Getting the First Draft Down - By Tamsin Cooke

 I don't know if any of you have ever done NaNoWriMo?

It's when you aim to write 50 000 words in one month, about 1600 words a day. It takes place in November and is a great way of keeping you inspired and on target. There's lots of support and it's free to join. In case you are interested, here's a link to their website. 

I did it a couple of years ago, and by the end of the month, I had a first draft of a story. Admittedly it needed an awful lot of work - but first drafts always do! Unfortunately the book didn't sell, but NaNo taught me that I am capable of knuckling down. 

And so I am planning to do it again this year. I have an idea and I'm ready to write. In fact I've been ready to write for a while but I have been procrastinating. My house is clean, the dog has never been walked so much, and I might be going for the Olympic record in bingewatching Netflix. Never have such few words been written in such a long time. 

I have written a beginning but I seem to be preoccupied in making sure it has a killer first few chapters. But I can work that out later. Instead of going over and over the same few pages, I need to get the first draft down to make sure the story actually works. Which is why I am doing NaNo. And once the words are down, then I can play with them.

It's great to know that most authors (possibly even all of them) hate their first drafts too.

"The first draft of anything is shit," by Ernest Hemingway

'For me, it's always been a process of trying to convince myself that what I'm doing in a first draft isn't important. One way you get through the wall is by convincing yourself that it does not matter. No one is ever going to see your first draft. Nobody cares about your first draft. And that's the thing that you may be agonzing over, but honestly, whatever you're doing can be fixed ... For now, just get the words out. Get the story down however you can get it down, then fix it," by Neil Gaiman

"I just give myself permission to suck. I delete about 90 percent of my first drafts ... so it doesn't really matter much on a particualr day I write beautiful and brilliant prose that will stick in the minds of my readers froever becasue there's a 90 percent chance I'm just gonna delete whatever I write anyway. I find this hugely liberating," by John Green

"The first draft is a skeleton... just bare bones. The rest of the story comes later with revising," by Judy Blume

So I am going to give myself permission to write an awful first draft. I will embrace the mess and plan on fixing it later!

Tamsin Cooke

Author of The Scarlet Files Series and Stunt Double Series

Website: tamsincooke.co.uk
Twitter: @TamsinCooke1 

Writing a First Draft - when the magic or the rubbish happens, By Tamsin Cooke

I am writing a brand new story at the moment and am loving seeing where the characters are taking me. I haven’t planned too much this time (please see my last post to understand why). During this first draft, I have journeyed through many different emotions. It all depends on how easy the words are flowing. 

 

1)    The Dream Scenario – unfortunately this happens very rarely. 

You sit at your computer and the words pour through your fingers onto the screen. Time passes in a blur, and you’re like a writer possessed, possibly in a dream like trance. Waking up from it 30 minutes, an hour or two hours later, you read what you’ve written and can’t quite believe it. These scenes must be in line for a Carnegie Medal or a Booker Prize. You have a created a masterpiece.

 

2)    The Realistic Dream Scenario – happens more frequently

You sit at your computer and the words pour through your fingers onto the screen. Time passes in a blur, and you’re like a writer possessed, possibly in a dream like trance. Waking up from it 30 minutes, an hour or two hours later, you read what you’ve written. You are absolutely gutted. You thought it was going to be good, but this is rubbish. You might as well press delete. But something stops you. You suddenly see the gem in there, hiding beneath the rubbish words. You can edit this section - edit it a lot - but it will work eventually. 

 

)         3) The Midnight Idea - happens occasionally

In   In the middle of the night, you wake up with the solution to your plot hole or a fantastic twist that will raise the stakes in your story.  You should write it down, but you’re so warm and snuggly. Plus the idea is that good, there’s no chance you will forget it. The following morning, you’re brushing your teeth, and the ideas come flooding back. You dump your toothbrush and rush to your computer. The words flow … (See scenarios 1 and 2 to learn how the scenes work out.)

 4)    The Midnight Idea Gone Forever – happens a little more than occasionally

In   In the middle of the night, you wake up with the solution to your plot hole or a fantastic twist that will raise the stake in your story.  You should write it down, but you’re so warm and snuggly. You wake up, knowing you solved the biggest crisis in your story, but you can’t remember it. It’s at the tip of your mind … if you just think a little more. Maybe if you go on Twitter or Facebook or play Solitaire. Maybe if you take a nap, that should reawaken the idea. Nope - your award winning idea is gone forever!

5)     5) The force yourself to write scenario - happens a lot.

Y   You sit at your computer, staring at the blank screen or maybe you reread the section you wrote last. What comes next in your story? An idea slowly begins to form, and you put your fingers on the keys, but you don’t press down.  ‘Come on,’ you tell yourself. ‘It doesn’t matter if they’re bad. You can edit them later.’ Ok, maybe it’s not quite happening right now. You’ll take a quick glance at Twitter. And it would be rude not to look at Facebook as well. Plus you really should know what’s happening in the news. An hour later, you’re ready to start again... except the dog needs walking and the dishwasher needs emptying. 

But now you’re ready … after making another cup of tea of course. You force your fingers to write some words. It’s painful and excruciating, but at least sentences are forming on the screen. In fact paragraphs are beginning to flow. You decide not to reread them now, just in case they are in fact rubbish. Instead you keep writing and feel rather pleased with yourself. Perseverance worked. And who knows, tomorrow you might discover you’ve written a masterpiece?

 6) Failing to force yourself to write - happens more often than I like

You sit at your computer, staring at the blank screen or maybe you reread the section you wrote last. What comes next in your story? An idea slowly begins to form, and you put your fingers on the keys, but you don’t press down.  ‘Come on,’ you tell yourself. ‘It doesn’t matter if they’re bad. You can edit them later.’ Ok, maybe it’s not quite happening right now. You take a quick glance at Twitter. And it would be rude not to look at Facebook as well. Plus you really should know what’s happening in the news. An hour later, you’re ready to start again... except you need a fresh cup of tea. And the dog needs walking, the dishwasher needs emptying.

After all of this, you try again. You manage to eek out a few words, but when you reread them, you stop. You’re heart sinks. 

So you decide not to write today and desperately hope that tomorrow the words will flow …

Tamsin Cooke

Author of The Scarlet Files Series and Stunt Double Series

Website: tamsincooke.co.uk
Twitter: @TamsinCooke1 

 

Guilt and Inspiration - John Dougherty

Guilt, it's inbuilt, and I'm in it right up to the hilt
If I'm working day and night, then I pay the bills all right
But I don't have time to write the things I want to write
Which is never what I'm working on right now

-from The Writer's Anthem by Jo Cotterill

I spend a lot of time feeling guilty. 

There are all kinds of reasons for this, not least that when I was a kid my family was dysfunctional and my school wasn't much better; and it's always easier to tell a four-year old that he's wrong or stupid or naughty than to admit your own mistakes and try to correct them. And one of the things I feel guilty about is that, whatever I'm doing, I should be doing something else. If I'm answering emails or doing other admin, I should be spending time with the kids. If I'm spending time with the kids, I should be doing housework. If I'm doing housework, I should be writing. If I'm writing, I should be answering emails...

You get the picture. And as my lovely friend Jo's wonderful Writer's Anthem - one of the songs, incidentally, that we perform together, along with Helen and Paul Stickland, in our author band First Draft - makes clear, guilt is very bad for the writer. Not least, it's very unhelpful when you're seeking inspiration. The more I feel I ought to be starting on a new idea, the less likely I am to find one  - however much I wrack my brains.

And then something happens that makes you want to write, or inspires you in a quite unexpected way. Something like that happened this week. I've been wrestling with a few ideas for a new story, unable to settle on one, and feeling like a bit of a fraud - after all, what is a writer who isn't writing?

And then, a couple of evenings ago, I was helping my son with his GCSE revision and we read together a poem called 3AM Feed, by Steven Blyth. It's a lovely piece about a father feeding his baby in the night. We read it a couple of times, and discussed it, and, well, I found myself getting quite emotional. This almost-man, this 15-year old pointing out the cyclical structure of the poem and analysing the poet's use of imagery, had been my baby once. I'd warmed his milk, held him in the crook of my arm, listened to him sucking, just as the poem describes. And those times are gone forever; I'll never have them back.

I think I was still feeling emotional the next morning when, before settling down to work, I started browsing the web. Of course, I felt guilty about it - I should have been writing - but, still, I browsed. And that morning, link after link pointed me towards articles about the Hillsborough case.

One particular article, by David Conn in The Guardian, grabbed me and wouldn't let me go.  It takes apart the lies that were told, tells how the innocent were blamed by the guilty for the deaths and how the powerful protected one another. And suddenly, for the first time in several days - if not weeks - I found myself with something to say. I wanted to write. It wasn't what I "should" have been working on, but I didn't care. 

By the time I sat down at my desk, a poem had begun to form in my head, and with very little teasing out it took shape on the page. And then I wanted to share it with other people; so I created a new page on my website for grown-up writing, videoed me reading it, and posted it there.

It wasn't what I "should" have been writing, but it was what I needed to write. And sometimes, that's more important.

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 The latest in John's Stinkbomb & Ketchup-Face series, illustrated by David Tazzyman and published by OUP, is Stinkbomb & Ketchup-Face and the Great Big Story Nickers, published May 5th.

His other new books in 2016 will include the sixth Stinkbomb & Ketchup-Face title, his first poetry collection - Dinosaurs & Dinner-Ladies, illustrated by Tom Morgan-Jones and published by Otter-Barry Books  - and several readers for schools.

First Draft will next be performing at the Wychwood Festival in early June.