A Life in Words

Untold Stories

~ ChanAtkins ~ 7 Comments

I’ve blogged recently about the amount of stories and characters I have in my head. I have also blogged about my struggles with the final draft of my YA novel The Tree Of Rebels, and how I have been constantly distracted by voices from untold stories. In order to keep some of these voices at bay, so that I can finish each project I am on, I have been writing the odd short story for these characters. Has this worked? Well, yes and no! On the one hand, it does feel good to get something out, to relieve a little of the pressure. But on the other hand, it seems that if I allow these people an inch, they will take a mile, and start shouting even louder.

Anyway, I am making great progress with the final draft of The Tree Of Rebels. I am probably only days away from finishing it. I might have mentioned before that I decided to try changing the tense, to see if that worked, and although I can’t be sure until I read through it all, I think it has! So, the plan is, I finish the draft then re-read the whole thing, checking a final time for errors, typos and so on. Then it will be done! What comes next? Well, I do feel I ought to finish my rough plot for the sequel, as it might be a good idea to not let there be too big a gap between the two books, but this won’t take me long. I will then jump into the second draft of my novel Elliot Pie’s Guide To Human Nature. As you might recall, Elliot Pie was a queue jumper! Jumping neatly ahead of the planned sequels to The Tree Of Rebels and The Mess Of Me! He was too insistent to ignore, so he finally got his story told. Once I have done the second draft I will send it to my wonderful beta readers, as I will need feedback on the structure of the novel, as it is a little bit different. What will I do whilst they are reading this?

Ooh, I’m glad you asked! Well, I recently wrote two short stories for a character that was getting impatient. Bill Robinson is one of the characters in a gritty teen drama I first wrote when I was sixteen years old. I never finished the book, and it had always been one I knew I would go back to at some point! Much in the same way I finally finished The Boy With The Thorn In His Side in 2013, after first writing it when I was twelve! Nightprowler and Bird People are both available to read on Wattpad if you are interested. Nightprowler is really a prequel to the novel, an event that happens before it all begins, and Bird People is really a snapshot into the mind and character of Bill.

Anyway, the point of this blog post is untold stories, and how exciting it is once you finally get the chance to tell them. Maya Angelou was quoted as saying that ‘there is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you,’ and I think most writers would agree that this is very true. It does become an agony. The desire to write and share, and the noise created by the characters and their lives, can reach unbearable levels if something is not at last released.

With this in mind I went hunting yesterday, and dragged the old suitcase out from under my bed. This suitcase is very important to me because it contains all my old stories, school work, essays and ideas. Luckily for me, I have never thrown anything away. And thank goodness too, because I found what I was looking for, and what a joyous moment that was. This great big hulking binder full of Bill’s story. It didn’t have a title back then, but the working title will now be A Song For Bill Robinson. Everything was right there. A plot (and how exciting to see that I used to plot at age sixteen, the same way I do no! ie a scruffy notepad filled with ideas with ticks on top of them!) character bios, and a whole load of notes and extra bits paper clipped together. More excitingly there is also a map! I used to draw maps of the fictional worlds I created to help me when moving the characters about. There is even a play list of songs, as one of the main plot lines involves Bill entering talent contests in his local community centre as a singer. He hooks up with some other people who play instruments, and the play list was a rough idea of some of the music they might play together.

How exciting! What a find…I knew I still had the unfinished handwritten manuscript, but I had completely forgotten about all the extra bits! I wanted to go back in time and pat my sixteen year old self on the back! Job well done! I can use all this! This is going to be brilliant! I was also impressed to find scraps of paper where I had written things like ‘by chapter 7 we know that Charlie is hiding something, and we know about some of it. We have suspicions of Laura’s private life, some from what she tells us and some from Bill’s own suspicions.’ Ha ha! Nice to know I had a good handle on the whole show not tell thing back then!

I can’t tell you how happy this discovery made me yesterday. This story still has to wait for me to get around to it, but in the meantime it is going to continue to grow and swell and evolve inside my head. I already know lots more about the characters than I did back then. There have been lots of nice, little details striking me lately.

So exciting!!

 

 

 

 

 

Too Many Ideas, Too Little Time

~ ChanAtkins ~ 7 Comments

I’m lucky that I never get writer’s block, or run out of ideas. It would be quite nice to get some peace one day, but for now, my head is full of so many people and stories that I struggle to sleep or get a break from them. Some of them have been around for years. They fade in and out, getting loud, only to fall quiet again. Some are new, popping up and thrusting themselves into my consciousness when they are least wanted. Some of them are being dealt with right now, while some of them are getting really, really impatient…

It was the same today. I was out walking, because walking is where most of it happens, when I get away from the home and the duties and the children, I suppose when I get the chance to become more me…Anyway, today was a day like all others. It was good the way my mind jumped from one thing to the next. A new idea for the collection of shorts related to next novel The Tree Of Rebels. I had almost forgotten about these until I heard a gunshot while walking through the woods. In my perpetual childish state, I wanted to run and duck and cower and find a tree to hide behind because the baddies were after me…instead I let my mind run, and there was this small child running through the woods, running from the gun and the men in black and the dog-like creatures she’s can’t quite believe will be allowed to hurt her…and I thought oh yes, hell yes, another short for Tales From Province 5…I forgot I already had three…I need to sort these out and get these done! They were meant to be part of the launch plan I wrote for The Tree Of Rebels ages ago…you know, because for the first time ever I’m going to try that!

Anyway, there was that, and that was really good. I pretended I was her for a while, blundering through the thorns and the undergrowth, so that was fun. Then there was the Tree Of Rebels in general. You’ll be pleased to know I am not struggling with the final draft anymore. That’s probably because I know it won’t be the final draft! So at the moment I am changing it all to past tense, instead of present. It was worth a try to see if it worked, and I think it has. I’m editing as I go of course, but what I intend to do, is change the tense, then go back to the beginning for the final, FINAL draft. And I definitely love it again. I am loving it. It is loved!

Then there were some extra bits to add to a short story I wrote the other day, which was an attempt to alleviate the urgency of an old story pushing its way forward. It keeps doing it. This story about teenage alcoholic Bill Robinson I wrote when  I was 16 but abandoned for another idea…used to do that a lot back then! Anyway, Bill Robinson keeps piping up, so I wrote a short for him a while ago and put it on Wattpad and here, and that worked. It pushed him back a bit. But not for long.

You see, what happens is, I will be in the car, I’ll see a person, a face, hear some music, glimpse a building, a snippet of conversation, anything god damn it, and it will link up, it will hold on and it will grow and swell and it becomes fiction, although somehow real at the same time…so I can’t avoid it or ignore it, it just happens! So I wrote another short for Bill, but that made it worse. Some new bits came today, they’ll get added when I get time…he is not going to shut up any time soon.

And then there is Elliot Pie…quiet for now because his first draft was done, and that calmed him, that quieted him because his story is told. But even today, I got some snippets of dialogue, some expressions in my mind, some bits I need to remember…and this blog post…

I thought, god its frustrating and crazy feeling like this all the time, like there are stories and lives and stuff everywhere, and I get so impatient because I will never have the time to do it all, to say it all, to get it all out, especially when every time I leave the house I get more! But then I thought, hold on, isn’t it also the best feeling in the world? Like no other high? All that energy and life, all those possibilities, all that potential, comedy, tragedy, and drama in my head! It makes me feel so alive!

How to cope? Who to listen to? Who shouts the loudest or who has been waiting the longest? How to hold onto one thread and not drop it when another one barges in? How not to dilute the passion of one project, because another one is already tapping on the door? I will try to keep them back with shorts and notes, and thoughts that calm them. I will get to them all in time. Take a deep breath . Plot them out if I need to. Let them stew. So I do this, and I get home fast, got to rush in and get to a notebook and make a list, jot stuff down before I forget any of those things!

And then I step into the hallway and see that it needs sweeping, and the reality hits, and the toddler wants me, and oh it feels so selfish to want to push them all aside and get to my notebook before it fades… I just need to get this down, just quickly, just a few things before I forget, and my mind is always on it, always wandering here and there, always listening to the people in my head. So selfish.

Yet it’s not.

Think about it. All that sharing. Writers share their thoughts and feelings, fears and anger more than anyone else! Okay, a lot of it is made up, turned into fiction, exaggerated and so on, but at the same time it is real, because it came from us. Maybe we are like the sponge, absorbing all the lives and stories we see and hear around us, but we don’t just take it and keep it for ourselves. We put it right back out again. We share it with the world.

So I’ve decided, I will try not to feel guilty. It’s not like I can help it. I can’t stop them coming, I can’t stop seeing ideas and stories almost everywhere I look. I’ll just do what I can with the time I have, and try to remain calm. I just hope that if I am lucky enough to live a long life…I will have run out of ideas by the end of it. I want to lie on my death bed and know that there is nothing more to say! But that is probably wishful thinking.

 

 

Final Draft Struggles

~ ChanAtkins ~ 6 Comments

Last week I blogged about the difficulties I had experienced writing my YA novel The Tree Of Rebels. I was just about to dive into what I hoped would be the final edit of the book, and I was looking back on the struggles I’d had so far. There was more than one issue, but in last week’s post I was examining the difficulties of getting to know your characters. I was trying to figure out what had been bothering me about this particular novel, which had not bothered me so much in my others. At least I now felt like I knew my main character Lissie Turner better, properly, finally. So I could begin…

I’m a few days in now, and I have to report that the struggles remain. Not necessarily with the character, but with something just not being right. I have tried to think back to the final drafts of my other books. Did I feel the same about them? Is this all completely normal? It begs the question, how do you even know if it is the final draft? I guess I feel I have already done so many drafts and sent the book out to beta readers, amended it, let it sit and stew, and now know, or at least think I know, how to finally make it work. So it feels like the final draft…or is it more like the last chance?

Because over the last few days I have been plagued by the feeling that something is just not right. I thought it was the characters, and not knowing them as well as I wanted to, but now I think it is more than that. The most frustrating thing is not being able to quite put my finger on whatever it is! And how do I know if this is the book telling me something is wrong, something does not work here, or if it is simply, normal writers self doubt? Because lets face it, writers are swimming in self doubt the majority of the time! You kind of get used to it. You learn to shut it up, push it aside and keep going.

My question is; how do you know whether you are meant to keep going? How do you know whether the doubts you are feeling are justified? I mean, that it really is a massive turd of a book that no one in the world will ever want to read?

I think my issue with this book is how different it has always felt to the other books, and there are several reasons for this. So it might do me some good to clarify them right here.

1) Firstly it’s set in a dystopian future, and I have never set a book in the future before. I have used the past and the present, but never a future made up by yours truly. I guess this means I am winging it a lot more than I would be ordinarily. I have had to make up an entire world, a civilisation, a back story as to what has led to this, and so on. In theory, this was not a problem, because for the first time ever, I got the idea for the plot before I heard the characters talk to me. Which leads me neatly to my second issue.

2) I got the idea for the plot first. And that never happens to me. Ever. Like I have said before, it’s the people that fill my head. They come with stories, so it is easy for me. I just do what they say. I just offload for them. But this time, I got an idea. What if in the future Nature is banned? What if everything you need to survive is kept under massive domes and delivered to you when you need it? What if, after endless wars, a tiny amount of humans inhabit the earth, and because there is no more war, and no more fear, they are very, very grateful for the lives they have…What if a young girl who was born into this world one day finds an apple tree outside of the domes? Anyway, without giving too much away, the idea stuck and grew and grew and eventually I had to start writing it. But I didn’t really want to. I will explain why in point 3.

3)I wanted to write a book that would impress my daughters. This has never happened to me before either, because I have always written for me, myself and I. That was how it all began. I wrote the stories I wanted to read. I created the characters I wished were real. This was different, and very new, and scary. I have two daughters. One is an avid reader, who devours YA and dystopia at an impossible rate. The other is a reluctant reader unless it is Diary of a Wimpy Kid. I wanted to lure them in, force them to turn the pages and show them what I could do. I now think this was a big, big mistake! They like the book, what they have read of it anyway, but I don’t think they love it. And I think knowing I was writing for an audience has haunted me all the way through. I’ve felt like someone has been watching over my shoulder. This is the first time I have decided upon the audience before writing the book…and I am not sure it works for me.

4) There was another reason I didn’t want to write the book. Well, a few. It was outside of my comfort zone, I knew I would have to research a lot of stuff, which I am happy to admit is not my strong point or my favourite part of writing, and I already had another book chomping at the bit, wanting to jump the queue. That book was Elliot Pie, which, if you follow this blog, you will know I finished the first draft of just a few weeks ago. I had only just started The Tree Of Rebels when Elliot tried to jump the queue. Now, as tempting as it is, I don’t let them do this. They all have to wait their turn, although they do get note books and they do get little bits written down and they do get thought about constantly! So, Elliot. Once I had him, I wanted to write his story. And I think that made things harder with this book.

5)Well, point 5 kind of sums up all the above. This book was a challenge. This book happened in a very different way to all of my others. This book scared me. This book confused me. I felt impatient with it, reluctant to do it, and constantly had this niggling little voice telling me that it was not right. It’s a fantasy, right? Almost a sci-fi, and that’s not my genre, that’s not my niche. My thing is realism, down to earth, gritty, edgy, a bit dark, that kind of thing.

Now that I know all of this and can admit it here to you, the question remains, what do I do about it? Keep going with the final draft and see what happens? Hope the self-doubts will pass, and some genuine love and appreciation will return for this novel? It has happened before. As with all my books, when I am writing them I tend to think they are rubbish, and it is only when I am re-reading bits that I smile and think hey, this isn’t too bad! This is better than I thought it was! And that has definitely happened enough with this book…even in the last few days!

Luckily for me I was talking to my 13 year old avid reader about it this morning and she made several wonderful points. She reminded me that the beginning of the book cannot be as dark and edgy as I intend to make it this time around, as in the beginning Lissie does not know anything is wrong with her world. Sure, things are suggested to the reader, but on the surface, for the reader and for Lissie, this really is a perfect, easy to live in society. Things do start to get darker very quickly, as things start to unravel and there is a fast pace, as this is by far my shortest book. I had forgotten this, and she was right. She also reminded me that my other books are concerned with ‘real-life’ problems ie eating disorders, bullies, evil step-fathers and missing mothers. The Tree Of Rebels does have some family drama, of course it does. In fact you could also describe it as coming of age as Lissie makes her journey, but it does not contain the same gritty subjects I usually handle. Again, she was right. It’s just different.

I’ve made a few decisions and I will blog again when I have them clearer in my head. Hopefully by the time I post again I will be feeling better about this book. I will have listened to the doubts, dealt with them and recognised that there is nothing wrong with The Tree Of rebels…it’s just different. At least for me!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Getting To Know Your Characters

~ ChanAtkins ~ 7 Comments

For me, writing is all about the characters. It is the characters who come to me first, with their lives and their problems. I let them set up camp in my head for a bit, try to ignore them while I am busy with other things, and then, inevitably I can’t drown them out and they get the attention they demand. They get to tell their story. By the time I start jotting down notes about them and their story, I already feel like I know them quite well. In fact I usually feel quite smug about it. I do like character led fiction, you see, and it would not be unfair to assert that The Catcher In The Rye is probably my favourite book of all time.

I’ve read it tons of times, and never get bored, yet my husband couldn’t even manage it once. Boring, he said. Nothing really happens, except he moans and worries a lot. He does concede that there is a plot of sorts, one where the character goes on a bit of a jaunt, escapes his reality for a while and goes a little bit crazy in the process, but it was not enough of a plot to hold his interest.

For me, it was a case of falling in love. Feeling like I knew Holden, because Holden was so like me, and if he was real and we met in real life, we would really get along, and he would stop thinking everyone was phony. Anyway…off on a tangent there slightly, but I was trying to explain how important character is to me in fiction. I love it. Can’t get enough of it. Action, drama, suspense and thrills are all great, don’t get me wrong, but they all fall flat without great characters. Give me a few good characters doing not much, over a page turner with unlikable and unbelieveable ones, any day.

Developing characters, making them speak and act and think, is one of the best things about writing. It’s probably my favourite part of the whole thing. Yes I appreciate descriptive prose and beautiful narratives, and yes I have respect for a page-turning plot, and action that peaks and troughs at all the right times, but the characters are everything to me. Stories come from people, without people, there would be no stories.

With me, it is the people, and the stories that come first, and everything else evolves from there. But even so, I have had to admit to myself lately that I don’t know them as well as I think I do when I get started.

I often stumble along in the first draft, making notes, hitting walls, having great writing days followed by abysmal ones, and sometimes it is really hard to pinpoint what it is I’m struggling with. This happened a lot when I was writing the very first draft of what will be my next release, The Tree Of Rebels. You see, for the first time, I had the plot idea first. Weird. Luckily for me I already had a character in my head, and a name, and she had been lingering for a while, maybe wondering where she could slot in. So I used her and got started. I had most of it planned out, but obviously there were surprises along the way as well. My main aim was impressing my daughters and writing something dystopian in nature that would hold their attention and keep them gripped.

Maybe I focused too much on this. Maybe the waiting character I slotted in was not loud enough in my head. Whatever it was, I struggled. Then I realised something. I looked back on all of my novels, even the ones where the voice of the character had come to me before any kind of plot took place, and I realised that this was normal. Of course I didn’t know Lissie Turner that well yet. That was what I was struggling with. I’d gone into it assuming I knew her, assuming I understood her, and oh how wrong I was.

The first draft, no matter how intricately you have planned and described your precious characters, no matter how many lengthy bio’s you have scripted, no matter how many images of them you have found and pinned on Pinterest; the first draft is all about getting to know them. It’s like meeting a stranger for the first time and going on a little, somewhat awkward journey with them. Do they take sugar in tea? You don’t know, so you ask. Which way to they tend to lean politically? You’d like to know, but you’re scared to ask. Do they swear? Do they have a loud, or annoying laugh? How are they going to react when you start throwing hurdles and dilemmas at them?  You think you know, but you don’t.

Realising this really helped me to relax with that awkward first draft. I decided to just get it written, because I had the plot all in place, and that was the main thing to get done. All the themes and ideas and images and so on would work themselves out, would pop up and blend in, and tie up as they often tend to do naturally. And the same would happen with Lissie, and the other characters. By the end of the first draft, I knew them better. We had formed a friendship and would definitely be travelling together again soon. But things were still a tad tense, a tad clumsy.

I jumped into the second draft and saw it for what it was. It was going deeper, getting under the skin, revealing the flaws and the fears and the motives. I had to accept that Lissie was really a stranger to me, and then allow the following drafts to entice her to become known. I had to have faith that this process would happen, and that I would feel I knew her better with every draft I completed. Looking back, this is also what happened with my other books, although admittedly it was definitely easier because the characters started shouting at me before I thought up stories for them… but more and more of them became revealed to me with each draft, edit and rewrite. Now I could easily tell you exactly how any of those characters would react in any situation. I could tell you what they would do, say, think, what their facial expressions would be and so on. To me, they are real people. That is what needs to happen before characters can make the reader believe in them too.

I am just about to dive into the final draft of The Tree Of Rebels, and I cannot tell you how excited I am. It has been a challenge, this book, for many reasons, not least the issue I just explained. I have decided to make some major changes, so the final draft may actually become more of a rewrite, than a last edit.

I am wary of the process and scared I will fail. But one thing I do feel better about. One thing I do feel confident about now. I know Lissie Turner. Finally, truly, I know her inside and out, and that is going to help make this thing work more than anything else!