No Buts...

I am definitely procrastinating. Three days into another week and no attempt at writing (save a few blog entries). Admittedly, I have more or less got my writing space organised and, as a consequence, my office is much, much more organised too. But, still...

I must do better in March. I must do better in March. I must do better in March. Etc.

"I'm O.K., You're O.K."

... But why am I not writing?

Instead, I am reading Scripts People Live - Transactional Analysis of Life Scripts by Claude Steiner. I think I am doing research (researching into life scripts) but maybe I'm still just putting it off.

Well, to counter any such putting off temptations (and they are clearly tempting) I've now set myself a deadline of March 1st to be the day that I begin writing my thousand words a day.

We shall see.

Onwards.

(Note: this is the first post tagged as procrastination rather than fear. Fear encourages procrastination, for sure, but procrastination can live a full and vigorous life in the absence of its more powerful brother. In my opinion, anyway. I shall review previous posts to change fear into procrastination (and hark, I shall be thenceforth known as The Alchemist! Apologies, my alter ego appears to be getting the better of me today).

Is this procrastination?

I know I should be writing, but it really does feel important that I

• Create my writing environment, first (I'm putting a table in my main bedroom and away from the office in my second).
• Go to Ikea again* to get suitable furniture for above writing space
• Tidy my office moving any writing-related books from there to my my new writing space

And, finally, I have to

• Go through all my notes, in search of writing ideas that might just be useful

Is this the equivalent of doing a spring clean in the house, or of reorganising my clothes by colour rather than by type of item, or of reading one more book for inspiration?

Or, is it a necessary process of preparing for change, of preparing to write a first novel?

After all, I still don't know exactly what my book is going to be about, except that it is, without doubt, going to be something different. (I have several normal writing ideas lined up for next year and the year after that. I do hope, though, that writing something different doesn't put me off writing something conventional the next time because a) I have a taste for the odd, now or b) that my experiment failed so badly that I never want to try and write a novel again.)

I am going to be running before I can walk, with my first writing project, for sure. And that is most unlike me. I guess that's what's good about change - doing things differently.

And I keep telling myself that I am not writing a novel right now, but a book; it is simply necessary for me to learn to write by writing, and this is how I choose to write.

(*) Going to Ikea twice in the same year is almost unheard of, let alone twice in the same week!

Books I Didn't Finish

(I was going through my notes just now and I came across a review of a book I didn't enjoy. And it made me think about the other books I've read that I didn't manage to finish. It made me want to write the following, in the voice of the character I'm writing about, called...)

Books I Didn't Finish

(Written in the voice of a character I'm writing about at the moment.)

I'm a man that does what his Mum tells him. If I should eat my greens then I eat my greens. If I should exercise three times a week then I exercise three times a week. If it's bad to drink too much beer, then I don't. So when I start to read a book I finish it. I don't skip the boring chapters; I don't read the first page and then the last page; I don't turn over page after descriptive prose page - I read word after succulent word.

There was a time, though, when I didn't finish my book. (Shhh.)

I started reading Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. Now I'm interested in maths and astronomy so I was bound to enjoy this book, especially as everyone raved about The Name of the Rose (much better than the film, as ever). Well I found it to be filled with turgid text, that my little mind could simply not penetrate. I could only manage 100 pages, which is much worse than Paula Radcliffe did in Athens Olympic marathon for women, that's for sure.

The trouble with quitting, as Paula can no doubt tell you, is that it sets a precedent, though.

And it wasn't long before I had not read another book then another. The books listed below are just the books I couldn't finish in the last few years. I have nothing against the writers of these books, except I couldn't finish what you'd started. These books failed me as a reader; or did I fail them as a reader, I'm really not sure? In no particular order:

• White Teeth - Zadie Smith
  Clever. Inventive. About London. But after half-way through the novel I found that I really didn't care about the characters; I was bored. There must be something less boring instead that I can do, or read, I thought to myself. So I put the book down.
  
• The History of Love - Nicole Krauss
  Even cleverer and more inventive than White Teeth. Still, half-way through, I was getting puzzled by the change in points of view, and I really didn't care about the world that was being painted for me.
  
• Where Did It All Go Right? - Andrew Collins
  A happy autobiography type of book. And what's wrong with that? Nothing, except I found this book to be both smug and dull. (Good job I'm writing this in character, isn't it.) It's a shame, really, because I do believe that happy stories can make interesting stories, but this is not the book to read to prove it. (Interestingly, if you read Andrew's blog, you'll see that his Wimbledon-green lawn looks to have come over all Blue Velvet perhaps. I'm talking about the fact that he's even considering the truth (or otherwise) of the 9/11 conspiracy theories.)

The following books were recommended to me by people who thought it would help my writing. In some cases I read most of the book, but others I couldn't even face opening it in the first place. Blimey!

• London Fields - Martin Amis
  Far too clever, and far too well-written to provide any semblance of inspiration to me.
  
• Books by Nick Hornby and Tony Parsons.
  Not me. Aggravatingly so. I didn't even make 20 pages of Man and Boy.
  
• A Multitude of Sins - Richard Forde
  I don't like short stories, and I didn't like how the author treated the subject matter. Good stuff like fidelity, feelings, betrayal, relationships - it just didn't sit well with me. I read most of the short stories then gave it to a person who likes reading short stories. Is that okay, Richard?

I forget what other clever stuff I was going to write here about books I haven't finished as this is my second version of this piece. Of course the first version was much better than the above, frustratingly so. I lost the first to the foibles of writing a blog at Blogger online. (Yes, I swore for several moments. And I'm still angry about it. As it says at the end of those classic Buffy episodes: "Grrr. Aaargh!". Exactly.

--

Okay. Time to do some work. I will let my character swear at Blogger.com one more time,"F***** B****x!" and get on with doing it, then.

I'm Writing!

You'll never believe it but I'm writing.

It doesn't make sense what I'm writing, not in terms of writing a proper novel anyway, but maybe that's why I went to Arvon last year: to learn that there are no rules to writing.

Thank goodness for that.

I'm writing by hand, too, which is not pretty.

What I'm writing is as disorganised as anything, and I have no outline and no plot but I do have a means of generating words. And that will do for now.

Onwards.

I've written my first line!

I've written the first line of my novel and the last line too!

The fact that the lines are both the same is neither here nor there!

It's a start.

Whether it's the start I was looking for, time will tell.

The first line?

(Not here. Not now. Sorry.)

Free Writing Exercise (Part 2)

Nick Daws' writing course shows you how to free write, or write without thinking. I've done a little bit of this in the past, and I quite like the results. It's the only way I'm going to be able to write quickly, that's for sure.

Anyway, what follows is the exact (unedited) results of my free writing exercise. It took five minutes exactly, plus the time taken to type it out (Nick recommends that you hand write for best 'right-brain' success).

Exercise: Write whatever comes into to your head for the following (more or less) random words:

Black hat
Cactus
Business card

(Here goes.)

The Black Hat Cactus. What a strange name for a pub. And the people that went into it were also strange, for sure. No business cards. Needed in this place. Absolutely not. No suits. No mini skirts. No power dressing of any kind. Just relaxed folk getting on with 'getting on'.

Yes, there were the odd fights - strange folk can rub up to other strange folk in most peculiar ways. But these fights always ended in the same way. The two men (or women), were forced to agree to disagree. They supped a pint of the other person's favourite tipple (not wine, obviously - that'd be a glass) and then they signed the Guest Book: a guest book of fights. There was no glory in being in the guest book, though. This was because all those that witnessed the fight got to write about it - and, a bit like drunks - no-one looks good when they're scrapping like a puppy.

That book didn't come out very often but it did come out. Tonight was a guest book night. And even though I'd remembered no business cards and got the name of the pub right, I was one of those involved in the punch up.

(Oooh.)