The Hare and the Tortoise do NaNo*

Once upon a time there was a Tortoise. Her name was Ms Plotter (Beatrix, if you were on first name terms with her, but that took a loooong while) and she lived in a carefully constructed box at the bottom of the garden. Ms Plotter had many fine qualities: she was steady as a rock, methodical and tenacious. Somewhat shy and retiring, but hey, who's perfect? Ms Plotter minded her own business, which happened to be the Writing of a Novel entitled Slow. Every few years she would add another chapter to her oeuvre. This chapter perfectly echoed the stepsheet made of colour-co-ordinated index cards that she had created before writing a single word. She would then spend several months refining and editing said chapter until it was perfect. All this made her very happy.

Autumn came. On the first morning of November, Ms Plotter opened one eye and pondered: should she begin another sentence or hunker down and prepare for a long winter sleep? She was just turning these possibilities over in her mind when her noisy neighbour, who happened to be a Hare called Ms Panter, squealed to a halt beside her and yelled:
'NaNoooo! sweetie! NaNoooo! NaNoooo!'
- nearly deafening Ms Plotter, who retreated into her shell with all the speed she could muster (not much) in case there'd been an accident.
Ms Panter breathed heavily, but didn't go away.
'Quick, dahling! Quick!' she gasped. 'We have just 30 days to do it.'
'Do what?' said Ms Plotter, wishing the hare would go away and do it, whatever it was.
'Finish a novel, dahling -' and with that, Ms Panter was off, laptop bouncing, on another circuit of the lawn.
'Bloody norah,' Ms Plotter muttered. 'It's That Time Of Year again.' It was bad enough in March, when the Hare and her mates went berserk and dunked dormice in teapots. But this was worse. Much worse.
'It's a race to the finish!' Ms Panter was back again. Panting.
'Finish?' Ms Plotter muttered. 'Who does she think she's kidding?'
'Only sixty-thousand words, sweetie - it'll be a piece of p**s -' and off went the Hare, whispering 'what ifs' and 'and thens' and oohing and ahing like nobody's business.

After that, things went ominously quiet for a while. Ms Plotter kept her eyes open just in case, and, over the course of the next week completed another 78 words of her oeuvre. Then removed 43 of them.

On November 7th, the Hare cast herself, gasping for breath, at Ms Plotter's feet.
'Oh-God-oh-God-oh-God dahling -' she panted, like something from When Harry Met Sally, only considerably less seductively.
'Something the matter?' Ms Plotter resented the interruption. She was just getting into her stride. 'Did you get lost?'
'Lost?!' Ms Panter said. 'How can I get lost when I don't know where I'm going? No. It's just that I can't - well, I can't get them down fast enough...'
Ms Plotter cautiously checked the Hare's nether regions. Everything seemed intact. 'Get what down fast enough?'
'The words of course!' the Hare foamed at the mouth. 'The ideas, dahling. The inspiration, the muse, the whole, whole - damned - thing. You know?' And off she raced again. The Tortoise licked her pencil and very slowly crossed a 't'.

On November 14th, on one of her perambulations of the lawn, Ms Plotter discovered Ms Panter stretched out on her back, her face to the sun.
'Given up, have you?' said Ms Plotter.
'Hardly, dahling! I've pretty much finished, in fact. Thirty days? Pah! That's for wimps.'
'What's the title?'
'Around The World in Eighty Minutes.'
'Ah.'

By November 21st, the Tortoise had completed a whole paragraph. Although it still needed a good edit.
She plodded up to the Hare, who was crouched on the grass, tongue out and forehead furrowed, still writing.
'Thought you'd finished?'
The Hare looked up. 'I have, sweetie, I have. Just the query letter to send off, and I'm done. I should have an agent by the day after tomorrow and a nice juicy deal with a top publisher by the end of the month.'
The Tortoise sighed. 'Aren't you going to revise it? At least read it through?'
'You can't improve on perfection,' smiled Ms Panter.
'Ah.'

Winter came. On the last day of November, Ms Plotter settled into her box of straw, her index cards arranged neatly in a file, the crisply printed page of her manuscript baside it, ready for Spring. Her eyes were half-closing when there was a sharp rap at her shell.

'Sweetie! Wake up!'
'Whaa-aaat?'
Ms Panter was leaping around, trembling with excitement. She thrust a brown envelope under Ms Plotter's reluctant nose. 'It's arrived. From the agent. Just as I said it would.'
The Tortoise opened one eye. 'Open it, then.'
The Hare tore the letter open and read the contents, her ears quivering.
'Dear Ms Panter...read with interest...today's competitive market...with regret...bog off.'
'I'm mortified. Mortified, dahling.' Through streaming eyes, she saw the Tortoise withdrawing her head into her shell. 'But hey...there's always next year. We could do it together. You and me, eh, sweetie? What do you say - yes or no?'

Just for a moment the Tortoise stretched her head out from the safe confines of her shell and blinked very slowly.

'NaNo,' she said, so quietly that the Hare could barely make out the word. 'Nah. No.'



*NaNoWriMo = National Novel Writing Month

Reining in Free Rein

There’s much talk about ‘Plotters’ and ‘Pantsers’ and I think I know who started this talk. I’m not naming names in case I get it wrong and I end up looking uninformed and stupid. Not a good look on the best of days. But, just like the awkward line-up in PE, I don't think I fit into either team.

Can I be somewhere-in-the-middle please? Because although there is NO WAY on earth that I am ever going to be able to formulate a plan, much less write one down and stick to it, I would likewise be very scared to Fly by the seat of my Pants (as the latter label infers). I'd be an OCD Pantser and require some kind of safety net; a parachute maybe. I’m not fond of heights, lifts or flying - having only JUST been able to stomach the occasional aeronautical dream, so long as they’re lucid and I’m in total control of course.

Which, you’d think, would make me more of a Plotter.  But no. In fact at the start of every English essay at school, I’d always leave a half-page gap at the beginning of my work where I could write my ‘Plan’ AFTER I’d written the story. Little did I know this was the start of my Synopsis training. Also I don’t like being tied down. (No sniggering at the back please). I don’t like restrictions of any sort to be honest, and I don’t like HAVING to stick to a plan – okay, I know it’d be different if I was, say an Architect or a Surgeon, but I’m not - anyway, restrictions just make me more rebellious and desirous to buck the trend. And trends are so ‘last season’ aren’t they?
I put it down to a cautious childhood where I had to conform to everything and where having an imagination was neither allowed nor tolerated. Freud could’ve based a whole new dissertation on my childhood, but I won’t go into that.

So if I’m a Somewhere In The Middle-type person, would that make me a ‘Potter’ or a ‘Plantser’? Hmmm… I’m getting definite Alan Tichmarsh-ian whiffs now. You see, I know precisely HOW I want to start and I know exactly WHERE I want it to end, but other than that, I give free rein to characters and any situation they decide to place themselves in. And if they’re silly enough to get themselves into a tight squeeze, well then they can jolly well get themselves out, can’t they? And it’s so much fun seeing how they do it.

Of course I know how far I will allow a character to go. Before the whole thing starts teetering like a pyramid of baked beans, I mean.  For instance I wouldn’t launch my lovely delicate female lead from the relative safety of a leafy London suburb to the wilds of Minnesota on a drug-hustle or anything. And equally I wouldn’t kill off my mysterious, brooding hero simply because he won’t get round to fancying aforementioned female lead and has his wandering eyes set on Denise at the Bookies instead.

So I rein in the absurd. After I’ve seen what it looks like written down of course. Have you ever done that? Written something so far-fetched simply because you CAN (a bit like God creating the Duck-Billed-Platypus -what was all THAT about? Thank goodness He also invented the 'delete' button).

Athough having said all this, if I find myself halfway round Sainsbury’s, realise I’ve forgotten my shopping list and I’ve merely been running on autopilot as far as the soft cheeses, then I have been known to flee and leave the half-filled trolley in a blind panic at not knowing which aisle I need next.

Luckily my characters have no such qualms. They’re made of sterner stuff; crammed full of promise and endless possibilities.

Failure + Singing Out Loud = Successful Journey

Wednesday last was dedicated to clearing the boxes in the small bedroom/office after our house move. Order was the order of the day – I hated the fact that things weren’t in their ‘right’ place yet.

Anyway, in amongst the boring tax and banking stuff and a huge pile of paper for shredding , I came across some cds with songs I’d co-written some years ago. So I started to tidy the mess with my lyrics playing in the background.

I knew when I wrote them that I wasn’t the best lyricist (most of the work being an excuse to write something more akin to poetry than commercial lyrics) and listening to them years later I still felt that though the end result songs were ‘good’ – they weren’t amazing. Simon Cowell was not going to call in his search for the Christmas 2011 number one... And the song I'd written with Kelly Clarkson in mind, well...maybe not.

But then a strange thing happened. I looked at the pile of demo cds, next to a shoe box that holds my two unpublished novel manuscripts and rather than think of failure, of the fact that none of that work was ‘good enough’, I found myself beaming with pride. Hey! I made that music happen! And I wrote two books – all of that in three years! I turned the music up, went downstairs and made a cup of tea, sang along at full belt to my non amazing songs (in the style of Kelly Clarkson naturally) then went back upstairs and read the first halves of both manuscripts in the shoe box.

Hours later, I beamed some more... They may not have been perfect but they weren’t half bad. In fact, yes, I’ll say it out loud –they are a little bit amazing.

Okay, book one definitely has a couple of plot holes and book two, a plot twist that simply doesn’t work in the story but both of these are fixable problems. I know how to fix them, if I choose to. And the thing is - it wasn’t the writing that made them imperfect. I guess that’s why I beamed. I just enjoyed the feeling of knowing I can write, and that all this past work is, to coin a cheesy phrase, ‘all part of the journey’.

I’ve decided not to fix the problems, at least not now, as I’m working on book three. I’ve learnt such a lot from writing all those songs and two novels and I’d prefer to concentrate on correcting areas I fell down in before. I realise that I’ve naturally become more of a plotter, less flying by the seat of my pants (Although ‘pantsing’ still remains important!)

And I’ve also realised I hate tidying paper just a little bit more than I hate things not being in the ‘right’ place. The filing is still not done, the papers still not shredded, but my cds have been framed and the old manuscripts placed in a shiny, new, hard to ignore, neon pink box. There to constantly remind me of what I’ve done and how far I’ve come.

And since last Wednesday I'm singing more. Out loud! I've missed singing! My new neighbours may not be grateful but I'm enjoying myself immensely. I've come up with a new song called 'Lucky Misfortune'. Strange title I know but Kelly had a hit with 'Beautiful Disaster' so you see where I'm coming from? And 'When We Collide' (which could mean ANYTHING) has been massive for Matt Cardle?

So if Orion don't call, come on Simon - you know you want me...

Character Versus/Is Plot?

"A perfect character is not engaging. Character transformation can be one of the most powerful effects in any story." Donald Maass



I’ve never written about perfect characters. I'm not sure anyone would want to read about them. But I have written about one who thought she was perfect, for her to discover en route she definitely wasn't. For me as a reader, the draw of the genre I write in (Commercial Women’s Fiction) is the character transformation that unfolds in the telling of an engaging story. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Yet, I’ve tried it twice and though novel two has not bitten the dust – far from it – I’m about to start writing novel three and felt it was time for a change in ‘how’ I approached it.

For a start, I already have an outline. Yep! Me, a prize ‘pantser’, has a plot! (For those of you who don't know, a pantser writes by the 'seat of their pants,' whilst a plotter ,er, plots.)


And I don’t only have a plot (fanfare and drum roll please...) I also have a check list thingy (see below) In my new found organised non pantsy mode, the list came first. It helped create character profiles, the characters whose emotional journeys helped form the plot and move the story forward.

1. Who is your reader? Where and how will they read this book?
2. What’s the title? Have one – even if it changes.
3. Themes? Are they hooky? E.G. Obsession, betrayal, life after death.
4. Who is your protagonist? What motivates her and what is she risking?
5. Is there an antagonist? How is he/she opposed to the protagonist?
6. KNOW your mc. Walk in her shoes...What does she look like? Does she have habits? What does she eat/drink? Does she have pets? Does she own something special/sentimental to her? Where does she live? What’s her job? Does she like it/hate it?
Is she strong/weak/overbearing/confident/secretive/sad? Who are her friends?
7. Place her in jeopardy! Introduce struggle, inner conflict, encourage change by overcoming obstacles. At some point make her hit rock bottom before the rise again.
8. Does she have a clear arc?
9. Have a 'shout line' e.g ‘Hell hath no fury like a mother scorned’

I’m looking forward to taking these people on their journey. I’m looking forward to that ‘splurge’ of a first draft. I’m hoping with this approach, it will provide a strong foundation (character and plot wise) which in theory should make the first draft flow easier, and may even mean that the inevitable EDIT won't have to be such a chore. Watch this space because that is a whole other blog post and if Ernest Hemingway is to be believed, ‘The first draft of anything is shit.’

But I’m brave enough to believe that this first draft, yet to be written, but planned (while still allowing room for sporadic ‘pantser activity’) may just be less **** than other ones I’ve written in the past. Character and plot. Character and plot. See? It rolls off the tongue. Now all I have to do is to get them to play nice and hold hands for about three hundred and ninety pages.