The Second Draft: It's Just The One After The First

I learned a valuable lesson this week - and it's all thanks to Chuck Wendig (whose latest novel, Under The Empryean Sky is out now. Of course I'm going to inform you of that - and not just because I'm grateful, but because I also happen to think it's a ruddy marvellous book, so there.)

As you may have noticed in my previous posts, I have whinged about this Draft Two of my novel-in-progress The Renegades taking much longer and seeming to be much harder than Draft One... ooh, maybe several gazillion times. Anyone still in possession of their World's Smallest Violin has probably long given up on the idea of just playing it at me and moved on to fantasies of smashing it over my whiny little head.

*Shrugs.* Sorr-ee. I'll stop now.

No seriously, I will. I'm sure it was annoying - and now that I've made this amazing little leap I shouldn't need to do it anymore. Much. No - at all, honest! Because now I see why my Draft Two was causing me so much angst - and how changing my attitude to it, even in these last couple of days, has helped me get my Renegades mojo back again.

It started when I wrote my previous post about NaNoWriMo. I believe there was this little statement I made along the lines of 600 words a day being a really productive writing sesh for me, yeah? Well, I'm doing my embarrassed face right now as I admit that was a massive lie.

I get two hours of 'writing time' a day in my life, so I doubt I'm ever gonna be one of those writers who can churn out two novels a year - but there was a time when 600 words a day would've been a piece of cake for me. (Mmmm.... cake...) But I haven't been writing anywhere near 600 words a day for... urrgh, at least a month now. I've been squeaking 300,  maybe 400 at very best  - and even then, only with the aid of PURELY MEDICINAL chocolate supplements. Fun and tasty as that is, I'm not sure chomping my way to Type II Diabetes is a great strategy for raising this novel into a functional, publishable grown-up, so I knew I needed to fix my shizzle. But how?

And then I read Chuck Wendig's blog, where he stated that it took him five years to write his first novel, 'Blackbirds.' Well, heck - if a real, properly famous and successful author is allowed to take five years to write his baby, then surely that means a little ol' 'who?' like me can take that long as well! I'm only on Month 20 since the entire Renegades Process began, so I'm kind of on schedule, if you look at it that way...

Then another thing occurred to me. If he really spent five years on it, then it can't have just been on Draft One, Draft Two and then a final spit and polish for grammar and typos. In other words, he probably had more than just a couple of gos at getting the story part right, before he even got as far as moving on to the technical bits.

And that's why I was struggling so much with my Draft Two!

All this time, I'd been thinking of Draft Two as my final chance to get the story right. After this, all subsequent edits would be purely for trimming and polishing the language and sorting out inconsistencies and the aforementioned grammar and typo bombs. Which meant I was putting my Editor Hat on - and an awful lot of pressure on myself - every time I sat down to work; "This aint no disco - this is Draft Two, Cupcake! (Mmmm... cupcake...) So every word you hammer out had better be freakin' good, if you don't want to prove to the whole world that you're not a good a writer as you like to think you are..!"

I'd lost that mindset of "just write - you can go back and fix it later" and gone headlong into "this has to be right now!" But the truth is, I'm still putting the story together in many areas; now I know all of it, I've realised there are bits in Draft One that don't need to be there, and important stuff missing that definitely does. I can't expect to fix all of that and have it all flow perfectly, first time, as well. So I'm going to need to do a Draft Three for that. And maybe a Draft Four... and Five...

And if I do...*fanfare*... IT DOESN'T MATTER!

It sounds so simple when it's written down, in actual words. But it's taken me a while to see it. So, if there needs to be a Draft Three, and Four, and Eleventy-One... so be it. No-one dies if I cock it up on Draft Two; I just get another go at putting it right. Which feels... kind of good, actually. Yeah.

So if you'll excuse me - I got some more Draft two to write. It'll probably be crappy, but I'm down with that now...

The Sound of (Multimedia) Silence

Aaah... TV. The internet. Newspapers and magazines. Books. Computer games. Where would we be without them all, eh?

Ever tried finding out for yourself?

There is a fabulous selection of books by Julia Cameron called 'The Artists' Way'; each one is basically a course-in-a-book that... well, I suppose the best way to describe them is to say they change your attitude to exploring your creativity. (If you're someone who dreams of getting into a creative field but has guilt/confidence issues about investing your heart and soul into it, you need to read at least one of these books. You will be forever glad you did.*)

Anyway, one of the exercises given to you as part of that course is to take what amounts to an 'information vacation.' For one week, you must abstain from: watching TV, surfing the web, listening to the radio and reading. Yep, that's one whole week - the whole seven days, baby.

The reasoning behind it is that all these forms of multimedia fill up your creative brain passively, with stuff you didn't necessarily ask for - like junk mail or spam in your Inbox. After a while your brain gets so used to being bombarded in this way it gets lazy and stops thinking up ideas for itself - and that's when your creativity gets stale and unoriginal. So what you need is a purge - a Media Detox Diet, to give your creative brain some quiet time to fill itself up with its own, new thoughts and ideas.

I first attempted this exercise several years ago, with a group of online writer friends. And I think we were all perturbed and sceptical in equal measure. A group of writers, not being allowed to read? How was that even humanly possible? And if anything, I think we were all fully expecting to be less inspired at the end of the seven-day period, not more - after all, without our daily diet of news and entertainment, where would all those creative sparks come from? Thin air?

The next step of course was clarifying The Rules. Being creative types, there were a lot of things we thought of that "maybe didn't really come under the remit of 'media' as such..?" *hopeful face.* So here's what we came up with regarding what was banned and what wasn't:

# TV - No dice; non-negotiable. That big flashing box stays OFF, 24/7, for the whole seven days. (And yes, DVDs and videos do count as 'TV!')

# RADIO - As for TV. It is, after all, basically TV without pictures.

# MUSIC - Anything instrumental is fine. Anything with lyrics - sorry, banned.

# COMPUTER - Internet is banned completely - and yes, that does include FaceBook, Twitter, Tumblr et al. You can write a blog entry, but you can't read any - same goes for emails. Computer games: puzzle games like Tetris and Jewel Quest - yes, okay then, but no cheating and reading the game rules/credits/options menu! Any games with characters/quests/storylines/dialogue - no way. Banned.

# READING MATERIAL - All books, magazines and newspapers are banned. And yes, so is anything on Kindle or other eBook gizmos (we didn't have them then, but they would have been nixed if we had.) Recipe instructions ('cos you've suddenly, inexplicably, taken a massive interest in cooking...) - you big cheater! No!  You can read the backs of packets if you desperately need to be sure you're reconstituting those instant noodles just right - but save your Great British Bake-Off ambitions until the end of the seven days.

Oh okay then... you can read road and street signs - but for safety and navigational purposes only, y'hear?

# SUPPLEMENTARY RULE - Regarding engaging in conversations with friends, family and colleagues about any of the above (i.e. "Soooooo..... anyone catch what happened on Downton Abbey last night then? 'Cos I missed it...") Obviously it would be next to impossible to prevent other people discussing all the things you're currently banned from indulging in - but if you are encouraging them this WILL be considered cheating.

How harsh all of the above sounds depends very much on your own lifestyle. For me, the TV part was pretty easy; I don't watch much telly anyway, and I've never really been one of those people whose entire week is ruined if they miss an episode of a programme they like. Same with radio - and even the music ban wasn't hard while I could still listen to instrumental stuff. Computer games - little bit harder, since I'm partial to the odd RPG or two, but doable. The biggest killer BY FAR was the reading part; swearing off magazines, newspapers and books for seven days was cold turkey of the highest order. And although the internet ban wasn't tough for me back then, I reckon if I did the exercise again it definitely would be now.

But I guess the million-dollar question is... how did it go?

Well, the first day was fine - "yeah, no probs, I can do this..." Day Three and I was beginning to wonder if reading the nutritional information on tins of beans really counted as cheating, because - oh! that stuff was fascinating..! By the time I got to Day Five I had rediscovered several crafting hobbies and was stringing beads and weaving scoubidous with a slightly manic expression on my face. And trust me, I was starting to effin' hate Jewel Quest.

But by the time I completed Day Seven I was actually sad the exercise was over. The multimedia vacation truly had felt like... a vacation. I realised just how much time there really was in the average day - without multimedia, there's loads more of it. I really did have the time to write a novel if I wanted to; it had always been there, I'd just never known how to look for it before. And, far from my Information Detox Diet leaving me with a head full of nothing, my brain was practically bursting with new ideas and scenarios. It had filled the void, all on its own. My friends all reported similar results, and many of us resolved to repeat the exercise again in future, whenever we felt blocked or stale as writers.

So... if you're worried you've become a slave to multimedia I'd say give this a go. Alternatively, if you're pretty sure you're not a slave to multimedia I'd say give this a go, because - ooh boy - you might just get a surprise. You'll find out just how big your life - and your creativity - can be. At the very least, you'll discover you have much more 'spare time' than you ever imagined.

If you feel like picking up the gauntlet, let me know how you get on...

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*Embarking on an Artist's Way course is a totally worth-it exercise in improving your writing - or indeed any other creative endeavour - provided you are able (and willing) to make the time for it. If you're living a completely manic life where you don't even have time to drive over the flowers on your way to Somewhere Important, never mind stop and smell them, attempting the steps of this course will just make you depressed and frustrated with that life. (This may be a great thing if you were secretly looking for a reason to ditch your max-stressful routine for something more spiritual - not so great if it's the only way to get your bills paid.)

Sometimes Real Life Sucks.

Yeah, I hold my hand up. I confess. It is an obscenely long time since I last blogged here.

I noticed it today; my last post was back in May sometime. At this point in time it's not the end of the world in terms of Blog Professionalism, since I can tell from the viewing ratings for this one that precisely nobody has been reading it so far. (Except for me of course - and I kind of have to, if only to make sure the brain-dumps I'm putting up here contain what I intend them to.) So, at this current moment in time, I am not exactly letting anyone down by failing to regularly post.

But thinking towards the future, when I've finally finished 'The Renegades' and I'm attempting to flog it to the world as a real, proper novel and everything... well, if that goes well people might start looking at this here blog and wondering why there was this humungous gap in the distant past of its lifespan. So I feel duty-bound to explain, so that you don't feel it was down to monumental laziness on my part. Well, not entirely anyway.

The reasons are many - but I'll start with the trivial ones. First, the older your primary school-age child gets, the more demands it seems their school places on the parents. These days it's not enough that your kid learns the three R's (which, as a phrase, is in itself a mistake unless 'not being able to spell properly' is a hidden fourth subject.) Now they have to learn them in the modern, new-fangled way that is completely different from the way you learned them when you were at school. This means that - even if your 'old' way gets exactly the same results as the new way - YOU ARE WRONG, and you must not infect your little darling's mind with your out-of-date wrongness when helping him with his homework. So YOU have to go to Special Classes, held by teachers at your child's school, to re-learn how to do all the things you're perfectly capable of doing your way in a completely different way that seems to you to take twice as long. You MUST do this, along with make costumes for your child's school plays and bake cakes for all of their fundraisers (no shop-bought muck, thank you every much - oh and can you also list every single ingredient in your home-baked offerings? For Health & Safety reasons, naturally...) Because, if you don't - YOU ARE A BAD PARENT. And that's worse than being - ooh, I don't know, a Liberal Democrat - these days.

So that's the trivial reasons dealt with. Now for the more serious one.

In December 2012 my father-in-law suffered a serious heart attack which almost killed him. He was in hospital all through Christmas and New Year before finally being discharged in late January. But even after this, it was clear that something was still wrong. He complained of pain in his neck and shoulder, and as time went by the area swelled and grew bigger and more painful. Soon it had grown so big he was unable to turn or move his head at all, and was having difficulty swallowing solid food. There was no two ways about it; he was ill, and whatever was making him ill was not just going to go away on its own, "so just keep taking the paracetamol until then..." In the meantime he lost nearly half his body weight, while doctors ummed and aaahed about maybe sending him for scans and tests...

For those of you not in the UK, our NHS can be a wonderful thing. It does save the lives of millions of people daily, and most of the population would be in dire straits indeed if it disappeared. But the financial pressures it is now under means that the quality of the care you receive can be something of a lottery. You can and, quite often, will, get the treatment and care you need from the NHS... IF you're prepared to push and demand and nag and shout and stomp your feet for it. If you're of the Old School, however - the kind of person who doesn't like to make demands on an already overburdened system, or be pushy or awkward with People In Authority because it's not good manners to demand good treatment - you will be ignored and shoved to the bottom of the pile. I can't say whether that's right or wrong - that's just the way it is.

My father-in-law was a man in his seventies - which, straight away, put him in the To Be Ignored Category. Add to this that he is of the aforementioned Old School stock, and... well, you get the picture. Suffice to say, it was only after a great deal of pushing and demanding from my mother-in-law, myself and my husband that, just last month, he finally got a diagnosis; a cancerous tumour in his neck. By this time it was so big it looked like a neck brace underneath his skin, all the way around. And it was terminal - or rather, they could operate and try chemotherapy, but he was now so weak he probably wouldn't survive the treatment anyway. They told us in no uncertain terms that there was nothing they could do for him, and they had no idea how much longer he had left.

After a further month of constant pain and rapid deterioration, my father-in-law died two days ago.

I don't intend for this to be a rant at the NHS - even though I can't deny I do have some very negative feelings about the way he was treated by some sections of it. Had he been fifty-four instead of seventy-four, I know for certain he would have been sent for the tests he needed - and had the results and, consequently, the option to have surgery and chemotherapy - months before he finally did get them. I'm not sure how angry I'm 'allowed' to be about that though, in this modern age when everyone's living longer and the NHS budget is being squeezed to strangling point. I can appreciate there's only so much to go around... but that doesn't make the months of suffering my father-in-law endured any less unfair - for him or any of the people who loved him and had to watch him go through it.

So yeah, that's why this blog took a back seat for a while. Along with quite a lot of writing in other areas of my life. Sometimes, however much you want to write your first, full-length novel and prove that you're not all talk and no action, etc. etc... you have to slam on the brakes and pull over to the side of the road. Because life throws more important stuff at you, and you need to deal with that first.
Writing is a big part of my life - but it's not all of it, and I would probably be a very strange and twisted person if it were ever to become so.

If you were expecting one of my usual pun-fests today... well, I can only apologise if I've disappointed you. Normal service will be resumed again soon, I promise. I suppose even a blog like this needs the occasional shot of darkness amongst the light stuff.