'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.

The unfinished 50,000

So there we have it. Prize level achieved, tale unfinished.

My Gemstone reached the 50,000 mark (actually as I write this over 51,000) and the story is far from being finished. There again I never thought a finished story would be neatly complete at the prized 50k mark. It would make a thin novel.

The sort of thing that perhaps an established writer could contemplate between great works but we lesser mortals know we have to put a bit more substance in.

I admit it didn't surprise me that I could reach 50k in 12 days. I did that last time round and to a degree November 2011 'went flat' as I neared the end of the story with 55,000 words on paper well before the end of the time allowed.

Interestingly, I have written more like 52 or 53 thousand already because on a couple of days I committed the 'sin' of going through a chapter I had written and reworking it. You are, as a Nano player, not supposed to do that. But while I do not think that such revision makes the story even remotely ready for serious(?) publication I have to feel the 'feel' of it is correct.

In one case I felt a character was acting, or speaking, out of character if you see what I mean. I have to feel the story, even in frantic type and rush mode, is one that I want to tell. If things are not clear or the ideas are sloppily presented it is less a case of going back and making it better later. More a demand to myself to get it half-polished.

I am a reader as I write and any awkward sequences or badly-worked paragraphs will combine to make me doubt if my effort is worthwhile.

The question is now do I still fervently pursue the same daily word rate in a bid to make Gemstone reach, say, 100,000 words or do I slow down and think more carefully about how the story ends? I know writers are supposed to enter the act of authoring in the spirit of knowing what the end point is, but I may yet want to develop a different ending to the one I had vaguely decided on back at the beginning of November.

I have, as I mentioned in another posting, finally crossed the line of the 'big incident' of my original idea. But during a poor night's sleep last night I came up with the idea of throwing something unexpected into the story. That's been done and there are a lot of implications from it.

I may have painted my characters into a corner by the event (a loss of freedom, without going into detail, potentially hampers the plot) but I like setting myself challenges. My main characters, and in particular Gemma Lawson herself, will have to find a way to overcome this new barrier.

That is the next stage, and I have a few days to do it in.

On that scene you first thought of, at long last

When I sat down in late October to think about my Nano contribution for this 2012, I had a title, a protagonist and one scene in my head that the whole novel is built on. I had an idea there would be some sort of problem early on that my protagonist would face, but hadn't specified it, and even a rough location for most of the events.

But the 'big scene' would come later. I just didn't know when.

That tends to be the level of my planning. I stagger on from there and let the thing 'flow' even if at times it is more like a glacier grinding its way downhill rather than a bubbling stream of creativity.

I know someone who is doing Nano this year (and who succeeded last year) and does a meticulous amount of planning before writing, right down to the expected number of words in each chapter. I admire that degree of detailing but I can't do it myself.

Anyway, the key scene I envisaged a while ago has taken me around 43,000 words to reach. I fully expected it to take a few thousand words (maybe 10k or so) but as the Gemstone story unfolded and more things came into play then the reason I had this original idea was pushed further and further back.

This supposedly all-important scene may provide some action but it might not be as big as I had originally thought. This may be because other scenes on the way to it grew in size and value. They certainly told me more about my characters than I had thought at the outset.

For example, I now have a character list of around ten people which may not be excessive but at least three of them were introduced 'out of the blue' and cemented themselves into the story.

But isn't that the joy of writing a story? You discover as you go.

One last point on characters. I don't know how anyone else does this, but my characters reveal themselves to me in their conversation with others. Their response to what they are told or the type of questions they ask or subjects they raise tends to give substance to an outline on the paper. I like my characters to talk and show me who they are.

No, I don't shout at them or demand they do something else for me, but I do like to hear them.

Ploughing on... 32,000 words or so

I have completed chapter nine of Gemma's steampunk-ish* adventures and clocked up the best part of 32,000 words in seven days. Thus I have a feeling I can achieve the target.

But then never say it is done until it is. To batter a Chinese proverb into my own cocked hat: On a journey of 50,000 words, reckon 49,000 to be halfway.

The question is whether hitting the target for Nano produces a novel. It produces a string of words and there is not much time for reflection when you are pounding the keyboard. It is entirely possible I have written up one of the biggest plot holes in the history of literature.

But, the object of the exercise is to make something out of next to nothing in a very short space of time. As I know from the world of work, you can achieve a lot through pressure even if the end product of all that effort is just getting it out of the way and moving on.

I like what I have written so far, and if I had to summarise the plot so far it would be, roughly, disaster and danger interspersed with astonishment and uncertainty. I like Gemma Lawson who plays the lead role, but then I tend to like all my protagonists. Not that I am falling in love, but she's growing and changing in front of me as I bang out the words. It would be fair to say she is a different person to perhaps the one I envisaged I would be writing about on October 31.

As I like to be surprised by what I write, this is entirely good. So now I will press on to at least 50,000 words.

*Steampunk-ish. Ah, yes, note the ish... You see, Gemma was supposed to be in a world of mechanical wonder that never advanced into the age of the internal combustion engine and electricity and with those changes all the things we now take for granted.

Steampunk is a very interesting idea but essentially flawed as progress really never stops. There is no reason that the human spirit should stop looking for new things.

Of course there is a mention of airships and goggles (how could there not be?) but if I was brutally honest they are largely incidentals. I could, almost, say this was a novel set in 1887 or whatever and actually eliminate the idea of inter-city travel by air. In fact, a dramatic scene takes place on a train -- admittedly a steam train -- and if a publishing house said 'lose the steampunk bits' it would be, at this point at least, easy to do. I don't think it would really damage the story line.

I understand as well that my main character is a mountaineer and mountains and climbers were around a bit before the invention of steam power.

But the cover I hacked out to stimulate me uses a picture of a steampunk lass and that's what kick started me in the first place. Oh well, it all may change as the tale moves on. We shall see.

The 20,000 point

Almost twenty thousand words, and chapter 5 finished.

Progress is being made in the Gemstone tale, so I am quite pleased. as always though with NaNo there are rough edges; inevitable as you hammer a tale out. The trick is to type and not edit as you go.

Well, I try to keep that to a minimum but I admit I do check (every so often) what I have just written and correct anything that doesn't make sense. I know, none of it makes much sense, but there we go.

Finally, a picture of a steampunk lady, just to show I care about the page 3 fans.

Gemstone is born

Here we go again. Welcome to year 4 of my NaNoWriMo participation.

Two years ago I wrote a steampunk novel, called Iron Virgin, which in NaNo terms was a winner. This time round, having dipped last year into alternate history with a post World War II adventure called Ersatz (again a winner), I am back in the retro land of stiff upper lips, top hats, goggles and airships.

This year's effort is for now titled Gemstone.

Once more my main character is female (I have about zero interest in writing about males, but so it goes) and my heroine Gemma -- geddit? -- is in fact a brave female mountaineer who reserves corset-wearing for when she isn't scrambling the heights of the world. Of course it isn't solely about that, but for now it gives me a platform.

Oh yes, and Gemma is not afraid of heights. As I can get dizzy standing on a chair I can write about someone who gazes down from on high without a shred of fear, unless of course she somehow loses her nerve...

We will, as they say, see what we write because my idea is usually to have a plan in my head and then see where the story takes me. Probably a bad way to write but I need to be surprised too from time to time and writing for me is a journey of discovery.

Okay, enough of the prevarication. Time to get novel writing.