Writing – Page 6 – Peggy Riley

Look, Ma – no laptop!

I write. And I write on my laptop, no matter where the writing is happening. Planes, trains – even on my lap. My laptop used to do everything for me, but it increasingly saw less email action with the invention of that gadget known as the iPhone. So far, so easy. Then that evil genius Steve Jobs went and wooed me with an iPad. I was powerless. I bought one. Maybe you did, too? And in one purchase, I turned into a virtual cliche’, juggling the constant charging of Apple products, phone, laptop and iPad, and having to buy more gadgets to boost the wifi – sigh…

The iPad is a thing of beauty, to be sure – but what is it actually for? I didn’t even know when I bought one. I use it to email and tweet. I use it to read magazines, mostly at that aggregator and app-of-wonder Zite (but not books. Can’t be doing with that) And then when it came time to pack for a weekend away of writing, I hefted the laptop in my handbag and looked at the slim creature I would be leaving behind. What if you could write – and I mean really write – on your iPad?

David Hewson blogged about software for the iPad, so I already knew that my beloved Scrivener was a non-starter, though I believe it is in development. Bring on the day, I say. David recommended Storyist, so after having a Google around, I plumped for the app. It’s straightforward to use, but not to edit in, which is what I wanted to do. It isn’t straightforward to import text into, but not impossible. The app says it will open emails in rich text format, but that didn’t work for me. Storyist didn’t like rtfs and didn’t recognise emails. Having a Dropbox app is a work around and once all your software is synching to Dropbox, you can import straight from there as plain text. A txt file is bug-ugly on screen, but once opened in Storyist, it looks formatted and fine – I don’t know how, but it does. Formatting in Storify isn’t as straightforward, and tabs won’t line up and things, but if that doesn’t get in the way of your editing, it’s plain sailing from there.

Some people are a whiz on the iPad’s keyboard. Not me. I end up jabbing with one finger when I am a touch typist. (Thanks, Ma, for insisting on those high school typing classes – oh, and Happy Mother’s Day!) I may not be picky about a lot of things, but, apparently, I am about keyboards. I had no idea I was so opinionated. The key action has to be “just so”. The keyboard must be full-sized, have return buttons on both sides, as well as a delete key in the correct place, and it must have a wide space bar, just like a “real” keyboard. When looking for travel keyboards, you’d be surprised what they try to fob off on you – from fiddling round with key placement to dinky space bars, as well as messing with the whole QWERTY system, which will, no doubt, go the way of the dinosaurs once all we touch typists have popped our clogs.

After days of obsessive googling, I found the travel keyboard of my dreams. It’s the Logitech Tablet Keyboard for iPad. It connects via Bluetooth to your iPad and ships in a nifty, rigid plastic sleeve that folds back on itself to make a secure easel to tilt the iPad upright into position, like a laptop screen. Lambda Tek shipped it with its four necessary AAA batteries – make sure you have them on hand or it’s tears all round – and after visiting the Logitech site and pushing one little “connect” button, I was off and running. The key action is perfect and there are only a few, random double strikes now and again, which are probably due more to my over enthusiastic typing than to the Bluetooth. I typed happily on the train, on cafe tables and beds. In fact, the only place I couldn’t type happily was in the writing workshops I had packed to travel to, the room of which only suffered from a lack of tables. Perhaps the only drawback to this system is that it isn’t a laptop – it really doesn’t work on your lap, because there’s no where to put the iPad. In the writing workshop, I was forced to use notebook and pen – a drawback for someone with chicken-scrawl like mine. Fortunately, I can read most of what I wrote, so all was not lost. If you have an iPad and want to go commando from your laptop, why give the keyboard and software a spin?

But if you can actually read your own handwriting, why not stick with the notebook and pen? They’re still the lightest things to travel with and you’ll never risk leaving your charger in a hotel socket again.

On not writing

Right now, I’m not writing. And it feels strange. I have been writing for a long time. Specifically, I have been writing my first novel for a long time, and I have been editing it for a long time. One week ago, I turned it over to my editor and maybe I’m finished with it now. Maybe. Maybe changes will be required and, if so, I am happy to make them. We both want the book to be its best.

So, I’m not writing. I’m waiting and dreaming and sleeping in and wandering around garden centres and pulling weeds and reading fiction and staring. I’m not writing. And I’m wondering how I would fill all this time and this space in my head if I didn’t write. I can’t imagine.

Lucky

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions. Good thing, as they’d all be dashed by now. Who needs to create opportunities for failure?

But I do like the clean slate of a new year. And mine’s still pretty clean. I like all those empty squares on my iCal. I would like all those empty pages in my 2012 diary if I could remember to buy one. But this week, I have been trying to fill them up. This year, I’m lucky enough to be doing some travelling. I have a couple of weeks in Berlin coming up, and I am filling a notebook with places I need to visit or revisit and putting lots of notes in my work-in-progress to remind myself to write a sequence once I have seen them/heard them/smelled them. I know I am lucky, for you can do nearly anything with Google maps – and paper maps, for that matter, as my character is in 1920s – 1930s Berlin. I am lucky I get to visit, so that I can come up with my own descriptions and not worry I am regurgitating Hans Fallada. First on my list are museums that have been moved, due to bombing. But my character will have needed to go to them before the war – before the bombing. I’ll talk more about these museums, once I find them!

I’m also putting in writing deadlines, committing to when I’d like to be done with the second draft of this second book, as well as the edited draft for my first book. Again, I am lucky to have all those empty squares to fill. And then I’m writing into squares when I will take a writing break, because I know I’ll need transition time to move back into the second book once everybody’s happy with the first one. I’m lucky that Susan Elderkin had room for me on the last workshop she will be running in her inspirational Dorset home, and luckier still to have good friends to write with during, and after, so that I get back into the swing after editing.

They always say that there are two types of writers – planners and pants-ers. I’m definitely a planner, and Scrivener lets me create folders for these chunks of time that I’m writing in, so that it’s easy to move around in them, when what happens in 1925 affects 1941, etc. I plan a framework – I know what the arc is – but I have no idea how I’m to get from one event to another, let alone one year to the next. In that respect, I’m a pants-er – I don’t do index cards for events or plot points – I’d rather wait and see what emerges from the writing. And perhaps that is how this year will be structured: a rough plan on an iCal grid, a year stretching out before me, and a rough idea of where I’m going by the end of it – but what will emerge is still a mystery. If so, that makes me very lucky, indeed.

Who’s your audience?

I am a bit of a social media junkie.

I say a bit, as I’m not as connected/compulsive as many. After all, I’m not on Facebook, I don’t have a Tumblr, and I’ve stopped using my Blogger site. I only maintain three websites, two active blogs, and two Twitter streams. I’m on a number of Nings and the like. I am on Google+ but I honestly couldn’t tell you why. Recently, my list has stretched to include Pinterest.

Have you seen Pinterest? It is like a digital pin board, like the peg board of your dreams beside the tidy desk of your dreams in your spic-n-span work space of your dreams, the one that doesn’t seem to have to store documents or bulk boxes of stationery supplies or random bits of furniture that don’t fit in the house. (Wait, that’s my work space) It is a place where beautiful things live and get “repinned”, meaning people who see the beautiful pictures pin them onto their own boards. They are all images that have been found on the internet and pinned onto boards you create – it’s like using scissors and a glue stick on the world wide web with Pinterest’s little widget “Pin It” that magically inserts itself into your browser bar.

I have four boards on Pinterest, because I’m still trying to figure out what it’s for and how I want to use it. There’s one for Stuff, because I like beautiful things, too. There’s one called Writing Spaces that are gorgeous pictures of seriously fantastic desks in the forest or cupboards that become tiny libraries. There is one called I Could Write About This because I love photography and it seems a nice place to put shots that are filled with characters and stories. The last one is called Work in Progress, and this is where I got into trouble.

My second novel is dealing with some pretty dark themes. Right now, I’m writing about racial hygiene and all that is abhorrent about that from the points of view of people who do not think it’s abhorrent, because it’s only in the 20s. The much-worse that it’s going to get hasn’t happened yet and I have to stay in the present of that time and risk any temptation to foreshadow. So, Googling about, as you do, you find images and click Pin It and it seems a nice place to put an image I can use, especially if Scrivener isn’t open and I don’t want to just drag another jpg onto my desktop. So, I click Pin It and this photo pops onto my board. It might be hard to see, but it is a small girl posing before a shop window that is selling callipers used to measure heads, when Nazi phrenology sought to sort us all out by our shapes and sizes and colours. I liked that this abhorrent tool was sitting up in a window, bold as brass. I liked the little girl standing by it, as if she had placed herself beside a doll house and had no idea somebody had swapped it. The picture made me think of Kristallnacht, when so many shop fronts like these, albeit without the callipers, would be smashed and paint-daubed. But it probably didn’t belong on Pinterest, the home of beautiful images.

I don’t edit myself through social media. I think you have to be yourself on your blog and on Twitter – unless you’re writing in character, of course, as so many writers choose to do. I certainly wouldn’t limit my interests or fascinations out of worry I might offend a reader or follower. Yet, I watched my fingers press the delete button over the image in Pinterest. And I think it is because the audience there is looking at things, beautiful things, and this image is not that. This image might make them wonder about the pinner, not understanding the context of my writing or of me. So, I deleted the image because I’d forgotten who the audience is there and what they’re looking for. So, I’ve decided to put those images here, on my blog, where they belong. In case this is what you’re looking for.

What are you looking for?

And really, that is the question to ask yourself when you are researching your way through a day, putting random combinations of words into the great roulette wheel of Google, to see where you land – even if you have no idea what the answer is. Today, my desk is covered with maps of Berlin, a variety of German history books, various and sundry notebooks, and a dirty mug of tea. But my Google cookies betray my online interests, from the history of Germany trains to the construction of railways in German colonies, to electrotherapy and mass nervousness in pre WWI Berlin. Honestly. What do I hope to stitch out of all of that?

A book, of course. In this run-up to the rewrite of my second novel, I am looking for some more information. There are things that didn’t get sketched out or made clear in the first draft. The first draft, for me, is always very present-tense-y, it’s the now of the novel and not a lot of before. In case the characters want to tell me something about themselves before I have to go and find it. As the last rewrite of the first novel was spent in addressing some “befores” this seems a sensible approach this time round. And all the digging around is leading me to think about the characters I have in new and surprising ways – which is, precisely, the point of research. For me, mind. It isn’t to show off facts and figures – thank goodness, for I can never read the notes I take. I don’t even know if it’s to add local colour, because those kinds of details always feel like tick boxes for me, particularly in Germany. I think the research is to inform why characters do what they do or did what they did, specifically. It is a way to set them not only into a place but into their time on their timeline, to make them a part of it in a way that suits them, and to create a web of characters around them for them to exist with or push against. All this stumbling around has made it a scrappy kind of day, but I can feel that I am filling in the black and white outlines I made in the first draft; I am putting flesh onto bones. I am trusting that this endless spinning will lead to some kind of payoff.

Morning Practice

What’s your morning practice? If you’re like me, it involves drinking buckets of tea and stumbling around, tripping over newspapers and an old cat. On retreat, it is easy to spring from a bed and vault into a yurt for yoga. At home, there is all this – well – home to deal with. How can you keep that retreat feeling going with a sink full of dishes and an empty fridge?

My mornings begin with Morning Pages, an old idea that I first came across in Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, though it was probably Julia Cameron who coined the phrase in her iconic The Artist’s Way. Natalie talks about timed exercises and writing to fill that time until the bell rings. This is, perhaps, an offshoot of how she sees her meditation practice. For her, meditation and free writing go hand-in-hand. Julia prefers to fill pages rather than an amount of time. As a writer, this works for me, too. What, after all, are we trying to do other than fill pages? I have been filling lined notebooks for much more than a decade. On those lines, I have celebrated, whined, mourned and worked through things. I have also found the first nuggets of ideas emerging, from a series of unconnected and random thoughts while in “write dump” mode. That is the big idea behind Morning Pages or any kind of free writing. Don’t think. Don’t analyse. Don’t try to connect thoughts or ideas. Just write.

But that’s just how I use it. There aren’t any rules. Does it have to be morning? No, especially if mornings aren’t your friends. Does it have to be pages? No. And thank goodness for that. My many years of filling notebooks are unreadable, unintelligible, indecipherable. Like so many chickens having a scratch. But the good people at 750words have come to my rescue, creating an online place for morning pages, for fingers more accustomed to keys now than pens. And what’s really fun about 750words is that you can use meta tags on your writing, to find things later and refer back to them, and that the site reflects back your keywords after your writing, giving you a glimpse into your preoccupations and your states of mind, as well as placing them in context with writers around the world, as in the picture above, which appeals to my Inner Geek. If you’ve tried morning paper pages and found them not to your liking, give online a try. Couldn’t hurt, anyway. You only have to try and see what works for you. And then to practice and practice and practice.

It is a practice, like yoga or meditation. It is like a full-body stretch for the mind. It is a wake-up call or a place of stillness. It is a place for lists and petty fears. It is a place to write mindful detail of what is around you, what happened yesterday, what you want to happen today. For me, it is a way to tame my monkey mind. After morning pages, the brain says “OK, you’ve heard me, I’ll get out of your way and let you write.” And sometimes, it actually does.

What is your morning practice? What rituals or states of mind leave you ready to write?

A Retreat of One’s Own

What are the places that make your heart lift? What do they look like? What do they require, if one is to write? It was Virginia Woolf, of course, who said that, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write.” On retreat, you might not be guaranteed a room all to yourself (and you will most certainly require money, for these things must be paid for) but the best places for retreat offer themselves up to you, allow you to find your “room of your own”, a place you can return to, to puzzle out your words.

For me, it must have a view. How about this one? It should not have a mirror that you have to face while writing. I have assaulted many a hotel room mirror with a towel, lest I catch myself gurning mid-sentence. It should have a table, or at least a wonderful chair with arms wide enough to support a laptop on crossed legs. It might have books and candles and, if you are lucky, a place to build a fire.

My new favourite place for a writing retreat is Tilton House, in the South Downs, nestled in Bloomsbury-on-Sussex. (It is the former Georgian country house of economist Maynard Keynes and his Russian ballerina wife, who was not taken into the chilly bosom of Virginia’s sister’s circle.) Keynes said of Tilton House, “There is no better air than here for work.” Who will disagree with him? Not I.

This is a picture of Keynes’ study, now the library, the room I found to work in, though I did have to occasionally share it, and gladly, with other writers who were collected together by New Writing South to work with Vanessa Gebbie. You cannot see the walls of books or the wood stove fire that burst into triumphant life an hour and a half after building it and giving up. Over 6 short workshops, guided visualisations, walks and suppers, we were all encouraged to look at our work in new ways and to challenge the assumptions we had made about our work thus far. It was a weekend of laughter, insight, and tremendous vegan fare.

I was lucky enough to have a room of my own, but I did not write at the adorable desk. I did write, huddled under the covers, listening to Radio 4 and pheasants. But most often, I padded down, back to the library. Nearer the kettle, to be sure – another retreat necessity – but probably also to be nearer the glow of others’ writing, the cats and dog, the warmth of a circle of people with shared interests and desires. If the Bloomsbury set lived together to share their interests in beauty, truth, and friendship, so do writers seek out writers for conversation, confirmation, affinity.

Now, back in my own room, I am struck by what I have. I have a view out of three small windows, to the house and to the neighbour’s allotment-style garden and a sky broken only by an ash tree. I have a broad desk and walls of books. I have candles and if I do not have a fire, I do have a Calor gas heater, which I have just rolled, grunting, out of the way so that I can squeeze in space for a yoga mat, inspired by Tilton House’s heart-lifting yurt to make a greater commitment to the practice and shirk yoga no more. If the vegan fare will not continue, I have at least committed to having lunch. I tend to write until I fall over, but I can now see the value of eating midday.

Most of all, I have got my groove back. I have been labouring the last few weeks to empty the last book from my head and work space, while others read it and decide what they will make of it. I have cleaned my desk, but still I have not written. I was hoping the retreat would allow me to transition to the second book that is ready to be rewritten, and find I am now ready to rewrite it. If you find yourself stuck, or in need of a heart lift, find a place where you can retreat, whether it’s Anam Cara, Arvon, Yaddo, Tilton House – or even if it is just in your own room and the circle of writers you find is on Twitter. But if you have that bit of money, it is a wonderful investment in yourself and your work. My retreat was paid for with winnings from the recent Mslexia contest, and I am very grateful to it, and that I didn’t have to spend that money on groceries – which are also very essential for writing. Speaking of which, I’m off for a digestive. Even though it’s lunch time.

Letting Go

So, I’m at that awkward in-between stage when I’m done with a rewrite, but my brain isn’t. It keeps ticking over the story I’ve written. It keeps asking me questions and demanding I check scenes and strands, again, again. It woke me up last night to nag me about a minor character. My brain wants to be sure that I’m as done as my fingers think I am. It’s annoying – and exhausting – but this is part of the writing process. This is part of how you let go.

I stack the last printed draft onto the precarious pile of earliers. I dust my desk, wondering who could have strewn all these digestive crumbs here? I put away the project’s reference books: Culpeper’s Herbal, The Grapes of Wrath, The Ways of my Grandmothers, my dog-eared Harper Study Bible, given to me back when I joined a church as a teenager. It didn’t last long, but I still have the Bible and I love all the things I tucked into it back then, tiny epiphanies on offering envelopes and prayer slips, all that earnest highlighting.

I change playlists, retiring the soundtracks that I have played ad nauseum, the sounds of this particular book. Characters have specific soundtracks per chunk of text. It helps me recapture what it is I want them to feel; it helps me get back into the book when I step away to work on other things. They are, perhaps, a form of self-hypnosis. Do you do that?

Amity, the youngest character, is mostly Mark Isham’s soundtrack to Nell. I don’t even know why I have this soundtrack, but I could hum the whole of it right now for you. The main character has several soundtracks for past and present portions of the book. To her, I have worn out two Rachel Portman soundtracks, The Lake House and Never Let Me Go. But recently, I had to put her through a scene that I was having trouble writing. All her music was too gentle for that; another soundtrack to the rescue! I turned to Javier Navarrete’s terrifying Pan’s Labyrinth. Again, I have no idea why I bought this soundtrack, but I was grateful to turn to it. When you Google writers and what they listen to, it is astonishing the variety of things we use to inspire us. I found a writer who can only write to ABBA. Really.

In putting these things away, I am telling my brain that I am in charge of it, that I know what “done” is. I am telling my brain to trust me and the writing. I guess I am telling my brain to let go, so that we both can move on…

Setting your share

When you set your share, you change the depth of the cutter on the moldboard of your plough, to cut more deeply into the soil. It is also an old title for my first novel, which I am rewriting.

I am still rewriting. I am 10K from the end, but I am still rewriting. How is it possible that I am still rewriting this novel? You might well ask. Last week I wrote past a big hinge in the book, one of those pacy climaxy scenes where much is revealed and resolved and the plot swivels round to run in a different direction, pellmell toward the end. Well, that’s the plan, anyway.

So why, this morning, have I gone backward into two short scenes before these big climaxy scenes that I’m happy with? In looking at them, I realized I needed to set my share lower. I needed to dig deeper. I had set some situations up and then, somehow, let my character off the hook. No pleasure can come from that. This forever going backward does nothing for my word count, but it does mean that I am digging as deeply as I can into this story and these characters. I am ripping into the situations I have set up and laying them open, as bare as I can. I am preparing the soil, I suppose, for the end of the book, of what I hope will grow for the characters, for their lives when I stop writing.

Or is this all just a tactic to delay my finishing? Am I so in love with these characters and their strange world that I cannot – gulp – let go of them? I have heard it said that you are not finished with a book until you are sick to death at the sight and thought of it. I cannot imagine feeling that, ever, so that must mean I’m nowhere near done. Still, I’m on track to finish my rewrite in 2 weeks time and hand it back to a couple of lovely readers. Check back and see if I’m on track, won’t you?

What I’m learning about rewrites

I am 65K into my rewrite. I woke up this morning, thinking about what I am learning about myself and my writing as I rewrite.

1. Why am I rewriting this? Knowing the purpose of the rewrite helps me to focus on what it is that I am trying to fix, so as not to make fresh muddles. Every rewrite you are just trying to make it “better”, of course, whatever better is. Better, faster, funnier, whatever. I mean, know what you are trying to improve. You’re not polishing or editing, after all, you’re rewriting. My first rewrite was mostly working on point of view, who was telling the story, how many characters and when; I was working on how the backstory would be revealed and worked through in the present tense story, because I wanted everyone to feel somehow haunted, but I didn’t want big monologues of memories. My second big rewrite was specifically looking at narrative arc, at how the story was structured and delivered, so that it was a better read. Both rewrites created very different feeling books, so it’s also probably helpful to know what it is you are trying to write as well, so you don’t lose track of yourself. This rewrite? I am going deeper into characters, reordering and sorting story elements, and cutting a lot of back story scenes, so that I have more “room” in the present tense story, and more ghosts that you can feel than scenes that you can read, if that makes sense. I’m reminding myself what my themes are and trying to tell a better story. That’s all.

2. Give it time. Leaving a big gap between rewrites helps you see what you’ve got. Nothing novel in that. But going away and writing something else in the gap – in my case, the first draft of a new piece, helps you shift your obsessions. With something new and different in your head, you really can see what you wrote when you get back to it, because you’re somehow a little less invested in it. You’ve already started the process of letting it go and leaving it alone. I don’t know if you can ever see it “with fresh eyes”, but perhaps you can see what it was that you meant to write before you did all that writing, and you can see the gap between them. Whether you want to tackle that disparity in the rewrite or not is up to you. Maybe you carry that old obsession of what it was you were trying to write into the next novel, and you let this novel be what it is.

3. What am I rewriting? In other words, how do drafts evolve from first drafts? Perhaps the real question is – what kinds of first drafts do we write? Do you write big soggy drafts that will need to be cut and shaped and made sense of? That’s what I thought all first drafts were supposed to be like. But my first drafts (all two of them, so far) tend to be an account of what characters do and say. The draft puzzles out why they’re doing it, who they are, and what they will do next. I’m sure this comes from being a playwright, but I just want to get characters in a room and talking, so that I can see who they are and what they want and what they’ll do to get it. I have a broad stroke of structure and what I think will happen, so that they can actually get into other rooms, but it’s only broad. I have rough character plans and lists, but they aren’t hard and fast. Any new character could walk in at any time and take over. In any draft, anything is possible, but with a big white page and no fixed map or floor plan, anything might happen at any moment. And that is thrilling, even if you write yourself off a cliff. Go down the cliff. See what happens. In later rewrites, I impose myself more on the story, I suppose. I try to go deeper into the story and the themes and what I’m trying to leave a reader with in the reading. I’m trying to ask the story and the characters essential questions, and pushing the what-ifs and the consequences further than the characters themselves might like, if they were solely in charge. There is no right or wrong about it – it’s just a process. But if you know what your process is, it might stop you panicking and reaching for a how-to book.

4. I can’t read. Oh, I can read blogs and blather. Books, I can only pick up and start, toss down again. They aren’t what I’m looking for. What I’m looking for is what I’m writing, of course, and while you can’t physically rewrite all day every day, your mind can. And will. If you could find something to read that would reinforce the jangle in your head and keep you in the feeling of what you are rewriting, that would be a comfort, I would imagine.

5. Every time you rewrite something, you have changed. You are changed by the writing and the rewriting, of course, but you are also changed, in and of yourself, especially if there is life happening in these gaps between rewrites. You bring that changed self to the rewriting. It’s up to you whether or not you let those changes into your writing or if you try to keep the “feel” of it as it was when you started, or something somewhere in between.

6. You probably can rewrite something too many times. But as I am rewriting my first novel, I have had a huge journey to make on it. The learning on a first novel is huge. You can read all the how-to books they can throw at you, but ultimately you are learning how YOU write a novel. There’s nobody else in the room with you. I think you have to rewrite something until you know that it is the best way that you have of telling that story through those characters. If you keep looking at it and thinking – no, that’s not quite it – then it isn’t.

7. Scrivener is amazing. I wrote my first novel before I knew about Scrivener. I wrote my second novel straight onto Scrivener, and I know that in the rewrite I will be grateful for it. It’s a brilliant tool for organising raggedy bits of text and not losing anything. It makes the moving around of scenes – which I do quite a bit – so easy. In Word, you have to cut and paste, and, invariably, you will cut twice and paste once and lose something and not know you’ve lost it. Scrivener makes that impossible. Everything you throw away is sitting in there in a little trash folder, ready to be pulled out and used. And things that you write that you don’t know what to do with can go into an “unplaced scenes” folder, which was David Hewson’s marvellous idea. You can download his Scrivener template from his site, as well as buy an e-book download to learn more about how he uses Scrivener. We Mac folk used to be all smug about Scrivener, but there’s a version for Windows now, too.

8. There are no short cuts. If I wanted to work on my first novel in Scrivener, I was going to have to type it in. 88K of typing. There was nothing to do but do it. I knew that if I just imported the whole thing and spent all my time cutting and pasting and ordering, I would, eventually, stop seeing what I was working on. The typing of it, each word again from scratch, means that no sentence is escaping me. We all have bits that we glaze over, we say, ooh that’s fine, but at some point we do stop reading it. Typing it again makes you look at everything. And it means that, now that it’s in Scrivener, I can move all my backstory and present tense chapters around with great ease. I feel like this is the first draft of the book that I can really SEE, if you see what I mean, and that’s all due to how it’s laid out in Scrivener. Sales pitch over.

9. You can rewrite a play in a day, but not a novel. Darn it. You really can rewrite a whole play in a day – a long day – but it can be done. And I thought, well, I’ll never be able to hold a whole novel in my head like I can hold a play, and turn it around and look at it and rethink it. But the more time you spend on a book, the more you can hold it up and turn it around and see it, to tease out its possibilities, to look at its themes and metaphors and see what it was that you were trying to do with it in the first place. You might not be able to rewrite it all at once, but you can rewrite with the whole of the book in your head so that you are working on the ending and the beginning and all the beats of the novel at the same time.

10. I’m not good company. Sorry about that. I’m not much interested or interesting. I’m listening, but I’m really somewhere else. I’m in the back of my head, turning things over, digging things up, and moving things around. But, no worries. I’ll be done soon.