When it's my turn to read out in class my word count goes up immeasurably. The adrenalin gets words on paper, like nothing else, which I'm told is good and I certainly need some sort of spur. (I'm ignoring the downsides we all know about: the immensity of the challenge - competition, from other aspirant and existing published authors, the length of time it's going to take, the sheer debilitating, lonely hard work but...).
The Book had trotted along quite happily in the beginning, with all the cheerful naivity of a 10 week old puppy. Despite my nerves on the day, goodness knows how many terms ago, the first piece I read out went down better than I'd expected for a newby. People were kind and supportive.
I know, in fact have known for a long time, the rough outline, nothing new, though I've been struggling with how to throw in a few unexpected twists because I don't want it to be too predictable, but hey, I've got shelves groaning with paperbacks by authors whose first novels went straight to a car boot sale.
Anyway, having an outline is all very fine, but after the honeymoon period it started to get serious. The story begins at a point some time after the event and that part virtually wrote itself. Then I needed to put in some back story. One thing the class has drummed into me is that flashback is BAD and it took me a while to work out the difference between that and back story. I'm still not sure I've got it right, but that's what I've been struggling with - how to explain what had happened before to make the heroine (huh! at the moment, she's so pathetic she irritates me and I've got to get her going forward so she won't do the same to anyone else) the wreck she is and bring her up to the point where I started and from where she can actually get going with her life, so the interesting stuff can begin.
Last summer, sitting under a sun umbrella in my tiny garden with the laptop and a jug of water, had been productive. I'd got more than 20,000 words. But (with the change in the weather?) I've been stuck since the autumn - well, since early autumn.
Last week I thought I'd turned a corner. The words flowed, she was dealing with new circumstances and I couldn't understand why TB had been dragging in recent months. I knew I need to bring in some of the other characters, so I did, but I worry about overwriting, so I cut corners, though I didn't realise it at the time. I list them and ..... well, that's pretty much it. The piece I read out last Friday is a descriptive list of the people who pop in an out.
While I was reading I heard my voice getting faster and faster from, maybe, halfway through, so perhaps my brain was pre-empting what came next. When I finished there was one of those silences while the class struggled to come up with something positive ... and it was obviously hard. In the end, bless them, they managed it and they were brilliant. The list of faults grew longer and longer, but after the initial excrutiating pause it was a relief. The thing is that what they said was absolutely right and as soon as they did, I could see it. Light bulb time. What I'd written was OK...ish, but needed to be interspersed in the text in a natural way. I was telling them rather than showing them - or do I mean leading them? Whatever, I could see instantly that what I'd written was a description, what I wanted them to know, rather than interesting prose and more importantly, they showed how I could put it right. Oh, and they made nice comments about the overall style of writing too, so that's the positive. Always end on a high note.
The ironic thing was that in the first half of the class we learnt about writing synopses and - though what I'd read out had been much too detailed - that was almost what I'd written.
Anyway, that's the thing about class feedback. Terrifying certainly, but it never fails to be constructive and supportive and I doubt if I'd still be writing without it.
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