Green ink, purple prose and pens

I'm feeling reather antiquated. I visited WH Smiths and Rymans with the intention of buying a fountain pen. My last fountain pen used green ink, had a broad nib and was used for writing countless letters.  

Letters are sadly old fashioned, but the feel of a fountain pen in your hand opens new possiblities when writing. The look of the ink on the page is far more satisfying and has personality, unlike the humdrum of arial or the crotetchy Times New Roman fonts. 

In my writing playbook a fountain pen would be the perfect instrument, adding weight to crossings out or scribblings of my short stories and poems. The flow of ideas through the pen has a different feel from the scratchy tap tap on a keyboard, with its myriads of typos or instant deletions. A fountain pen, I decided, is essential to my writing experiments of getting into the flow - and it would be fun to play with the physicality of writing, so long as purple prose doesn't emerge of course, but even then as an expression of thought it could be a relief after the intensity of my daily rigour of the taut press releases I write for work. 

The assistant looked me up and down. I'd asked, politely, if I could try the pens out so I could test out the nib and the thickness of the instrument in my hand. Back in my day this was how it was done -  Smiths had a special counter for the purpose. 

"Of course not. Sealed packets," she said, staring at me and speaking louder than was strictly necessary to get her point across. 

"She was probably looking for the owl on your shoulder." my colleague replied when I returned to the office grumpy and aggrieved.

Controlling creativity and negativity in the writer

Controlling creativity is something that feels deeply unnatural to me. Surely cretivity is about playing, experimentation and being free? Isn't it an oxymoron? 

As I sat down on Sunday morning to begin editing 'The Wish Bone,' all sorts of negativity crept in - it's no good, you aren't as good as you were back then, it's too long since you wrote anything. Fear. 

Path in Austrailia

With my novel it's like endlessly climbing the same  mountain. Each time you re-start you seem to be at the bottom of the pile.

Hemingway said," Writing's easy - you just sit over your typewriter and bleed."

So on Sunday I fiddled around with facebook, couldn't resist checking my emails, and kept reading over and over Caroline's words, worrying about how the plot fitted together. Then I tired meditation, something new to me, which for me just means sitting in a room on the floor and trying not to think about thinking. There is no rest from the busy mind, it keeps me awake at night, inhabits my dreams, leaves me exhausted. 

So, in the end I forced myself to sit there and focus on the text and the words, and I gave myself an end time - one o'clock. As the deadline approached I suddenly entered the 'zone' and I was away. I edited 5 pages - it's slow but then it was re-writing, as it really wasn't as polished or meaningful as it should be. Stephen King in his book 'On Writing' which I can recommend says you need to get closer to the truth, and that's what I was aiming at. 

In the afternoon I had a much more productive day with my  family than usual. Becuase I'd only allowed myself to be creative in a time frame, I could then be free to really be with my family when I wasn't writing. And I promised myself I'd write the novel everyday. Have I? Well yesterday I was just too busy checking out instructional video's from the 30 DC project, and tonight it's my writing group, so no, not yet!

Happy writing and reading everyone. 

Editing Chapter 24 - how to avoid cheap sentiment in writing

I'm feeling very chuffed with myself as I have finally finished editing Chapter 24 which tells the story of Freddie at Bristol Kite Festival. I had to write in a whole new character into the scene and increase the pathos. But it's done and the word count for the edited novel now stands at 75,698 words. I have a childish pleasure in knowing how many words I've edited. Though as Mark Twain says in The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain, "The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug." 

Freddie flies a Black angel kite like this 

Chapter 24 has always been a favourite of mine - it's got emotion and power, it's a high point in the book, and it's got a bit of magical writing about kites that uses extended metaphor to mirror what's going on in Freddie's world. Freddie doesn't normally do sentiment being a 14 year old boy, but here I let him have a bit of fun linguistically. 

A few weeks ago I took Chapter 24 to my writing group and P, (he likes to be anonymous) said, 'Grace, you've got a puppy moment in the scene. I don't like it. Too obvious.'

I considered, and I knew he was absolutely right. I'd written this chapter as if it was a film scene. Queue: tears, soppy music, and heightened emotion. I was cheating. I was giving the reader a scene which wasn't deserved. It was too predictable, too expected, too easy. 

"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader." - Robert Frost.   

I've gone back and made it sharper, edgier. Now Freddie has a mix of emotions and the high points are counterbalanced with rougher edges and dark humour. 

One writing technique I'm using which is very useful is to read my work out loud when editing. In a novel like this which has three first person narrators the voice is all. It won't work if I get the voice even slightly off. It will stand out. 

Getting the specifics right is also really important - what references does Freddie use, or any 14 year old boy? Am I being consistent across the novel? The more I read it out loud, the more I can hear if my own voice, or  use of language, is getting in the way of my character's voice, and the more I can hear Freddie's voice. Reading aloud helps as I can hear the duff note and when the rhythm falters.

 For now, it's done.