There is something fairly amazing about having the inspiration to write. I think perhaps I spend 98% of my life in a permanent state of writer’s block and the other 2% in a state where I think of so many things it’s hard to get it all down. I have ideas while I’m sleeping, I have ideas at work… I get most of my ideas in the shower actually. I like to think that it’s 98% writer’s block and not 98% unimaginative, but I suppose it’s a possibility.
So, I’m pretty sure it’s not in my original list but I have been thinking for some weeks now that I should make one of my challenges “write something every day for a week”. And when sudden inspiration hit last week, I made myself do this, and I couldn’t be happier. 3 characters had already fallen, not fully formed but I would say, fully loved into my mind a few weeks' prior. One character in particular makes me so happy. Firstly, I never write lead female characters for some reason, and here she is, a wonderful, excellent girlperson all ready for me to send off on adventures. Secondly, she is from the future. I was worried that I had started to write some sort of River Song fanfiction at first, but no, she is her own self, her own person, and also she has smiley faces on her shoelaces.
When I was younger I started a couple of “novels”, and they would always inevitably turn out horribly. I am quite good at coming up with snappy, opening moments, I am the queen of first chapters… and then I would just flounder. I’d know about 5 major plot points I would want to happen but I had this bizarre belief I had to start at the start and plow through to the end. I’d dawdle by trying to write character descriptions of characters I hadn’t even written yet and plot arcs that I had no control of. Disaster.
Then I turned to poetry. NEVER read the poetry of your youth, if you wrote it. You will come to hate your teenage self with a passion. My teenage self was obsessed with long, rambling lines of poetry sandwiched between bad rhyming couplets. I don’t know what she was doing, but it was rarely good. It got a little better, but I never really enjoyed writing poetry anyway, so I’m not really sure why I tried.
It wasn’t until a few years ago that I discovered the joy and wonder that is comedy. WHY had I been trying to write deep, emotional things when I could be writing puns and hilarious gag characters? (For those playing at home, please see Grumpy, the friendly dwarf). And yes, I turned to play writing. WHY would I write tens of thousands of words when I could write ten minutes of frivolity? Especially when Underground Productions so kindly accepted not one but two of my scripts into it’s short play festival?
And yet, when this idea fell into my head, I knew instantly that it was a novel, and I also knew that some bad things were going to happen, and some things might be sad or unfair. But I also knew that it would have moments of comedy, and also that the tone wasn’t going to be sad and dark and gloomy. I have placed my main character out of her time, and this leads to some pretty amusing encounters with people, objects and things that my readers, but not my character, are completely familiar with. Also, my other two characters are kind of an amusing pair of petty criminals, and I enjoy their banter greatly.
I recently posted this excerpt on my tumblr, it’s one of the first things that came to me. Yes, I had the idea in a Laundromat.
***
Terry opened his eyes. His forehead lay on the filthy tiles of the Laundromat, a piece of lint playing gently in a breeze near his left eye. His right felt puffy and sore – she’d punched him. Oh God, the knitting needle. He looked down. It was still embedded in his leg.
“So. You be taking all the shinies from the washing boxes?”
Her boots came into view, the laces had little smiling faces on them at regular intervals. They looked at him. He found it difficult to match their gaze.
“You be taking the shinies no? Those shinies not for you to be keeping.”
Her accent sounded normal, but she spoke all wrong. It irritated him.
“Why are you talking like that? Stop it.”
She kicked him. “Why you be talking like that… like you be from the moves”.
“The moves?”
“The moves! The movies.” After a pause she added, “the films,” but the word seemed to sit strangely in her voice, as though it had never been there before.
Terry stared up at her. She glared at him fiercely from within a pile of scraggly, blonde hair. Dirty blonde his mother would have called it - sort of a dull colour. But it framed her young face like a lion’s mane, and gave her a presence he found intimidating. Or perhaps it was the knitting needle she’d imbedded in his thigh, he suddenly thought – one of those.
***
In fact, quite a few things came to my mind in that Laundromat. It was the week I was knitting, which is quite an amazing way to have ideas can I just say. You turn a lot of your brain off, but you also leave a lot of it on… and some of that is the creative part. It’s kind of genius, really, which is why it’s so tragic that the first line that popped into my head was:
“There’s a girl sitting in this laundromat and she’s knitting!”
Genius, Lizzy, really inspired. I can’t imagine where that idea came from, can you? But really though, what was important was the voice that came with it, the man’s face that appeared, the backstory that started to form.
What was also important was that I knew that while I had dreamed up a fairly exciting and interesting scene, it didn’t have to be the first chapter, and I didn’t have to follow linearly, or know what was going to happen next. I started this week with nothing, and I’ve come out of it with 4000 words. I did this by sitting at a blank page and writing headers like, The Girl doesn’t like Coles and The Girl finds herself somewhere strange. Then I would look at that header, and ideas would start to flow, and I would write punchy, opening-esque scenes to go with each one. One day perhaps I’ll have 100s of scenes like this, and I’ll start putting them in order, and there’ll be joining up scenes and auxiliary characters and you know, a proper plot and it will all look lovely. Or maybe I’ll continue to write disjointedly and all over the place, and that will be a narrative feature I shall use to tell this tale. Who knows? The point is, I feel like I could go on doing this till the 2% runs out, and maybe even increase it up to 3%, or 4. It’s been a great week.
I take way too many of these photos in my pj's.
Just quickly, I’m going to TiNA (This is Not Art) in Newcastle in just over a week and I’m pretty smegging excited. Alex and I are going to meet with our faces and I’m going to volunteer in some capacity and I’m going to go to a million events while I’m not volunteering and I’m going to stay in a youth hostel in a city I’ve never been to before and it’s all going to be amazing. I can tell you with honesty that I would not have done this before this year, before these challenge blogs.
Also, a shout out to Eloise Kemish and Kath Chown who are both ladies I don’t really know all that well but who have recently told my face that they read and enjoy my blog. It really means a lot to hear that from people, and I thank you both, and every one else who secretly lurks on this page for lurking, and for reading and for validating my existence. You guys are all the best.
Also to Alex, who wrote the best blog today. It made me smile while processing timesheets at work, which is an unthinkable thing.
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