Just A Bit Of Silliness Really

Don’t you just hate it when your in the shower and your all soaped up, you’ve got that pore scrub all over your face, and if your someone else and not me, you’ve got your hair all shampooed.

Then, this brilliant start to the story you’ve been struggling with comes into your brain, and you just need something to write on. How you wish you had something, like a waterproof computer or paper that you can write on under water. But you don’t have those, so you try and hold on to this brilliant storyline.

And then you remember that your son has a new aeroplane called El Chupapabra or something and you start singing that name over and over in your head, because lets face it, it’s so cool and very musical. Every intelligent thought goes out of your mind. And by the time you’ve reached 50 El Chupapabra’s, and you’re ready to get out of the shower, you can’t remember anything about the brilliant start to the story you were struggling with.

You go to bed. And I’m not sure about you, but my brain seems to have this auto save system. When the computer crashes and you restart it, sometimes the document that you thought you’d lost forever comes back again. In the middle of the night, while your brain is rehashing all the events of the day, suddenly there is your story. Of course, now it’s got a green-eyed monster in it and it’s taking place on Jupiter, but that is ok, the basic plot is still recognisable.

So, you wake up at 3 am and need to get out of your warm bed. You stumble to the computer and turn it on and you quickly type out your brilliant beginning before El Chupapabra comes along, and you lose it again. 

My First Day of Writing

 I had my first full day of writing the other week. I have to say I was very excited but also nervous. I’ve never had a whole day dedicated to writing before. It seemed very indulgent and so incredibly amazing. 

Writing energises me. I love it and to be doing something that I love for a whole day. Wow, what an awesome thought. But what does one do with a whole day of writing? Would I really be able to sustain my concentration for a whole day on my writing project? Does a writer really sit at the computer all day and just reel off thousands of words for a eight hours? I didn’t want to be wasting my time. After all, I do have a family and I can’t just be whittling a day away when maybe I should be doing something that might actually be earning money right at this moment.

So I wanted my writing day to count because it’s important and also because I have two writing days a week.

So I prayed about it and I thought about it and planned it. I also tried to remember anything that I’d read or heard from other writers about how they organised their days.

So here is what I did and you know, it took up the whole day and it was fantastic.

I re-read what I had written last. The last time I had written anything actually was quite a while ago. We’d been moving interstate and staying with other people, house hunting than setting up our house and trying to get settled. So my writing had taken a back seat for a while. At first I was quite discouraged. What I had last written seemed so boring and trivial. But as I read and thought and started to write again I got more and more excited. I also decided that I would journal on my writing days. I try and listen to some interviews with writers or some sort of writing thing like going back over old modules from my online courses. I also blog and try and keep up with facebook, goodreads, kidsbookreview and other writers blogs and websites.

So that was what I did and it used up a whole day. And I’m so glad that I get two days!

The Slog

The slog

I love writing, I really do. I love thinking about it, I love reading it, I love creating characters and situations. I even love figuring out how to reword sentences to make them sound better or condensing and changing tenses. But at some point in the writing process it becomes a bit of a slog, an endurance test.

We were reading this morning about the story of Noah and how God told Noah to build a huge boat. So Noah built the boat and when it was finished God filled it with animals and Noah’s family. Then the rains came down and the floods came up (as the song goes). For some reason today I was reminded that in between God telling Noah to build the boat and it being finished was the time it took Noah to build the actual boat. Talk about a long haul project. Building the ark must have taken years. It doesn’t actually say in the Bible how long it took to build the ark. But I’m thinking it must have been a while and it must have been a bit tedious at times.

Well writing I guess is sort of the same thing. You get an idea or someone gives you one, you’re all excited and you start off and you write your heart out. You build on your story and shape and refine the characters and plot and structure and dialogue. Then you write it again. Then you send it out to people who read it and hopefully give you good constructive criticism. So you write it again. Then comes the grammar and the punctuation and if you’re me lots of spelling typos.

One thing I’m learning about writing a book is you can’t be in a hurry to finish it. Because writing a book isn’t a one-person thing, it takes a lot of people to for a book to be written.

I feel like I’m in the murky marsh, all the exciting parts of writing have finished and I’m in the tedious, sloggish part.

I’m hoping that writing a book is like being in labour. When you think you can’t take another minute of the contractions then you know you’re almost at the end. We’ll see.

Eliminating My Wases

One of the self-editing tips I got from the writer's conference was in eliminating words that are superfluous. I can't believe just how many words I use in my writing that are superfluous. It's quite amazing.
The thing with eliminating words is that sometimes taking out a word means changing the whole sentence and other times taking out a word just means hitting the delete button and the sentence still functions perfectly fine.
I can't tell you how much my word count has gone down simply by going through the story and finding all those little meaningless words that crop up at least five time on every page. Maybe now I'll have to boost my word count again by adding another chapter?
Of course one can edit too much and come up with a very tight story but totally inhuman. So while I'm zapping my thats, zinging my ings, eliminating my wases and cutting down on my ly words (thanks so much for the tip Amanda). I'm going to have to make sure the flavour of my story still remains the same and doesn't become to sterile.

Writers Conference

I had the opportunity to attend a The Word Writers conference for Australian Christian Writers in Melbourne last Saturday. It was an awesome time. I was able to meet some real life authors and even a publisher. The topics they spoke on were really helpful both from a writing perspective and also information about what is happening in the publishing and marketing world.

Talk about feeling like I had a full brain afterwards. I was exhausted but it was amazing. One of the things that was so encouraging was hearing again about how supportive and encouraging Australian Christian Writers and also Publishers are of each other.

Going to conferences like that one is a great way to start networking and becoming known by people in the industry. I'm excited to be attending the Omega Writers conference in Brisbane in October as well.

I'm starting to feel very patriotic about Aussie authors and building up the writing scene here in Australia. We've got some great authors and fantastic books out there.

A great place to discover books written by Australian authors is www.lightthedark.com.au

Enjoying The Scenery

I’m beginning to realise that the Christian writing community here in Australia is very close knit. It’s such an encouragement. People want to help each other and support each other. They’re so passionate about good writing, about promoting books that are amazing,

I never knew this. It’s a lovely, warm thing to discover.

I have been and still am very naïve about Australian Christian writers. I had no idea how extensive the numbers are. I am really excited to be discovering so many things that I never knew before. It’s like I’ve opened a book that I’ve never read and I’m being introduced to a new world.

This photo was taken at Cradle Mountain in Tasmania and an amazing friend of wrote this beautiful comment about the photo. I sums up this journey that I'm on, that everyone is on in different ways.

The picture with you and the boys on this long wooden trail just fit perfectly to what you wrote. You don’t know exactly where the trail leads you to, but someone has prepared it, you trust that person that he’s not leading you into difficulties and you can even enjoy the scenery. Isn’t it what God has prepared for us. And it’s not only the goal that is exciting, but the whole journey he’s leading us!

Killing Off My Darlings

I didn’t know that I would get so incredibly attached to my writing. 

In Jane Austen Regrets, Jane comments how she is worried about sending her books out into public scrutiny because she sees them has her kids. She doesn't want people to dislike them and criticise them. I never really understood what she meant but now I reckon that I’m getting closer to.

I’ve been working on my story for about six months now. I’ve thought a lot about it. Prayed about it. Agonised over wording, scenes, characters and dialogue. I’ve gotten really protective of my story and the characters within it. It feels like they are coming into focus, that they are more than just characters in a story.

I don’t mind people giving me constructive criticism and maybe if someone had said, ‘You need to cut that,’ it would be easier than having to make the decision myself of what needs to be cut. It’s heart rending to delete paragraph after paragraph of words. It’s like they were never there.

But I’ve got to be brave. I’ve got to be willing to sacrifice the mediocre to get to the rich core of what I’m trying to communicate. Hopefully my writing will be all the better for it.

Hopefully it will end up being a beautiful picture, something that people will want to look at again and again.