Takeaways from a 10K writing challenge – Rowena House

Last month’s personal challenge to write ten thousand words during NaNoWriMo threw up several lessons, good and bad, which I’ve been trying to capture while they’re still fresh in my mind in the hope they might help me complete a first full draft of C17th witch trial work-in-progress next year, having failed spectacularly to reach that goal this year.

That failure is another story about spanners in the works of life, now best forgotten, because the good news is I DID IT! Ten thousand story words now exist that didn’t on October 31st. Even with zero words written on three days, the total accumulated in fits and starts.

Lesson One, therefore, is that it can be done, even at home with life doing its usual tricks. Expensive writing retreats are luxuries, not essential.

In my initial notes about Lesson Two, I also claimed that November's concentrated bout of writing demonstrated it is possible to pull the story back on track ‘on the hoof’ as it were. That is, plotting while simultaneously adding new words.

I thought I’d achieved this by first reviewing the structural aim of the new scene and making any adjustments necessitated by the previous scene/s. I then wrote a short first draft of that new scene, taking the protagonist or plot from A to B; finally, I increased the word count by weaving in nuance, meaning, and detail, plus polishing dialogue, before starting over again with the next scene.

Two subsequent events proved me wrong, however. First, my beta readers (AKA two PhD supervisors) couldn’t see the story in these 10K words; there was too much trial, they said, and not enough story. Second, I agreed with them.

Pondering the reasons why this 10K didn’t work in story terms (even though I'd covered a lot of plot ground) brought me back to something a very smart lady told me at a writing retreat early this year. She said I’m exploiting the witches to write my story, just as others have done over centuries.

I accepted that criticism then. I still do now. The people hanged as witches deserve our respect for their suffering. In light of this, and in hindsight, what I suspect I have been doing in my first versions of their trials – completed during MyNoWriMo – is writing stories about dead people with imaginative respect.

I refused to make them victims. I gave them a voice, which is the purpose stated by many writers for writing about women in the past.

But giving silenced women a voice is not what I’m doing in my work-in-progress. At least, not in the A-plot. The A-plot is about the pamphleteer. A young man in my fictional history of the trials.

Powering through 10K words in four weeks thus showed up a weakness in my emotional cognition (if that's a thing) as much as holes in my plotting. Basically, I hadn’t assimilated my creative purpose sufficiently to write the story truthfully. Out of a sense of duty to the past, I felt it necessary to first show the witches* respect.

Having sat on this idea for a while, I would now argue that dramatizing the trials was a necessary stage in the creative process, but it was clearly far from sufficient.

On the other hand, writing this blog, I can now articulate a benefit which I hadn’t anticipated from this year's forensic rewriting of the semi-official record of the witch trials.

When studied closely, one can see between the lines of the original account slights of hand pulled off by the pamphleteer (or perhaps by the prosecutor), tricks of presentation to fool the jury, the reader, or both.

One could even say, belatedly, I have spotted an elephant they’d hidden in the room. An elephant that can now stir again and trample about my story. Mwahaha.

Lesson Three, therefore, is thanks for that, MyNoWriMo. Now let the real work of plotting begin.

Two years ago, I noted here advice from author Hisham Mattar about the need for creative openness, which he explained during an Arvon Foundation writing masterclass back in July 2021. He said that without such openness, we risk becoming trapped by our original intentions; to access our deeper levels of intuitive invention, we should avoid planning the first draft altogether.

That, perhaps, is what happened during MyNoWriMo.

Despite my conscious efforts to follow The Plan, what came out was an undirected recreation of the past, liberated from my conscious control by the dictat of a daily word count. In it I honoured the witches’ memories, creating agency for them in mini histories of each trial.

If this interpretation is true, the question thrown up is this: if I want to write about witches, why write about the pamphleteer? If, on the other hand, I am writing about the pamphleteer, is the witch character I thought important actually incidental?

At the moment, I believe the latter.

After all, I’ve got half-way through the A-plot and she’s barely appeared. Thus, either the B-plot is hers, not Beth’s, or ... What? She isn’t there at all? Or nothing more than an ephemeral presence on the edges of his imagination? It seems cruel to erase her again, yet the witches’ story never felt like mine to write.

To put it another way, having honoured them in words, can I now escape from a subconscious, guilt-driven original intention?

Who knows. Maybe next year will tell. Meanwhile, midwinter greetings to you all. May 2024 treat you kindly.

@HouseRowena on Twitter

Rowena House Author on Facebook

*I use the term witch and witches to describe the people accused and convicted as such. This also is fiction. They weren’t witches in the satanic, supernatural meaning of the word employed back then.





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