What They Tell You

What they tell you about writing? Forget it or -if possible- don't listen, don't read and don't believe what they tell you. And they will tell you: a) how to write books and b) how you're going to feel while writing them. It won't be like that  - not because you are better, or worse; but because there aren't any standard scenarios.

I wish someone had told me this, ages ago. Instead here I am, after agonies, finally understanding how I function. It doesn't fit the theory. For example:

The white screen is the scariest thing you'll ever see. The rest is easy.

Not so. The scariest screen I see is the one I wake up to, every day, containing the dreaded draft. Editing is far worse than writing the first draft. White screens; what's not to love? An empty ballroom, yours for the dance. But this crowded muddle?

I scan each page, armed and vigilant, ready for any horror. Precision, progression, adjectives (adverbs are long extinct), suspense, dialogue, darlings*. The trouble is, it feels exactly like crawling in a jungle. Whoever says editing is fun is in fact a caterpillar.

*When I say darlings, as writers will know, I'm not referring to the people who inhabit my heart (and break it occasionally); no, I mean words, sentences, paragraphs, even chapters, that I love and must kill (because they suck). Darlings - in a first draft - are Satan.

Plan your writing - write synopses, back stories, character outlines.

Yeah, you do that. Every time I try, I fall asleep (best case scenario). I have been known to spend days on creating the perfect character outline template. I applied it to six characters. The first was eight pages. The last five - half a page each. None was used in the writing of the book.

I sobbed with tedium writing synopses and planning scenes - drinking the equivalent of the Caspian sea in coffee. The scenes themselves, when I got to them, were nothing like the plan.

And so on. I am doing what needs done, grateful for watermelon, breaks on the stone bench at the top of the land and the delete button. I reached page 103. Toodle-pip.

How People Write in Films

I want to say something about writers in films. I do, because I almost flung my computer at the wall when one such author popped up in a film trailer a few minutes ago; and I remembered all the others.

Writers in films. They sit in their rooms - always a classy mess of manuscripts, crumpled drafts in bins, cups of tea, and always that beautiful, gauzy light streaming through the window. The type for about five seconds, looking serious. A dreamy glance out the window, a bite out of an apple, then back to typing furiously...  until a smile tugs at the corners of their mouths. The light turns golden, the music is turned up and we know they're onto something glorious.

In the next shot they're signing books.

In the meantime, I write and drink coffee and write some more and the light outside my window stays the same for a very long time, and then goes dark. I have moments of passion and joy, I have moments when I don't recall the names of my characters. I don't remember words. I'm not sure about words I use every day. I'm not even sure I can write in English.

I love my story, it's what keeps me here. On occasion I love paragraphs I write, or metaphors, half-lines. When I re-read I find them worthless and pathetic, you know, a bit like those creeps you fancied at school, and made a complete fool of yourself for, until one random day you saw them for what they were. The horrid finality of that moment - the end of a beautiful delusion; I have that feeling about a hundred times every day.

So no more movies with writers. Just get up every day and kill your darlings. 

Mutant

There was a mutant fly in the bathroom yesterday. A no-worries, mostly-fly as it buzzed past my nose. But then it landed on the windowsill and turned into a Gollum of flies. A fast-moving, sideways-sidling dark hornet.

Fine, have the bathroom. I left.

I shouldn't have worried this morning: it was dead, ugly as before and sharp, shimmering with ants. What did they do to it? Bite? Feed on it? Suck it dry? Would Gollum slowly disappear? Dismantled into ant-sized portions and stored?

By noon, disaster: they had tipped the mutant into the bathtub. By nightfall, a rescue squad had been dispatched. They had it and had started the climb up the steep enamel.

With the manuscript, it's worse: I have it, but alive and fighting; and there's still this mountain to climb. 

Investigaciónes

9pm: I'm sitting outside the kitchen, moth wings fluttering past my temple - not quite a nuisance, not even a presence, only a temporary deeper darkness, like the occasional suspicion that I am not a writer after all.

Why did I ever tell anyone that I'm writing a book (in fact, I had to tell the husband. It was out of my control afterwards). But now, what if at the end of 20 days here they actually expect a book? A fully formed volume and the film rights bought and Liam Hemsworth in the running for Amar? Imagine stepping out of the airport, back in Scotland:

"So, book finished then?"
"Hey, how's the writing? Found a publisher yet?"
"Did you do lots in Portugal? Did everything come together?" Etc.

Should I tell them about the irredeemable page six? About the soul-destroying fact that, after all the work, Zefira still manages to sound spoilt and soppy?  About the Aleph conundrum - should he play a bigger part, when, how? Stuff like that? Or should I keep it simple and merry, "Oh, yes - just watch that bookshop"... as reassuring as demented dreams can be.

In the supermarket today, I queued behind an old sea captain (Spanish, it turned out); quite dashing (grey beard, liquid eyes) and gallant too: he instantly gave me his place in the queue, we chatted.

"What do you do?" he asked. I noticed he was buying vast quantities of bottled water. I cast about. "Pesquisa", I said in Portuguese, alarmed at once that he may ask for details. But no, he nodded, entirely satisfied,  and provided the word in Spanish:

"Ah, investigaciónes."

This is it: research, the perfect occupation. Vague, interesting-sounding and important; moreover, endless. It spans anything I want to do, and anything you want to think I'm doing. It's what humankind itself does: investigaciónes - cleaners can declare they 'investigate' dust, bakers can say the same about sugar and flour, and bureaucrats ditto, on boredom.

Cheque-list

Depressing realisation, as I try to attack this editing process in a systematical fashion, i.e. by making a checklist. There are some things you can do to make a book good. There are some things you can do to make a book easy to sell. They're not always the same, these things.

What now? I want this book to be published and read. I absolutely don't want it to be drivel.

In fact, given how hard it is to get published, I can't get over how many bad books are being published everywhere, all the time. Publishers get a tad defensive about these; 'oh, but think of the many good books that are being published' I heard some say. Yawn. That is not the point. How did the terrible ones get through?

I finished one a couple of days ago. I would have chucked it out of the window, if it weren't on Kindle (where it sat possibly infecting all my other books...). Arrrgh - how come no agent, no publisher said wait a minute... the narrator is spineless and nothing really happens, no redeeming feature, except maybe for that one metaphor on page 57. But the hero looks cute and there's some sex half way through...  it doesn't go anywhere and everyone dies but heck, let's print it anyway. Let's con some people into buying it by writing a few blatant lies and fake reviews on the blurb. Here, well done. 

Delete, delete the book, delete that thought. Deep breath. Think of Vora.

I write my checklist. It's huge. Lunch becomes suddenly important, and a nap. It was impossible to sleep last night - the music stopped only briefly, for the fireworks.

(do you see the outline of the church, underneath the red mushroom?)

We breathed cordite between 3-5 am, while the music continued. Music, by the way, exactly like that novel I was describing: trite and depressing - a string of cliches and pseudo-philosophy, this is how men are, this is what to do with a broken heart. A vision of hell, what with the cordite and all the smoke.

Could this be what people -readers- want?

I refuse to believe that, and drop the cheque-list into the stove, the first to burn come winter. 

Drum Roll

Aiiiii. It's 7am and cannons are blasting across the valley. The noise behaves like toxic gas in a mine: it fills the space, unseen and odourless, and explodes. A flock of homing pigeons fly in circles above the river - pale silver wings pulsing round and round. Poor creatures - or the fish, imagine the fish darting under rocks.

At 8am, still under bombardment, and now a new layer of sound is applied to the neighbourhood; the aptly called bombos, the village drum band is bringing its full repertoire to your doorstep.

At nine, the drums still parading, we get another surprise. The church sound system comes to life and issues a victorious trumpet blast, a brief announcement and the ubiquitous ranchos. The village celebrations appear to have reached a frenzy, and it's not even 10am. Muito bom dia.

I'm not going to hold forth about my work today (scene outline, pacing, progression). But here's what I learned about writing. At dusk, the sun turned scarlet and slipped in the sky until it reached the ends of trees. A skirting of leaves all around, all touched by a deep blush; but not the olive trees. Olive leaves lit up instead, a luminous silver.

See, how trees take the same light and colour it their way? That's it, my lesson about writing. A fable in which the sun is reality (one sun for all) and trees are writers who give that reality their own hue. They cannot help it - their character, their history, their seasons shape that reality as it goes through them. That's it. I'm not saying anything about writing well or badly, just about the fact that we cannot write against our nature or beyond our wisdom.

Drum roll.

A Fresh Eye

This is it: the virgin manuscript. I hover above it, paralysed. It looks so good, untouched, the rakish glint of black ink in the curl of a letter, a million letters, scattered and yet deliberate, perfect to the eye. A book, almost.

I know what I must do: read it, rip it apart, shred and reset, rewrite, re-dream the whole silly thing. It just seems such a huge task. I need a plan, some tools, a checklist. I must look at it with a 'fresh eye'. A fresh eye is acquired slowly, by locking the manuscript in a drawer for months. The trouble is, the same fresh eye is lost in an instant, at the first perusal; a bit like soda water losing its fizz as soon as you open the bottle.

Make the best of it, caution all those books I once read, on editing. But what if I forget something? Something important? At this point, two things happen: I realise I have forgotten everything, in fact I've no idea how to start and what to look for.

And the village festa begins.

This annual event, lasting three days, celebrates the village protectress, Nossa Senhora do Livramento, Our Lady of Deliverance (as in 'deliver me from evil' not, you lexical heathens, 'deliver my pizza at home'); and consists of fireworks, local bands, barbecues and vinho verde, dancing in the village square, and as if that - over three nights - is not enough,  jaunty ranchos (the local brand of folklore) blare from the church tower throughout the day.

No one can escape them, from here to the Asturias. I am writing from a fog of folklore now, with ringing head and trembling fingers, and we're only on day one of the party. The famous 'fresh eye', the one I need for editing, feels more like an egg laid 2 years ago and left in the sun.

Urgent measures are needed; I re-read 'The First Five Lines' - an important step, and necessary. While doing so I imagine myself a bit like a young peasant sharpening his scythe, sucking at a straw, surveying the meadow he's about to cut. I pat the pristine manuscript from time to time and thumb through the pages, thinking sorry, sorry.

A pause in the village broadcast and I run to my stone bench at the top of the land, to look over the valley: wisps of mist, silence. And just like that, before the day is over I make sense of the fear - it's not just the manuscript about to be mangled, but also the ego. It will be ugly, it will hurt. I'm about to examine, ridicule, eradicate all my pathetic, writerly elations and delusions from months back, when I was clucking to myself and scribbling Vora.

Fine, it needs to happen, bring it on. Fizzing folklore or not, I start tomorrow.