Correction

Actually, that was a lie. That isn't what happens, the crucial (and possibly slightly smug) difference being that I do often have very clear memories of my dreams, sometimes for years afterwards. I'm not saying they don't fade. And I'm not saying I remember everything. I'm not even saying that I remember any more than a tiny fraction of the total amount of nocturnal visualised brain activity that must occur during the many, many hours of my life that I spend asleep.

But, most mornings I will wake up with the after-images of a dream safely washed up on the beach of my consciousness. And, insofar as any of this has any meaning or importance, I find this a satisfying and stimulating state of affairs.

What I don't do is spend a lot of time agonising over what my dreams mean.  I'm not looking for clues to explain the inner workings of my mind or suggestions from my unconsciousness as to how I should manage my life. Having said that I do get recurring dreams, or rather recurring situations which get re-staged every now and then. That's quite interesting, but they don't tell me anything I didn't know already.

No, what I enjoy is the act of creation, the idea that my brain can spontaneously spin a scenario out of nothing for me to experience. I'm fairly certain that this was what I am trying to ape when I am writing, but I get discouraged by the wearying reality of having to think about it and having to write it down. All I really want is to have the story play out effortlessly in the comfort of the visual centres of my own brain, thank you very much!

So when that does happen and I wake up and am able to consciously remember the narrative, I find that quite amazing. And the more complex and long-winded the salvaged dream is, the more exhilarating it is to go back through it once I'm awake.

I feel I must warn you that the gnawing dread that's been building inside you, the growing fear that I might actually tell you one of my dreams, is now about to be realised. You may look away now. But I promise it's a good one: brief, vivid and not particularly weird as far as I can see, but you may be the judge.

It happened this morning and prompted this whole post, of course.

Today I spent an indeterminate time before I woke up staring out of the top floor south-facing window of the house I don't own overlooking the San Francisco Bay. I was looking across to the city. I knew all about my house already, obviously, I didn't need to examine that. But for your benefit I'll mention the pale brown hardwood floors and the luminous bare white walls, all washed clean by the sunshine that splashes in through the green shutters. Not much in the way of furniture, but then we've only really just moved here, haven't we? And that's why I'm checking out the view.

Despite it being a beautiful sunny day with clear unbroken blue skies, a thick mist has moved in off of the ocean, obscuring all but the tops of the tallest buildings of the SF skyline. When I peer carefully, I can see the cables and hawsers of the Golden Gate Bridge reaching out of the fog, although the bridge itself is in completely the wrong place. Well, it would be rather in the way of my view if it had been left in its original position.

I can see the walled garden beneath me with its dark green lawn and beyond that there's the road that dips down the slope towards the Bay itself. I should be able to see the large mossy rocks that rise out of the dark blue water. But I can't see them because the water is suddenly in tumult, writhing like a monster. Then I realise that it is crashing towards me, uphill, swamping the road and drowning grass and trees with frothing white foam. I'm not perturbed. I can see this is a small, albeit dramatic looking inundation and judge it not likely to endanger the house or garden which do, after all, have a wall. I'm just about to shout for L to come and have a look when, JESUS, EVERYTHING IS SHAKING!

Books are falling off shelves, toys are rolling across the floor (I am a conscientious unpacker after all), but that's nothing because the floor is moving, the window, the house, the whole headland is rocking and buckling. I swear I can feel the juddering climbing up inside my legs, sending my knees in useless directions, making me reel, even as I turn and try a staggering run towards the stairs. The children are downstairs, I've got to get to them whatever, but I'm thinking that I don't yet know what the rules are for an earthquake and that scares me. Am I supposed to find a lintel to shelter under? A doorway? Does my new super-duper house have a special room for such an emergency? I do hope so.

Plaster dust is falling from the ceiling. I'm just getting to the stop of the stairs. It's a beautiful staircase (more bare hardwood) but it's so steep, with several sharp, square turns. I can barely stand, but I'm just going to have to pour myself down it.

And then the shaking stops. Completely, like someone's thrown a switch. The quake lasted a second, maybe two. Everyone's all right. I return to the window. Nothing has collapsed or fallen, but there is water nearly everywhere, running along the road, sloshing and churning around drains or marooned in pools amongst the trees. Everything is still, even my hands on upon the white window sill.

And of course, suddenly, that's that. I'm awake and elsewhere.

Nearly almost there!

Well I have been slightly quiet about Nanowrimo but tonight I passed a MASSIVE milestone: I wrote more words today than I have left to write before I reach the 50,000.

This does not mean I'm going to get there tomorrow necessarily, but it does leave me a mere (ha!) 2328 words shy of the grand total with seven days to go.

This is an achievement I am happy with. The writing, well not so much. Actually that's inaccurate. I'm very pleased with the writing - it's just the words I have a problem with. The process of thinking, persevering, setting aside time, repeatedly hitting the keys, sitting down when I didn't want to, when I didn't care, when I had no idea what to say, making myself do it and make words appear, make people say things, do things, just to fill a relentlessly endless page - that has been totally awesome and has transformed writing for me from something abstract into a real physical activity. I am delighted with the writing.

But yeah, a LOT of the words, sentences, whole chapters are awful. Utterly, indescribably bad. I know you'll think I am not a fair judge of my own work, but I can be really very objective when I want to and a good 20,000 words of what I have written is unremittingly foul. That's okay. It meant that when I wrote something good (or well) then I really noticed and that was also delightful.

I started off trying to novelise a dream I had had. You might not be surprised to learn that I now think that was a dumb idea. It went well to begin with but it was unsustainable without some serious planning. At about fifteen thousand words I began to worry that I was running out of story. But I persevered. I extrapolated. I lensed in, exploring relationships between characters. I added twists. Moved locations. At all costs, I swore, I would not give up! I banged my head on kitchen tables. I drank coffee. I drank bourbon. I drank tea. I drank beer. I wrote in the garden. I wrote at my desk. I wrote in Starbucks. I wrote on the plane, hunched over a laptop that was so squashed it was nearly folded shut.

It was horrible. Painful. Dispiriting. I still kept going. It got a bit better. I had already written up the dream, in incredible detail, much of it twice and then much more. But I was breathing stale air into a dead story.

At 28179 words and 17 days I stopped writing that story. I switched. I dusted off a plan for a novel I had made several years ago, and written only a few hundred words of. I scratched those and I started again. I wrote 5000 words the first day and I've almost hit 20,000 a week later. Having a plan makes an enormous difference. But so does writing something that is supposed to be a story, rather than a dream.

I'm not abandoning the dream story. It's no more than a distended metaphor, but I think there's a very long short story/ very short novella there. It's not uninteresting, just unformed. I'll go back later and polish and cut and so forth and at some point during that process I'll nail the focal length of the thing and it will be fine. And in the meantime I will continue with my new work in progress until I hit 50,000 total for the month and then I'll submit.

No, it's not an ideal first Nanowrimo, but in a way, it has been perfect. They talk of there being two kinds of writers for this thing: planners and pantsers, the latter being those who just wing it by the seat of their pants. Well, at my first attempt I've tried both approaches and learned an awful lot more as a result.

Bang. Crash.

This is the somewhat predictable "I've hit a wall and can't write any more" post. Suffice it to say that I have no idea how to keep going from here.

I managed to write 20,000 words in 8 days which is wonderful. I am delighted with the fact that I can do that. I have managed about 1500 words in the last three days however and this is not good.

I have written the story in to a ditch. The characters, who've been stuck in more or less the same place for the entirety of proceedings, are bemused and exhausted to the point that they can't express themselves any more.

I can relate to that.

Another problem is that I have nearly exhausted my plot ideas. I did expect this to happen, but I thought I might get another 10,000 words done first at least. Perhaps it is in anticipation of this that I have slowed up.

I want to reverse out of the hole, work backwards until I find the problem and fix it. I think that won't work. This is sausage-factory fiction. I guess I just have to plough on and start really making stuff up. The important thing is the word count and the deadline. I have to keep going, no matter how turgid my prose becomes, and just, argh, you know.

Day 1: 1667 words gets me a Jaffa Cake.

I'm not going to post EVERY DAY about how well or badly I am doing at this NaNoWriMo thing, but I'm going to do a Day 1 blog because my enthusiam levels are still relatively high!

So far, I have written 1742 words - just over the given daily target of 1667 - so I'm going to stop for a bit and interact with the children, cook dinner and so forth. This is a good progress I think and I'm surprised that it has come as easily as it has, especially considering the hangover I started with this morning. I certainly haven't been sat here crying against a blank Word doc, which is what I was afraid of.

I've been writing in bursts, trying to get between 250 and 500 words done at a time. This is great for fitting in the writing between chores and dovetails very nicely with an online app called Write or Die which lets you input a time limit and a target number of words before gently nagging at you when you stop. Surprisingly effective. Obviously, not having a day job puts me in a rather luxurious position for this sort of thing. If I were to actually write all day, like it was a job or something that I was good at, then 1667 would be a feeble effort. But it isn't just about smacking your fingers against the keyboard. The words still have to come from somewhere. Again I've been pleasently surprised.

The two short scenes I've written today were both entirely new to me and they have allowed the rather cardboard characters from my vague plot outline to begin to push back a bit against my expectations. This has got to be how it works - whilst I do have a plan, I can't have everything exhaustively mapped out. If I knew absolutely what is going to happen then I wouldn't need to write it.

Hopefully I haven't stopped for the day either. Any word surplus I can build up this week has got to be a good thing, especially with some of the upcoming November fun I have to look forward too.

Above all it is a relief to be writing and it feels wonderful to have the time officially ring-fenced for writing in. And Jaffa Cakes are great motivators.

Small Talk

Believe it or not I quite like small talk. At the school with the Moms, or with the opera people at shows and parties, I quite enjoy the inconsequential chatter with which we try and fill the micro-longeurs between this and that. I'm not saying I'm any good at it. And it's not entirely stress-free either. Especially with people I don't really know, it can feel like a determined act of transmutation, grasping the wordless nothing that we have to say to each other and spinning it into a conversation about nothing instead. But then I like it because of the inconsequentiality. It is possible to talk freely because I am saying precisely nothing.

So, speaking the other day to someone I've met only a few times, I was not in the least uninterested, despite being heavily disinterested. At least I was until they started talking about me.

"Oh yes," they said. "Someone was saying about the November book writing thing. What a wonderful idea! I can't wait to read yours!"

With these words, my coffee turned to cold, slimy dread in my throat. Read my story? I don't think so! If the prospect of writing 50,000 wasn't daunting, then the idea that they might have to be 50,000 readable or interesting words certainly is. In fact given the parameters of the competition (an average of 1667 words a day for 30 days) I'd be amazed if I produced anything which made any sense whatsoever. What it will be, hopefully, is extant, possessing a beginning, middle and end. This is the lowly state of my ambitions.

Like my small talk, the story I'm going to write came out of nothing. One morning, about a week before I found out about NaNoWriMo, I woke up having literally dreamed a book. It was a very strange feeling. I often remember my dreams and they are regularly vivid, albeit normally fragmented and surreal. This dream was oddly organised and comprehensive, filling like a thick and hearty soup, and it stuck with me long enough for me to scribble down a summary. It was all there, unfolding in order, protagonists, antagonists, imagery, conflict and something that certainly would have done as an ending if I wasn't worried that it might need a bit more. As I mulled it over I even realised that there was a crude allegory to it: the damn dream even had subtext.

But that makes me nervous: if it ends up being a story 'about something' then it stops being small talk. The more consciously I think about it, the more contrived it feels and I realise that I only want to write the story because I have so little investment in it. By writing the dream story I have deniability. I am insulated from some of the responsibility for it if it turns out to be rubbish whilst still being able to take all the credit if it is actually, you know, good. Hopefully I can write freely enough that I can take a dream, the most insubstantial nothing, an unconscious notion, and spin it into the comparatively solid nothing of a story, even one that is not to be read.

As for the person I was chatting to who scared me so, I don't think they'll be disappointed if they don't get to read it. It was just small talk so, in a nice way, I take great comfort from the fact that they weren't really interested at all.

581 words. Hmmm.

NaNoWriMo - WTF?

One of the things I don't write about is writing. And one of the reasons I don't write about writing is that I don't feel I do enough writing to write about. There are other reasons too, not least of which is my assumption that writing is a solitary pursuit, something to be done in private with the curtains drawn. When people ask how the writing is going or, hell, even what it is that I am working on, I feel embarrassed and unworthy of their interest. Compared even with the average Brit I am allergic to the notion of self-publicity; here in America, I might as well be a ghost.

Anyway, it is slowly dawning on me that I may have got a lot of this wrong. If I am lacking in confidence, it may have something to do with the fact that I am only asking for my own opinion on what I have written. Hopefully. And it may also be the case that talking about writing, writing about writing, and (gasp!) socialising with writers might be beneficial. I'm queasy having typed that - stay strong Michael.

So what has brought me to this? Well, mainly it's the fact that I've been (re)writing the same story for four or five years and I'm no closer to understanding where it is I need to go with it next. And going round and round with it is making me like it less and less. That's a heavy hat to doff at passers by.

Luckily that's just the dull side of a coin that also has a very shiny side. One point of light is my incredible friend Chris has, through hard work and natural brilliance, had several books published since he began writing full-time a few years ago. His success shows what can be achieved and, whilst I am happy for him, I am also grateful to him for setting such an example.

Another sunbeam struck earlier this year when Chris, my just-as-incredible friend Jamie and I were able to work together and entered a short story into a competition, only to be selected as one the winners. Our (excellent) story will be published early in 2011 (I think - still not taking to the self-promotion) but I didn't enjoy the winning as much as the process of collaboration. Sharing the words and ideas was wonderful and perhaps it was this that made me appreciate that it doesn't all have to happen in my head.

And then here in Houston I have my friend Caroline who is also writing hard, albeit in a more organised fashion than me. Now that school has started back up, we are both shot of our children during the day and we've started meeting up to write, not together, but at the same time. It's extremely helpful, applying just the minimum pressure, enough to make us sit down and do some work, even if we're not in the mood. Even better, it's fun too.

Because Caroline is organised (she may dispute that, but in relation to me she is) she recently spotted another competition.Something with the unlikely name of NaNoWriMo. This is National Novel Writing Month which, despite my initial cynicism, seems to be an utterly altruistic exercise. The idea is that you sign up to write 50,000 words between during the month of November. From scratch - it's not supposed to be something you have been working on previously. The thinking is to promote unfettered creative writing: have an idea and just write it without worrying about revising, editing or questioning it. By setting aside one month to do it, the participants set themselves an intensive challenge. I suppose the organisers are providing a false deadline for people who endlessly mull over the thought of writing a book without ever achieving it. People like me, in other words.

There's no cost and no prize. At the end of the month you submit your novel and they validate the word count. Then they delete it. The books are never read. But what you do next with what you have written is up to you.

Last year, 165,000 people took part from all over the world and 30,000 ended up writing 50,000 words or more. This year 57,000 people have signed up with little over a fortnight to go, but the writing itself is only part of it. It also serves as a way to get writers together, both online and in the Real World, to support each other, to socialise and to swap ideas. There are, amazingly, 1772 in Houston alone and Caroline and I are two of them, which is both very exciting and ever so slightly scary.

So there you go, I'm going to write a story from scratch. I'm telling you because I'm worried that I might not manage it but also because I'm going to try to be more open about my writing.

If nothing else, it should be something to write about.