How Not Writing Your Novel Can Sometimes Help You Write Your Novel

It's the Easter school holidays here in UK-Land now. Which means...

*drumroll and fanfare - probably played on a kazoo...*

'Excuses-for-not-writing-of-the-busy-mum-variety' - time!

Put down that tiny violin please, it's not necessary. I worked through my guilt in the week leading up to this one, so by the time it arrived I was already down with having a week 'semi-off.' This is partly because my husband also had a week off, so I knew it was pointless trying to adhere to my usual writing targets. I'd just get my inner Gollum on when I couldn't meet them - "we didn't mean to be bad, preciouss... You failed ussss! Ussselesssss little hobbit!"  So.... it's fine. Really. Not a problem at all.

As well as Easter, Spring has also... sort of started. It's a bit hard to tell here in the UK, what with random raging storms and torrential rain still rearing their spoilsporty heads (I have at least two friends who lost their greenhouses in Storm Katie this week. Yep, we've started naming our storms too, just to make them feel that bit more important.) But the calendar says it's here, and for me that means getting my allotment ready for this years crops - so yeah, lots of digging over plots and sowing and potting up of seedlings. But there's something about losing yourself in the rhythm of digging and garden-pottering that gives your brain time to ponder over the mechanics and machinations of a novel-in-progress, and I've solved many a twisty plot-knot while up to my elbows in mud and weeds.

Equally, while I may not have contributed as much to the actual word-count of Redemption this week, I have found another way to work on it that's really helped me in ways I could never have imagined, so I thought I'd share it here.

I first discovered this strategy by accident a few weeks ago. Neither my husband nor my son enjoy accompanying me on a food shopping trip at the best of times, never mind on a Saturday morning when there's serious gaming time to catch up on, so I usually end up going into town on my own and leaving them to it. However, this week I went in an hour earlier than I normally do, and took a big notebook and pen with me in a rucksack, so I'd have an hour to myself for sitting in a nice cafe and scribbling with a coffee and a snack beside me. I've done this several times in the past, and even talked about it previously in this blog as part of a process for unsticking a stuck bit in your novel. This time I didn't have a specific problem with anything in Redemption, but I did feel as if my progress was slowing down a bit, so, without really thinking about it too much, I opened my notebook, stuck the date at the top of the page and started writing about it.

I started by writing about the scene I'd just finished writing; what I'd changed from my outline and why, how I felt about that, and what else I might now have to change further along in the story as a result. Then I wrote about the scene I was going to write next; where I would stick to my outline and where I might deviate from it and try another angle. As the debating and deliberating occurred in my head I wrote that down too, transcribing each little internal question and argument along with the mental responses that followed. It was part free-writing, part journalling - and indeed, by the time I had written a full A4 page in this manner it did look very much like a diary entry. Along the way I was able to make crucial decisions and answer nagging questions I'd had in the back of my mind about those particular scenes, which I was able to tackle as soon as I sat down in front of my computer to work on them.

So, when next Saturday rolled around, I decided to do the same thing again. By this time, I was at the stage of writing a scene that would need to change as a result of the scenes I'd changed last week. Not a problem; I had all my scribblings from last week's diary entry as notes to help with figuring out those changes. Again I wrote down all the internal debating as well as the solutions I came up with, even if they seemed trivial or irrelevant (or simply repeating what I'd written in my previous entry.)

And as the weeks have passed, I've found this to be exponentially more helpful with each new journal entry (I'm doing at least two a week now, even if that means doing some of them at home rather than in a comfy cafe.) It's not just the nuts-and-bolts decisions and outline alterations that have been useful to record; expressing the doubts and questions still to be answered has been just as useful too. Particularly since the act of writing them down seems to ignite a kind of slow-cooker process in my brain so that, by the time I come to write the next journal entry, the answer is at least half-formed already as I address it again.

When I worked as a software technician for an avionics company they had a standard practice that was very similar - the Project Log Book. Each employee had their own, and was required to record details of whatever code they were working on, progress made and things that still needed to be done to complete it. Of course this was a software environment where only the dry, technical data was to be recorded - putting in your feelings about what you had to do and internally debating whether it was the 'right' thing to do would have been somewhat frowned upon. That may have been why I didn't take the Project Log Book ethos all that seriously when I worked there (mine wasn't just written emotionally, it was filled with silly/cynical cartoons expressing those emotions.)

But now I can see how the basic idea of the software environment Project Log Book, combined with the freedom afforded by a diary format to express the accompanying emotions, can be invaluable to a writer. Done regularly, it offers deeper insights than an outline, helps you devise a plan for each writing session before you sit down to begin it and - best of all - creates a record you can look back over, to observe thought patterns for those particularly troublesome parts of a work-in-progress. And unlike random scribbles jotted down on the nearest piece of paper as and when inspiration strikes - which are just as useful in their own way and not to be dismissed - this type of W-I-P Journal works best as a one-stop location where all decisions and feelings about the project are recorded and collated over time.

Try it, is all I can say. It may well help you as much as it's helped me.

5 Ways My Writing Has Been Like Working On My Allotment

As of this month, I have now had my allotment patch for one whole year - at the same time, I have also been working on Draft Two of Redemption. And during this time I've learned a lot of useful stuff from both activities.

On the surface they don't seem related to each other. But a lot of the stuff I've learned can be applied to both writing and growing stuff, so maybe learning the lessons from one has helped me to look at the other in a different way as well. And because this is a Blog and I like to tell people about my stumbles and tryouts so they can be more sensible than I was... let's do this:

1 - Aim for Functional Before You Go For Beautiful

As I said previously on this very Blog, the plot of land I was given was in a right old state when I got it. Neglected for over two years, it was a wasteland of couch grass, ivy and thistles with roots that practically had an Australian accent by the time you got to the bottom of them. Added to that the wire netting, old pipes and half-rotting bags of fertiliser entwined underneath said urban foliage.... well, Kew Gardens it certainly wasn't.

But I had visions - oh, yes I did! One year from now this weedy eyesore would be transformed into a thing of beauty, with perfectly symmetrical plots lined with neat, green lawns, bearing more fruits and vegetables than I could eat in a lifetime...

Mmmmyeah, didn't quite happen like that. Oh I've done pretty well when it comes to the fruit and veg part; I've grown and harvested potatoes, onions, curly kale, sweetcorn, peas, gooseberries, tomatoes, peppers and a metric tonne of courgettes ( or 'zucchinis,' if you're American.) But only in the spaces I managed to dig in between the jungle infestation I didn't get round to clearing. So it's a functional allotment... but still not what you'd call 'pretty.'

And that's a pretty good description of the process of draft one through two of Redemption, to be honest. Draft One was a weed-infested wasteland - like most first drafts are - and maybe I was a little naive to think I was going to be able to sort it out and make it beautiful in a single, second-draft pass. Weeds have very deep roots, after all, and sometimes you think you've pulled one out only to find you didn't get all of it and the darn thing's grown back again. It takes as long as it takes, so sometimes you have to scale back your goals; first get it functional, then work on getting it beautiful.

2 - You Gotta Have a Plan, Stan

I'll stick my hand up and confess; when I took on that allotment I didn't have a chuffin' clue what I was doing. I'd grown stuff in pots and containers before, and that had worked out okay... surely it was the same, but just, like, in huge containers, right?

No. Soooo much no. The world invented gardening calendars and manuals you could demolish a shed with for a reason, and this reason is that plants are kinda picky about when they're going to start growing and for how long. In our modern world of global trading and intensive farming most of us take it for granted that we can stroll into our local supermarket and buy things like potatoes, onions and carrots any darn time we want to, from January to December. So it can come as a surprise to discover that, when you're trying to grow them yourself, they're working to a goddamn schedule - something to do with 'seasons' or some such malarkey. How inconsiderate of them...

As a result, I couldn't grow a lot of things I wanted to grow in my allotment because to do so successfully I would have to travel back in time and plant the seeds a couple of months before I decided I'd quite like to grow them. Sometimes you can cheat and buy them as young plants from a garden centre if you're quick (and I confess, I did do that for a couple of things) but the more sensible way is to assemble the aforementioned gardeners' calendars and manuals and work out your battle plan for the whole year in advance, so you know exactly what's happening, when it has to happen and for how long...

And if that sounds an awful lot like an outline for a novel... it's meant to. Yes, this was the year I finally figured out that outlining was something I needed to know how to do properly and then actually do it. No more going in blind and rewriting the bits I wasn't happy with 'organically,' to see what 'felt right' when the time came; I had to look at the whole story and decide in advance precisely what was going to happen and when, where, how and why. My outline for Draft Three is taking shape already - and it's good to know that, this time, I already know most of what's ahead of me. Heck, I might even make some spreadsheets - for my novel and my allotment.

3 - Sometimes You Don't Get What You Thought You Were Gonna Get

I planted a load of King Edward potatoes in one patch, and in the picture on the front of the packet they looked like... well, your standard King Edward potato. So I was a bit surprised when about half the potatoes I dug up a few months later were red-skinned -  still lovely, perfect for chunky, oven-baked wedges in fact - but not what I thought I was going to get.  I don't even know how that happened. And lets' not even mention the carrots... oh okay then, I'll mention the carrots. I sowed lines of purple carrot seeds (yes, they were going to grow into actual purple carrots!) between my rows of onions (that's supposed to stop the carrotfly getting to them, apparently.) When their little tufty green heads appeared above the soil I thinned them out as per instructions, watered them and cared for them as lovingly as if they were my own children. Until, months later, at least two other seasoned allotment-ers gently pointed out that they weren't carrots at all, but weeds. How on earth straight rows of weeds with tops that looked very similar to carrots manage to grow in exactly the place I'd planted carrots I'll never know, but that's what happened (and it is what happened; carrots don't produce little purple flowers in July, like mine did - nope, not even purple ones.) Point is, plants can be tricksy little hobbitses.

I also got a few surprises with Redemption draft two. For example, I'd been writing from two POVs up until this point, convinced that I needed both to tell the story properly. And then it gradually dawned on me that one of those POVs, far from providing tension and foreshadowing crucial plot points, was actually ruining them in the style of a human Spoiler Dispenser with his 'can't tell anyone this, but...' diary entries. Either that or repeating in technobabble what he'd previously said in laymanspeak to the other POV character. Not cool, Dr Harvey. You are hereby demoted to Standard Major Character.

On the one hand, I don't know why it took me so long to see such a basic error - but on the other, maybe I needed to see it in full bloom to know it had to be eradicated (like my carrots-that-weren't.) Other characters have turned out to have more depth than I'd previously realised, and will now be playing a bigger or more complex role in Draft Three (Junor, Jim, Randy and Fraser.) So, like my surprise crops, at least not all the unexpected results were unwelcome ones. And I've learned some useful stuff for next year.

4 - You Need To Tend To Your Plots Regularly...

Some days - mostly the baking-hot, beach-weather ones - I looked out over my allotment and thought "Y'know what? I can't be arsed to go over there and dig today." Other times I watched the rain sliming down my windows and thought "My god, I can't go out in that - I'll catch some form of Victorian consumptive disease!" And it's fine to play hookey and have a duvet day... every once in a while. But the thing about summer is that you get quite a lot of hot days - even the UK, believe it or not - and when it comes to the wet, windy and cold days of winter the UK's got them down to an art form. So when I started letting the climate dictate whether or not I would go to my allotment, those 'odd days' quickly turned into two or three weeks at a time. Which meant that when I eventually sloped back like the kid who knows she hasn't done any of her homework for ages, everything was overgrown and neglected again. I had to fight my way through 2-foot-high weeds and couch grass to get to my crops, and when it came to tidying it all up and preparing new plots I barely knew where to start. It felt like I'd gone a step backwards, and now I had twice as much work to do just to get back to where I was - all because I'd got lazy and kept telling myself "Tomorrow. I'll go over and do stuff tomorrow..."

I had bad-weather days with Redemption too. Days when  just the thought of sitting down to open up that Scrivener file and knuckle down into a writing session was enough to make me wish I cared more about housework than I do (so I could at least run away from the screen with a feeling of 'fifties housewife pride rather than lazy-arsed shirker's guilt.) Being a mum of a school-age child guarantees an excellent supply of excuses for slacking off; sports days, birthday parties, various PTA-sponsored events...

I told myself it was fine. I was just taking a break from the thing for a few days because I'd hit a gnarly bit I didn't know what to do with, and when I finally came back to it my brain will have magically unblocked itself - like sneezing out a really gluey bogey, presumably - and I'll just know what to do to fix the gnarly bit.

Except that nine times out of ten I didn't, any more than I did before I left it. And on top of that I'd forgotten a lot of what I'd done so far, so I had to go back and look through all my notes to remind myself again. Leaving the problematic bit alone wasn't what caused the problem; running away from the rest of it as well was my mistake. Even if I'd switched to adding new info to my character biographies, putting all the subplots into a spreadsheet - or even restructuring the outline - I'd still have been keeping myself in the loop with the story as a whole.

It's the same as it was with the allotment; if I'd made myself walk over on those sunny days just for five minutes, to water the plants or pull up the weeds in one patch, for example, I could have saved myself a lot of work later on and still indulged in a little bit of slacking off.

I guess that's why so many authors who've 'made it' say you need to write every day, like working a muscle or training for a marathon.

5 - ...But Sometimes It's Better To Leave One Part Alone For a Bit.

Weeds were - and are - a constant annoyance on my allotment - if there was some sort of award from growing the strongest and most impressive weeds, I'd walk away with it no problem. Accidentally bend the stem of a precious little seedling? I can practically hear it scream in agony before it crumples into a Camille-esque heap and dies. Gouge out the heart of a thistle and roar like Brian Blessed as I tear its roots from the ground? The bloody thing just pops up again a week later like I've done nothing more than give it a haircut and a massage. How does that even work? Damn you, Mother Nature!

At first I thought the answer was to swoop on every weed in every patch when it was just an ickle baby, smiting it while it was at its most vulnerable. Until I realised that meant being hyper-vigilant, scanning each patch on a daily basis and turning weed elimination into a never-ending job with standards of perfection that would make a professional forger beg for lenience. "I only weeded this bit two days ago, how in the holy heck have they all come back already?" became something of a catchphrase for me (and a lousy one for someone aspiring to the superhero title of 'Weeder Woman.')

Eventually I realised a far more effective tactic was to... just let the weeds grow. Because for most of the ones that grow on my allotment, trying to dig them out while they're tiny is a fiddly and messy job that involves getting right down on your knees and tooling around with mini-forks and dibber-things. You can easily spend an entire day faffing around like that, only to find that when you've finished things don't really look much different from when you started. However, letting each baby weed grow a foot high and then yanking the whole thing out, roots and all, is a breeze - five minutes work per patch, tops. And boy, does it look like you've accomplished something afterwards!

I've now adopted a similar approach when I'm working on Redemption too. For each rewrite and edit of a scene, I decide in advance what element of improvement/cleanup I'm going to be focusing on - and stick to that task and nothing more. If I spot things I can fix on the fly - spelling or punctuation errors I hadn't previously noticed, for example - I'll do that, but if I see anything that requires switching my focus from the Plan for Today - for example, further research to check if that thing this character says is still true, adding in new plot elements to explain that new bit I added into the previous scene - I leave it alone, to deal with another time. Yank it out, roots and all, when it's time to weed that particular part of the patch.

So... that's the lessons I've learned this year. I shall be taking them with me into the next one, and hoping the processes - in both writing and gardening - will help me be more effective at both.

Have any of your non-writing-related hobbies taught you more about your writing? Why not drop a comment below?

How Sorting Out My Plot is a lot like Sorting Out My Other Plot

Way back in 2014 I talked about how I'd managed to bag meself an allotment plot, for the purpose of growing my own fruit and veg in the future instead of bothering the likes of Tesco and co. Not that it was in any fit state for that at the time; the plot I'd inherited hadn't been touched in two years, and as a result looked like part of the set for Jurassic Park (except minus the dinosaurs. At least, I assumed there weren't any - but it was hard to tell what might've been lurking in there...) Lotta work to be done before I could get it even close to cultivatable (is that a word? 'Tis now.)

Fast-forward about six months through a cold and soggy winter, and that plot has now had a serious shave and a haircut. I have three patches I've worked over enough to actually have some seeds of the vegetable kind planted in them (and *fingers crossed* growing as we speak) and another five big brown squares that I'm still working on, but should be able to bring up to standard ready for my baby seedlings I'm currently nursing indoors on every available windowsill. Happy days!

But lordy, it's hard work. This is good though, especially - surprisingly - for my writing. Going to the allotment and doing some heavy-duty digging, lifting and shifting for an hour or so before I sit down to write seems to have improved my ability to focus - not to mention dramatically improved my ability to stay awake at my keyboard without the aid of medicinal chocolate and copious amounts of tea and coffee. Heck, if I carry on like this I might even end up looking like Kim Kardashian! (Well, okay then, maybe her mother... hang on, that's Kris Jenner - oh heck no, scratch that...)

But anyway, back to the important improvements. Far from getting less writing done and not meeting my weekly targets for hours and wordcounts, as I'd feared might happen once I started tackling my allotment in earnest, I've actually been exceeding them. I haven't needed twenty-minute 'top-up' naps during the day anymore. And I can go to sleep at night and only wake up about once or twice during that night, as opposed to every hour-and-a-half as had been the norm for me for god knows how long. I'm even having actual dreams again - and this time not the kind I don't remember but still wake me up with a pounding heart and the vague feeling I might have been crying. I'm talking proper dreams, with plots and characters and everything.

And maybe as a result of all this, I'm feeling a lot more positive about my writing - and my progress with Redemption. And as I've been knee-deep in soil and garden tools, I've noticed that some of the things I'm having to do to get my land in shape are very similar to things I'm doing to get my novel in shape too.

A large part of a second draft involves working out what you really meant to say in your first draft. The ideas are... kind of there, but it's as if you enlisted the help of some very drunk person to speak on your behalf, who only half read the memo and is really more interested in getting back to the bar and necking some tequila slammers. So after a period of leaving your first draft to mature you go back to it and you start the process of digging - just like I've been doing with my allotment. And just like in my allotment, this has meant digging my fork in really deep and turning everything over, to expose what's underneath that surface layer. You find a lot of surprises that way - both good and bad.

The good ones in my allotment have been worms and centipedes (good for the soil) and plants already there that I can still harvest (a massive clutch of rhubarb that'll be ready in a couple of weeks.) In my novel, it's been new depths to characters that I didn't notice before, extra nuggets of setting I can add in from further research I've done and places where I can strengthen and polish the themes. Bad things? Well, in my allotment it's been weeds that were sown by the devil himself - bindweed, thistles and couch grass, all with mahoosive roots that go down so far they have an Australian accent by the time you get to the bottom of them. In my novel it's weeds of a different kind; repeated words and phrases, using words that look different but are basically saying the same thing again that I just said (see what I did there?) And not forgetting, in my desperate bid to Show Not Tell, so many gestures and movements and - oh god! - soooo much looking, staring and turning to - that in some scenes my poor old characters read like Thunderbirds puppets on crack.

In both cases, it's been tough and dirty work, but worth the effort. And... it's been fun too. So I shall continue with both projects in tandem. With any luck, I shall eventually end up with both a completed novel worthy of publishing and dinner.

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...'