Infrequent blogger

OK so I’m an infrequent blogger. I’m sorry. I have a full-time job and toddler. And he’s amazing, by the way, but it means I have less time to write. I remember when I could lie in bed on a Saturday or read the papers and drink coffee or go for a walk or not get out of my PJs and work on my novel all day long. The thing is, though, something was missing and that something is pint-sized and smiley and likes chasing pigeons. So nowadays I have to pick carefully when I have a bit of time to write. It takes some adjustment because I can still just about picture myself in the old days with yards of time stretching out in front of me in a seemingly endless sea. What did I do with myself all day? The picture is kind of blurry, but I definitely had more sleep and looked younger.

I’ve been struggling to find a publisher for my third novel. It’s been rejected by the guys who published the first two and now I have an email inviting me to send it to a high profile person somewhere else. I don’t know him, but he sounds like a nice guy. The trouble is, I have to print it instead of emailing it. This is something that’s changed in the last few years. Almost no-one would email submissions unless they already had a foot in the door. Anyway. What did I do with the few chunks of time that came my way? Did I spend time printing the thing so I can send it off? The invitation to submit is a couple of weeks old already. (By the way, I’m fed up with it. Not a good sign. And it’s about 750 pages long.) Or   did I spend the time finishing off my book on planning a novel? You guessed it: I took the procrastination route. I finished off the book on planning a novel, step by step, paragraph by paragraph, in the small bits of evening I get to myself.

OK, maybe it’s not just procrastination. One comment I’ve had a lot is ‘where’s the story?’ (I’m convinced there is one in the first two, in case of argument) but I couldn’t ignore this kind of feedback, given how frequently it repeated itself! It was the same with my most recent rejection: this book is about character, the market has moved on. It’s true to a certain extent. I’ve always been interested in having fun with language rather than having the story at the front of my mind. I want to play around with words. Given these kinds of complications and dilemmas, I decided I would investigate what story actually is, when you get it down to the bare bones. So when I wrote my novel planning book, I went on yet another journey of discovery like I always do when I’m writing: I figured out (by articulating it) what I know about story. Here are a couple of nuggets:

1. I discovered that problems are central to storytelling. That’s right. Keep giving your characters problems to ponder, dilemmas to unhinge them, niggles to annoy them, puzzle to perplex them. I could go on but you get the point. (In fact I do go on – for a whole chapter in the book – and it’s worth the £4.50 on Amazon just for that bit, of course!) I knew this already but I didn’t know how central problems are until I started to write about it.
2. Human beings have told each other stories since right back when. There’s something innate about stories, something in us that wants to tell them. And when we tell them they almost always tend to be about a person, in a particular place, who changes as a result of solving a problem. If you can use that recipe, you can tell a story.

I wrote the book for a couple of other reasons too. I wrote it for my novel writing students. I wanted to get down the essence of what I’ve been trying to teach them for the last six years. And I wrote it because I believe in learning by doing and I wanted to know what goes into self-publishing, especially self-publishing an ebook. It’s not perfect as it’s my first go, but I am quite proud of myself that I have finally got it up there on Amazon and Smashwords, ready to download. I know now why there are so many self-published ebooks on how to publish an ebook! Once you’ve done the learning curve, you feel like passing on the information. I used one of the dummies guides: Ali Luke’s Publishing eBooks for Dummies. I chose it because I like being taken through the stages step-by-step and also because I found the Dummies book on WordPress really useful. I have to go now because my boy has just woken up. If you’d like to see the book search for ‘How to Plan a Novel’ on Amazon. I’ll post a link here soon.