I'm not going to quote the Sound of Music

Even if I am going to be talking about beginnings and the best place to start them.  And this is a bit long so scroll down to the underline if you can't be arsed to read the teal deer (though I think it's a pretty fine specimen of the animal).

Because that's where I am.  Now that the glorious madness of NaNo is over, I'm back to working on my other novel, the one I actually need to - shock horror - think about.  The one I love, which has characters I adore and a plot I'm marshalling into shape and lines that are perfect, but which is also driving me ever so slightly mental.  I have to pay attention to what I write, rather than enjoying the freewheeling fun of writing without a plan or an outline or any real thought at all.  Consequently, I'm finding getting started difficult.

To clarify: putting words on the screen isn't the hard part.  That's easy enough.  First day of NaNo this year (to brag completely) I did 5564 words.  They're not particularly good words and there's a lot of placeholders where I didn't have a correct term for something so just typed MONSTER or similar, but they were fun words to write.  The first four days I did over 16K, so being able to get words down isn't my problem - it's getting the right words down.  (That and avoiding repetition, hello use of 'word' 6 times in that paragraph - but that's fixable at a later stage)

When you know that what you're writing has the potential to count for something, when you know it's what you want to send to agents, when you know it's what you'd love to see in a finished book in an actual bookshop...then the panic and confusion sets in.  Suddenly what you're doing matters, really matters, and you have to make sure it's good.  No matter how many times you tell yourself "oh, but this is fixable, you're not going to be submitting this because it is rough as and you need to edit the hell out of it" you still have the internal editor telling you that this time it has to be right, it has to be perfect.  Which leads to no words at all being written, because you're agonising over every one.

It doesn't help to read articles about beginnings.  I mean, obviously it does help because they're all full of excellent advice and thoughtful discussion, but they add to the panic and realisation that what you thought was amazing/clever/brilliant/perfect is actually far from it.  Knowing exactly what a beginning has to do, what bases have to be covered and what you have to achieve is both useful and infuriating - as with much of writing.  The actual craft of it is a pain in the arse (and yet I still love doing it, so clearly I'm either a masochist or a lunatic).

None of this is particularly helpful, except for giving me a chance to let loose herd of teal deer and splooge all over the interweb, but there is a purpose to it - I'm going to do some close reading/case studies of books and TV shows I love in an effort to figure out this beginnings malarkey.  Not 'once and for all', as I nearly wrote, but to at least get myself into a better headspace.  And if this looks like procrastination, it kind of is, but I'm justifying it with my powers of justification so there.  I'm still fiddling with the plot of Novel, and need to work on the first act, but this is something to occupy me while I work on that.  Also, TV.

The Plan

Choosing the things to watch/read
Books & TV from last 15 years - this is just going to be things I love/which are popular and these are not always the same

Books
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
The Hunger Games
Twilight
Stormbreaker

TV
Buffy
Doctor Who
Torchwood
Merlin

Not a complete list but where I am at the moment.  I'll probably post the TV ones on livejournal, along with the books (which will also be here), but will link to everything.

And a quick link to my delicious list of articles on beginnings.

Now to get started...

NaNo & Me

So, I've been thinking about NaNoWriMo and my own thoughts/experiences as November looms around again (in the course of doing this, I will probably state my opinion as to whether or not it's a Good Thing, but what the hell).

I tried NaNo a couple of times, but it wasn't until last year that I actually won.  I don't know if that's because I'd voiced my decision to take part to more people, thereby making the embarrassment of failure greater; because I finally discovered an untapped well of self-discipline*; or because I had the right story this time, but I did it.  Just over 50,000 words in just under a month.  Oh, I was smug.  I think that's something NaNo is good for (here comes an opinion) - it makes you prove to yourself that you are capable of writing that steadily for that long, that you have a story that can flow for that long.

Saying that, what I produced during that month was not good.  It was messy as hell.  Plot lines petered out, characters disappeared then bobbed up again, I realised the entire main action plot was wrong, and at one point I changed tack so completely that I went from numbering my chapters to lettering them.  I wound up with 'Chapter 3a' and 'Chapter R2 use this one not the other'.  The ending was completely pasted on in an effort to narrate the finale and get over 50K.  It was, in short, something that I will never show anyone and which I haven't looked at since December last year.

So, what was my NaNo draft good for?  The characters and the general idea were there, and I've been working on turning it into a proper novel (with properly numbered chapters) ever since.  That has been hard and difficult and there have been stretches where I've given up completely because it is so tricky and surely it's easier to watch a load of crime drama and not think about the festering mess that is my novel?  But I know, from experience, that that's how I write, so I don't think I'd be doing anything differently if it wasn't a NaNo novel - in fact, I probably wouldn't have even got to the end of the Plot That Was Wrong without NaNo.

Am I doing NaNo this year?  Yes.  I'm still in the middle of turning last year's muddle into something coherent, but I want to a) write something new; and b) fall in love with writing again.  That is a hideous cliche, but I miss the freewheeling madness of working without an outline or thoughts of themes and subplots and character arcs.  To plunge in and write whatever pops into my head with no worries about whether the first line has a good enough hook, whether the plot fits classic structure and whether I'll be able to turn it into something publishable.  In the middle of November, hyped on coffee and checking your word count every five minutes, it's actually fun.

This is turning blathery, so to cut it down: NaNo worked for me.  It got me to finish what I started, which is rare, and it got me to do it without running the deadline up to the wire, which is even rarer**.  I can see why agents and editors would get pissed off with it, because there is a temptation, during the euphoria of finishing, to view your creation as the Most Perfect Thing Ever and send it out in all its manic, messy glory.  But that isn't what (I think) NaNo's for - to me, it's about getting a massive push to write something that may not be publishable or polished or even on nodding terms with good writing, but which is still yours, and proof that you can do this writing thing if you try.

That is quite a preachy note to finish on; I feel the need to lighten the mood, but I can't think of any way to do that.  Er, The Apprentice is good so far...

* Said well having remained hidden throughout school, college and university.
** I was one of those people who finished essays the night before they were due in, sitting up till 4am mainlining coffee and fumbling through books for the exact quotation of Sarpedon's death oh where the hell is the head drooping like a poppy bit I can't find it I'm going to fail this time for sure maybe my friends will kill me so I don't have to hand this in.

I think this post might be filler

Gearing up for NaNo (something new to write, yay!), struggling with Current Novel (blasted thing), and adding to my general procrastination by starting a book blog.

Have vague ideas for some NaNo related posts but they are v vague.  Off to scowl at my WIP.

Bad lazy type (for which I blame others)

I won NaNo, yay! I have done nothing since then - er, boo! Yes, boo me. Turns out changing the sort of scrappy, caffeine-fuelled, muddled draft I created during NaNo takes some doing, especially when subsequent thinking makes you want to change the entire plot, add POVs, alter subplots, mess about with what I thought were fixed ideas - generally rip the entire thing to pieces and then stare at the remains with hollow eyes while clutching a glass of wine and wondering how it happened.

Have been procrastinating like crazy, pondering such important issues as

1) should I start a book blog? My thoughts on books I like tend to be confined to "it was awesome/lovely/I can't put it down even though I've finished it" and on those I hate along the lines of blistering rants ending in "how did this get published?!?!? How!?!?!"

2) should I get a livejournal? This is purely for the usage of pretty icons

3) moving to London - actually, this was an important issue

TV has not helped. Yes, it is entirely the TV's fault that I have been watching that when I should have been writing. But there has been new Doctor Who! And Sherlock, which was unbelievably good. I think I blame Stephen Moffat for this, as he was responsible for both of these.

Basically: I have been a lazy procrastinating type, and all that needs to change. That is my Half Year Resolution.

Achievement = smugness

I won NaNo! For the first time ever, I have won NaNo! Yay, go me, etcetera.

Off to recover.

Book addiction

Goodreads is far too addictive, could easily waste hours on there adding books (like all my Terry Pratchetts, which I've just done) or playing the trivia game (which shows that I've gleaned a good working knowledge of books I've never read - how to blag your way through an English degree).

But then I get wondering about some books which I'm not adding, or books which I should add as some sort of "well, I *own* it even if I haven't *read* it" - on this list stick almost everything that's won the Booker in the last fifteen years, a ton of literary stuff I picked up in 3 for 2s or second hand shops (why yes I will try some Ishiguro if it's £1.50). Also other books which I should have read, either because they're classics or because they formed part of the curriculum at schools I didn't go to, or because all my friends have read them. And then I stare at my bookshelves and wonder how much stuff lurks behind the double stacking which I'd love to read but which I don't get to.

This is rambling. And yet another way to avoid getting on with The Novel of Doom (as it has now been renamed; may leave it like that, it's catchy). Have to restart whole thing from beginning, change plot, add new character, kill off a character mid-book rather than pre-book and generally look towards NaNo as a time to work on a shiny new thing. But then by about November 15th I'll be wanting another shiny new thing to work on because I'm getting annoyed with NaNo Project. Ah, fickleness.

Was going to avoid posting a video, but (slight swearing):