Trying to write during lockdown has set me pondering my Scribbler’s Progress.

I have learned a lot about writing over the years. Some came from experience; also, an occasional discovery of my own. But a lot was quite simply from reading great books or discussing with and listening to other writers.

Remembering has been a pleasure – and salutary for my next project. So I thought I would share, in case some of this might help someone else.

Scribbler’s Progress Milestone 1

I wrote stories very happily as long as I could remember. It was a nasty shock, therefore, when I found myself living half way up a cliff in Country Kerry re-writing the same scene for SIX WEEKS until I ran out of time and money.

So I cobbled something together and sent the thing off to publishers. They all  turned it down. I heaved a sigh of relief and haven’t looked at it again.

But the experience shook me. Maybe I wasn’t a writer after all? Until I vaguely remembered something I’d read…

It was in the cracking Wildfire at Midnight and I had to re-read the book to find it. As, indeed, I have just done again.

Well worth it, too. Fabulous story, beautifully told. It’s set at exactly this time of year, back when the Queen was being crowned and Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing where the first to reach the top of Mount Everest. I thoroughly recommend it.

My milestone insight comes in Chapter 3. The narrator’s ex-husband, a writer, appears unexpectedly and she notes his tension. “It couldn’t just be the strain of starting a new book, though some stages, I knew, we’re hell.”

Hell?

Yes!

Hell, yes. Thank you from the bottom of my heart, dear Mary Stewart.

Scribbler’s Progress Milestone 2

Roll forward a couple of years. Mills and Boon published one of my books, and an author I enormously admired told me I must join the Romantic Novelists’ Association — 60 this year!

I did and went along to a meeting. I knew nobody — my mentor lived in Spain.

“Plotter or pantser?” asked a friendly woman whose name, sadly, I never discovered. I mumbled an answer and tiptoed away. Professional writers, I deduced, spoke a language that someone like me just didn’t understand.

I discovered that if I wrote a synopsis for my publisher, the synopsis, of itself, absolutely guaranteed that what I’d written was not what happened in the finished book.

So I could plot. But I couldn’t stick to it thereafter. Maybe a sort of Anti-matter Plotter?

Was I a pantser, then?  I started a book on a rush of energy, flying into the mist.

But then, somewhere around Chapter Three, I would slow down. One bit of me would carry on writing. While another bit would start asking things like: who these people were, how they’d got here and where they were going. 

And I’d start writing myself Notes. Piles of notes. Notebooks of Notes.

What’s more, I found that the two activities fed off each other. After Chapter Three, I was jumping between paths all the time.

What I worked out about the past then influenced what my characters did and felt in the now of the story. Not because I planned it. Because my characters were finding their way.

So my milestone discovery was that I don’t fit either template. I do a bit of both. And it has to be at the same time because they are inextricably interlinked, like a double helix.

If asked, these days, I say I’m an oscillator.

Scribbler’s Progress Milestone 3

My third milestone was the gift of historical author Anne Gracie. It occurred at a Romance Writers of Australia Conference after I’d made a white-knuckle trip round North Eastern Australia with the Birdwatcher.

I arrived in a state of zoned-out post-terror. Went to Anne’s workshop on the historical novel like a zombie.

 A digression here: to Birdwatchers on a field trip, birds are the only thing that matter. Thus, in a small boat, on a river known to embrace crocodiles, the Birdwatchers kept their binoculars trained on the tree line. They were looking for Tawny Frogmouths and other exotica. The only person with their eyes on the water, especially every passing log, was ME. It was — interesting. I pumped a lot of adrenaline.

Listening to Anne, however, I revived. She demonstrated setting up a timeline for a novel. You had to look at the sequence of events in the novel itself and the critical events which preceded the story your characters lived, as well as in historical records. So we knew where the protagonist was coming from.

There was a ping and the light came on. I thought that’s what I need. 

Suddenly I had an anchor and all those Notes sat on a time-chart.

Thank you a thousand times, Anne!

Scribbler’s Progress Milestone 4

I don’t need to run through this in detail, since Joanna blogged about it only a couple of weeks ago: Filing to Keep Your WIP Safe.

Ever since she sat me down and gave me her Little Talk on keeping my writing work straight, I have been more productive, more creative and less in a panic that at any time in my life before. (I think it’s showing in my writing now, too.)

It’s more than just filing, it’s a lifesaver. It has stopped me drowning  and returned me to a place of Zen calm several times now.

For the book to which I am returning the moment I have finished this blog, I have amassed four discreet folders over the years. Can’t tell you how many documents.

These include — I don’t know — at least five versions of various bits of text, plus essential research, interesting research and stuff I have absolutely no idea why I bothered to file.

No longer. I am reformed. From today I operate filing the text of my novel on the Joanna System alone.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Joanna. You’re a star.

Thank God for friends and fellow authors — and especially for the people who are both.

Sophie