'Tis done

At 75,000 words (plus a few more) my Nano for 2012 is done.

Well, almost done. I know I need to finish it up with a little more polishing and a final wrap-up chapter needs to be written, but it is just a 'closer' in which the final explanation gets, er, explained. Mostly it will show who did what and why but essentially I have brought my Gemstone tale to a conclusion at least as far as the action goes.

Now here's a thought: While another 1,500 words might act as a nice wrap, there is the possibility I will set the scene if I haven't already (hint, hint) for a sequel. In fact, the more I think about this the more there is a good reason for a book two...

In the last chapter I wrote today there is 'something else going on' and it needs fleshing out. Anyway having introduced a number of  characters who I like or may have bigger parts to play in the future I can't really bear to say goodbye to them.

Still, I am pleased I got through so many words in two thirds of the allocated time and with a bit more drive there's good reason to think I could have made 100k. Whether the story warranted that many words is another matter.

For now though I will take a breather and casually go through what I have done as a preliminary or interim edit. Such as looking for the times in my haste where I forgot where capital letters go. Oh yes, and the wrap-up chapter, too.

In the meantime to everyone else out there battling towards their 50k and/or completion, good luck and good writing.

The allowable coincidence

Here's a problem with rapid Nano-writing (apart from the typos, of course): you can easily fall into the trap of throwing in convenient coincidences to propel the story along. No time for careful consideration so let's have something unexpected but beneficial to keep things moving.

Stuck with characters who are not sure how to solve a problem? Crazy old uncle turns up out of the blue who just happens to know the solution...

Struggling to get a person from one continent to another? No problem, an unused airline ticket is lying on the ground...

Want the prince to meet the peasant girl and fall in love? Well, the boar he is hunting just happens to lead him to her lonely cottage in the woods...

You get the idea. You can drop in any convenience to get the character out of a situation or get them to meet someone in unlikely circumstances. As such, I had to reign in my own horse of improbable coincidence (the one called "Swift-Get-Out") on a couple of occasions. I mean, my heroine just happens to be hiding where two important characters decide to meet to have an all-revealing conversation...

Well, I didn't do that. Thought about it, was tempted but rejected it as unlikely.

But then coincidences happen. Our lives are full of them and so too are stories. If Sam Gamgee hadn't been in the garden outside Frodo's window in The Shire then he would never have tagged along to Mordor. He was the gardener, so was in a likely place to hear what Gandalf was saying.

The trick, I thought, was to have a likely coincidence. So, without rushing my plot in an unlikely way, I needed my heroine to know something. She had to get information in a plausible way. Find out from the sort of place where you would likely come across someone who listens in routinely to other people's conversations or even know the whereabouts of places.

I know exactly who that would be, and if I told you what I'd decided on you'd say, oh yes, of course...

I mean, every modern city has them. These people hear a lot in the course of their daily job.

So in my world that is an allowable coincidence. The 'listener-in' does not know my character wants to know something, but when it comes up in conversation, she grasps the significance of what others have said casually and can use it.

Well, I can't sit here writing this. I have to get on with the novel and move the story forward in allowable fashion.

A bit like hiring a taxi, I suppose.

Diversionary tactics

I normally write my stuff in linear fashion, but occasionally I will divert away from this and write a later scene and store at the back to be included at a later date.

I use an author-friendly program called Scrivener, which is ideal for this as I can label the section as something that appears last in the list of files and I will use the 'explanation' scene later. It runs to some 850 words because it contains dialogue between the two characters central to this part.

The only reason I did this scene out of order was to avoid carrying a somewhat complex bit of reasoning around in my head while juggling other aspects of the tale. I may, however, still remember all the bits of it and write it out again, rather than paste my later scene in.

We shall see as a lot depends on who else might need to be present at the explaining. I don't leave a lot of characters in any scene as silent observers, so it may have to change.

One other aspect: although my story is set in London in Victorian times I have avoided in my rush to do a lot of research into street names. Having lived there years ago I can remember all sorts of place names and so on, but when I come to the second draft I will insert place and streets to provide an 'authenticity' (if a steampunk novel can have aspire to that) so that my character doesn't go from say one road in east London to one several miles to the west in an impossibly short time.

(I recall seeing a movie set in my home town which, for purely visual purposes to entertain an audience who had never visited it, had the characters turning a corner and being in a completely different end of the city five seconds later.)

Anyway, I have got hold of a map of London from the early years of the 20th century or so that shows me street names as they were, though in fairness a great many of London's roads have been named exactly the same then as now. Any city that can still have an Isle Of Dogs and a Ha-Ha Road* can't be all bad.

*Yes, really! Ha-Ha Road is in Greenwich, of GMT fame.

Going flat and worrying about okay

The image here is the Nano graph, my Nano graph to be exact. It shows that I have suddenly gone a little flat after a steady climb to the current total.

It isn't bad news as such; I haven't quite run of steam yet. As I am 'ahead of the game' though nowhere near finishing, I have taken the opportunity to do a little revising and polishing and looking for that gaping plot hole I fear may be lying around.

Such a luxury of re-reading allows me to re-evaluate what my characters are doing, and as a lot of my stuff is dialogue based (dialog for US readers) also check what they are saying. There is a tendency, if you are trying to press on with the story, for the characters to have all too brief conversations in which everyone effortlessly appears to understand what is being said.

There is a balance to be struck between action and reflection, or either side of some event both talking about what to do beforehand and discussing it afterwards.

Okay, re-reading takes time so I can do it for now.

And there's my next problem, right there: the use of the word OK or, as I write it, okay.

I have long held that okay is probably the world's most useful word. It is probably understood these days in just about every country and while the jury is out on where exactly the word "OK" came from (I subscribe to one theory, but won't bore you with it) there is no doubt it is an essential part of what could be seen as a common language. (Taxi, for what it's worth may be another)

But I do not know when okay came into everyday use in Britain. My Gemstone novel is Victorian steampunk set mostly in London, and I have to be careful when in hurry-conversation-and-get-on-with-it mode not to drop the word into formal language. I don't want my characters saying "My dear chap" and "Jolly good, old fellow" or any other vintage Hollywood Sherlock Holmes dialogue, so it's important their interactions are slightly precise but reasonably natural. Hence I am scanning the text for a stray 'okay.'

If you like, it's not okay for my characters to be saying "okay."

Jolly good, old chap. Carry on, what?

220,000 words, 10,000 hours

Gemstone is rolling towards a conclusion. At approaching 59,000 words I think I am drawing closer to the end game, though it is getting hard to write currently as this is the point I begin to worry that there is likely to be not only a thread left idly hanging but a whole rope with a noose poised to strangle the plot.

My Nano 2012 effort has drama, conflict and action. Because it involves people not liking each other as well as people hiding their motives there are inevitably going to be moments when I wonder if I have forgotten an important strand. That's the joy of writing the way I do; it's a rollercoaster of wondering and wandering rather than a smooth transition from planning to achieving.

You would think I'd have learnt by now, but it seems I never do.

Of course, 58k words is nowhere near 220,000. Even my numerical skills wouldn't pretend that it was. But this is my fourth year of Nano and while I have hit the finish line before the end of each November with the smallest 'success' being 52,000 words I estimate I have now written the best part of 220,000 words in all four books. Throw in my penchant for on-the-fly revising and even in one spectacular case wiping out two thousand words as I just didn't like what they were doing to the story, it is a fair bet I am on the way towards a quarter of a million in total.

So if that explains the 220k figure, what of the 10,000 hours?

I have no idea, and would probably shudder at the total, of how long I have actually spent connecting up all those words and dropping the odd full stop and comma in among them. Even at my modest typing speed (going back to ensure for example that the word 'today' has not come out as it usually does when I am at the keyboard as 'toady') we are talking a lot of time spent.

The 10,000 hours though is, I once was told, the basic qualification for mastery in any skill. Guitar playing, car fixing, cooking, chain-saw juggling... Every skill needs time to develop.

Despite the popular idea of passers-by plucked off the street to reveal a staggering talent and become hit recording artists thanks to television shows like X Factor, the reality is all those successful people have practised and practised. They have put in their 10k hours. Talent, after all, requires work and dedication as well as an opportunity.

So for a writer 10,000 hours is all the time you were trying to write those stories and that novel, or even that sprawling trilogy. It was gathered while doing newspaper or magazine articles or even thoughtful letters to the local paper (or in my case, week in and week out providing copy for a football programme for more than a dozen years as well as writing manuals for training purposes). I was learning the craft and disciplining myself to getting it all done on time. Yes, I have had those bleary-eyed two in the morning times when nothing seemed to make sense and yet I had to keep going.

If there is one good thing from Nano –– and I am sure there are many good things to emerge from all this furious writing and agonising –– it is to get people to set a target, complete it on time and acquire a huge chunk of that 10,000 hours mastery along the way.

I am not, for a single moment, imagining what I have done is 'great' and nor do I believe that everyone else's efforts in Nano are destined for the next best-seller. I am fully aware that it takes a lot of lipstick on a pig to even make it look remotely presentable. Some indeed may become best selling authors, and good for them. But with each word, each effort, eachNovember, every Nano participant is getting nearer and nearer to what professional writers have already done. All those hours of typing and scribbling will slowly add up.

The leading authors have achieved their 10,000 hours already and may well have the certificate on the wall, though the small piece of paper in the frame may look suspiciously like a cheque.

Getting ungutch with the help of padding

Years ago one of my offspring, when ever so young, used the word "gutch" for stuck.

Well, gutch has stuck for me ever since. I like the word a lot, which is a good job because when I write I frequently get gutch. The trick, therefore, is to get to being ungutch. In a time-pressured environment like Nano there is a need to get ungutch as fast as possible (though I have already reached the target, so yay for me) and press on.

Anyway, the plot of Gemstone had hit a snag and I needed to move it forward.

As so often I left writing alone and went and did something else. This might be washing up, walking the dog, staring at the ceiling (not to be underestimated as a creative stimulus) and in the midst of one of these it struck me.

I had already written the basis of a solution, but just hadn't seen it before. I had put what was, essentially, padding into part of the Gemstone story a day before. It was, in the nature of rolling the plot along, almost a throwaway line. Definitely the sort of thing that could easily be chopped out if the final thing appeared too long, though it is unlikely that trimming one line would make much difference.

So, that one bit of padding -- the unnecessary insertion of words and sentences that makes the final word count look great in Nano -- provided me with the answer. I ran back to the keyboard and typed away joyfully at the solution. I was ungutch!

Of course, the condition of getting stuck once more no doubt awaits further down the line. Just because I have overcome one small barrier doesn't mean I have leapt over them all.

Until the next gutch, onwards and upwards!

PS: One of my authoring 'tricks' is to introduce characters that may or may not be useful later in the tale, so in a way the padding I had inserted could be considered just a variation on a theme. No doubt from now on I will value all my padding, like stray characters, as potentially useful.