“Having struggled for a year to get new words onto the page, I’m hoping that by this time next year – the creative gods willing – a full first draft of the story will be sitting in one of three bulging Scrivener folders.”
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!
Those words were written for the June 2022 ABBA post about my seventeenth century witch trial work-in-progress, plus two ancillary projects. And guess what? Bulging Scrivener folders my backside!
All my creating writing text in Scrivener is now back in MS Word for reasons explained below, none of which have anything to do with software.
First, though, I’d like to ask a question: can art be created in stolen moments?
Here’s a quick explainer about my choice of the word art.
Since starting to write fiction seriously back in 2007, I’ve mostly approached it as a craft, one that can be analysed, understood, and improved through practice. Once, I also believed that if I worked hard enough at getting better at it, fiction writing could become a business. Naïve or what?
Now, having been published, I’ve come to terms with the financial consequences of devoting years of one’s life to writing a novel without any serious prospect of gain. (Whoever calls this ‘business’ a hobby misuses both words, imho.)
To justify working for free to myself, I have recently adopted magical thinking, turning myself into my own Patron of the Arts, and calling the WIP an expression of artistic desire rather than a craft product. I can’t sing, paint, sculpt, or play a musical instrument, therefore it’s words or nothing. And nothing sucks. Art for art sake it is, then. Whoopee.
[To people unable to subsidize their writing in this way, I am truly sad for you. The creative industries are cruel to working content providers these days, as the discussion generated by Moira Butterfield's excellent Picture Book Den blog on Monday, June 12, once again proved.]
For me, it’s been a relief to turn aside from thoughts about money, and the bitterness that generates, even if (as I suspect) reframing the WIP as art is merely a trick of expectation management: if the story as an expression of agency, not ambition, it won’t matter if no one buys it, right?
Anyhow, art or not…
Having outlined the plot in detail last year, this year I’m finding epiphanies about the psychological and emotional drivers behind the actions of my two protagonists, Tom and Beth, are flowing more naturally during the writing process than they had before. Previously, I had been imposing possible patterns of behaviour on them; now, they seem to have energies of their own.
Recent enforced breaks from the story seem to be feeding these emergent energies, presumably by giving my subconscious time to work through their potential without the pressure to capture them in some nascent form.
For example, midway through writing the witch trials which occupy most of Act 1, up popped a far better explanation for the necessary action which ends the fact-based opening chapters and breaks the story into its purely fictional Act 2.
For plot purposes, in Act 2, Tom must go off on his own to investigate the evidence which led to the executions of eleven convicted witches. In the latest iteration of his motivation for this action, he doesn’t understand his own behaviour. It is his subconscious which manipulates his desire to defend his ‘tribe’ from accusations of corruption and rationalises his atypical action – going off alone.
In fact (well, fiction), he is satisfying a deeper, selfish, repressed desire to know the Witch as Other. It is the psychological and practical repercussions of satisfying this desire which gets him into hot water and propels him towards the denouement in Act 3.
Why this plot twist hadn’t occurred to me before, I don’t know; it seems obvious now.
Beth’s unconscious is also undergoing a transformation at the moment, inspired by recent personal experience. I wrote out the plot consequences of this change fully for the first time for this blog but then cut it out for reasons a psychotherapist could presumably explain. It will just have to stay hidden away in Beth’s Scrivener character file until it’s fully fictionalised.
Which gets us back to the subject of writing software.
As I blogged here last June, I took the plunge into Scrivener last summer as a way of rationalizing and re-ordering two years’ worth of PhD historical research, academic texts, creative character profiles, plot synopses, and archived and current scenes for the WIP.
Having studied Scrivener’s workings before purchase, I spent several months learning how to use it for real, transferring files into folders, building them up as I went along, and writing new material.
Then, Blam! A non-fiction contract offered to pay more than I expect to earn from fiction: not something to turn down in a cost-of-living crisis. Then, Blam! Part 2. A miserable Christmas and New Year organising parental care homes, getting transitional care into the backwoods of Devon midwinter, and two tax returns on top of the contract.
All of which stress meant I forgot how to use Scrivener.
When I needed to escape into the seventeenth century again for the sake of my own wellbeing, the only way I could do so was to paste the story back into MS Word, where it will sit until the magical day when there’s time to go through all those Scrivener video tutorials again.
Hence the question, can art be created in stolen moments? Doesn’t it deserve and demand concentration? Because if it does, Tom, Beth, and I are in trouble.
If on the other hand it isn't art at all, just a yarn peppered with lots of emotional and mental baggage which may or may not be anacronistic, we'll probably be okay. If I ever untangle this stuff, I’ll blog about it again. Maybe in June 2024. I might have finished Act 1 by then.
Twitter: @HouseRowena
Facebook: Rowena House Author
Website: rowenahouse.wordpress.com
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