A Writing 101 Production - Part 5 To Plunge or To Plan--That Is The Question

You know those nice long Twitter conversations you get into?  Oh wait.  You don't.  Because I still haven't blessed you with my Twitter wisdom in a 101 Production.  Yes, I know I promised.  Do stop whining about it.  It'll get to you.  Definitely.  When I get around to it. This year.  For sure.

But where was I?  Ah! Having a Tweetexchange with the lovely Keren David, whose excellent debut novel, When I Was Joe, was published by Frances Lincoln earlier this month.  We had covered several topics (including our shared love of Georgette Heyer) when we moved on to the subject of writing habits.  I was twitting about how important it was to CLEAR THE DECKS before starting, when she replied with this: "That's something I need to learn - I'm too apt to just plunge in....Never make notes. Am useless at planning or thinking ahead. Just see where it takes me."  And it started me thinking.

Are you a PLUNGER or a PLANNER?

I used to be a PLUNGER.  I'd jump straight into the millstream of story, gripped in the jaws of my plot and the Story Gods, and paddle frantically to wherever they took me.  Then, later, I'd need to know who did what to whom when and where and what their hair colour was and whether they had three eyes in chapter four or five and when-did-the-scales-appear and
OH-GOD-I'VE-LOST-THE-SCRAPS-OF-PAPER-I-HAD-SOMEOFITWRITTENDOWNONANDI'MGOINGTOKILLMYSELFBECAUSEICAN'TREMEMBER
ANYOFITANDIT'SGOINGTOTAKEDAYSTOFINDITALL.  Get the picture? I've never been one of those annoying people who can remember the 44-line poem they wrote 15 years ago and recite it verbatim.  My brain has always been forgetfully middle-aged.  Not senile, you understand.  Just a little...absent-minded.  It's all that creative stuff going on in my head, of course. So now I PLAN.  The story is knocking on the door of my brain, wanting to hurtle out and lick me all over.  But there are PREPARATIONS to be made first.  Here's how it goes:

• First I clean/clear the desk and office of dirty teacups, cloudy glasses with suspicious grey things growing in the bottom, sticky rings of who-knows-what (but possibly Ribena or limejuice), crumbs, old dog bones, dead insects, dust, odd socks, uneaten-so-stale chocolate-covered snacks and pieces of cake (a VERY small item, this), 104 random books in a tottering pile, post-it notes with mysterious telephone numbers scribbled among forgotten must-remembers, redundant piles of proofs, my missing wedding-present earrings (thank god I found THOSE before the Wanton Toast Eater asked why I wasn't wearing them), plus other revolting or unnecessary ephemera. I'll also do filing, tax returns (if it's that time of year--new projects always seem to start in January) and general tidying.  Never underestimate the power of a little selective desk de-cluttering (or Office Feng Shui if you're posh). It clears the mind wonderfully. And it makes me feel less of a slattern.
• Phew! So that's it? Let slip the dogs of story....  NO!  Wait.  The FOUR ALL IMPORTANT FILES come next. I make a folder on the computer with the book's working title into which will go (along with the working copy) the following files:
• FILE 1: CHARACTERS:  Every character will be put here as they arrive in the book, along with their physical characteristics, who they are related to, and any quirks, likes, dislikes and useful information like how many legs they have.  I might also, later on, group them into categories.  Humans/Fairies/Gods/Monsters etc. Even if I don't use it in the book itself, I need to know who they are and what they are like.  And of course, I can refer back to it when that dodgy memory of mine lets me down as to whether they have green eyes or blue on page 43.
• FILE 2: PLACES: Whether I'm writing about a real place or a fantasy otherworld, I need to know where things are.  How far is it from Wyrmesbury to Vesterton?  That's something I didn't know when I wrote Hootcat Hill, and I needed to.  And doing the mapping for Atticus and Melissa's journey through the real landscape of the Greek myths was far more of a nightmare than it needed to have been if I had written down stuff as I went.  So in here go towns, cities, streets, roads, landmarks and everything else remotely geographical. People who can draw might make paper maps.  I can't and don't, and I haven't learnt how to do it on the computer.  Yet.
• FILE 3: TIMELINE:  Oh God!  The timeline and its importance cannot be overstated.  Where something happened is important, but WHEN is just as vital.  It took me days of angst and panic and sleepless nights to disentangle the complexities of the timeslip passages and exactly when the when on both sides of the door was in Hootcat Hill, BECAUSE I HADN'T KEPT NOTES.  Continuity is vital--and you can be sure that if you get it wrong some beady-eyed reader will take pleasure in telling you so.  You just hope the beady-eyed reader is your editor, or it can be embarrassing.
• FILE 4: REFERENCE: In here goes every weblink, book and page reference I look at for a book, whether it's useful or not.  The point is, I might want it again.  And if it's not here I won't be able to find it.  There was one reference in Atticus the Storyteller about eggs and onions being left at crossroads as an offering to Hecate on a certain feastday.  Guess what?  I didn't write down where I found the reference, and it caused me no end of trouble and tearing of hair to find it again.  Lesson learnt.

Now, after doing all that, I can allow the story out, and do a bit of plunging.  I need to get the feel of my main character, find the voice of the book.  All that great and interesting stuff which I love doing, and which makes this job of writing worthwhile.  But after a few thousand words, when I've got an idea of where I'm going, I'll need to make two more essential files:

• CHAPTER SKELETON PLANS
• and that dratted all-important SYNOPSIS

Another time, another blogpost, I feel.  That's quite enough 101-ing for now.  Time for bed, said Zebedee!

**Stop Press** Publication Day for Hootcat Hill

How nice it is to have friends on Publication Day! Yes, it's Thursday 19th March 2009--which is when the lovely new paperback of my first novel, Hootcat Hill, lands in the shops. The hardback was published last year to some very flattering reviews, and now the nice people at Orion have once again given me a beautiful new and eyecatching cover (left), complete with scary, red-eyed purple dragon and a lightning bolt. So far today I've had many wonderful messages, as well as alerts from the Bookwitch and from Fiona Dunbar to say they have mentioned me on their blogs--and the Witch has given me a lovely review, which I am very happy indeed about.

Knowing that my book is in the shops (albeit only in a new incarnation this time round), is a funny old business. I feel hopeful and excited, of course, and proud too--everyone has worked so hard, editor, design, sales and marketing, publicity to get it to this point. Now I just need people to buy it and read it. Naturally I feel nervous about this in a recession. But then I think, where else, for the relatively small outlay of £5.99, could you buy escape to another world, thrilling adventure, a feisty heroine, cutting edge technomagic, a furiously beastly dragon, a malicious and scary green elf witch with pointy teeth and a slug bag, a dwarf with a living beast tattoo, gory death, epic destruction, a blacksmith with a burned bum and scarlet motorbike leathers, talking owls, beer which makes you grow horns (or a tail...or claws), and, well, too much more to mention? It seems to me that the power of the imagination is far greater for a reader translating words on the page into pictures in his head than it is for the player of a computer game that someone else has already imagined on the screen. Also, it's better value and cheaper.

So, welcome to the world again, Hootcat Hill. May you give pleasure to all who open your pages. Personally, I'm off to open a bottle of champagne to celebrate. Blow the credit crunch--it's not every day I get a book published! I can go back to the bread and water tomorrow.

Earth Sores and Angels: The Price We Pay for Creativity?

"How strange that we have to make these public declarations of our secrets,' said Ted Hughes in a letter to a friend, with reference to the publication of Birthday Letters, and in a British paper today is the headline 'The Healing Power of Putting Pen To Paper'. Creative types of all kinds--writers, songwriters, poets--have found solace in putting their pain down in black and white. There goes Amy Winehouse making sense of an unfaithful partner with with her lyrics for Back to Black , there is Dylan Thomas agonising in poetry over the death of his father with Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, there is William Styron with his memoir of madness, Darkness Visible.

Since I blogged about depression a short while ago, I have had many kind expressions of support which have helped me to start to find a way through again. What struck home most though was the number of creative people who wondered whether, perhaps, this dark place, this 'earth sore' as one friend put it, is the price we pay for our visits from the angelic Muse of inspiration. I do know that a very eminent chiropractor, who treats many literary types, told me once that almost without exception we are all literally 'off our rockers'--a phrase which has come to mean mad. The 'rocker' is apparently a small bone at the bottom of the back of the skull. Writers, artists and poets are inclined to have it out of place. So this is a physical clue. But mentally? Why do so many of us have days when it is unrelievedly dark amid the blaze of noon?

If you were to trace a path through literary history, especially the literary history of poetry, you would find a trail of evidence. Pain internalised festers, pain crafted and honed and bound into the form of a sonnet or some other poetic form takes a step outside the mind, and by doing so begins to make sense. At the very least it is a release of emotion. By writing painful things down, exposing our innermost secrets to the light of day, we begin to heal them. For myself, having been badly bullied as a child, writing about that experience in a fictional form was cathartic in the extreme. Linnet Perry in Hootcat Hill is not me--nowhere close. But fictionalising some of my own painful childhood experience into hers helped me to face it and put it behind me. I have not yet begun to make sense of my depression through fiction--though I expect that one day I will. However, looking through old files, I found that I had tried to make sense of it, as so many others have, through poetry (see below). I have been in the dark place before as I am still, partly, now, and will be so again. But I will continue to try to make sense of it by writing it down, and I will not be alone in doing so.

Nil, nisi, nihil, nix

Might they be monsters?
They come on dark days and stormy nights
and bash in the outward signs and symbols
of your life, till all you thought you knew
about yourself is crumpled metal panels
and glass on a dirty pavement
with the rain falling down.
And if a familiar knight in shining black jeans
should come running by,
then they will take the crowbar to his face too, until
it becomes an uncharted territory of bruise and bone.
They are not totally cruel. They will allow you one
long long kiss on his bloody-lipped swollen mouth,
and ten short seconds
to whisper red-tasting messages of love to
your family. Then there will be hard hands
under each armpit and a faceless dragging journey
away from the blood and the broken headlights.
You’re on your own now, babe.
(And always have been hisses an ancient echo).
So here you are flying—it’s very sudden—
almost pleasurably swooping along
over the cute corn-cut patchwork of England
listening to a maybe voice of hope on the wind.
Then it’s down down down as
they handle you into the sloped
cream room with wooden slatted floors
and only one blank window—
the place where nothing is in balance, and silent
voices shout questions of sorcery and power
which you cannot answer.
There is a polished walnut wardrobe on the
right-hand side of the room,
just halfway down. When the silent ones
leave for a tea-break you open it,
and out from the empty mothball shelves blows
the secret name of the wind.
It begins with ‘M’.
If only you could remember it
you would be free.
But until then you must climb in
and shut up mind and wardrobe doors
very tight, so that
when they return into the now-empty room,
they do not discover
that the wind has gone missing too.

(Copyright Lucy Coats 2009)

Secret Gardens, Literary Doors**AND A PRIZE GIVEAWAY!**

What is behind the door? Where might it lead? Who might lurk behind it? Another world? Another time? A faun with an umbrella? A robin? A garden full of wonders? Doors have a wonderful literary heritage in children's books. My grandmother bequeathed me her very own childhood copy of Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, complete with onionskin covered, handcoloured plates, and slightly foxed sepia endpapers with elegant, curving swirls drawn upon them. A valuable second edition? I didn't care about that, only for the words inside, which blossomed into pictures inside my head. As an only child, with much older parents, I could relate to the lonely Mary Lennox, and her grumpy moods, and her 'might I have a bit of earth?'. The scene where that bit of ivy swings back, and the robin shows her the door to the garden is, for me, one of the great moments of heart thrilling literary suspense. And what I love almost as much is that what is behind the door is not a disappointment, but a wonderful adventure composed not of another world (though it might almost be so), but of brown earth and the magic of growing things. I too, after I had read about Mary Lennox, asked for my bit of earth, in which I grew lettuces and chinese lanterns and nasturtiums. Since then, I have branched out a bit in the gardening line, but that is a tale for another day.

The wardrobe door leading to Narnia is possibly the most famous door of all--and which of us can say that they have not looked longingly at the back of a cupboard (though probably not one hung with furs) and wished for it to dissolve into nothingness with snow and a lamp post beyond? My own novel, Hootcat Hill, features its own magical door--the Door to Avvallon, through which the heroine, Linnet, has to go before she can find herself and save her world. A shut door is an adventure in itself. What lies beyond the door at the top of this page? Only I can tell you--but I choose to leave it to your imagination. I'd love to know what flights of fancy you come up with, and I will send a signed copy of the new paperback of Hootcat Hill, which comes out next month, to the person who comes up with the most original answer, in 50 words or less in the comments box. I look forward to your entries. Closing date 15th March 2009.