GATD Week One

This week I tied up all the sketches I had written, hunted down all the ideas I'd had and ended up with about 14,000 words.   This is a really good start.  I don't know whether I can achieve as much next week (being here, at my father's, and then having to have Easter and the whole day of catering for Looping the Loop plus the whole new wave of anxiety about money etc.   I realise I am often writing as a displacement activity.

The good thing is that I now have all the material - it's already a coherent first 4-5 chapters and I have a few moments of lightish relief... I don't have to present every dramatic scene directly, some of them can be dealt with as flashback or in retrospect - so that's good too.  I hope I can manage another decent tranche this week - there's every chance it will be quite short... but that may not matter.

The outline for a blockbuster?

A number of things have kept me from making serious headway with GATD... research resources are about to be assailed, but one of the things that stopped me from writing was the sense that while I knew what the beginning  and end would be - and some of the things in the middle too I didn't quite know how I was going to receive redemption/comeuppance etc.  And there was an unexpected fear:  I usually rely on the process, the intuition, the "muse" or whatever to come up with the goods as I write, and usually it does.   That said, I did have a rough outline for The Ash Grove - and I wasn't too worried, and this was rewarded, characters appeared, played their roles, pulled the levers, changed the tracks of the other characters, and went their merry ways.  I had thought of doing the same for GATD but Tara kindly lent me an old book of hers, called Writing a Blockbuster - by a guy called Aaron Zuckerman (I think).

"How to" books
I usually shrink from these, I bought a few in the early days, and was fairly sure that I had learned all the lessons technically that I needed to know.  I think it was helpful - I read a lot, I was absorbing stuff unconsciously.  I have never thought consciously of writing a blockbuster - although like every (?) writer I've fantasised about making a lot of money.  So when Tara passed me the book and said "I thought you might like to see that",  I was (a) mildly sniffy  (b) paranoid - was she trying to tell me that TAG wasn't good enough and needed significant work (that could be true of course)?   She assured me it wasn't, and last week I suddenly had an urgent need to read it.

It is a most peculiar book - Zuckerman was Ken Follett's agent/editor... and large chunks of the book consist of a series of plot out lines by KF for his book The Man from St Petersburg (no, I haven't read it either - and no longer need to!) plus analysis of other epics such as Gone with the Wind, The Godfather, The Thorn Birds and a book by his wife, somebody Goudge - which sounds quite interesting but not in the same blockbusting category.  Anyway, he makes some valid points about structure, big scenes and light relief etc.  It all makes a lot more sense than trying to use a Syd French 3-act structure in a novel... and I think I might learn something from it, for GATD.

However, I am unlikely to put anything from it in the other two - I can't see either of them ever aspiring to blockbuster status - and the honest truth is that I'd rather write a really good literary novel than a blockbuster.  BUT there is the fact that you could reach more people with a "message" if you could wrap it into a blockbuster.  So one has to say, should I do something of that nature for GATD... I could certainly pimp it up if I felt minded to.  Of course GATD isn't written yet, but today I gave myself a 2 hour writing window and worked on the outline and came out - mirabile dictu - with a plot, a strong storyline about small people doing good - although in a rather ambiguous way at times, and it all ties up fairly neatly in the end...I think it has legs - and tomorrow I am going to make it walk.   I actually wrote the first few thousand words some time ago, and they will not need to change much, but at least I know where everyone is off to now!

Get going!

Right, we have had 3 months of 2014, and a good deal has happened one way or another, but I could not be said to have written very much.   I have been incubating GATD, and learning a certain amount, but now I think the planets are aligned.   On Tuesday I ran into PC Keith in the street - one of the people I wanted to talk to for research - and today Sheree sent me details of her probation officer friend, who is willing to chat to me.   So it's all set for a bit of decent research and talking the idea through...

I have commitments - the setting up of a webzine with the gang, and the Easter hols and the return of Ned, the necessity of dealing with my father and so on.   But I also have to start writing again soon, not just submission letters!   I have written about 5,000 words of GATD and am clear where it's going - the first half of it, but I'm not sure how it will develop - and I think talking to Keith and Donna and anyone else I can persuade will probably start some ideas out of their holes.  I am also going to do some wide on-line reading about people trafficking.

Is this the best rejection ever?

I have been submitting The Ash Grove - and had some hopes of a couple of the UK agents who had it... but today I received this rejection.

This is great and very well-written.  Sadly it’s not for me – this is a period I feel I’ve read about too much in novels – but if by any unlikely chance you don’t find anyone to champion you with the enthusiasm you clearly deserve, do think of me for your next book

Best wishes

Seldom has a pill been so well-sugared.

It confirms the thought that I am "nearly there" but it's worrying that even a "great and very well-written" novel cannot pass muster.  What a bummer!    It makes me wonder whether her opinion reinforces the idea that UK agents are a bit jaded with submissions about WW1 - even though The Ash Grove isn't a mud and blood book.  I never intended to write a book "about" WW1 - it just happens that these events occur in those years.  Perhaps it should be taken as a further hint that I should submit to North American agents who are perhaps a bit less jaded.

Plan B will now come into operation.  It started with me sending her my "last" book - first - last, what does it matter?  It will continue with a massive unrelenting onslaught on North American agents (i.e. at least 3 more submissions in the next month).   No - I must become ruthless and write the sort of businesslike, impersonal letter US agents expect - and receive a plethora of businesslike, impersonal rejections in return no doubt!  Heigh-ho!

Progress report

Well, yes, there haven't been many entries recently, mostly for personal reasons, but also because I've had a bit of a crisis of faith.

I had planned to start on the next episode of the Conscience saga, but a rather unhelpful comment from an agent, about being unable to sell anything connected with WW1 somewhat took the wind out of my sails, and I was forced to drift to a halt.  I was completely lost - what to do?  I was geared up to research the next book - only lacking the petrol money to take me to the right places.  Should I do it anyway?  I pondered, and, coupled with the depression that a really bad flu/virus/chest infection brings I rather began to despair.

Somewhere around this time two thoughts occurred: firstly I suddenly had two novel plots, one modern, one historical - neither connected with the toxic WW1.   I suggested them to the rejecting agent, and she told me which she thought was more commercial.   This idea is gradually taking shape - it is inspired by Judith Murray's suggestion that I read The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry - which I predictably loathed.   However, I thought if my "good" novels were not getting far in the market, then I should try and write something unutterably middle-brow.  And possibly heart-warming.   I have the idea, but am just warming it up a bit, and hoping that a plot is maturing somewhere.

Competitions
In the meantime I have submitted TAG and TRF to two novel writing competitions, the Dundee International and the new Bath Literary Prize.  The latter only asked for 5,000 words, but I am obviously hoping they will come back for more and to that end I have been re-editing it - and have reduced it by about 6-7,000 words.... which is delightful.  I am astonished that there is so much superfluous bumf - in some cases I have been "showing AND telling" - I hope I'm not writing for the hard of thought.   They will organise a long list - I am praying to be on that at least - something to put in submission letters.

Success
What will I do when I actually get an agent, an editor, a publisher.... will I have to start a new blog full of success and vaunting?  

The Plan
If I get interest in TAG I will move onto Conscience, but in the meantime I am working on GATD and the plan is to write it in 3 months or so.  Mind you, the sight of the great flood yesterday made me think I should revive Islanders

A teenage feminist in the 1970's - for International Women's Day 2014

Lucy and Leo were perfect children of their time: their interest in the environment and her interest in feminism, coincided with the Pill (The cure for the population explosion!  The liberator of women!)  All around the media were proclaiming a great cultural change.  It was on the covers of Time and Newsweek, in colour supplement photographs, whole episodes of Panorama, Man Alive and Horizon.  They had no historic perspective for this: this was their now.  1968, hippies, the Vietnam war, the “Sexual Revolution” had been followed by environmental awareness, the oil crisis, the troubled economy.   The words oil, Nixon and pollution cropped up in every conversation.  Sometimes people mentioned (derisively of course) Women’s Lib. 

Lucy never became a feminist: she was one, probably since birth, but was piqued into consciousness by the unequal treatment of herself and her brother Peter.  It was so obvious.  The feminist emphasis on male oppression was naturally associated in her experience with her father’s traditional views on women and how they should be controlled.  When Lucy used a Christmas book token to buy The Female Eunuch in January 1972 Mike immediately demanded that she should not read it and should hand it over to him “until you are 16.”  She read it anyway: she was fascinated by the arguments about love and altruism – she looked around for a male oppressor, but her chief sources of oppression were women: her mother, her headmistress, her fanatical PE teacher, her dismissive art teacher.  When Leo came along he did not seem to interfere with her freedom (or was she just being complicit in her own oppression there?).  

 Some adolescent girls dream about marriage, but it didn’t seem to fit with the peace, love and freedom doctrine Lucy had acquired as a hippy fellow traveller: she had the loon pants, the scoopneck t-shirts, the ethnic jewellery, but these outer decorative touches meant nothing without the mental furniture, and Lucy had bought the whole shopful.  These ideas weren’t bolt-on goodies, fashionable bells and whistles borrowed from others’ mental processes. They were the product of an interior alchemy which produced surprising intellectual results. Lucy had taken the gospel-based understanding of her Catholic upbringing, combined it with the actions of Che Guevara and the Women’s Liberation Movement and her own personal need for freedom to create a philosophy that embraced Jesus’s promise of life in abundance and transmuted it into peace, love and freedom for everyone and everything, but particularly herself.  

Marriage seemed to conflict with her desire for freedom and self-fulfillment.  Joni Mitchell warbling We don’t need no piece of paper from the City Hall, keeping us tied and true sounded cool and hip and non-possessive. She knew there were other ways of living – some of the girls in her class had been passing around Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa.  This was a step up from the National Geographical as a way of discovering more about human sexuality.  The book was admired for its exhilarating descriptions of different ways in which adolescents were allowed to discover sexual pleasure.  Lucy wondered about these different modes of sexual relationship: more experimental, non-exclusive, with monogamy a brief pause in a kaleidoscope of other possibilities.  Hippy tribalism and communal living were the closest the West came to Samoa; intellectually these were fascinating, and clearly feminist. Not that she wanted sociable sexuality herself, she just wanted Leo, to be his.  Her romantic yearnings made her more a surrendered wife than a sexual outlaw at that stage.

Leo is less impressed with feminist arguments than Lucy, and Lucy begrudges giving up valuable kissing time to tell him more about it, but one evening as they lie on cushions on the floor, she does her best.

“Don’t you see Leo – women’s liberation is actually everyone’s liberation.  Plenty of men are oppressed by their sex roles, just as much as women are!”

“I don’t feel oppressed by them,” he says, “I’m happy with it.”

“But – some men, I mean, might find it hard to be strong and tough and manly and go out and kill animals.  I would if I were a man.”

“But you’re not a man!”

“Oh, honestly – use your imagination – not all men want to be told they have to be fierce and competitive and aggressive – some of them might want to be caring, co-operative sort of people instead, they must feel uncomfortable being forced into a masculine stereotype.”

She’s looking at him earnestly, he doesn’t really have an answer for her, but he knows a way to end the argument, so he just says

“I suppose so, if you’re that type,” and then his hand wraps her breast, teasing her nipple, until she loses interest in discussion.

Dilemma

Since I heard that the market for WW1 novels was dead, I have felt rather deflated.  The idea of finishing The Ash Grove at this point and getting it published to take advantage of the WW1 hoo-ha has been a long-standing one, which I first conceived about 8 years ago.  Sometimes clearly, one can be too far sighted.  Perhaps if I hadn't been distracted by the Love Object and written The Romantic Feminist first, then things would have been different.  I might have finished it by 2012 and snugly moved into the correct position.

However, I have clearly had to do a great deal of learning on the job and as a result The Ash Grove is probably better than it would have been otherwise.   So.   What to do?  I still have the wretched book in 5 or 6 slushpiles at present - I plan to try about 6 more in the UK and at the same time attack the US market, and send half a dozen query letters to US agents in the next few days.  I can probably risk a rather harder sell on them... trumpet blowing being better appreciated apparently.

The dilemma is of course, whether to carry on sending TAG out - or whether to revert to TRF - and whether to write Conc. or whether to dive into TGAD (the name of the new project)....I tried turning a little bit of it into a script and presented it at Tara's script writing group - of which I am an apathetic member - I usually go along to supply critique, rather than submit work, but as one of the group last time said "Why do we never see any of your work?" I thought I'd better turn up with something...anyway, it was politely received, no real criticism - which was disappointing, I was hoping people would spot all sorts of deficiencies - but apart from someone suggesting "wicked" would be used rather than "smart" there was no real critique.

M has just told me that TAG is "an absolutely marvellous book" - which I immediately translated as "anything to stop you whingeing".  It does need some editing - so that is what I should be doing in my idle moments.  I'm sure it could happily lose 5,000 words or so.

So, I do have a plan of sorts.  I don't feel really happy or secure about it, but it seems better than doing nothing.