There’s Been A Murder

I really hope you read that in the voice of Taggart.  If not, or if you have no idea what I’m talking about, I’m very disappointed.

I just killed someone.

It’s the first time I’ve killed a character I loved, I think.  It’s rubbish, but it needed to be done.

And now, wise words from a man who knows his business when it comes to character assassination (see what I did there?):

“I’ve been killing characters my entire career, maybe I’m just a bloody minded bastard, I don’t know, [but] when my characters are in danger, I want you to be afraid to turn the page (and to do that) you need to show right from the beginning that you’re playing for keeps.”

-George R. R. Martin

Insecurity

As a random aside, I will inform you, dear blog readers, that I’m a fan of the music of Sia.  In my fandom, I sometimes read interviews to understand the mind behind the music I’ve found resounds with me.  One such interview was in Interview Magazine  online, and featured a conversation between Sia and her friend/performance collaborator Kristen Wiig (of Bridesmaids fame, and with whom Sia perfomed at the Grammy Awards earlier this year).  One comment from Wiig struck me in particular:

In any of the creative arts, you rarely meet people who are like, “Hey, I’m great.” We all have our insecurities and we all kind of don’t know if we belong here: “I’m not sure if I’m supposed to be doing this, and all the other people who do this know that I’m really not supposed to be here.” It’s so subjective. What’s good, what’s bad? A song can be good to one person and bad to another. An acting performance can be loved or hated. It’s hard to have a very strong foot on the ground and feel confident in that world.

(From: http://www.interviewmagazine.com/music/sia/)

I find this is a constant struggle of mine.  On one hand, I’m confident in my skills as a writer (some days, at least).  On the other, I feel like a fraud, a rank amateur and a fool (this is most days).  But hey, look, Kristen Wiig says everyone else feels that way, too!  Hurray!

Anyways, here I am starting to write Bestial Part 2.  It’s taken me a while after completing Part 1 to face writing Part 2, and I’ve begun, and rejected, several false starts already.  However, I’m planning to use April in much the same way as I did November, and complete my first draft within the month.  So long as I push myself to write a segment in every spare half hour I find myself having, despite my toddler-sized personal chaos-monkey following me around, I should succeed.

I love nap time.  Long may it reign benevolently upon me.

How One Book Became Two

I had always intended for Bestial to be one stand-alone novel.  I was tired of all the trilogy hype, and I was determined that it was possible, even preferable, to avoid multiple volumes as a matter of principle.

But then I was sat here, working on my Unhappy Ending, and it was so glaringly obvious.  This novel was finished, and it had the most perfect Unhappy Ending: a cliff-hanger, leading you to volume two, inevitably entitled Mortal.  A novel which can revisit things kept hidden and subtle in volume one, and elaborate on characters not yet explored to their fullest, while still continuing down the current narrative track.

So that happened.

But I’m still not writing a damned trilogy.

The Unhappy Ending

I find ending a story the most difficult bit of all.  I’m often overcome by my emotional attachments to the characters, and my deep-seated wish to do right by them which is nice but ultimately unhelpful.  I sometimes have to first write the ending I wish I could write, where the characters are made happy and the loose ends are nicely tied up – and then delete it.

In writing the first draft of Bestial that’s what I did.  The ending I gave it was the wishful-thinking version of the ending which was easy to type out and required little forethought.  It made me feel nice to write, but it was not a good ending.  I gave The Husband its synopsis the other night while lamenting my ending problems, and his words helped me to feel finally ready to relinquish it to the depths of delete hell.

‘Yeah,’ he said, nodding sagely.  ‘That’s crap.’

Exactly.

Nice and happy and tied-up loose ends are just crap in most books.  If you need any convincing of that, remember the ending of the Harry Potter books, where all the friends are married and have children and all the children are friends and blahblah isn’t that just lovely?

Yeah.  Crap.

Sure, it’s the end you would love to give every character of every book if those characters were your friends and loved ones, and sometimes it works, but other times you have to get a little more brutal to tell the story you intend to tell.

So instead of happy endings for all and everything coming full circle, maybe there needs to be emotions left unrequited, antagonists allowed to escape punishment, and some horrific wrongs unable to be righted.  It’s real life, after all, even if you’re writing genre fiction.

Just because a story isn’t factual doesn’t mean it isn’t a true story.  Just because Bestial is the story of a fairy tale doesn’t make the turmoil of its characters less valid and it doesn’t make characters themselves, even the Beast, less human.

Now I need to spend some time finding the ending the novel needs to tell its story.  It is entirely about humanity, and sacrifice, and love in all its different forms.  It’s about how even those with the very best of intentions can make a god-awful mess of things.  Good does not triumph over evil, it simply comes into conflict with another type of good, from someone else’s perspective of goodness.  This is not a happy story, this is a tragic tale of life’s unfairness, of ugliness inside and out.

There will be no ‘Happily Ever After’s here.

Editing

This has historically been the part where I give up on a story in disgust, when the first draft usually so completely fails to live up to the expectations I had when first imagining it.

I left Bestial for the whole month of December, and only the other day picked it back up again.  I printed it out, hole-punched it, placed it in a binder and went through each page with a red pen.  There were entire sections I hadn’t read since I first wrote them, and I was pleasantly surprised by most of it.

There’s a long way to go still.  I have to reformat the narrative, fill in some gaps and make a couple of decisions on some key points.  But success doesn’t seem as distant and improbable as it has on countless other first drafts.

Tale As Old As Time, Song As Old As Rhyme

Well then – I’ve finished my story, on the eve of NaNoWriMo’s bitter end!  However, saying that, I didn’t reach 50,000 words.  I got to 37,821, which is well behind, but I knew it would be a struggle to reach the wordcount goal.  As I have stated from the beginning, this year’s NaNoWriMo was not about winning the competition for 50k, it was about finishing the story I wanted to write.  I had to rush a lot through the end of the plot but I have finished, and that’s what counts.

I still love it.  There are parts I don’t love, bits that will be chucked out like last week’s smelly tupperware of culinary nightmares hidden in the refrigerator of my mind.  But I have accepted that this is fine.  It was hard, but I have convinced myself, finally, to deal with the fact that novels do not jump out of anyone’s head fully-formed, perfect and without the need to edit.  I have labeled this draft Draft Zero, and am already beginning Draft One which has already markedly improved upon the tone and flavour of what came before.

Does anyone else feel like words have flavour?  Like some books you try to devour (I love to devour my books, in one sitting if possible) are so bland and tasteless, they fall flat both in your mind’s voice and your mind’s eye.  The images they inspire are a dull kind of greyscale.

Or maybe it’s just me.  I digress.

I’m feeling pretty victorious about this whole endeavour.  It has to be said that I thought it would be impossible to do this with a clingy toddler, and with Thanksgiving and the visit of some much-beloved Noodles for whom I happily forwent writing to spend time with.  I will always prioritise my family, but I’m also pleased as punch (is punch really so pleased?) to have been able to have my pumpkin pie and eat it too, to mix my metaphors with reckless abandon.

I will now rest my tired wrists, my sore and unfocused eyes, and recover from this final writing sprint.  And then, after a bit of time away to give me perspective, I’ll jump right back in again.

Progress Report

I hope that there will be a time, years from now, when I am reading this story to my son, in all its finished and complete glory, that I can point to a scene and tell him, ‘I wrote this while feeding you soup, when you were just a little baby.’

Though it might be quite a few years before he’s ready for this story, in all honesty.  It’s a bit grim.

I am enjoying this story so much more than any other novel I have written.  I believe in its message, and I feel that it deals with so much real life humanity, even in the guise of a beast – which is kind of the point.

If you are reading this having read my blog in the past, you might recall that I often struggle with writer’s block.  I haven’t had the luxury of that condition this time.  My writing time is only an hour here or there during naptimes, or when I can snatch some moments when  my silly monkey-baby is happy to entertain himself.

I even *gaspshockhorror* turn on the TV purely for distraction purposes.  I’m actually doing that right now – I know you’re scandalised by my parenting choices.

The one thing I’m not sure about if is this novel will reach 50,000 words.  It depends on what happens after the Crucial Scene which I am actually writing right now, at just over 20k.  I’m not sure if there’s another 30k in it.  But so long as I finish the story, which was my own personal goal for this month, I’m not sure that I care about it not reaching the NaNoWriMo wordcount goal.  My only hesitation is that a shorter story may not be considered a novel.

So we’ll see how it goes.  I’m only halfway through November, after all!