Progress in four lessons. What a surprise! - by Rowena House

Today marks the end of a new words push, started in wonderful Chez Castillon in late September, and aided by a month-long not-NaNoWriMo organised online by Scattered Authors Society luminary, Nicola Morgan. To her and everyone else who joined in, many thanks.

My results? Six weeks of stuttering but significant progress. Hurrah! Yes, I fell short of the 12.5k new word target (8.5k) but when comparing where the story now stands with this time last year, the plot, the characters, and the themes have all come on by leaps and bounds.

This progress only became clear, however, after I compared where-I-am-now in terms of process with the benchmark of where-I-was-then, most especially which lessons learnt from last year’s not-NaNoWriMo, discussed here last December, had stood the test of time.

Lesson One, for me, therefore is this: understanding progress is a subset of understanding process and how it evolves. New words are great but if story is what it’s all about, quality trumps quantity. 

It's not "get it writ, then get it right" it's "get something writ to get it right".

Lesson Two: don't expect to learn something, remember it, and apply it. 

This may seem silly to people whose memory is great, but I’d forgotten where I was back in Nov/Dec 2023 to the extent that I’ve been describing current scenes as Draft Zero as a way to lessen the anxieties around a blank page, when, in reality, the story is very much WIP 2.0.

For example, looking back to last year's ABBA post, I was genuinely shocked how radical the changes have been since then. The dual narrative is gone. The young woman whose real-life execution for witchcraft inspired the story in the first place is now a minor character.

Both losses were hard won, which leads on to Lesson Three: writing something out of a story might be as necessary as writing something else in. 

Let me explain.

Sorrow and anger at the execution of a young woman four hundred years ago made me feel, like many feminist historical fiction writers do, that giving back a voice to women silenced in the past is a moral imperative, something a story ought to do. Now, though, for good or ill, this 'character' has her moment on the page and will only appear once more as a vision. How and when did this happen?

It happened after 2023’s Not-NaNoWriMo, during which I wrote her trial and that of the other accused with as much skill and dedication as I could muster, chapters which were subsequently critiqued (gently but clearly) as over-long and departing from the main story.

It was very hard to hear this at the time, but also good advice. How do I know? Because the WIP made better progress after I edited these chapters to include more story and less history.

Last December, I ruminated on these trial chapters thus: “Despite my conscious efforts to follow The Plan [to focus the story on my hero], what came out was an undirected recreation of the past, liberated from my conscious control by the diktat of a daily word count. In it I honoured the witches’ memories, creating agency for them in mini histories of each trial.”

Yet, in truth, these ‘witches’ were victims. It does them a disservice to pretend otherwise. What voice they have in my telling of their tales is fiction. An attempted erasure, even, of historical shame. No one knows how the accused defended themselves. They were written out of their own histories. “The record” is what a male pamphleteer reported of the male prosecutor’s evidence and what the male judge and jury did with it. That is the history I’m writing about.

I now think I had to over-write the witch trials, and over-imagine what the accused could have said, to overcome sorrow, anger and guilt about the past. A past which, in making the pamphleteer my protagonist, I perpetuate. Yet that is the creative choice I made. Logic and story form dictate I stick with it, even if the inner writer had to acknowledge past suffering to the best of my ability before I could move on.

Maybe those spiked chapters were like wishes and prayers written on pieces of paper which are then hung on sacred trees to let wind and time take them. Or, as we did once at a wonderful oral storytelling festival, written hopes and dreams burnt like offerings.

Writing as ritual, then. Or, perhaps, like neurotic demons, we must acknowledge an obstacle fully before we can get past it.

Back in the practical realm of word counts and progress...

I discovered (and then validated) Lessons Two and Three while drafting this post yesterday. It led to Eureka! moment when I realised that I had gone through exactly the same process with the dual narrative point-of-view characters, Beth, as I had with the witches.

I have spent years researching Beth’s life, writing synopses for her, drafting and editing her early chapters. Then, back in July, I spiked the lot following (yet again) negative feedback from my PhD supervisors.

This feedback hurt like hell at the time - worse than their trial chapters critique - but again it was entirely justified. How do I know? Again, because the story made so much progress since then. [Like I said, just because I discover something once about my process, that self-knowledge isn’t a handy tool lying around for when you need it next. It has to be learnt over and over.]

Which leads to Lesson Four: the inner critic doesn’t necessarily break through the barrier between conscious and subconscious intentions when the subconscious is defending something important, in this case having at least one strong female voice in the story. It seems I have to write it down, then release it to the elements. Maybe a story tree or a bonfire would be fun.

PS Sorry no pictures. Uploaded several to the computer but Google frozen on something about cookies and I've got to dash.

I’m still on the nastier social media, though Blue Sky and Substack nudging at my knee.

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