Day 6

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Set ye olde timer for 10 minutes and write.

Clean. Simple. Neat.

We've had a week(ish) of warm ups and targets and now you're going to find the story you've been working on, or wanted to work on, and find the scene that's been playing in your head over and over, and you're going to write it, non-stop, for 10 minutes.

No messing, no faffing. Just writing.

If you're currently not working on anything, then pick something from the previous five days - one of the changes you wrote about in Day 4, or maybe something struck a chord with you during the FEAR DAY.

There is a path through the woods that you must follow. If you do not follow the path then terrible things will happen. Or so they say. They may not be wrong but our world would be less interesting if it weren’t for those who wanted to check for themselves. Most of those who stray from the path end up as a smear against a rock, or an interesting mobile hanging from a tree but there are those who discover the terrible things but are not vanquished by them. There are those who learn to live with the terrible things, who may best them or befriend them or leave them be. There are those who avoid the terrible things altogether and leave a life unimagined by anyone else in perfect isolation. Then there are those who clear the new paths through the forest who may bring brand new terrible things into the forest itself or they may bring wonders. Often it is hard to tell which.

Our story begins, as many stories do, with a girl lost in the woods. She is not there by choice and certainly seems to lack any skills that will lead her back out again. Her shoes seem more appropriate for a ballroom than the outdoors, her bodice limits her movement and her long red hair catches on every bush as she passes.  Her eyes are red with weeping and the sleeve of her blouse is smeared with snot. She moves quietly but there are creatures here that do not use their ears to track their pray and the smell of her sweat, her snot and her fear carry far down the path and deep into the brambles. 

Day 5

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Pick a character you know and love and make them do the thing you always wished they would. Write trash*. Have a ball. Enjoy it. The world is your literary oyster.

[I didn’t quite fulfil the brief on this one - I wanted to write a good man and really struggled to think of one. I ended up landing on The King of France in King Lear, who only has about 25 lines and almost no character. Still, he makes good choices.]

It is hard to watch our neighbour lose his mind so, to watch him lean towards lies over love. How can he cast away such treasure as Cordelia for the baser metals of her sisters? What inflamed his mind to make such a brutal break from nobility, from good, for the sake of blatant lies. 

By the gods, I love her. I miss her now. Her need to fight for her father and her country, to try and prove that truth and love and constancy are worth more than the squalid baseless words of her debased sisters who, even now, are pitched in pointless competition and rending each other and the country into smaller sadder parts. Their selfish greed and false promises will tear Britain apart as they sit upon their thrones and count their gold. Faithless to their father, their husbands, their country - these monsters have destroyed all that has been built. 

I wish Cordelia could have stayed by my side but how can I not support my love in her fight to save her country? I would lose her ten times over to have her stay herself. I must fight for my country too. I fear the same false faces and worthless lies have seeped across the channel and I feel the fear rise in my people. We all have tasks to do to show that we praise moderate  truths over extravagant lies.

Day 4

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During the 10 minutes, you’re going to write down as many changes as you can think of.

Start by listing (at least) five physical things that could change for Esme. These are real world changes - she could decide to have an Americano instead of a latte, her mother might decide to visit, she could be made redundant.

Then list (at least) five metaphysical or emotional things that could change for Esme. These are subtle world changes - she could realise it's time to let go of an old insecurity, that she believes in God after all, that she hates her boyfriend.

If you still have time in your ten minute slot, see if you can come up with more changes for other people.

Willa - physical changes

  • Thicker thighs - clothes don’t fit leading to a shame spiral 

  • Sore breasts - reappraise what they actually mean, what they’re for - it’s not about getting served first at the bar, they’re for serving someone else

  • Ravenously hungry - growing a human, shedding cares about how she is perceived by the faceless public

  • Mild nausea - irritation that Dave doesn’t particularly care

  • Swelling belly - the change is astonishingly quick

Willa - emotional changes

  • daydreaming - unable to focus on a task, poleaxed by the sheer delight of growing a human. It’s a miracle. A miracle that even a sheep can do, but a miracle none the less. 

  • sheer delight - lots of stroking her tummy

  • sudden bursts of irrational fear - what if she drops the baby onto the cutlery basket in the dishwasher and it is full of knives?

  • Delighted by the sudden kindness of strangers - living in a city you get used to polite disengagement most of the time, now people make time to make life easier (contrast this with the later change of when everything is awful and everyone stops fucking helping. It is easier to get onto a bus with a bulging belly than with a buggy and she will have had less sleep - though at this point she will find it hard to believe that.)

  • Sudden concerns about how Dave is handling the whole thing. How important is travel now anyway?

Day 3

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Imagine what you would write if you were totally free to say anything you wanted without worry or fear or inhibition or tact or appropriateness. And then freewrite* until the timer goes off.

All this talk about fear has got me feeling fearful. I don’t really want to say outlandish and shocking things or cross any taboos but I must admit that I do stay my hand when i think about writing about other peoples ecperiences. I  think about how easy it is to upset people but twisting their truth just a little to punch up the story but doing it so badly it blows up, its just awful. I know i have to use my life experiences and that includes my friends and what they did too but i dislike the idea of grinding their bones to make mum bread. this is the big thing that gets me. imagine writing a sex scene and they your dad reads it. Yuck. or writing a bitter conflict between mother and daughter and using lines you know you’ve said in anger and then watching your mums face as she reads the words and feels the hurt all over again because this isn’t the argument she was in - this one is twisted and turned to be seen only from a younger angrier point of view, to read the lessons you tried to impart as twisted and and irrational diktats and you see your point went sailing over the head of the child you love and hatching them turn it into something shameful and sad. Awful, 

It would be fine because if it wasn’t we wouldn’t have the wonderful storied that ring try and resonate within our losses . it is only in this baring that we can find truth s that speak to us all. we need to tell each others stories it is vital because there is another side - there is the side where you make someone you love wine and sparkle as you gild them gloriously on the page - uncovering those precious moments the ones that made you love each other, the warm glow that suffuses the skin when you are held in the arms of the one you love. sharing those small intimate moments and making them universal can be an act of celenbratimn 

Day 2

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Set your timer for 10 minutes. Write down your general day-to-day routine, both during the working week and at the weekend. Be honest with yourself – How much can you delegate? How much can you just... not do? How much time do you actually spend on Facebook? How much time do you spend staring at Netflix?

Weekdays:

  • 5:30 - wake up and swear

  • 5:45 - get back to sleep/toss and turn in existential dread

  • 6:30 - bitterly resent my alarm going off

  • 7:30 (ish) - leave for work

  • 8:30 (ish) - work work work, motherfucking work

  • 4:30 (ish) - drive home

  • 6:00 - get home with the kids

  • 6:10 - 8:00 - an utter shitshow

  • 8:00 - kids’ official bedtime (they don’t know this - they think their bedtime is 7:30. Ha!) 

  • 8:00 - 9:00 - the bit between them going to bed and actually settling the fuck down. Also dinner. 

  • 8:30 - 9:00 on a good day this is when I will write

  • 9:00 - 9:30 on a bad day this is when I will write

  • 10:00 - watch telly/surf my phone until semi-conscious

  • 11:15 (ish) go to bed

    There is literally no part of this that can change. The variable seems to be whether there is just me or two of us dealing with the 6-9 bullshit time. They play us off against each other like tiny Kaiser Soze’s (or some less icky reference if I can think of one)

Saturday:

  • 7:45 - bitterly resent my alarm going off

  • 7:50 - 9:00 - sit in bed drinking coffee, reading the news on my phone and cuddling the kids who are occasionally quite nice. 

  • 9:00 - leg it into the shower

  • 9:20 - leg it into the car (hopefully having dressed first) 

  • 9:45 - drop the kids at drama and luxuriate in the thought of three hours without them. 

  • 10:00 - 12:50 - rest and refresh/shop/drink coffee and go on my phone/do smoochies/read/write  

  • 1:00 pick up kids & get some lunch

  • 2:00 - birthday party/improving activity/sack it all off and let them on screens until they start drooling. I faff about a bit not sure what to do with myself/gardening (weather permitting)

  • 6:00 - get dinner together/argue with big kid about how we can’t have fish and chips every single Saturday

  • 7:00 - watch some family telly (thank the lord for Michael Mcintyre - in my day I made my parents watch Russ Abbott for gods’ sake. Also what the fuck is the masked singer all about?! It’s demented) 

  • 8:30 - some sort of bedtime routine for the kids or stay up a bit later if we are watching a good film. 

  • 9:00 - watch telly/go on my phone or laptop/read a book/

  • 12:00 - roll of the sofa, wipe the dribble from my face and go to bed

Sunday

  • 9:00 - stretch, smile, stay in bed

  • 10:00 - begrudgingly get up in time for second breakfast

  • 11:00 - homework (them)/colouring in (me - it stops me wrapping my hands around their necks)

  • 12:30 - lunch

  • 1:00 - some sort of improving activity

  • 5:30 - make dinner

  • 6:30 - eat dinner

  • 7:00 (ish) Doctor Who 

  • 8:00 baths and bed

  • 9:00 - write/read

  • 9:30 - polite discussion with husband about how he should turn off his computer game so I can watch something delightfully stupid instead

  • 9:45 - gleefully grab the remote and do a small, respectful victory dance

  • 11:30 - go to bed feeling guilty i didn’t go earlier - i have work tomorrow, for gods’ sake

 

Day 1

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Task 1:

By the end of 2020, what do you want to have produced? Is it a novel, a short story collection, a screenplay, a bunch of flash or poetry? Is it just one good short story? Or do you just want to experiment with words and see what you've got in you?

How much do you want to write per week, per fortnight, per month? Is that realistic? What do you need to change in order to do it? What are you prepared to change to do it?

If you have any time left from answering those questions, quickly jot down some notes that will form the bones of your acceptance speech for when you win the Costa First Novel Award.

Here I go, writing again. (It seems appropriate to start with a quote from one of my favourite writers.) I would like to be able to get to a place where I can create a complex plot with an A and B story that interconnect and weave together. I also want to write something new. The story that has been banging around in my brain for the last decade now feels stale so i think i want to try and write the kind of thing I like to read; so hopefully something a little bit funny, a little bit fantasy-y and a little bit wise. I think i will probably start with a short story ideally without a trite ending. 

Ideally I would like to write for about half an hour a night. I haven’t really thought about it in terms of amounts, of word counts - I have more focussed on trying to write something that makes me happy as my novel has been making me sad. I know the best way to learn to write is simply to do it and I think I need to free myself up and start something fresh. I would also like to learn how to edit. 

I don’t really need to change that much to write. I can waste plenty of time watching telly being jealous of other people’s writing but that’s not very healthy so I will try to carve out half an hour (or what ever the email tells me to after the kids have gone to bed to do my writing whist S cleans the kitchen. Except on Wednesdays. Wednesdays are bastards.  

I think I might create a new section on my blog and chuck these posts up there. I’m not going to give it any preamble or publicity but  I pay for the bloody thing so I may as well use it. 

My word ten minutes is a surprisingly long time isn’t it?

I haven’t really thought about doing an acceptance speech for the booker or whatever, which is odd because I wrote my Oscar speech years ago and I’ve never really wanted to act. That’s cultural hegemony for you I suppose. Also I think the clothes are often better at the Oscars but the people are better at the Booker.