Jiggety jig.
And two days after Clarion I am here, throat-deep in the troubles of my patients and wondering when I’m going to be able to do all that wonderful writery stuff I learned.
That’s not exactly true. I did write this morning. I got up and found a scene from “the novel”, where my heroine and her unattractive but deeply loved brother sit on the parapet of the castle and witter, and I tried to fix it. I think I ended up with fewer words but better, but only time will tell.
I don’t know if I dare look at the rest of the novel. If I don’t look I may have written forty thousand words of half-decent stuff. Once I do look, like Schroedinger says, all those potentials will collapse. I will open up “Novel Chapter One.doc” and find not only is it not good prose, it is bad: dead animal bad. And if I look, and it’s bad, I have to fix it.
What I may do at the moment is wimp out and just press onwards - get the thing finished and then revise. A lot of writing, I am finding, is like suspension bridge building - you throw out a line, ensure it’s fixed at either end, and that’s the arc of the story. Everything else you can add on to that.
We shall see.
The thing is, there are many non-writery things I wish to do as well. My garden looks like a blasted heath. The house needs gastroplasty. I have to take to the kitchen with a chisel and change lightglobes and dig trenches and do all that kind of stuff. There is plaster to be smeared on the kitchen wall and friends and family to see and work to be grasped.
But this morning, two days out of Brisbane, I got up at five. The house was dark. Outside the birds were silent. Cats blinked from the sofa and were still. I opened up my laptop and made myself back coffee - strong and dark. The coffee warms your hands when you carry it in from the kitchen and set it beside the computer. When you look at the surface there are miniscule island galaxies slowly rotating on the surface. They coalesce and separate over the space of a few minutes, as if I am watching billions of years of stellar evolution in minutes.
All this will come. Writing is a long term thing. But I am grateful I have started today.
Next post - I think I still have to write about the conjoined twins - next post may be the Glorious Five Year Plan.
Thanks for listening,
Brendan
If you can school yourself to do that every day, Brendan you’ll soon have the first draft all done. And while I can’t imagine you writing anything seriously bad, another draft will obviously improve the work.
I hope you’re not feeling too let down now Clarion’s over. That can be the worst part of a life-changing experience in the company of like-minded others: it can be hard to sustain that feeling of OK-ness and enthusiasm once you’re back in what some people think is the “real world”:-) Hang in there - there is life after Clarion. Helen and Carol and Lee and Lyn and ever so many more people have shown that!
Welcome back, Brendan! I’ve been thinking about you since the weekend and wondering how you were settling back in. Hey, I was up early this morning writing too, the first day of my new “get up at shriek o’clock every day and write for an hour or so” plan. I’m glad to be in your good company! Maybe we can egg each other on. I have not dared to look at my novel. I wrote most of a short story instead.
Anyway…happy writing, and keep at it!
Camilla
Get that first draft done, Brendan. I’m sure it’ll be better than you think. And it is just that, a first draft.
But don’t forget to live as well. We only really get a first draft at that; something I find much scarier than first drafts of novels.
Trent
What Trent said.
JeffV
I want to see that novel, too, damn it. 990AD? Totally my thing. Hop to it, then.
Heather
[email me for the link we discussed to that forum, Brendan, if you'd still like a look-see.]
Your blog is impressive,it is always in my mind after i read it.