NaNoNearlyThere

With just a few days to go of November I have somehow resisted the urge to muck around on the internet or procrastinate in other ways, and I'm only 3500 words from my 50,000 target for the month. It's been very tough going, and I'm shattered and looking forward to a rest when I'm done, but I'm most looking forward to reading it back, praying that there is actually a decent story hidden in the manic speed writing. Just a couple more hours of work and I'll have reached my target. I can't wait.

Going Solo

I read Roald Dahl's first autobiography, Boy, when I was myself a boy, loads of times, as I did with nearly everything that Dahl wrote. Matilda was my favourite and still is, but BFG, The Twits, The Witches, Fantastic Mr Fox and all the others were on my bookshelf and very worn out. I actually had Boy in a double edition with his continuing adventures, Going Solo, but for some reason I never read that one. I'm sure I remember starting it once, thinking it was boring, and never going back to it. What a young fool I was! Going Solo is just as exciting as anything else the great man ever wrote, and it's really interesting to see how his little details from his experiences as a young man served as obvious inspiration for his later books. The book is split roughly into two parts, the first chronicling his adventures as a Shell rep living in Africa, and the second detailing his time flying for the RAF during the Second World War. This is the best stuff, it's almost a real-life Catch-22 as Dahl somehow survives the insanity of the British war operation in the Mediterranean, including such crackpot plans as being sent to join a squadron at an airfield that doesn't exist, and taking on the might of a 100-strong Luftwaffe squadron in Greece with the help of only eight other RAF planes. Reading all this, it's miraculous that Dahl survived to write his wonderful stories, and the world is lucky that he did.

I'm getting on well with my NaNoWriMo challenge. I wrote every day for twelve days in a row which was very tiring but very worth it. I was up to within 1000 words of where I should have been, but was too busy on the weekend to do any more so I'm now back to 3000 behind. I've done over 30,000 words now though, and I've got Thursday and Friday off work so I'm hoping to catch up then. My novel is about a boy who's very shy, but follows a salesman and learns the art of manipulating people through his words and actions, moves to Los Angeles when he turns sixteen, and eventually becomes the leader of a cult. It's vaguely planned out but I'm sure there are lots of twists and turns hiding in my brain that will jump out when I least expect them. Hopefully when I read it back at the end of the month a title will leap out at me, because at the moment I've got no idea what it should be called.

A State of Narcopolis

The first thing that attracted me to Jeet Thayil's Narcopolis was its brilliant cover, and it certainly fits what was a great read. I often wonder about covers: does the author get a say in them, and when the book is rebranded who decides it's time to get rid of an old cover and move onto a new one? If I ever have novels published I would hate it if they were given bland covers, or had covers with images on them that I didn't like, or that I thought altered the way in which my work would be perceived. Narcopolis has a cover that it makes it look like a druggy book about India informed by centuries of its culture, and that's exactly what it is. It reminds me of Trainspotting, Salman Rushdie, and Naked Lunch with the meandering insanity slightly tempered, and this combination could never be a bad thing. Narcopolis, combined with the recent BBC series Welcome to India (which showed the hand-to-mouth existence of some extremely poor people, doing anything they could to eke out an illegal living), has renewed my interest in India, but though I would love to visit it I think it wouldn't be so much a holiday as a difficult insight into the gross privileges we enjoy in the West.

My November novel, still untitled, is coming along very well. I'm now up to 19,000 words, having written every day since last Monday, easily a record for me. I used to find myself riddled with excuses not to write: bemoaning the lack of comfort and writerly atmosphere in my house and reasoning that when I move next year everything will be fine and I'll be able to write without problems, but now all those cares have drifted away as I'm desperate each evening to sit down and see where my story goes. Then an hour later I've done my 2000 words, and my story has new characters and incidents that if I rewound time and sat down again to write would probably never exist. I haven't read a word of it yet, and I'm excited at the end of the month to look back on it and see what I came up with. It does have something of a plot now: it's about a boy who overcomes his supreme shyness to learn how to manipulate others to his will, and leaves for Los Angeles when he's sixteen to eventually become the leader of a cult. Beyond that, the story is still writing itself as I go along. It's all very exciting!

The Precious First Draft

Three days into my challenge to write a 50,000 word novel in the four weeks and two days of November (I started late), and even though I've only written 7,000 words so far, the amount I've learnt about writing is staggering. I've managed to add at least two thousand words a day for three days in a row, which doesn't sound that long a time to write in consecutive days, but for me it's really good. I used to be so precious over my first drafts, constantly going back and changing things, or sitting and agonising for long minutes over the perfect word to use in a sentence. I'd even read articles in which people said not to do this, just to get the first draft done and out of you and worry about polishing it later, but chose to completely ignore this advice. It's only now that I have the very real time pressure of knowing I just have to write and write whatever is in my mind, get it out onto the page thick and fast in the battle to reach 50k, that I'm finally realising that a quick first draft is not only easier, it's actually a lot more productive.

I've stopped myself from doing any more than skim-reading tiny parts of my 7,000 words so far, so a great part of it may be garbage, but at least it's there, and there's plenty of time to print it out and cross out masses of it and swap things around once I've finished. I used to worry so much about mt writing being almost-perfect first time that it would slow me down hugely, and even put me off sitting down to write because I'd know that it would take me hours to write a few hundred words, but now I know that the only person who'll read the unedited tripe is me, and everyone else will only see the gold that comes out of a mind quickly working and adapting to the pressures of getting words onto a page, and of course the hack n slash of editing that follows this. I'm really excited to keep going with my novel; the thought that in only three weeks I'll have something so big completed is amazing.

Beach House and NaNoWriMo

I went to see the band Beach House on Saturday and it was unlike any other gig I've been to. Where most bands make me want to dance, or maybe slightly sway or tap my foot or something, Beach House made me feel, in a good way, like all I wanted to do was stand completely rigid for the entire duration of their set. I felt as if I was on smack, like I would have been happy to collapse into a chair and stare at the wall for hours while listening to them play. The singer has a very strange presence, she reminds me of a monster or the girl from The Ring, the way she stands and towers over the microphone and stage is enthralling. Neither of these things sound like positives really, but the gig made me feel very content and dreamy, something that no other band I've seen has ever done.

I've decided to take part in the NaNoWriMo (National November Writing Month for longhand) challenge this year, in which the idea is to try and write like a beast for the whole of November, bashing out an entire novel by midnight on the thirtieth. You're meant to get to 50,000 words, but since I forgot about it for the first couple of days and was then in Bristol for the weekend, I only started yesterday. That leaves me with 2000 words a day for the duration. The idea is to just write and write and write, not to think too deeply about what's coming out onto the page, not to go back and change things, just to get your ideas all out of you. It's meant to teach you how to not worry about the first draft so much, just to speed through it so the words are there, and then later on you have as much time as you like to change them. And also, it shows you that you are capable of writing a novel, no matter how shoddy the first draft may be. This is perfect for someone like me who has started writing a novel, but then agonised and procrastinated so much that they worry they'll never finish.

Hopefully in thirty days I'll have a complete novel written, and I'll learn loads along the way I'm sure. I'll keep you updated.