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Ghost story: choose your own ending

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He woke and saw her standing by the bed, staring down at him. What did she want from him? She had been dead ten years and still she came and watched and waited.

Her gaze was steady; he yearned to reach out and take her hand, yet knew instinctively that to do so would be his own death. Nor did he dare to close his eyes.

Why did she visit him every night? What was she seeking from him or trying to tell him? He had done his best. Nobody blamed him, not to his face at least. What else could he have done? The alternative had been unthinkable and what would it have changed?
Would she have lived if things had been different between them that day?
She gazed at him, unwavering, expressionless, the dark eyes he could never forget. The room grew cold. he wanted to reach out and hold her, it was ten years too late.
She faded away, to reappear the next night and every night until finally, in the pre-dawn light, he did what he had long known was the only way out.

Death: I am a part of all that I have met

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On Sunday a friend died, perhaps she took her own life, perhaps not. She was not a close friend, others closer to her are grieving deep as I write; for me she was a smart, funny and caring person whom I liked and respected.

Her death shocked me and it has triggered profound memories of friends and family whom I have ‘lost’ over the years. In my student days from drug overdoses deliberate and accidental and later in life from cancer, the number one killer far above mental illness as number two and any other cause negligible. Some were ready to leave, others resisted to the last.

So, it has left me numb and triggered the predictable reactions of grief, sorrow, sad memories, questions about what is truly important in life and how to lead a good life and the importance of showing others that we love them and value them.

Nothing original here.

The beautiful title line is by Tennyson in his “Ulysses”.

What has intrigued me since Sunday is our use of the word ‘loss’ to describe our emotions. We ‘lost’ a loved one or the world has ‘lost’ a beautiful person. I understand why we say it and I say it myself, for they are gone and we remain, but now I am wondering what it means to say ‘lost’?
I write here of myself, I do not speak for others.
They are ‘lost’ in their corporeal selves – ‘never again’ to touch or to speak – but they are not lost to our memories and in their acts and shaping of others and not lost to the world except in an immediate, concrete, tactile sense which is never again. They are gone from me. I don’t know how to put this in words, nor what are the right words. what I do know is that I have spent four days puzzling over the word ‘loss’ and understanding it intellectually yet with a gnawing feeling that it is not adequate.

Death is a rupture. There is ‘before’ and there is ‘after’ and nothing is the same.

This is not about finding euphemisms for death, it is about finding the right word, if indeed one word can capture the emotional intensity of death.

NaNoWriMo: shaking the cliche tree with a side order of adverbs

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First, what I have done right is blast out 40,000 words in 20 days putting me ahead of schedule and confident of hitting the goal. Interestingly, at least to me, I think 50,000 words will be all the story needs; that is, this one will be novella length and probably less than 50,000 when revised and edited.
So, what have I ‘done wrong’ to maintain this speed?
Used lazy cliched expressions; I haven’t quite sunk to ‘speaking through clenched teeth’ or ‘the clouds were like fluffy white sheep gambolling in the sky’, but I’ve given the cliche tree a good shake.
Sprayed adverbs like a child with a can of paint on a white wall – the school of ‘she crept slowly and quietly along the dark and gloomy lane, the trees hanging limply – ‘ well, you get the idea. Sure keeps up the word count!
Instead of hesitating whether ‘resolved’ or ‘decided’ is the most appropriate word and getting sidetracked in the process, I write ‘thought’ and hurry onwards. Revision comes later.
When arriving at a complex plot point, instead of hesitating etc as above, I think of any dramatic development and hurry onwards as above etc. I killed off a main character yesterday, much to my surprise and you know what, it works. If I’d pondered and procrastinated, I suspect I would not have done so and the novel would be the poorer for it.

Finally, it brings back the good old days when I wrote my PhD at top speed to crazy deadlines after three years of surfing and partying instead of doing much actual research. A much maligned skill which appears to have lasted a lifetime!
All’s well that ends well as an actual great writer once said.

100 happy words

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I love you
I’m pregnant
Mother and baby are fine
There is no sign of the tumour, we don’t need to see you for six months
I’m coming home
We’ve found your daughter safe and well
The war is over
You’re hired
We loved your manuscript and will send a contract to you shortly
You won
Unicorns and dragons are real
We find you not guilty
Parole is granted
Sold to the man in the third row
I changed flights, I was not on that one
I can feel a pulse, she’s alive
And they all lived happily ever after

Suggestions?

NaNoWriMo: writing a sequel

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yes, l am writing the sequel to my second draft completed and much more work to do novel manuscript. Bizarre, no? Not really.
1. I need distance and time away from my manuscript of 78000 words while I decide whether to do a third draft or to send it to an assessor for independent professional assessment. Writing a novel in a month, the infamous NaNoWriMo exercise, gives me time to reflect.
2. Maybe as important I have had the sequel in mind since early this year; sitting at my computer, sometimes the words flowing and feeling right and other times squeezing out words like dead flies accumulating against a window pane on a hot summer day in Australia. Inspiration struck on how I could continue their story and make my key characters suffer and suffer. Like every writing workshop tells us, right? Make them suffer! Oh trust me, they suffer for their love.
3. So, Tom and Anika are back! Spoiler alert: now you know they survive what is thrown at them on the Camino as they struggle in the maelstrom of murders. Ah, but you do not yet know how they survive and I agree that I have been slack or, more accurately, deliberately withholding, on that score.
3. Writing a sequel is also fun! My characters are so familiar, I know them like friends; what clothes they wear what they eat, how they talk and argue, how they walk, their little quirks and likes and dislikes and how they have aged and changed six years later as ‘the author’ puts them through their paces once again.
4. Writing 50,000 words in a month is quite exhilarating simply to rattle words on the screen without lots of prior planning and without a study full of index cards on boards or Scrivener corkboards! Totally different to my normal approach.
4 days down and 8,200 words in the bag = so far, so good.

This may be a terrible mistake

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I have decided, sober and in the cold light of day, despite much trepidation and every common sense cell in my body saying ‘no’, that I shall participate in NaNoWriMo for the first time. This is a commitment to write a 50,000 word novel draft in one month starting tomorrow. I think 300,000 wannabes took part globally last year, what could possibly go wrong? So, yes, I have to write 1500 words tomorrow morning! That is, 1,500 words ….
Why undertake such a crazy mission? It has taken me two years to have a second completed draft of 80,000 words of the current manuscript and I aim for 500-1000 words most days, so the odds do not look good.
And yet. And yet, I have reached the stage of the current manuscript where I need to put it aside for a time and let it lie fallow (one of the few things I remember from my school days, that plus ‘why sea breezes?’) as I have applied for an ASA mentorship, entered another competition and need to ‘let it go’.
And also – drum roll – I have the plot and characters and setting for ‘my next novel’, published nothing yet, but it sounds good, right? and so I do have a flying start and am, believe it or not, eager to have a go at it and see where it might lead me. By nature I am a ‘plotter’ stemming from churning out academic books and articles in my past life as a university professor, and being a ‘pantser’ will be good for me; a bit like cold showers, AFD’s, clean living and long runs in the morning are ‘good for me’.
Anyway, I am committing myself publically to keep the pressure on myself; please feel free to check on me and keep me honest. Oh and wish me luck.

You believe your lover is a murderer: what do you do?

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No, I am not talking on this post directly about my novel, though precisely this does happen to Tom on the Camino, nor about Gone Girl which is a neat re-working of the theme. In the so-called real world, the non-literary world let us call it, what would you do if you become suspicious and then convinced that your lover is a killer?
Infidelity leaves love a twitching corpse, but there is expectation of a full recovery [in time, as they say]. With murder, dead is dead.
Do you confront your lover? Well, you had better be right in your suspicions because if you are wrong you can kiss that relationship good bye.
Do you empathise and understand? Maybe the victim ‘deserved it’ or you convince yourself it is so; maybe it happened a long time ago, maybe you can find extenuating circumstances.
Do you simply love them and accept it – ‘love conquers all’
What is your moral responsibility?
Do you turn a blind eye because it is all too hard and horrible?
Do you watch and hope to learn more,sleeping with one eye open?
Do you ‘do your duty’ and turn them over to the law though it tears your heart apart?
And what if you are wrong?
What then?

10 obvious things I had to learn for myself writing my novel

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I have written scholarly books in a previous life, so I have omitted the stuff I knew; for example, writing is hard work [oh yes!]; there is no other way to start than to write one word and then another and then a sentence and a paragraph etc; if it is boring and unclear to you, well, it will be to everyone else and it is amazing what the human mind can conjure up to avoid sitting in front of the blank page and creating a masterpiece.
No doubt these are the staple of writing workshops and you already know them, dear reader. I did it the hard way.
1. Have in mind for whom you are writing – note that I am old-fashioned and cannot end a sentence with a preposition. Write for an audience, not simply for yourself.
2. ‘Nice’ and ‘good’ characters are boring; make them complicated and imperfect.
3. What makes me most uncomfortable and even distressed as a subject is what turns out to be my most authentic and engaging writing.
4. Insert ‘shame’ in 3 and it is doubly so.
5. Eliminate the adverb.
6. Avoid generic descriptions and declarations, always make them personal and specific to the characters’ points of view.
7. Show, not tell. Yes, yes, a total cliche but especially important to me as I spent years as a university professor teaching and writing to explain and analyse. Great for teaching, death for a novel.
8. Following from 7, ‘less is more’.
9. If it feels flat or inauthentic to me, it will to a reader. Dump it and try again; perseverance no matter what is not always the answer.
10. Swallow hard – gulp – and be prepared to discard entire drafts.

The writing process: conquering the wastelands of Act 2

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I had 50,000 words of draft 4 of my novel-in-progress and all had been running smoothly; heavens, I was even writing in Paris! Okay, not in an attic, still you get the picture and then boom. The plot became bogged, main character motivations became muddied, key turning points were arriving too early or too late in the narrative and the whole boat was listing badly, if not actually taking in water and sinking.
What had gone wrong?
I had been rattling along and feeling pretty good about my writing and thinking hmm, I should have draft 4 finished and ready to send to the assessor by the end of this year. By late yesterday I knew that it was not working: the narrative arc stalled exactly as I had read about and been warned about in writing workshops.
We have all read novels which start with a bang – original, tightly paced, sympathetic characters, interesting location and all the rest – and then it loses momentum, becomes flaccid, drifts, labours to make points and seems stale. Then we hit Act 3 and we pick up steam and sail into port (to muddle a few metaphors).
What to do? Back to the assessor’s comments to see what I had forgotten in the excitement of being in my own little world of writing every day and then, painfully, back to read the manuscript from page 1 to see where it had stalled. I was horrified to discover how much I had ‘forgotten’ of the detailed assessment discussions and reports and was able after a couple of hours of close reading of my manuscript to see where it had fallen flat. More sighs and then major surgery: deleting chunks of ‘fine writing’ which slowed the narrative and added nothing and bringing forward 1 turning point and delaying another.
Time will tell if the problem is solved. I comfort myself that at least I could tell when the words were dying as they fell from my pen.
Back to work with a lighter heart ….

Do not despair …

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No do not despair, those readers who are still sitting on the edge of their chair wondering what is happening on the Camino with Tom and Anika and the mysterious pilgrim deaths.
Your beloved characters will return after our little diversion into Coast to Coast mayhem. After all, I am in Paris and it is August, the traditional time for some rest and relaxation and even a small literary folly or two.