What Doesn't Kill Your W-I-P Makes You Stronger (Hopefully)

Yeah, I've been away from this blog for a while. August? Soooo not a good month for me, it would appear.

Apart from the obvious change in routine that having my eight-year-old son at home on school holidays inevitably brings, this particular August has been something of a lesson in stress management for me. I've had a catalogue of minor disasters occur, which has led me to conclude that this first book in The Renegades Trilogy has more lives than a cat and must really, really want to be written. After all it (and by association I) have been through these past few weeks, I practically owe it commitment now.

Disaster Number One pretty much put the mockers on me writing anything at all on my computer, since sitting at it felt like having arrows shot through my shin-bones. Remember that allotment of mine I told you about in this post?  Yeah, well, about three days after that I spent an evening out there doing my Monty Don thing, and managed to get bitten by some nasty flying midge-y things. Four of them, to be precise. I know it was exactly four, because some three weeks later I still have the four slightly hideous puncture wounds on my shins as evidence. Y'see, as the doctor helpfully explained to me, ninety-five percent of people suffer only itching and stinging for a couple of days from said midge-y things, but about five per cent will have a reaction that requires antibiotics and staying horizontal for a couple of days until their lower legs deflate back to their normal size and stop oozing. Guess which category I fell into? It's fine, don't worry. I now wear wellies and bathe in insect repellent spray before I set foot in my allotment. And I'm not a leg model so the unattractive holes in my shins are no big deal - although if I were to audition for a role as a Plague Victim I reckon they'd at least earn me a callback.

Disaster Number Two was what you might call of a triumph of my own stupidity. I use Scrivener to organise my novel, which is saved on the hard drive of my computer. But, in the interests of averting disaster (ha ha) I also keep a 'backup copy' of it saved to a USB stick, which I copy over at the end of every writing session. Or at least, I thought that's what I was doing. It turns out actually no, I wasn't. Somehow I had managed to make two copies of the Master Version on my hard drive; one that I'd been diligently adding to every day, and another that hadn't been touched for about six months. When I discovered there were two copies I thought it made sense to delete the old, redundant one - after all, if I left it there I might get confused and accidentally do something terrible to the wrong copy, mightn't I? So I solved this potentially terrible possibility by deleting one of the copies on my hard drive.

The wrong copy, as it turned out.

Did I double-check beforehand that I was deleting the right one? Noooo, because that's how sure I was I knew what I was doing. But that's okay, I hear you cry, because you still had the backup on your USB stick, right? Erm... yeah I did. A backup of the six-months-old, redundant copy I thought I'd just tried to delete. I'd been diligently copying the wrong version to my USB stick for the past six months as well.

I looked in my Recycle Bin, but for whatever reason the deleted files weren't in there. I went into Scrivener and tried to restore the most recent backup, but for some other reason it wouldn't let me do that either. I could of course have gone into full-on meltdown at this point, but for some reason I didn't - I was actually quite calm, if a little depressed about the huge amount of work that potentially lay ahead of me if I couldn't retrieve my files somehow. After a day or two of posting queries on the Scrivener forum and preparing to start the whole thing over from scratch I got some helpful replies and, with a lot of tweaking and fiddling, was finally able to restore a backup of the right file that only had about a days' work missing. And you can bet your life the very first thing I did was delete the real redundant one and put my new, restored one in a sensible place I was sure to remember. And backed it up to my USB stick as well. That's how to learn a lesson the hard way, let me tell you.

They say disasters come in threes, and clearly Fate didn't want me to feel I was being short-changed so Disaster Number Three followed less than a week later. My computer began to die. I'd switch it on and it would chug along happily for about - oooh, ten minutes - and then suddenly go to blue-screen and try to restart. Sometimes it was successful - until another ten minutes had passed and it would blue-screen and try to restart again. Other times it wasn't, and just hung there in blank-monitored silence like the proverbial dead parrot of Monty Python fame.

Needless to say this was a problem that trumped the preceding two. Being permanently without a working computer would mean I wasn't going to get much of anything done - but I didn't have the money to buy a new one. There was always my local library, which offers free computer access - but that often means waiting for ages for one to be available, and while the Scrivener program does fit on a USB stick (and I'd managed to copy it to mine before my computer started its death throes) running it from there is so agonizingly s-l-o-w it's unworkable in practice. And libraries definitely don't like you installing your own software on their machines.

Buying a new computer was out of the question, but fortunately I have a computer-y background, part of which involved a previous job at a large, well-known computer retailer with a technical support department. If I could get an expert opinion from one of the guys there on which bit of my computer had gone belly-up, I could possibly afford to replace that one component. (I'd already previously replaced the hard drive in the past, when my old one succumbed to the effects of a particularly malicious virus.) So I packed it up and took it into the store I used to work in, and after a forty minute diagnostic the verdict was in. Praise the lord, it was simply clogged up to the max with dust, which was stopping the fan from turning and making it overheat and shut itself down! A quick blast with their air-jet thingy and, like Lazarus, my beloved old 'puter rose again.

So yeah, a stressful month - but all of this has convinced me I am meant to write this novel. Even if it takes me years, even if I end up self-publishing it because no-one in the Legacy Publishing industry wants anything to do with it - hell, even if I end up never publishing it at all and just moving on to something else instead. And since it fights so hard to live, no matter what, I've realised it needs a little more respect than I've been giving it so far. It's planned as Book 1 of The Renegades Trilogy, so I can't keep calling it The Renegades; it needs its own, stand-alone title. And in keeping with both the theme of the novel itself and its ability to keep getting back up from every little setback, it will be known from this point onwards as Redemption.

Well... until some agent or editor somewhere tells me it sucks and suggests changing it to something else, of course. That could happen. But I'll chew on that gristle if and when it gets served up to me.

So come on, Redemption - we've got an appointment. You and me, at my computer, now. I'll bring the chocolate.

How My New Allotment is a Lot Like Draft One of My Novel

Yesterday I finally become the proud owner (well - 'leaser' anyway) of an allotment - a lovely patch of land about forty feet by twenty feet for the purpose of growing stuff to eat.

I'd been on a waiting list for a while, so when this came up I jumped at it. If I hadn't, my eight-year-old son would probably have jumped on my behalf, since he's been panting to have his own little patch to grow things ever since our next door neighbours got their allotment plot. Needless to say, he is beside himself with an excitement which hasn't been dulled in the slightest by the current state of our newly-acquired plot. Because... yeah. Ready-to-plant it aint. Not by a long shot.

Its previous owner was a man in his eighties, who gradually stopped tending to it because it just became too much for him. So when we took it over yesterday afternoon it hadn't seen any action for at least two years. As a result, any soil there is hidden under a thick carpet of knee-high grass, ivy and a particularly virulent form of thistle - not to mention long-discarded bags of fertiliser, bits of wood and wire netting and other assorted rubbish scattered all over the place. So yeah, something of an unholy mess that's gonna need a lot of clearing up, digging up and tearing out unwanted stuff before I can start putting in the things I want to grow and nurture.

And it struck me that my first draft of w-i-p The Renegades looked a lot like that too, when I first came back to it after a six-week 'fermentation period.'

In both cases I think I went through the same emotions. I started off  by staring at it and going "Whoa... that's a whole lotta work to do right there." I definitely doubted my stamina and determination to commit to the task. My track record in the past hadn't been that great, particularly with novels; I'd put in the hard work for a bit, but as my enthusiasm trailed off so did the hours I put into it, until it got to none at all. But that was with even getting a draft one finished, and this time I'd done that - I'd finally got to the stage where I had a completed draft to work on. I finally proved to myself that I can do it after all - I can commit when I feel something's worth the effort. The Renegades is worth the effort, even if it ultimately never gets published - I'll still have learned so much about how to write a novel from it, which I can use towards writing more and better ones in the future. And this allotment will be worth it too.

So yesterday, within minutes of acquiring my new plot of land, I decided to approach it the way I approached my other plot - the one I'm currently shaping into Draft Two of The Renegades.

Golden Rule Number One: start small. I can't fix everything right away, and trying to make the whole thing look better overall in just one pass is just too big a task and will ultimately leave me feeling like I've barely made a dent in terms of progress. So I set to work on clearing just a small section of the plot, a six-foot-square corner overgrown with thistles and trailing ivy. I ripped them all out, broke up the soil underneath and dug it over, so that I had a nice, bare patch of ground to plant things in. Okay, it might only be six foot square patch, but it's the best patch, and when I look at the whole plot overall it's very obvious that I've done something to improve it. Which makes me think "hmm, yeah, I can do this. A bit at a time, in regular little chunks, and I can do all of this."

I've reached the halfway point in draft two of The Renegades so far - and that too, was done in regular little chunks each day. Of course I'll still need to go back over them and tighten them further - but, like my little patch of earth, they already look miles better than the draft one sludge pond they emerged from. And that spurs me on to keep going, in regular little chunks at a time.

I'll be the first to admit I'm no gym bunny, so after yesterday's efforts in my allotment I was fully expecting to wake up this morning feeling like I'd fallen out of a first-floor window. But actually it's... not bad. The only place I ache is, somewhat weirdly, my hands, from tearing all those stubborn thistles up (a writer who's fingers are out of shape - how ironic is that?) And I probably felt the same way the morning after my first time at the coalface with draft two as well.

Each morning, before beginning my writing session, I've also been reading a metric tonne of books about novel writing and plotting and outlining and dialogue and show don't tell... Because if I'm gonna do this thing - and I am gonna do this thing - I'm darn well gonna do it armed with every tidbit of knowledge and advice I can get my hands on. So now I'm planning my library trips to get books about growing fruit and veg, not to mention trips to garden centres to ogle all those lovely seeds and gardener's charts and all the other fancy-pants things that now look like I desperately need them (I probably don't - a bit like I don't really need another notebook divided into six sections, or another set of highlighters that - oh look! Can be hung on a keyring this time..!)

And now I must leave you - I have an allotment to tend to. And my eight-year-old son has already planted it all out in his head and is nagging my ears off to make it a reality - by the end of today, if possible. Hmm... looks like not everyone can see the benefits of 'regular little chunks...'

Writing A Novel vs. Writing Lyrics

I'll be the first to stick my hand up and say I was a late arrival to the novel-writing party.

 I'd certainly tried writing novels in the past - I think the first one was when I was about eighteen or so (for the life of me I can't remember what I called it or what is was about, so it must have been so godawful I've blocked it out.) As the years went by I tried to write several more, many of which still languish in tatty old notebooks in a dingy cupboard somewhere or in the Story Graveyard Folder on my computer. So yeah... novels? Something I was more than a bit crap at, judging by the evidence (or rather, my consistent lack of it.)

Lyrics for songs, on the other hand...

I'd been writing lyrics since my early teens - and unlike novels, I did finish the majority of them. I wrote them for myself (although I was way too shy to sing in public, so god knows what I thought I was ever going to do with them) I wrote a few for some singers in local bands (no formal copyright stuff, just gave 'em away - hey, it was in the hippie-chick-ing, doing-it-for-the-karma-man period of my life...) And, in my mid-twenties, I collaborated with Stephen W. Rodgers, an American composer, to write the lyrics for two stage musicals - Cinderella and Peter the Great. Both were performed publicly and received good reviews from theatre critics. And ever since then I've continued to write lyrics; 'straight' ones geared towards the mainstream music scene, comedy ones and parodies of existing songs a' la Weird Al Yankovich. (I've written over 100 parody songs alone.)

Lyrics were always things I could write pretty easily - and finish pretty easily. Novels... not so much. And yet every time I started a novel I wanted to finish it - but somehow, for years, never could. Eventually, after stumbling upon Chuck Wendig's excellent blog and being inspired by his advice (the most important bit of all being "finish your shit") I began to wonder why. What was it about writing lyrics that I found easy - and writing novels that I found hard?

The most obvious theory is of course to do with length (said the actress to the bishop...) The average song is designed to last somewhere between three and seven minutes, while the average novel  is designed to last... um - flippin' ages - well, a lot longer than a song, anyway. Aha,  it seems I've found the answer - when it comes to writing I clearly have the attention span of a goldfish!

Except that doesn't really hold water when it comes to writing lyrics for stage musicals - particularly in the case of the second one, Peter the Great. There were no previous stage productions - musical or otherwise - that I could read to 'get an idea' of the story; it hadn't been done before. Instead, Stephen and I had to research his life using academic and historical textbooks, pulling out the parts we felt would be interesting and structuring them into a coherent plot. In other words, using the same process used for outlining a novel. And while it's true to say that in place of chapters containing scenes in a book we had scenes containing songs on a stage, the commitment to a cohesive story as a whole was just as important. So no, it wasn't simply that I was only capable of creating five-minute-long stories.

However, when I started breaking down the structure of stage lyrics compared with the structure of novel chapters, some key differences emerged. Particularly when I compared my strengths as a lyricist to my weaknesses as a novelist.

 Description, for example, has always been my weak point in my novels. Like an over-geeked George Lucas, I tend to dump my characters in front of little more than green screens a lot of the time, with this vague idea that the awesome CGI-o-vision that's rocking in my head will somehow magically translate to the readers without me having to paint anything in myself at all. This is a direct result of writing lyrics, of course. In a song on a stage you've already got the set doing the work - and since you've only got a few minutes to tell the audience what's going on plot-wise (about 20-30 lines of lyrics) you can't waste them bibbling on about the view and the ambiance. Being good at describing scenery was something that I not only didn't have to learn as a lyricist, but would even have been a handicap to the process - so in a sense, I almost had to train myself not to be good at it.

Another key difference is the speed at which plot is given. In a novel the pacing ebbs and flows; some parts are more emotional and therefore more at a slower pace, while the more action-packed parts move faster. Either way, the pace still feels 'natural' to the reader, even when there are jumps forward in time. Stage lyrics, on the other hand, because they're also songs as well as chunks of story, tend to fall into one of two categories. On the one hand, you can have an entire song for one small, special moment (rare, but usually saved for the 'memorable songs' - y'know, the ones you envisage being the 'favourites,' that wannabe actors will pick for their 'audition pieces' in years to come.) Or, on the flipside, one song can whoosh through a whole chain of events like a high-speed train. "Peter needs a wife! We must invite tons of women to the palace! Oh look, here they all are - why, they all seem to want to marry the rich and powerful tsar-in-waiting! Not her, she's too fat! Not her, she's not classy enough! Not her, she looks like a horse! Oh wait - this miserable-looking one looks like she'll be a proper doormat, so let's have her! Well, that's quite a random choice, mother, but hey - you're the boss I suppose..." (Those aren't the actual lyrics to the particular Peter the Great song in question, but it does give some idea of how quickly the events zip past.)

And then there's the whole 'rhythm and rhyming thing' that you have with song lyrics. They've gotta fit the tune they're going to be sung to, and, while they don't have to rhyme, audiences do seem to prefer it when they do. Obviously, doing all of that and still making it sound like normal, naturalistic speech is next to impossible, so, in exchange for all of that lyricists - like poets - are granted huge amounts of creative license when it comes to proper use of grammar and sentence structure. And cliches too. Cliches are the invention of Satan in novels - but can be almost comforting in song lyrics. Basically, in their quest to Make Stuff Rhyme And Fit, lyricists can do things with the English language that would make Strunk and White cry like babies.

All of the above traits have helped me write lyrics over the years, because lyrics are compact and fairly abstract boxes, where getting your point across involves packing as much as you can into the small amount of space you have to work with. By comparison, the landscape of a novel is a vast, open wilderness; you must still choose your words carefully and not waste them, but that doesn't mean applying the same principles as for lyric-writing and then simply scattering the results over a bigger area. That, I've come to realise, is where and why all my previous attempts at novels failed.

So... it's been Back to Writing School for me while writing The Renegades, metaphorically speaking. I've been reading tons of writing how-to books to fill in the gaps in my knowledge, along with following the blogs and online tutorials of various authors who know their stuff. I've focused mainly on improving my outlining and plot structuring skills, and learning how to incorporate descriptions without resorting to cliches. It'll be a long, hard road I'm sure - but I'll stay on it for however long it takes to make The Renegades the best it can be.

How to Detect the Clank of the Deus Ex Machina

There comes a point in almost every rewrite of a draft one manuscript when you suddenly become aware your internal Writing Satnav/GPS is yelling at you. Not the normal sort of yelling, where they're just giving you instructions like "continue with this POV until the next plot twist" in that slightly bored and disjointed voice they do so well, but the loud, insistent scream of "do a U-turn NOW or you're gonna dump this story over the edge of a cliff!"

Y'see the wonderful thing about a draft one is that anything goes in terms of making your characters Get Important Stuff Done. They can temporarily be Superman, McGyver and Gandalf the White all rolled into one if that's what it takes to move your story from Plot Point A to Plot Point B, because you're still in the figuring out stage and "the rest of the story can't happen unless they do this thing and shuddup okay I haven't got time to think about it I just wanna get this done dammit!" In essence, you roll out the Deus Ex Machina.

Translated as 'The God in the Machine,' a Deus Ex Machina was a plot device employed in Greek tragedies, when the audience loved nothing more than tales of piddly little humans getting repeatedly kicked in the 'nads by the awfulness of their piddly little lives until some random Greek God dropped down from the sky and fixed everything in the last three minutes of the show. (In these stage productions, the actors playing said gods were literally dropped on wires through a trapdoor in the ceiling to perform the obligatory last-minute miracle. In a world that had yet to acquire a 'Die Hard'-ing Bruce Willis, this was the best they could manage.)

Draft ones of manuscripts are the perfect place to slap Deus Ex Machinas; it's how many draft ones get completed at all. But when draft two and beyond rolls around you can't get away with that sort of nonsense anymore. Stuff has to make sense. You need to make sure that, when it comes to solving problems and moving the plot forward, your characters aren't using a sledgehammer to crack a nut - or, even worse, an inexplicably-acquired magic nut to destroy a sledgehammer. And if such a thing occurs, it often occurs more than once. Like that thing they say about a butterfly beating its wings causing major disasters on the other side of the world, one such doof-up can have knock-on effect on several other areas of your story, amplifying the doofiness of each subsequent doof-up until your precious draft one begins to look like the work of a lunatic.

This week, at the two-thirds-through mark of my current w-i-p The Renegades, I reached that point.

As I began rewriting Chapter 22, I realised there was some major information that needed to be given earlier in the story if what occurred from this point on was going to make any sense. Which meant a pretty intensive re-write of Chapter 18 - the only place where including that information would be sensible and flow naturally from the events described. And as I started doing that, I began to see holes in other areas too, until the crucial Grand Plan of my protagonist and her two comrades-in-arms began to look distinctly colander-like in terms of its ability to hold water.

I sighed. I head-desked. I ate cake ('works when you're happy, works when you're sad - the all-purpose mind-medicine!') And then I decided that the only way to fix it - and at the same time catch any other giant doof-ups that may still be lurking elsewhere in my story - was to draw up a list of hard questions to ask myself. Put every one of my plot points on trial and see if they made the grade. And here is the list I came up with. The Renegades is a sci-fi story, which is why I need to focus heavily on technical details, but there's no reason why this list couldn't work for other genres too:

1 - Would this course of action actually achieve the desired result?
This is the first question because it's the most obvious. Are the characters - with all their strengths and weaknesses  - actually capable of doing what's required? Does this thing they're trying to do comply with what's physically/scientifically possible in their world? How could things go wrong, and how plausible is it that they could still achieve their goal a) without anything going wrong or b) by adjusting to a Plan B 'on the fly' if things did go wrong?

2 - Is this course of action the easiest/safest way to achieve the desired result?
Because characters don't care what makes the plot funkier; they just want to do what they want to do. In real life we don't generally pick the hardest and most dangerous way to do something, and if a story is to make sense to readers then the characters shouldn't either. So if your heroine is creeping up behind a burly security guard and doing a Vulcan Death-Grip on him, hacking into the security system to bypass the locks, and then taking out another couple of security guards before escaping through the front entrance of an underground complex - when instead she could just sneak out of an unguarded back door and run like heck... well, it might be more exciting, but it's ludicrous. Forget the action-thriller whizz-bangs and let characters behave like someone with common sense.

3 - And they're doing this thing... why, again?
There are only two reasons people in real life do something they don't need to do; if it's enjoyable, or if they believe they can't avoid doing it. The same should be true of characters in stories. This applies to the big, game-changing actions taken and the smaller efforts that help towards achieving the big goals (those times when a major action can't be completed until a series of minor ones are done.) Both can suddenly become redundant with even the smallest of plot changes elsewhere in the story, so it's worth going back and checking to see if they're still relevant when such changes occur. Do those characters really still need to do that slightly random midnight raid that contributes nothing to their current objective at all? Or is Cackling Overlord Author only making them do that, so they will 'accidentally' find the secret thing they didn't even know existed but just so happens to reveal some really vital plot information? Don't be that author. Readers will snigger at you and call you names behind your back.

4 - Why are they doing this thing NOW? What stopped them doing it BEFORE now?
If they're doing what they're doing now in response to a situation they were aware of ages ago, what changed to make that happen? The answer can't be 'nothing,' because that just makes your characters look like apathetic chumps. Action should always be followed in quick succession by reaction, and even if that reaction is to do nothing, the reasons for that should be logical within the context of your story - along with any reasons for them to change their mind at a later date. The same rules apply when it comes to characters with special skills or magical powers. The reader has to know about them as soon as the character is aware of them - and from that point on, they're a tool in their toolbox, to be used whenever any person with an ounce of intelligence would use them to make their life that little bit easier. No saving them up for an oh-so-convenient, one-night-only appearance in the Final Showdown Moment - "Oh I remember - I can shoot burning jets of fire from my hands! Well thank goodness I finally realised that  just now, as I'm fighting the Deadly Ice Troll we've been hunting through The Frozen Wastes for nearly three-quarters of this tale! Doh - now I think about it, I could've used that on all his icy minions on the way here as well... silly old me, eh?"

5 - And they still think this is a good idea, right?
Sometimes, in the name of building the tension and moving the plot forward, characters have to do completely the wrong thing. Make really bad decisions, horribly misjudge a person or situation or take a risk  on impulse and have it not pay off in the worst possible way. Your readers might see the disaster coming way in advance, fighting the urge to scream "nooo, you raving idiots, that's the worst thing you could possibly do..!" as your characters blunder towards the inevitable snake pit - but your characters definitely shouldn't. People don't generally choose to do stuff that's going to mess their lives up. If you're gonna make your characters do a dumb thing, they have to have damn good reasons for not thinking it's a dumb thing, and those reasons have to be crystal clear to the reader. If your character has clearly stated he has an acute phobia of snakes, that's not going to go away without intensive therapy - so you can't suddenly - and purely for the purpose of fulfilling your plot obligations - make him read an advert in the local paper for a job as a snake-charmer and say "Ooh, I'll go for that! I mean, I know I'm terrified of snakes... but I'll muddle through, I'm sure!"

I'm applying these questions to my w-i-p as of now - and it's already given me things to think about. Have I left anything out that could be added to this list? What are your experiences of extracting the Deus Ex Machina from your work? I'd love to know.

Striving For Perfection: A Great Idea (Theoretically.)

Well, it's all over; Number One Son's eighth birthday party went swimmingly, a fab time was had by all and my stress levels have returned to normal. Normally I would recover by eating cake, but today... cake is likely to make me run for the hills, to be honest. Don't want to see cake again for a very long time. Maybe even a couple of days...

As you might recall from my previous post, I had been tasked with making a Minecraft Island birthday cake, and I was determined to do it justice. The vision in my head was a work of art. My imaginary Minecraft Island cake was a thing of such cakey awesomeness that grown men would look upon it and wish they were children again, so they could have one just like it for their birthday. Every angle was mathematically perfect, every inch of the icing was smooth and flat and coloured to perfection. That was the cake my brain wanted to make.

Unfortunately my brain was just the foreman; the actual work was left to the pair of easily-distracted and somewhat unpredictably-coordinated flappy things at the end of my arms. And they clearly either didn't get the memo, or are spectacularly bad at interpreting instructions - either way, my brain wanted to fire them both on the spot when it saw what they'd done...

It's alright - I'm not fishing for compliments. It's not bad, I know that. But it looks nothing like my brain's interpretation (which was utterly freakin' incredible) so my brain is currently having a massive sulk and screaming that it's awful, a travesty - an insult to cakedom. My son pronounced it 'awesome,' and his little friends were suitably impressed - which I keep telling myself is all that really matters - but even so, I still can't stop myself doing a Simon Cowell Face every time I look at the chuffin' thing. When it came to recreating the sculpture of loveliness in my imagination, I failed.

And I do this so many times, in so many areas of my life.

Whether it's cake-making, arts and crafts, acting, singing - and yes, writing too - I start off with a picture of perfection in my mind, and when the thing I actually produce (inevitably) fails to live up to that ideal, I feel ashamed of both it and myself for faceplanting so far short of the impossible goalposts. It's probably held me back in my writing far more than I care to admit. And as I keep on truckin' through Draft Two of The Renegades, I'm starting to realise I'm going to end up feeling the same way about that too. I'm gonna need to fix that if I want to get this baby published.

I'm far from the only writer to point my arrow at perfection every time. Many of us - even if we don't admit it out loud - have a secret ideal in our minds of who we want our work to be compared to in terms of standard; 'the next Stephen King,' 'the new J.K. Rowling,' 'the Romance Genre's answer to George R.R. Martin' (mmm, okay, maybe that last one wouldn't work so well...) Anyway, those of us who are perfectionists tend to reach for the stars - which is fine, as long as we don't keep turning back in disgust the minute we've left Earth's orbit because our rocket's making funny noises.

There's nothing wrong with striving to produce only the very best work you can do; in fact, readers expect nothing less from any author whose book they've bought and rightly so. The difficulty, if you're constantly chasing perfection, is learning to accept that your 'best work' probably isn't going to be that, because it's simply not achievable - by anyone. If your Inner Critic is a drill sergeant he'll no doubt tell you to abandon all hope - if it looks like what you've produced isn't going to be a No. 1 Bestseller then you've already failed and you should just give up now. Inner Critics have their uses - but they can be a dick sometimes too...

While I was studying Performing Arts I had singing lessons as part of that course. Before that point, I did not sing with the intention of anyone actually hearing it - the very thought of it terrified me. During a one-to-one session with my singing tutor, I confessed to him that this was because I actually hated my singing voice. He asked me why, and after thinking about it for a bit I told him "because when I sing something from Les Mis, I open my mouth and I want Lea Salonga to come out - but all that comes out is me." He laughed and said "Well, you're not Lea Salonga, are you? You're you. So you've got a choice. You can either wait until you magically turn into her before you ever sing a note publicly - and then you'll waste the rest of your life not doing any singing at all. Or you can accept that you're you and work on making your voice the best it can be."

I haven't done any singing in public since graduating from that Performing Arts course, so I think I shall take his words and apply the essence of them to writing instead, since that's my focus now. And to any fellow perfectionists out there: have a high-five from me. Our best is better than 'perfect.' We need to remind ourselves of that whenever we beat ourselves up.

Starting a Novel is The Easy Part

Okay - for a bit of fun, let's imagine for a moment we somehow have the attention of everyone in the world all at once, for just the next five minutes. I'd like to see a show of hands, please. How many of you good people believe, as the popular saying goes, that you have 'a novel in you?'

Ooooh, lordy - that's a lot of people! Okay then, keep your hands up if you've 'always wanted to write a novel someday...'

Well, that's put a few hands down - but not many. There are still loads of you in the game! Right - keep your hands up if you've ever started writing a novel...

Oh yes, the numbers are dropping a little bit more now. But there are still a lot of you with your hands up - goodness me, who knew there were so many aspiring novelists in the world? Okay, final question: keep your hands up if you've ever written a complete novel - as in, finished it, right to the end...

Woah! What just happened? That's a whole lotta hands just dribbled back down... the group left standing suddenly looks very small...

Because that's the bit no-one tells you about. When they interview the likes of Stephen King and George R.R. Martin and J.K. Rowling on the telly or in a magazine, they never ask "How in the heck did you manage to finish writing even one of your books, never mind all of them?" And even if they did, I can imagine those authors staring aghast in response, as if the very idea of not finishing their work was akin to never getting out of bed again for the rest of their lives. Because famous writers finish all the novels they start. Proper writers finish their novels. Which makes The Rest Of Us squirm in our seats and shoot uncomfortable sidelong glances at our writing workstations, where all our half-finished ideas and aborted works-once-in-progress now lie in permanent stasis.

You know who you are. If it's any comfort, up until recently I knew who I was too. We've had tonnes of ideas for great novels over the years. Stories we got really excited about, writing or typing at breakneck speed as the inspiration poured out of us and onto the page. We could see it all clearly in our heads; the characters were fresh and three-dimensional, the setting was original and vivid and the plot... oh, the plot even kept us - the lucky pup writing it! - hanging in sweet, sweet suspense. Until - ooh, rough guess here, but - usually about a third-to-halfway through our wonderful, sparkly new novel.

And then, somehow, it all goes a bit pear-shaped. The enthusiasm begins to feel a bit more forced every time we sit down to work on it. The doubts start to creep in; does that plot twist really make sense, or is it just ridiculous? Is this character really likeable, or is she a pain in the arse? (And since she's a bit based on me, would that mean I'm a pain in the arse as well?) With every day that passes, we start to feel less like we're crafting a story and more like we're trying to shore up a building that's destined to collapse from just one wrong smack of our hammer. In the stress of trying to decide if carrying on with it will only increase our chances of breaking it, new ideas start to sprout in our minds - little seeds of characters, settings and plot points for a brand new story... The excitement builds again, the cogs begin whirring - and, like children, we shove the old and worn-out toy to the back of the drawer, so that we can explore the intriguing possibilities of the new one.

 It doesn't matter, we tell ourselves; we haven't given up on the old story completely - we've just put it aside for a bit while we work on this new one, which has much more promise. We'll come back to it again someday. Except 'someday' never comes. And the 'new' story that siren-sang us away from the first one goes the same way as its predecessor a few months later - out-charmed by an even newer, even better story. And so it goes on - until that little Work-in-Progress file starts to look more like the Story Graveyard, where novel ideas go to die...

Ring any bells? Of course it does - because this is the thing that happens to so many writers so much of the time, but nobody ever talks about it. Well, certainly not the writers that are finishing books and getting them published, anyway. But here's the secret; that's not because they've never done it. No writer on the planet has ever finished every single novel they've ever started - no, not even writing superhuman Stephen King (and if he claims otherwise I'm afraid I shall not only refuse to believe him but demand some form of proof.) Every writer ever has abandoned at least one novel at some point in their writing lives. Even the most famous and and successful ones. Some of them still do it, even today.

That's all very reassuring of course, but how does knowing this help those who've yet to complete even their first novel? Well, if my own experience is anything to go by, the stage of Never Finishing Any Novel You Start Writing is exactly that; a stage in your writing journey. A metaphorical puberty, if you like. I'm still going through it myself; last year, for the first time in my life, I completed a first draft of my current novel. I'm currently knee-deep in draft two, so I haven't made the full transition from girl-to-woman yet; if we're gonna use the puberty metaphor I may have finally got the bra, but it's still only a training one.

But the process feels different this time around. This time there's a dogged, bloody-minded determination that wasn't there through all my previous years of aborted, half-written attempts. I'm gonna get this novel done, to publish-ready standard, no matter what - even if it ultimately gets rejected by every single agent and publisher in the known universe. That doesn't even matter anymore - because by then I'll be writing my next one anyway, which I'll know I can complete because I'll have already done it before.

I've heard some authors say it takes the 'right' idea for a story, the story you were always destined to tell, for the breakthrough with completing a novel to be made. I'm not sure if that's true. Looking back over many of my aborted novel attempts, it's certainly true to say there are little pieces of what's now become The Renegades scattered through them, so maybe I did have to collect all the elements of the story I was 'destined to tell' from the discarded fragments of what went before. Maybe you could try taking a look through your own files of half-stories and see if there are any common themes, ideas or scenarios that keep cropping up in all of them. That might turn out to be the story you're 'destined to tell.'

 I've also only recently learned the mechanics of outlining and plotting novels, after years of being a Pantser, so maybe that's played a part too. It might even have been hitting my forties and having my kid reach school age that suddenly gave me the kick-in-the-pants thought of "jeez woman, half your life's gone by and you still haven't finished a single novel you've ever started!" And last - but by no means least - it sure as heck helped to read Chuck Wendig's blog, where mantras like "finish your shit" turned on all kinds of lightbulbs in my head. (Seriously, if what you need to fire up your writing mojo is tough love, that's a site you wanna bookmark.)

It could have been any one or a combination of all of those things. But I think, more than anything, it's a just switch that suddenly flips in your head. Something just clicks into place and your mindset changes from that moment on. I wish I knew where that switch was and how to flip it at will - not only would I have flipped it years ago, I'd have done whatever I could to help others do it too. I've heard so many other writers beating themselves up over this very issue, and I know only too well how hard it is to get past it. All I can say is, if this is you, don't get down on yourself about it. I don't have a solution I'm afraid - and I'm not even sure if there is one - but don't ever stop believing you'll get there eventually. Keep on starting those new novels, keep on having better ideas that make you give up on finishing the novels you've started... keep on writing, no matter what. And one day it will all fall into place. You might not know when, or where, or even how - but it will.

Keep on writing. As long as you're doing that, you're still winning.

Outlining is My Elephant in the Room

While still beavering away at current w-i-p 'The Renegades' - with a determination so grim I am now 100-per-cent positive I'm actually gonna finish this thing (it might take me until I'm old and grey, but dammit I am gonna finish it...) - my brain, for some reason, decided to do a time-jump into the future. And as a result, presented me with a whole new set of things to worry about. Cheers for that, Brain!

The Renegades is actually planned as Book One in a trilogy. I've learned so many things about how to write a novel from writing this one, that I'm anticipating the process for writing books two and three to be a little quicker than the snail's pace I'm currently achieving. Once I get to the stage where I'm ready to start submitting Book One to agents and publishers, I'm obviously going to have to already be working on Books Two and Three if I don't want to look like an all-mouth-and-no-trousers kind of writer. Which means I need to be at least thinking about the storyline for Book Two...  oooh, right about now.

Because if an agent or publisher should like The Renegades enough to actually want to do something with it (other than bin it or burn it on a ritual pyre of Novels That Should Never See The Light Of Day, obviously) I can't wiffle about taking an eternity to write the two follow-ups. I need to work smarter - and that means having proper outlines in place from the start. All the most respected authors say you must have an outline for your novel (the only exception I can think of  is Stephen King, but then he's a writing superhero from the planet Writeon. I, on the other hand, am me.) So I realised I was going to have to get serious about the process too.

I did the research. I read books about outlining your novel; detailed books that turned it almost into a science. They were a revelation, suggesting techniques and procedures I'd never even dreamed of before. "A-haaa" I thought. "So that's how the professionals do it - jeez, no wonder my writing process has been so disorganised all this time!" I absorbed all the things about Plot Points; Key Points, Mid Points, Pinch Points... I dunno, Decimal Points as well probably. I made up special sheets with all the correct headings on them, in order to construct the most mathematically-perfect outline from beginning to end. And then I sat down in front of them, notebook and a gazillion different coloured pens at the ready (you need them to categorise your thoughts between character, action, setting, dialogue etc., apparently) and got ready to kick the plot-shaped ass of The Renegades Book Two...

...And monumentally failed to get anything useful done.

Problem is, the kind of Plot Outlining these books are championing, by their very nature, require your brain to think in a very structured, procedural way. Clearly they've never met my brain, which doesn't do that.

(If yours does, I can highly recommend Rock Your Plot: A Simple Guide to Plotting Your Novel, Structuring Your Novel: Essential Keys For Writing an Outstanding Story and The Busy Writer's One-Hour Plot. I'm sure they'll work like a dream for those of you whose brains are compatible. I did learn incredibly useful things about story structure, pacing and arcs from them.)

If the process of plotting a story for a novel could be compared to a car journey, this is how my brain works. It has a big picture of the landscape it's going to be travelling through - but it's more like a Google Earth photo rather than an actual road map with highways and placenames marked on it. It sure as heck doesn't have a satnav/GPS. It doesn't set out with a clear idea of where it wants to end up or look at the map to work out the towns and cities it needs to go through to get there. Instead it sets out with no clear idea about a final destination, but notices there's a big blue bit that might be a lake over in that part of the Google photo, and a yellowy patch that might be a desert or a beach or something... so maybe heading north-east-ish might be a good start. And, rather than reading the map to look up the names of places of interest in advance, it just pootles on its merry way using only the Google photo as a guide, seeing where the road takes it and making a note of anything that looks cool as it drives through, with a view to plotting it on the journey it'll take the next time through (i.e. in my case, Draft Two.)

And that's it. An approach about as structured as a Jackson Pollock painting, if I'm honest. And definitely not suited to the kind of meticulous plot-point-by-plot-point-breakdown trumpeted in the books I read. If the methods prescribed in 'the books' truly is the only way to outline a novel in advance of writing that first draft, I'm going to fail every single time. I'd even put money on it.

And then I revisited the Index Cards System of outlining a novel.

I'd read about it before, but didn't think much of it because, at the time I read it and the way it was presented, it looked to me like it was just a variation on the methods described in the books I've just read; deciding on your diversions and pit stops was a bit more flexible, but for it to work you'd still need to know in advance where your story started from, which direction you were going to travel in and where you planned to end up.

But then I read about how the author Michael Crichton uses the index card method to outline his stories. Rather than try to break down the skeleton of a story that already half-exists, into index cards that he can then swap around to 'fit' that structure, he instead spends a good few weeks carrying blank index cards around with him wherever he goes. If he gets a great idea for the story in the course of his day - whether it's for a snippet of dialogue that reveals a character's motivation, an unexpected twist, or even just a fantastic moment that just has to happen at some point in the tale - he scribbles it down onto a blank card... and then stuffs it in an envelope. And leaves it there, to marinate.

Over time, he scribbles on more cards and puts them in the envelope, until it's bulging with cards full of these little 'magic moments.' Only then does he tip them out and look at them all - and that's the moment he starts to move them around into something resembling a story outline.

For him, the plotting process is not looking at a road map, tracing a route from a to b to c and then writing an  index card for every place of interest that route takes him through. For him, it's more like finding all the pieces he needs to complete a jigsaw; he has to gather millions of them from everywhere and anywhere first, and then lay them all out in front of him to decide which of them belong in the jigsaw and where they should go.

And that, I've come to realise, is how my brain works too. I already have ideas for killer scenes and plot twists for Book Two - I just don't know where the heck they should occur in the story. So I'm going to give Michael Crichton's method a whirl; at the very least it's something I can do while I'm still writing Book One. In the past couple of days I've already added a small handful of cards, so it seems to be going well so far.

I'll let you know how it goes.