Tag: rewriting

Writeathon

I think it’s important for a writer to always be looking for new challenges. If the thing you’re working on isn’t teaching you something then how are you going to grow?

My current challenge is the Writeathon challenge over on Royal Road. Writeathon has some similarities to NaNoWriMo, which I’ve done every year since 2004. In both cases the challenge is to write a set amount according to a fairly tight deadline. NaNoWriMo is 50,000 words of a first draft in 30 days. Writeathon is 55,555 words in 5 weeks but the words have to be published to a single fiction on the website. The daily writing total is lower for Writeathon but you have to edit as you go, which is very different to the “Writing with abandon” atmosphere of NaNoWriMo.

The thing I love about NaNoWriMo is the permission to suck. Nobody ever has to see the bullshit you come up with at three in the morning when you’re desperate to just keep the story going, and so a bunch of ninjas jump out, and menace your romantic leads who’ve been stubbornly refusing to kiss for three fucking chapters.

Writeathon does not come with permission to suck. It comes with permission to care what other people think about your writing. A lot of writing advice boils down to “Write to please yourself.” This is true and important. If you’re not enjoying the story then writing it just isn’t sustainable in the long term. It is possible to write stuff that you hate but writing it will destroy you eventually. The temptation is to avoid that by forgetting about the audience completely.

However, if you never think about the audience then you end up writing stuff that no audience will be able to enjoy. At some point you need to consider clarity and coherence for readers who don’t live in your head. I think it’s perfectly valid to leave that consideration until it’s time to edit but there’s something to be said for cleaning up your messes as soon as you make them.

Ray Bradbury is often quoted as saying “Throw up in your typewriter every morning… – Clean up every noon.” I’m a night owl, and also incapable of sticking to any routine for long, but throwing up story into my laptop for a bit and then cleaning it up when I run out of steam might be sustainable. I’m going to spend five weeks finding out if it is.

Project files: Singularity

Where things stand with the project

Singularity wasn’t the first novel I wrote but it was the first one that I queried. I got some interest from an agent when I pitched it at XPONorth in 2016 but that never went anywhere and I was unprepared for how much the lack of interest from the other agents I sent it to was going to hurt.

The complete lack of any feedback from agents led me to wonder if there might be something fundamentally wrong with the novel that I was too close to see. After relatively few form rejections I put it to one side and decided to focus on something else for a while. That something else turned out to be finishing and then querying Project Kindness.

Now that I have a bit more experience of the querying process and I’ve learned more about it I suspect that the problem with Singularity is more likely to be in the query letter, the synopsis and in the pacing of the first three chapters than in the underlying structure of the novel.

I’m almost ready to take another look at Singularity and see how much work it would take before I could send it out to more agents. Now that I’ve got to the stage with Project Kindness where I can rewrite the synopsis without retiring to my fainting couch [LINK TO POST] it might be possible to restart work on Singularity.

So what’s it all about then?

It’s always tempting to answer that question with the synopsis. The elevator pitch is a briefer and more entertaining answer but it doesn’t really tell you what it’s about. We’ll get to the pitch later, but what it’s really about is the lure of the road not travelled.

We’ve all been there. Standing in the yellow wood, looking at two roads diverging and having to choose. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like a choice and sometimes it’s more like a coin toss and once we choose we are stuck on that one path and we can never go back and choose differently. We’ve been shunted down one leg of the trousers of time and some other version of us is in the other.

Even if we found a similar looking fork in the road it wouldn’t take us to the same path because we can no longer get there from here.

But what if you could? What if you could see the places the other path would have taken you? What if you could meet the person you would have become if you’d taken that path? Would you admire them, envy them or would you be appalled by the things they’ve done? And what would they think of you?

Singularity is told in three narrative strands. One is the tale of an investigation into an apparently impossible murder, the second is the story of a witch planning the most dangerous magical ritual there is, the third is the story of the Brain: the world’s first artificially intelligent, quantum processing supercomputer.

The three strands are on a collision course involving demons, the Many Worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, the secret city beneath London, mechanical revenants and, potentially, the end of all things.

How about a few short excerpts from it?

“The house was no longer ordinary. It was made extraordinary by the crime scene tape and the uniformed officers milling about outside. Inside it was full of Scene Of Crime Officers in blue paper suits, the home office Pathologist and staff in white paper suits and CID in crumpled off the peg suits.”

“Lizzie walked the short distance from her ugly tower block to Latham road. The once busy shopping street was clinging on to life like a drowning man clinging on to a partially-inflated beach ball. Half the shops were closed or closing down. Only the stubborn, the optimistic, the charities, the bookies and the pound shops remained. Even the off-licence had closed down when the new Tesco Metro opened up round the corner.

At the far end of the road, where it was closer to the Victorian brick tenements than the estate, was the last remaining proper greasy spoon café in this part of London.

The Ha’penny Bit hadn’t changed in at least 20 years. The lettering of the sign was so retro it had gone in and out of fashion twice. The tables were Formica and the chairs were covered in orange vinyl that made your bum sweat. The coffee machine made coffee. You could have it with hot milk, cold milk or black. If you asked for a cappuccino the staff would give you a look that suggested they’d knife you if they could be bothered.

The place had probably only survived because of the huge, hand lettered sign on the door that read Come in and try our Atkins all day breakfast.”

“George drew himself up to his full height, about 5’10, and said, ‘No you don’t. Cuz I’m not a cleaner. I’m a Janitor. I’m here to make sure that the heating and the air conditioning work and the bulbs get changed and someone with two degrees don’t spend their time fixing the recliner on an office chair when they could be creating world peace or inventing the perfect biscuit or doing whatever the hell it is you people are doing down here. I just also clean.’ He passed her the clipboard.”

Where things are going with the project

Picking out the excerpts for this post forced me to really look at Singularity with fresh eyes. I can see that while it’s worth going through it again and tightening up the point of view in a few scenes there doesn’t seem to be anything major wrong with it. I think the problem was with the query letter and the synopsis. That and giving up too soon.

However, while it was as good as I could make it at the time I’m a better writer now so I’m going to tighten it up and see if I can’t take the word count down a bit. I reckon I could have it ready to query with by the time I run out of agents to query with Project Kindness.

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