) projects.

 

My aunt at NBC Radio City in Los Angeles in 1942.

And at the Brown Derby.

One of my favorite books on 40s LA.

Something else that's bubbling.

I'm doing research on Paris, both on 19th century ex-pats. . .

 

And in 2006/2007. . .

Aquarium de Paris.

And, of course, on some of its inhabitants.

Wish me luck!!!

---Wendall

What comes next? Handling writer's block

Zoë Sharp

I wrote a post about writer’s block about seven years ago, but as it’s a condition that does not improve with time—or age, alas—I thought it was well worth revising and revisiting.

 

Up until a few years ago, I would never have considered that I suffered from writer’s block. I still view my work as a craft not an art, and whilst I always strive to become a better craftsperson/crafter/more crafty, that doesn’t mean I can get away with sitting around waiting for the muse to strike. Putting arse in chair and putting fingers on keyboard generally works for me. This is a job, after all, no longer a hobby. As Lee Child famously once said, lorry drivers don’t get lorry driver’s block—they simply get up in the morning, get in their lorry, and drive.

 

In the past I thought of writer’s block as being a dreadful case of staring at a blank page and not being able to get a word down. But according to the online definitions, it can go much further than that. It also covers being able to write, but being convinced that everything you produce is utter rubbish.

If that’s the case, I’m a chronic sufferer. 

One of the best blogs I ever came across on the subject was penned by Charlie Jane Anders going back ten years ago. In it, she explored the different types of creative shutdown that form WB, and how to overcome them. The blog itself is well worth reading, but here are the highlights:

You can’t come up with an idea

This has never been my problem. I have so many novel ideas they’re falling out of my ears. Unless, of course, we’re talking about blog ideas, or short story ideas, and then yes, I do stare holes in the walls. These days, if I’m stuck I try writing up any kind of scene for which I have half an idea, regardless if it might fit with a current project or not. The CJA blog recommends you do a ton of exercises to get your creative juices flowing, from writing a random scene in which somebody dies, or falls in love, to writing a scathing satire of someone you hate. (Of course, just be careful not to accidentally email this one out to your writing class buddies…)

 

You have plenty of ideas, but none of them seem to go anywhere

This is a tougher one to get around and I admit to it being an issue with me. Until I have the starting point of a story of any kind nailed down I feel I can’t proceed further. CJA suggests working out the purpose of a project—that the novel idea you’re losing a grip on is actually a short story, for instance—which may rescue it. Saving them for a later date is often the only thing you can do, and come back to them later—and by that she means sometimes years later—when any reservations surrounding them have had time to disperse. Instead, look round for something fresh. If your creative mind is working so hard on reasons to reject the current crop, the chances are it will soon produce something that works here and now.

 

 

You can’t make progress even though you have an outline

This always happens when I’m in the middle of a novel. I’ve carefully worked out my outline beforehand, but there will always be sticky bits, and they’re usually where things have got a little vague. I tend to think of working from an outline as like driving along a road at night. Your headlights are on and you can see the road immediately in front of you in stark detail, but beyond that things are hazier. You know ultimately where the road leads, but that doesn’t mean a deer isn’t going to leap into your path, or an oncoming driver will career into your lane and you have to be prepared to react to that. If I’m trying to shove a story forwards and it won’t go, there’s usually a good reason. The best bits—to my mind at least—are the ones that arrived easily and fast.
 
CJA points out there could be a couple of reasons for getting stuck in this way. Either your outline has a major flaw and you won’t admit it, or there’s nothing whatsoever wrong with your outline, but you just can’t see a way of getting from one high-point to the next. In either case, she suggests going off on a bit of a tangent and seeing what happens.
 

 

You have no idea what happens next

This can quite often happen if the night before I didn’t stop writing until my forehead kept nudging the space bar. The next morning I’ll open up the document and discover that not only have I stopped in mid-sentence—occasionally in mid-word—but I have no idea where I was going with it. Sometimes the bulk of the previous paragraph makes very little sense either, but that’s another thing altogether. This is why I try never to end the day’s work at the end of a scene or chapter, so I do know what’s supposed to happen next when I pick up the thread again, and I re-read the previous day’s scribblings as well to get me back up to speed. CJA suggests, if you’re really stuck, to have something unexpected happen. To have Huck and Jim take a wrong turn on the river and get lost, or to drop a grand piano on someone. Or, as Chandler would say, to have a man walk into the room with a gun.
 

You think your story took a wrong turn waaay back, but it’s only finally come to a head now

This is terrible. I mark progress on a book by the cumulative total of words and having to throw away some of those words because you’ve wandered down a literary cul-de-sac just throws the whole project out of whack. To quote some old phrase: there’s no harm in turning back if you’re on the wrong road. That’s not to say it doesn’t hurt, but don’t throw any of that excised chunk away. The chances are it might come in handy for something else further down the line. You just might not be absolutely sure what that is yet. CJA suggests that you miss a section and carry on from the point you feel you should have been at, had you not decided to deviate in the first place, leaving the missing part to be filled in later. As someone who frequently writes out of sequence—many’s the epilogue I’ve written before the rest of the book—this would work for me.

 

You’re bored with the characters

Here CJA and I deviate because she suggests that perhaps this is because you haven’t worked out who your main protagonist is yet, and you’ve been concentrating on someone who’s a minor character. CJA’s advice is that sometimes you have to find the knife before you can twist it, and therefore writing a dozen pages or so of nothing-much-happening will help you get inside the world you’re creating and possibly also discover whose voice grabs you hard enough to make it obvious they should be the main character rather than a bit-part player. 
 
When I was writing only the Charlie Fox series, I was never in any doubt who was the main protagonist. But since then I’ve written more third-person, multiple-viewpoint narratives. The latest Blake & Byron books focus on two main characters, but with various scenes from other viewpoints. These characters are important to that particular story, but who may (or may not) reappear in the next book.
 
The best advice I ever received on this front was to make everybody count. Imagine Hollywood is turning your book into a movie, and a bit-part actor has just been cast in only one short scene, in which he/she is questioned by your hero/she-ro. I want that actor to be delighted with the part, rather than reading glumly through their lines and thinking, ‘ah well, it pays the rent…’
 
The scenes I’ve just been working on are a case in point. My detective, Byron, needs to question a possible witness at a motorway service station. The witness turns out to be a female truck driver from Glasgow, who is a reformed drug addict and spends her downtime reading Dostoevsky. What’s not to like?

 

You keep imagining all the reasons why people are going to hate your work

CJA describes this as your Inner Critic—you can’t make choices because you keep imagining how someone on goodreads or Amazon will tear you apart for it later. The Inner Critic, she says, has its place during revision, but during the first draft stage is better drowned out with some Finnish death metal. I’d agree with this, but at the same time I tend to self-edit as I go along, and therefore I don’t rush a first draft onto the page with the thought that I can correct any problems at the second/third/fourth draft phase. But, this is just me. I know everyone writes in their own way and therefore I do give sneaky house room to my Inner Critic during the first draft. I just try not to let it paralyse me to the point where I can’t get anything down. Reading over and over what I’ve written previously, trying to refine and improve it, always helps.

 

 

The Difficult Third Quarter

Here I’m deviating completely from CJA’s list to add a few of my own. The Difficult Third Quarter—DTQ—is one of my constant bugbears when I write. The first quarter of the novel I’m racing into the story, introducing the players and asking more questions of the reader than I’m answering. The second quarter is for some answers, followed by more questions and a few red herrings. But the DTQ is when you have to start pulling the threads together. Pull them too tight, too soon and the ending falls flat. Don’t pull them tight enough and you’ll be left with too much explanation to do in the final chapter. Unless you write the kind of books where the detective settles everyone down in the drawing room for the big reveal, this is something to avoid.

 

 

So, my question this week is do you suffer from writer’s block and if so what do you do to combat it?

 

This week’s Word of the Week is carking, meaning anxiety, worry, a burden on the mind or spirit. It comes from the Anglo-French karke, from the Old North French carche, charge—a variant of load, burden, imposition.

A Writer's Lament, Revised

Sujata Massey

A ragged, handwritten sign has been taped to my study wall for about a year.

I love this job!

A quarter-century ago, I was working full-time in university public relations and desperately longed to be a fiction writer. It seemed like an impossible dream, to stay home all day and use as much of it as I wanted for fiction. I thought I'd use each day to the fullest and greet my husband every evening with a smile and a reports of many pages written.

As the saying goes, be careful what you wish for.

I did leave that job, and began writing full-time at the age of thirty-two. And here I am, twenty-two years later, in the same job, but with the rose-colored glasses removed. With the sale of my first book came a lifestyle where I pretty much always have a deadline. It's a lifestyle in which I can work every day but never be finished.

When I'm struggling with a chapter that's going slowly,  it's hard to remember that I once longed to be in this place. In a writing day--for me, that's three to four hours--I write 500 to 1000 words, when in the old days, I could do 3000-4000. Is it because my brain has fewer cells? Probably.  Tat and the fact I'm writing historical mysteries, which make dashing off scenes and casual conversations more of a complex effort.

I am grateful to be published, and I love meeting readers and understand that my books are a fun escape for them. I wish I wasn't looking for my own escapes within my writing day--activities like cooking, reading, napping, aqua aerobics, yoga, walking, lunch with a friend. Actually, all of these are healthy things to do. But they are methods evading the hard business of thinking, which is Part A of writing. That's the worst thing about writing--thinking up the sentences that I consider worthy of keeping rather than deleting. Sometimes, I feel as inexperienced and awkward as before I was even published.

A lot of writers say that they enjoy "having written" more than the writing itself. But I think that if I want to keep going at this ten or twenty more years, I'd better start enjoying the writing more. It would mean closing my laptop and moving on to dinner and evening activities in an upbeat mood,rather than a frustrated one.

We want the life that is just beyond us. Perhaps the idea of escape is something I can work with.


 What if I reversed my thinking what my responsibilities are? Could I tell myself that I am working full-time again--but for needy dogs and people? What if the act of writing could be transformed into a kind of sanctuary? It would mean pretending that I didn't have a deadline.

Okay, I'm game.
From this point forward, I am doing things that make it seem more like that. If I want to write snuggled up in bed for a couple of hours, I will allow myself to do that.

There is beautiful sunlight in my third floor study in the mornings, and that's when I want to be there. Only then. On dark mornings,  I can sit in my dining room and look straight across the hallway to the gas fireplace and two sweet dogs napping nearby.

Then there are times I am restless and know I will wind up in the kitchen making toast. In that case, I will pack my laptop, drive five minutes, and sit among the students in the Eisenhower library at Johns Hopkins University, where I was once a student.


Moving on from place to page. One strategy is to approach my work with curiosity. Surprises will come as I discover the story that was waiting all along.Why don't I play with words rather than task myself with hammering them out? Can I try to enjoy my characters as if they're in a film (or a really terrific BBC historical miniseries) playing before my eyes? Does the line of dialog I've written truly show anger, humor, or tenderness?

Being mindful about writing could make the process feel more like pleasure reading. Which is what it's all about, isn't it?

The bush

When I tell non-Africans that I am going to the bush, I suspect they either have no clue what I mean or they think I am going on a glamorous safari, watching herds of zebra and wildebeest galloping across vast plains, cheetah and lions in pursuit.  Where dinner is served on white table linens with umbrella-tree acacias in silhouette against a fiery, setting African sun.

The truth is different – at least for me.

Yes, going to the bush usually includes early-morning drives in an open game vehicle or late afternoon trips with various stops for sundowners –gins and tonic or chilled sauvignon blanc, or cold beer, accompanied by trout or liver pâté on water crackers.  Sometimes there is a night drive to try and spot nocturnal animals - honey badgers, civet, genet, and porcupine, and, if lucky, leopard or hunting lions.

Even vultures like an evening snack - in this case the remains of an impala

The surviving impala take a much needed drink.  Note: this is only part of one male impala's harem!

If you are like me, drives also call for time spent identifying some of the amazing birdlife South Africa has to offer.  I am over 100 species on this trip in four days.  There are potentially another 200 or 300 still to find.

Lilac-breasted roller

African Fish Eagle

These trips are wonderful, often punctuated by things one has never seen before, even after 50 years of visits.  Like this morning.  We were up early – 5 a.m. – and set off after a quick cup of coffee.  At about 6 a.m., we saw two hyenas walking into a small pond – aptly named Hyena Pan.  One – the female - took a quick swim, then retreat to the edge of the water.  The other spent the next fifteen minutes, not only swimming, but submerging itself completely for up to ten seconds at a time.  Was it just having fun?  Or had it evolved a way to catch sleepy barbell (catfish) on the bottom.  Whatever the motivation, it was a magical episode.

Spotted hyena coming up for air after diving

To add icing to the cake, the female (which is normally larger than the male) walked up to our open Land Rover, stopped two metres away, and stared at us.  It was a little disconcerting, but as it wasn’t licking its lips or drooling, I wasn’t worried.  I actually think that hyenas (one of my favorite animals) like companionship, and often hang around humans for that reason.  However, I’m not tempted to stick out my hand and tickle them.  They have the most powerful jaws of any animal.

It was so close, I could have touched it

We also were closely watched by a very big bull elephant with 2 metre tusks.  We watched it bathing in (surprisingly) Zebra Pan, spraying muddy water over itself to cool off and to rid itself of goggas (insects).  It then wandered over toward our Landie, stopped three or four metres in front of us, and just stared.  Normally I leave an escape route in such situations – in case - but it was so close I couldn’t maneuver.  So we sat quietly watching it watching us.  It showed no signs of angst or irritation, so I wasn’t worried, but I have to admit, having five or six tons of elephant that close, standing 3.5 metres at the shoulder, always increases my pulse.

Very close!  Not sure if the elephant is leaning or the photographer.  That's me under the hat.

Keeping a beady eye on us.  Like the eyelashes?

And we've seen and been watched by big herds of buffalo.

Is that a homo sapiens I see over there?

I guess that it is perfectly reasonable for animals to want to watch humans just as much as we want to watch them.

But what I have described is not what “going to the bush” really means for me.  Certainly, animal and bird sightings are wonderful, but it is what the bush does for my psyche that is the real attraction.  

Perhaps addiction is a better word.

It is in the bush where I let my mind just float, rationally and irrationally, reflecting and projecting.  It is where I seek balance and stability.  Professionally and personally.  It is in this most natural of surroundings that I find inspiration and strength.  Being there is what is important – not what one sees.

The bush is where I find peace with myself.

For example, 2012 was a remarkable year for Michael and me.  DEATH OF THE MANTIS won the Barry for Best Paperback Original, and was shortlisted for three other awards, including an Edgar.  And we finished the fourth Kubu mystery, DEADLY HARVEST, which will be released at the end of April. What a lot to celebrate!

On the other hand, the year ended with a big disappointment.  Headline, our UK publisher, decided not to continue publishing Kubu.  So we don't know how Kubu is going to visit all the Commonwealth countries that Headline serviced.

And US sales have hardly been stellar.  Thankfully HarperCollins continues to like Kubu or we might be homeless. 

How does one reconcile great reviews and recognition with meager sales?  It is difficult to do, but the bush is the place to do it.  The bush helps perspective.  It tempers temper.  It grows enthusiasm, and squeezes disappointment into its rightful place, out of sight and mind.

It even helps writers block, from which I have been suffering.  

“What are you complaining about?” the bush asks.  “Why are you worried?”

“But nothing is coming . . .” I respond despondently.  "I can't write anymore."

“Que sera sera,” the bush says, surprising me, as I didn’t know it spoke a foreign language.

“Que sera sera,” it repeats.  “Don’t push it.  It will come if it needs to come.”

Easier said than done, I think.

“Relax,” says bush.  “Relax.  Look what you have already written.  Enjoy that.  Don’t worry about what you haven’t written.”

Easier said than done, I think again.

“Relax!”

So I relax.  Bit by bit.

And my mind opens.  Bit by bit.  And ideas start to flow.

I used to tell my bosses, in the days when I worked, that I should have a month’s continuous vacation a year.  The request was never met with enthusiasm. 

“But,” I would explain, “I never have had a good idea at work, what with meetings and memos and email.  My mind needs space, no pressure, vast horizons to function creatively.” 

“Pshaw,” they would reply. 

“Humph,” I retorted.

Of course I wanted to be in the bush or on the vast plains of Namibia or in the Okavango Delta.  Any place where my mind could go into neutral and expand and seep into places it hadn’t gone before.

No matter what junk is rattling around my head and heart before I arrive in the bush, it is usually back in perspective when I leave.  Inevitably, the same thought is in my head everytime I head back to civilization, namely that I am the luckiest man alive, with enough resources not to struggle, the best of friends, and, most important, good health.  What better thought can one have than that?

So, if anyone asks you to go to the bush, don’t go just for the animals and birds.  It doesn’t actually matter what you see or don’t see.  Go and just be there.  To find perspective.  And the realization that most of what worries us is just our heads trying to make us feel important.

The bush is a great leveler and an agent of calm.  Go there when you can.  And open that can sooner than later.

I'm always available to go with you.

Peace at last

Stan – Thursday, from the bush at Ingwelala (where the leopard sleeps)