Category: WRITING

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Quaint French festival

Posted on by Claire

For the past thirteen years, which I’ve just realised is half my life, my older brother has organised a theatre festival in a tiny village in Southern France.

It is a quaint, adorable little place, so tiny that the only businesses are a small cafe-restaurant and a bakery with a corner-shop type room at the back that sells mostly local wines. I kid you not, it is one of the Frenchest places I know.

Seriously Frenchest thing ever – I was working on my prologue, and then all of the sudden, let there be dudes dressed as horses…

And during the festival, the village transforms into a temple of hipsteriness – all the decorations are made from recycled materials, you have to pay for your plastic cup and there are dry toilets. Seriously, it’s as if the whole place were already Instagrammed – of course, I still instagrammed the pictures.

Going out there to watch outdoors theatre, lounge under the trees by the second-hand book seller’s stall, and drink local, organic beer while I write was a seriously good way to spend a week-end – I’ll never again leave my netbook at home when I go. I got so much work done!

And I think the fact that I had no one to speak English to for the whole holiday was more than a contributing factor. I love playing with the English language, it rarely ever stops being tons of fun. And I think the fact that I couldn’t indulge my English addiction with speaking meant I was all the more keen to indulge it with writing.

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Writing Group

Posted on by Claire

I’ve recently started going to a fortnightly Critique Group which meets a short walk from my office and a short bus ride from my house. It’s a very friendly group of regulars, now including two of my close friends, who give honest and supportive critique and advice.

Having attended a couple times before I brought anything to read, I knew there would be no gratuitous tearing into my work. Still I was shaking when I brought my first piece of flash fiction to read. Some of the people is that group are very talented, and I didn’t want to make a fool of myself.

I got very positive feedback on the flash fiction, so I brought in the first bit of the prologue for my work in progress. This got mostly positive feedback too, as well as some useful nitpicking. I was happy that there was nitpicking because the group operates on the basis that they only nitpick if they don’t think there is anything majorly wrong with the story.

The feedback I received gave me drive and confidence, so much so that the week-end that followed I did some of the most pleasant, least anxiety-ridden writing I’d done in a while. I carried on with the unfinished prologue I’d shared at the writing group, and got it done while I was on holiday with my family in France. I also had no internet and gorgeous weather, of course, but I know the positive feedback was a great part of how successful that week-end was.

Now, I’m trying to channel the drive and energy I had during that week-end into pushing forward with the novel so I have something decent to read next time.

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Writing every day: Pros & Cons

Posted on by Claire

The number one piece of advice I’ve heard professional writers gives to aspiring writers is simple enough: WRITE.

Put your butt in the chair, your hands on the keyboard and just write your story instead of fretting about it. Then when you’re done, write another one, and then another one.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

A lot of people also say that the best way of achieving this is to write every day. Write about your day, follow a writing prompt, write your novel, every day. Even if it’s only a few hundred words, it doesn’t matter, Neil Gaiman said when he explained that he wrote Coraline by two-hundred words increments every night before going to bed.

So, a couple of months ago, I started the experiment of writing a bit of my novel every day, with a fairly low daily goal, but the hope that the regular additions would plump up my Scrivener file nice and quick. It worked, in terms of adding words regularly, but because it was always only a few hundred words at a time, the text ended up being fairly disjointed.

I found it difficult to maintain writing every day more than a couple of weeks, because after a while I got really depressed about the state of the story. I couldn’t manage to get the tone and action consistent from where I’d left off, and ended up having to delete a lot of words.

The two to three thousand words I wrote during those two weeks are now the chapter in need of the most revisions, and it’s so broken up that it’s not even ready for me to read at writing group.

I could try and write quicker, that’s true – three NaNoWriMo wins have taught me I can write fast, but I don’t really want to, in all honesty. I don’t write quickly, and I haven’t found that my writing improved when I made myself write very quickly all the time. I now consider the wonderful Write or Die a November-only luxury. I’m now trying to write things that make sense and sound nice the first time around, rather than having to re-draft my whole book before it makes any kind of sense.

The good thing about my Writing Every Day experiment is that it’s shown me again and again that once I got in the groove, after maybe ten or fifteen minutes, writing wasn’t as difficult as all that, and I produced decent stuff. What I’m taking from these few weeks is that I need to find a way of writing regularly that works for me.

My assessment so far is: I need to write often, but in longer stretches of time. I can’t just grab ten or twenty minutes here and there (again, that’s a November thing) – I have to set aside an hour at the very least, two at best and knuckle down properly, giving myself time to think. The good news is that I have that time, the bad news is that I don’t know how much I trust myself to put it to good use.

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What I’m doing?

Posted on by Claire

Being an aspiring writer in possession of some free time and an internet connection, the main reason I don’t write more is that I procrastinate. I do other things in the time I could use for writing. I’m entirely responsible for that, and I know how and why I’m wasting time. It’s because procrastinating is easy and can be quite pleasant.

If you’re also a writer, you know how much easier it is to research or plot my story than to write it, how much easier is it to read (or indeed write) about writing than to actually write? If you’re not a writer, it is A LOT easier. It’s very easy to get discouraged, to believe my writing won’t ever amount to anything, etc… Again, if you’re a writer you’ll know the drill. I have a fairly short attention span, and my inclination tends to be to try lots of different things, so when I start thinking my writing dreams are doomed, it can be hard to get back on the horse.

I’m not making excuses for myself, I’m laying out facts. I want to become a better and more prolific writer, so I want to try and get a more logical approach to my writing. Try to see when and where I’m more productive, what’s helpful to me, etc… so I can take all these things and apply them to finishing my damn book.