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This week, Avril talks about the highs and lows of writing, with some tips for overcoming some of the things that may be stopping you from finishing that novel. This post originally featured on the Enterprising Writer blog on the 8th of December, 2020.

So how come some days are Today-I’m-going-to-write-my-masterpiece days, full of exuberance and optimism and the feeling that writing is the most miraculous way of spending time ever invented, whereas other days if somebody pulled a gun and said “Write, or else!” I’d barely have the energy to mumble, “Go ahead and shoot.”?

To account for their bad days, some people tell me they have just run out of ideas. Luckily for me, that is never the issue. There is no shortage of ideas in this house. In fact, to quote Bob Dylan, “I’ve got a head full of ideas that are driving me insane… “. He also wrote. “If my thought-dreams could be seen/They’d probably put my head in a guillotine.” When it comes to ideas, to use the phrase much beloved by people of a certain age, the ones I have will see me out.

So what is she moaning about? I hear you cry. Well sometimes, the difficulty is prioritising. Which idea is going to fly and which is best consigned to the dustbin of history? If I knew the answer to that question, my dears, my life would be very different. I wouldn’t have wasted all that time writing an allegedly comic play-script inspired by Titania and Oberon, with an abundance of fairies and a dearth of credibility. On the other hand, those neglected opening chapters once destined for Mills and Boon might be the answer to my bank manager’s prayers. It is very hard to tell. My experience is that even if you’re bang on the money and you do choose the idea that will fly, sooner or later the apparently simple task of writing down your thoughts seems Herculean.

When things aren’t going well

Take Sinnerman Star – book five of my young adult dark fantasy series. Please. I didn’t get stuck for a few days. Or even a few weeks. Or even a few months. It was three years ago when I was 75% of my way through the blessed book. I knew exactly where I was going. Yet I ground to a halt and my characters, normally extremely vocal, demanding that I get on with it, seemed in a permanent sulk. From time to time I gave them a prod, but it was like having a house full of teenagers who wanted to spend their weekends under the duvet in slothful slumber.

Creative diversions

I do have a useful strategy for when writing is not working out. I do something else creative. It might be making a stained-glass window or composing a song or a sewing a Florentine tapestry (yes really!). I did all that, but it still bugged me that I couldn’t get on with Sinnerman Star.

I talked it over with my son who has been inspirational throughout this process. It took a while but eventually I realised that, like it or not, the book was heading for the mother and father of a battle and writing about fighting is frankly not my strong point. My natural tendency to skip the description and just say “After the battle was over… ” simply won’t do. My reluctance to deal with mass slaughter, even in fiction, seemed like a barrier I could not breach. Jim had an inspiration. “Could it be a battle of wits?” he asked. That seemed really promising and I returned to the task with fresh vigour. Being in lockdown certainly helped. What else was I going to do anyway? That burst of energy lasted about two and a half hours. Long enough to for me to read through what I’d already written, do some editing, play a couple of rounds of Spider Solitaire and gaze into the middle distance before logging onto Twitter and enraging myself about Brexit.

The mystery of the puzzle boxes

It felt like I was boxed in. The operative word here is ‘boxed’. For my sins, I had created an elaborate pair of intricately carved wooden puzzle boxes as part of the story. Conjuring them up was easily done… What was much harder was working out the mechanics of the damn things. If only I had been trained in the art of carpentry. I had to work out every twist and turn of the workings of the boxes, and by golly, was it complicated. Lots of games of Spider Solitaire later and watching YouTube videos filmed by young men with frankly too much time on their hands, helped me devise a very cunning locking device for my boxes. I wasn’t exactly off and running, but I was stumbling in a forward direction.

It was pure slog but I made myself do it and I reached the point where all was revealed. The final secret compartment had sprung open. And do you know what? I suddenly realised that I could not for the life of me remember why I had embarked on this particular journey. What was the point of the boxes? Everything they revealed contained no new information. However intriguing they were, it all seemed like an elaborate confection, doing nothing to drive the plot forward.

I considered summoning up the energy to be ruthless enough to jettison them. (Shades of my Art teacher. “Sometimes you have to kill your darlings, Avril!”) After all that slog, that felt very drastic. I had a good old talk to myself. The boxes surely did have a function. I had simply forgotten it. Why had I not made better notes? (The answer being, that three years before, the idea was completely fresh in my mind. Making notes seemed unnecessary. Which just goes to show. There is a valuable lesson to be learned here.)

I have never discovered the original purpose of the puzzle boxes. What did happen though was very satisfactory because a chance idea opened up a whole new possibility which will figure very largely in Book Six. Thanks to the wonder of cut-and-paste on my computer, I had not actually destroyed the offending section, instead adding it to a very large folder marked Odds and Sods so even if I’d decided against including it, it will be available should its day ever come.

Overcoming the obstacles

So all obstacles cleared and it was full steam for those most magical of words – THE END. Within a relatively short time I had completed the book. I set about reading it as a whole. I’m glad to report that I’m very pleased with the shape of it, its direction and yes, even the boxes. What I’m not pleased about is that I seem to have spent the whole book in a rather ungenerous, skimpy frame of mind. Don’t get me wrong. I’m very fond of spare, economical writing. I like there to be space for wonder and not have every i dotted and every t crossed. Great chunks of description and purple prose tend to leave me cold. However, even with those caveats, I was forced to accept Sinnerman Star was seriously under-nourished. I need to revisit the book with a greater portion of generosity. So next week then.

If all writing was like that, frankly, I would give up. When it feels like every word is extracted with forceps… when pitifully slow progress is akin to wading through wet concrete in ill-fitting Wellington boots… when you decide that the whole idea is rubbish anyway… well, nobody in their right mind would persevere with writing. Fortunately, there are days that are simply magic.

When things are going well…

Sometimes the words just fly off the page. My fingers can hardly move fast enough on the keyboard as inspiration after inspiration tumbles forth with ebullient abundance. I spend whole days in the company of my frisky, wayward characters. Meals are missed… (auto-correct just changed Meals to Males… spooky or what?) All other commitments are jettisoned. It is like being in the grip of a powerful enchantment and it’s wonderful.

Amazing things can happen. Out of the blue, Ivor, a sound engineer friend who recorded my songs decades ago, called me and said that during the first lockdown he had read Forget Me Knot, my first Young Adult novel. He is so enthralled by it that he wants to adapt it for radio! He is a great mover and shaker and he amassed a director and cast and yesterday recorded the opening section.  He just wrote to say that the session was fantastic and I can hardly wait to hear the results. I love having his creative input as he sees – hears – the world very much through audio. At one point my character is walking in an abandoned railway tunnel. Apart from researching the quality of the sound of silence in such a location, Ivor asked, “What would Jo sing to comfort herself as she walks?” And in a trice I knew the answer…

More good news. During the lockdown I was commissioned to be part of a collaborative playwriting process. Recently, thanks to Zoom, I attended a rehearsed reading of my play Love in the Time of Corona with actors from Somerset’s Wassail Theatre company. There is something indescribably wonderful about seeing one’s words made tangible. That applies across the disciplines. When Ivor first recorded my back-of-an-envelope scribble and I heard it as a completed song, I wept for joy. When Ali’s friend, comic book artist Wayne Snooze, breathed life into my comic-book creation of Tor, the Avenger of Avalon, I could hardly breathe for excitement. As for the sensation of unpacking a box of freshly printed books… books that you have sweated and sworn over… books that have your name on the cover…Well, apart from saying that, rather like childbirth, the result makes all the pain worthwhile, I’ll leave that to your imagination!

If you write, I sincerely hope that you too will experience such pleasure in your writing career.

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