Go Build A Tree

I have almost a dozen trees outside my window, the tallest standing at least ten metres high. It struck me, while I was lying on my bed and putting off opening the first draft of Sarai, that a novel is like a tree to me. 

All those thousands of leaves (words?) anchored to their branches (chapters?), which are anchored to the trunk (of plot?), which is supported by strong yet invisible roots (themes!). Who knows how deep they go – the point is they hold the tree up against the harshest storms (of criticism?)*. These trees are calming yet interesting: serene, they have nothing to prove because they're old and know they belong here. 

The novels I love and admire are like these trees: strong, graceful, whole.

And someone telling me to write a novel is basically saying: Go build a tree.

That 'someone' is of course a part of myself. The ambitious part that wants a Jag in my driveway even though I don't drive. 

Go build a tree? It seems a bizarre and unachievable task. I may have a pile of sticks and some half-rotten leaves, but any Frankenstein's monster* I construct out of those bits would look pretty bleak. I couldn't call that odd thing a novel any more than I could call a scarecrow a person. 

I never believed I could write a novel until the 29^th of November last year, when I looked back at my NaNoWriMo attempt and realised I'd written one. Maybe it wasn't just selfish ambition – it'd be nice if Sarai was a bestseller, but even nicer if the people who read it (even if it's just the four poor souls I bribe into beta-reading) would enjoy it. And if they don't? If they give me the stinkeye for wasting their time? It's dangerous for the ego, this whole writing thing. I don't know what's scarier, that the whole thing might fail – or that it might succeed and people would actually expect even more from me next time.

So here I am, with my first-draft monster made of sticks and leaves in front of me, wanting me to bring it to life. I'm rubbing the paddles together and shouting CLEAR, not knowing who I'd like to electrocute more, my novel or myself. 

But maybe if I love it enough to siphon more and more life into it, cutting away the dead bits and supporting the scrawny trunk with one of those little splints you get at the garden centre, it'll start to grow. And maybe once it's finished, a reader I've never even met would download it, fly through it in a day, throw it down and and inexplicably yell, “It's alive!”

*I promise the actual novel doesn't have so many cumbersome mixed, extended flora / zombie metaphors.

Rainbows and smileys and some bad writing.

I ordered business cards from Moo (to be fair, they're baby mini business cards) and as I was browsing through the designs available, my first thought was 'do they have Hello Kitty ones'? Now, you might think nobody who wants Hello Kitty business cards should be allowed to have business cards at all. They should be given printer paper and crayons and sat on a tiny plastic chair. That's what I think, anyway. Maybe it's a symptom of the chronic childishness my generation is trapped in – but screw it. I'm a writer. I'm artsy. I'm whimsical. All the smart, pastel designs seemed boring. I'm a special snowflake, goddamnit.

So I got rainbow business cards. They'll be delivered around Christmas. I'm psyched.

Now, I'm aware that I keep calling myself a writer but please let's not get our wires crossed – this self-imposed label is not some sort of delusional, narcissistic thing. It's an affirmation which I know for a fact is currently false (with the definition of a writer being someone who writes and gets paid and knows how grammar works – see extract below for evidence to the contrary), but which will hopefully become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you're not esoterically-minded, humour me and pretend that an affirmation and a lie are separate things.

I also did something sorta crazy the other day. I've been reading No Country For Old Men and while I'm not mad about the plot, Cormac McCarthy's style just blows me away. When I was still labouring under the delusion that I could mentally handle two years of Masters, I wanted to focus on Cormac McCarthy's novels for my thesis – because The Road is probably my favourite novel of all time. And he's too cool for quotation marks.

So while working on Project: Not A Fanfic, I wrote a whole chapter in a weak impression of McCarthy's style. It turned out to be rather spectacularly bad. Have an extract:

She stood and went outside. It was dark and it had just rained and there were strong winds knotting her hair and raising goosebumps on her skin. The air smelled wet and fresh. The rustle of the wind chewed on the edges of her mind and she pictured a thousand enemies waiting beyond the edge of the darkness for her, breaking twigs and shifting restlessly in the distance waiting impatiently for her to come within reach, within swiping distance.

She shivered, looked at the moon, and went back inside. He asked her what she'd been doing outside. Fresh air, she said. She looked to the ground so he wouldn't see her pupils had become tiny pinpricks in her muddy green eyes.

He said he was going out and that she should have a hole dug by the time he got back. She said how big. He said about six foot long and six deep. It should be easy in this mud.

If she had been sober her stomach would have dropped and her skin would have grown to match the green of her eyes but none of that happened. She nodded and made herself and him a cup of coffee. Most of the time even when he said he wanted coffee he wouldn't drink it. His cup stayed full and a thin brown ring started to stain the cup around the edge where the coffee ended. He packed up his things, real organised, and left. She listened to his truck start and chug dead and start again. She looked at the cup he left behind and downed the lukewarm instant coffee that had a sludge of sugar at the bottom. He hadn't even stirred it. 

She tied up her hair in a knotty tail then twisted the tail around into a messy bun that would stay off her neck as she sweated. He kept the shovels in the shed which he kept locked because some of the tools had blood on them and no point letting people wander in there. Although he liked things clean some stains were sentimental.

I doubt this chapter will survive revisions, but it was fun to write.

Project: Not A Fanfic is going well, by the way. I'm on schedule in terms of word count (37,086 words as of this evening), and just yesterday I tackled a massive action scene I've been putting off since day one. Anyone who knows me knows I consider it a feat of strength to walk and talk at the same time, so my co-ordination and spatial reasoning skills aren't quite at action-adventure levels. Luckily the good folks in my story have guns* so they don't have any messy, confusing, multi-limbed hand-to-hand combat for me to grapple with.

One of my characters gave me a pleasant surprise too – while I thought she was relentlessly blasé and well-adjusted, turns out she's been faking it. I'm thrilled, because she's more real and relatable now. She was bordering on Mary Sue-ish before. Although I realise how problematic it is that when a male character is perfect it's heroic, and when a female character is perfect it's unrealistic.

Like any adult with rainbow business cards, I use smiley stickers to motivate myself.

My new favourite quote and motto for NaNo.

Luckily, perfect people are boring and I won't tolerate them in my stories. Right now every character in Project: Not A Fanfic is so damaged I'm surprised they get anything done. Hell, I don't even expect much from them, I'm just hoping the poor bastards manage to get to the end of the book without turning into a suicide cult. 

*I dislike guns and I don't really understand them. If it were up to me, my characters would shoot jelly babies from slingshots at the bad guys. But since the bad guys don't care how I feel, and have guns with bullets, I fear this could put my team at an unfair disadvantage.

Project: Not A Fanfic

So last night I had a dream about this amazing novelling software that helped with planning, note taking, quote collecting, and making high-waisted Guess jeans fit. Just a fun fact that has nothing to do with the rest of this entry.

Well I guess it does, in a way, as it concerns novelling (novelizing? noveltry? novel-mongering?) I figure since I keep declaring myself a writer, I want to somehow back that up by talking about the stuff I'm working on. (You can tell by the elegant structure of that last sentence that my Pulitzer is in the post.)

I have two big projects on at the moment, which will hopefully both grow up to be novels. The first is an idea I had about eight years ago and have been afraid of tackling since – let's call it Project: Stone Cold Bummer (30 Rock reference!) because not only does it involve elements of genocide and the moral bankruptcy of wealth and feral children, it's also forced me to do a lot of research into factory farming and modern agriculture, which believe me is a stone cold bummer in itself. If you don't believe me, just google ‘factory farming’ and you'll see why I'm thoroughly depressed about the world. And then google ‘do a barrel roll' to cheer yourself up.

But anyway, the second project that's alive and kicking right now is my NaNoWriMo attempt, and perhaps the kindest name for it would be Project: Not A Fanfic (I like the colon in my project names - it has a Mission: Impossible feel.) I've attempted NaNo two or three times before, but always faded away because I never actually planned much beyond “I'm just going to keep writing until I get hungry.” But this year, I made notes. Hell, I even have an ending! And a beginning! The middle, though, is a slightly different story... or rather, a lack of one.

Notes! What is it about a new black pen on fresh white paper that gets me all tingly?

There's just the tiny matter of this blank page.

As for the (incredibly kind though not highly accurate) name of Project: Not A Fanfic... you see, I've been watching Supernatural quite a lot lately (soon we'll have a whole blog entry devoted to the deranged excellence that is Misha Collins) and it's possible that a few elements of the story are shamelessly stolen from inspired by the Supernatural franchise. 

It's not a big deal, so maybe I'm referencing tiny insignificant things like a character (or three) and maybe the overarching plot or even a forbidden angel-human gay love story - but come on, what adventure fantasy doesn't include that these days? It's practically a given! (Like hobbit-wizard relations with homoerotic undertones. Or lightning-shaped scars that hurt when one is near a bad guy who killed one's parents.) I'm critically addressing the tropes of the genre! It's not copyright infringement if you're consciously troping, right? Right!

So Project: Not A Fanfic is roughly a quarter through its first draft, and it's been a bit of a mission to pull out of my brain (or out of the ether? Let's pretend my brain isn't made of ether) and get onto paper. I think part of the problem is that the devil-monkey on my shoulder – the same thing that tells me it's okay to have that third cup of ice cream or stay up past 2am watching Comic-Con panels on youtube – realised early on that I was serious about this project. Some people's devil-monkeys organise flat tyres, friends who call crying in the middle of the night, and computer viruses (*spits three times* *crosses self* *gives the monkey ice cream*) to keep them distracted from the work at hand. My monkey lacks this sort of initiative and creativity – it just makes me stare blankly at the screen, mind soaked in self-doubt, and convinces me to take a break every thirty seconds for either coffee or the bathroom (one habit tends to enable the other.)

So this project is alive largely due to the glory of the productivity steroids woven into Dr Wicked's Write Or Die. The web app is free and quite useful, but I highly recommend giving this god among men ten bucks for the desktop version. It's great because you can customize how harsh you want 'punishments' to be (I'm sensitive and easily spooked, so the screen going red is quite enough for me without the soul-shattering sound effects) and you can customize a bunch of other stuff too. It really is a lifesaver if you've got to write a first draft in a hurry and / or you suffer from devil-monkeys.

In case anyone cares, my devil-monkey looks roughly the same as the Chicken Licken orangutan, but mine wears those kitsch little light-up devil horns you find in every Cardies on Halloween.

Is it bad that this is one of my favourite ads ever? I love the music and the puppetry and the fact that this guy looks more like a strung-out junkie than a fried chicken enthusiast. But I can't think about those hot-wings without feeling a little sick. I won approximately a metric tonne of them once... let's just say the devil-monkey made sure they didn't last long.

Editor's Note: Sorry about the impossible amount of ellipses and brackets in this entry. I'm definitely in first draft mode... (and ellipses... will always be a bad habit... from my fanfic days... don't they just... imply so many... impossible.... to... articulate... feelings...?!?!)