5 tips to get your novel written

Now that we're over halfway through November – NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month – how's your word count looking? While NaNoWriMo enthusiasts try to crank out 1,667 words for 30 days straight, completing a first draft by 30 November, I prefer writing rather more sedately. I'm at the 55,000 mark on my new novel and it's taken me some months to get there, but my plan works and it doesn't require me to press pause on the rest of my life for a month. Here's how.

1. Set aside two writing sessions a week

Just two. For two afternoons a week, I commit to sitting at my screen for at least an hour, opening up my manuscript and typing something. That's it. I write fiction because I find it fun, creative and relaxing, so I allow myself to spend an hour writing whatever part of the book I feel like. But I try to make an extra half-hour to an hour available, in case I get on a literary roll and want to write more. I aim to write 1,000 words at a session but usually write more.

2. Switch off distractions

This really, really works. The time when I'm working on my book is sacred, so before I start, I crawl down behind my desk to unplug my internet cable, then switch my cellphone onto flight mode. People, it's frigging miraculous what you can achieve in an undisturbed hour. A single email or social media check-in can bomb an idea, derail a train of thought, vaporise that mood that could have been the beginning of an amazing scene. Try using a tool such as Freedom to lock yourself out of the internet for pre-set durations, say 90 minutes.

3. Leave judging and editing your first draft till later

Whether what you've written is good or not isn't relevant at this point. Write first; edit later. Your book won't be perfect now, and parts of it may be downright laughable, but it's important to get the story down while you feel that rush of inspiration. Editing and judgement can kill the excitement you need to make it to the finish line of your first draft. As my writing buddy (and fellow swimming-class parent) Byron agrees, unexpected things happen when you're writing. In his case, a sinister character appeared, seemingly out of nowhere. 'I just went with it,' he told me. His book needed this character to the balance the others, he now feels. Half the thrill of writing lies in the unplanned developments that happen while you're writing. Don't think, 'I didn't plan this so it's wrong and it's not going to work.' Leave it in; relook it later.

4. Don't talk about your book too much

Avoid revealing too much about your story to those who ask. Hone a one-sentence description or elevator pitch to give them enough to satisfy them. Don't go into details or they'll give you their opinion, which may ruin the magic for you. It's vital that, while writing your first draft, you stay true to your vision. Once you're happy with your completed first draft, get feedback from trusted friends or colleagues who love reading novels and whose opinion you value, or from a professional editor. But don't open yourself up to criticism too soon, or someone's offhand comment may make you divert completely from the shining idea you really want to pursue.

5. Save your work after every session

I learnt this the hard way. Rewriting a large chunk of my mystery novel Little Diamond Eye that had come to me as if channelled (you know?), three days later, was not nearly as fun as it had been the first time around... Make backups each time you write. Save your work in two different places, ideally emailing the latest version to yourself on gmail.

Let me know how it goes, and share your own tips for getting your novel written, on The Peacock Book Project's Facebook page: www.facebook.com/peacockproject 

Catriona Ross is a journalist and author. Find her books in the Kindle Store: Little Diamond Eye, The Presence of Peacocks or How to Find Love and Write a Novel, The Love Book, Writing for Magazines: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know, and The Happy Life Handbook.

What writers can learn from the lives of artists

I've been reading about the life of Impressionist artist Edouard Manet this week past. His paintings delight me with their clean lines and satisfying contrasts, their masterful brush strokes and perfectly considered daubs of light and dark. But what really struck me were his letters, which reveal the reality of life as a creative person: translating idealism into practicality; trying to create something beautiful and meaningful; and frequently dealing with cash-flow problems. Manet was from an affluent family but many of his fellow artists were not, as this letter shows:

To his friend, artist Theodore Duret, he wrote, circa 1875,

'I went to see Monet yesterday and found him in despair and absolutely broke.
He asked me to find someone who would take between ten and twenty pictures of their choice for 100 francs apiece. Shall we do the deal ourselves, putting up 500 francs each?
Of course no-one, and least of all he, should know that we're in on this. I thought of trying to find a dealer or collector but suspect they might refuse.
Unfortunately, it takes people as knowledgeable as we are to do a good piece of business, in spite of the repugnance we may feel, in order to help out a talented artist. Send me an answer as soon as possible or suggest a rendezvous.'
E. Manet 

From 'Manet by himself' (Macdonald Illustrated) Edited by Juliet Wilson-Bareau

Monet! Broke! If only Claude had known the international stardom he'd later achieve, the zillions of office walls his avant-garde poppyfields and haystacks and sunrises would populate more than a century later. But thank heavens for his friends, no? As creatives following a personal vision, we all need a community of supporters. We need those people who'll give us a pep talk when our work's not selling, who'll convince us not to throw in the paintbrush or pen or PC but to continue doing what we love. If you're feeling broke and desperate today, phone a fellow creative. There's no such thing as an overnight success in art or writing - or anything worth doing, for that matter. Keep going, people. Keep doing what you're doing. The hard times are as valuable as the successes in turning you into the person you will become one day.

Start writing the novel of your dreams with The Peacock Book Project: www.peacockproject.net







 

Is this the year you write your novel?

Writing a novel is an intensely personal, intimate experience. It's just you, your imagination and the magic of words. When you sit down to write and find yourself in the creative zone, you may experience timelessness, a feeling of flow, the sense of universal energy swirling around you - and the ability to draw strands of that energy down onto your page or screen, as required...

Sound a bit too esoteric for you? Well, keep writing, keep plodding on, and from time to time you will experience writerly flow. Promise. Don't expect it all the time, though. Mostly, writing a book is a mundane matter of forcing yourself to sit at your computer and write something. Anything. But if you do that, rewards come: the gold dust sometimes descends, making the boring, practical side of writing worthwhile.

As for that blank screen staring back at you while you try to construct an opening line: could there be any greater freedom available to anyone? There you are, poised to create a whole new world using words; a world that is a mental construct filled with sensations and scenes of peculiar significance to you.

And one of the bonus outcomes is the infinite number of ways your work will be interpreted. Each reader of your novel mirrors your creative writing process by using his or her imagination to conjure up the imagery and meaning provoked by your words, turning your book into something of unique significance to him or her. Which, I think, is creative and cool in itself.

Author Jonathan Lethem wrote in O magazine, '...one of the things that defines reading is its intimacy - which is what I love about it. Even if you have a train carriage full of people, all of them reading The Corrections, they'd each be on a different page. It's not like watching a movie; you're not having a collective experience.'

Here's to writing, to reading, and to the personal experience of words. (If you're ready to start writing right now, go to www.peacockproject.net and use the free Writer's Template.) Happy 2013.

Author Marina Lewycka on sudden fame, the seriousness of comedy, and her new novel, Various Pets Alive and Dead

This interview with the best-selling author of A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian originally appeared in the Sunday Times Lifestyle section, 24 June 2012.

When she appears on my Skype screen, Marina Lewycka is lying in bed. ‘Excuse my hair; I’ve just been for a swim,’ she says with a sheepish look.

Lewycka (pronounced ‘Lewiska’) not only conducts interviews from her bed at home in Sheffield whenever possible, but writes her novels there too, on a laptop. ‘It’s comfy and cosy in bed, and you can shut yourself off. It’s much nicer to sit back and have cups of tea at your side and a hot water bottle under your knees than to sit at a desk. I could spend six hours a day in bed, but it does get a bit hard on the body,’ confesses the writer, now in her mid-sixties.

Dismantling the webcam, she takes my eyes on a quick tour of her bedroom, past an antique mirrored cupboard and a shelf stuffed with books to the window, where I peer down a few storeys of red-brick house to her spring garden, momentarily lit by a pale English sun.

The tale of Marina Lewycka’s late-in-life literary fame has become legend. ‘Until my mid-fifties, I was really a housewife who stayed at home,’ she says with self-deprecation. ‘But I’d always wanted to be a writer. I’d tried writing Mills and Boons, and had a go at thrillers. In fact, I’d written two complete novels, in longhand, and got very dispirited.’ A part-time lecturer at her local polytechnic, she was approaching retirement and was invited to take any course offered by the institution gratis. She chose a creative writing course, ‘and that,’ she says, ‘led to my breakthrough.’

Among the external examiners was literary agent Bill Hamilton of A.M. Heath in London, who, after reading her manuscript, signed her up. A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian was published in 2005 and sold over a million copies in the UK alone. The hit comedy about two sisters whose widowed father, a former engineer writing a history of tractors in Ukranian, marries a much younger Ukrainian immigrant, was followed by Two Caravans in 2007, We Are All Made of Glue in 2009, and Various Pets Alive and Dead last month.

Success flipped Lewycka’s life around. She describes not only the fulfilment in attaining her dream – of ‘having always really known I was supposed to be a writer, having worked for it terribly hard for so long, and then it all happened at once’ – but the downside: ‘When something is no longer a dream, it becomes a day job. I’m 65 and I’ve never worked so hard in my life! My friends are retired, and I wish I could relax, like them.’ But for the next few months, following the launch of her new novel, she’ll be giving talks and interviews, doing readings and book signings at the Scarborough Literary Festival, the London Book Fair and other events. ‘Then it will all calm down, and the story that’s at the back of my head will come out – I hope.’

Lewycka’s first literary effort was a poem written at the age of four. Born in a German refugee camp, dark-haired Marina was a year old when she and her Ukranian parents moved to England. Her father, who worked for International Harvester tractors in Doncaster, ‘considered himself a poet, and was actually quite good,’ she recalls. ‘My mother was one of the great story-tellers. She’d tell me about life back home in Ukraine – what people did in the winter, the names of their pet animals.’

The author remembers a stimulating, multi-cultural household filled with her parents’ friends from France, Germany and elsewhere, partly thanks to a warm, embracing mother who liked to invite interesting people home and feed them cake. Lewycka, however, was uncomfortably conscious of her own foreignness throughout childhood. ‘I grew up in the habit of seeing myself on the outside of things. It’s not nice for a little kid, but for a writer it’s nice to be on the sidelines, watching.’

Early feelings of exclusion may explain her empathy for those marginalized by society – the immigrants, refugees and elderly figures who appear in all her novels. Always full-blooded, quirky and indomitable, these characters offer more than mere entertainment value by humanising the people one might unconsciously regard as ‘other’.

Their presence reflects too the years Lewycka spent writing handbooks for Age Concern, Britain’s support organisation for the aged, and Mencap, the charity for people with learning disabilities. ‘I’d interview families for the handbooks and write about them in the first person. I still had dreams of telling their stories in novels one day,’ she says.

‘When I started writing Various Pets Alive and Dead, a Down’s Syndrome boy I knew popped up in my mind. He was so enthusiastic, so full of life, and could do anything he wanted, such as go off to the Special Olympics.’ This case study inspired the character of Oolie-Anna, a lusty, loud young woman with Down’s Syndrome who is desperate to leave home and live in her own flat, while her adoptive mother, ageing hippy Doro, struggles to let go.

The novel illustrates actual situations Lewycka encountered during her work with Mencap. Children with Down’s Syndrome live longer nowadays than they used to, and, as Lewycka points out, ‘What happens to them when their parents grow old or die? One needs to plan for the possibility of their outliving their parents.’ In Various Pets, a perky social worker finds Oolie-Anna a job and irritates Doro with such platitudes as, ‘But in the long term it’ll be better for everybody if Oolie-Anna can spread her wings and learn to fly’.

Various Pets Alive and Dead is a characteristic blend of farce, wit, pathos and social awareness. ‘I’m actually a very serious person, but I’m not good at writing serious things. They come out with a light touch,’ explains the author, a fan of British comedy classics including Fawlty Towers and Monty Python. ‘You think comedy isn’t serious but with comedy you can say such a lot that serious can’t. Comedy can expose the depths of the human soul; funny is what we are when we least intend to be.’

            A wry exploration of modern values, the new novel moves between three narrators: Doro; her son Serge, who’s pretending to finish his maths PhD at Cambridge while secretly raking in money as a City trader in London (a position that would horrify his anti-capitalist parents); and her daughter Clara, a primary school teacher. ‘I’m a bossy sort, like Clara,’ Lewycka laughs. ‘Actually, there’s a bit of me in all my characters.’

The storyline involves two present-day locations, flashbacks to Doro and Marcus’s lentil-infused commune in the 1960s, loads of backstory to inform the present-day plot, plus various pets. ‘It was very complicated to write,’ Lewycka admits, ‘as the backstory and real world had to dovetail together. If I changed one tiny thing, I had to go through the whole novel and change a whole lot of others.’ Yet she clearly thrives on complexity: Two Caravans featured nine interlinked narrative voices, including a dog.

Having taught media studies at Sheffield Hallam University for twelve years, Lewycka acknowledges the rewards of teaching but adds, ‘There are some really, really awful students and you wish you could flog them. There are departmental meetings, and days when you just don’t feel like doing the marking…’

Since retiring from teaching in December, Lewycka has more time for writing in bed. Her daughter and granddaughter live in New Zealand, and her partner, a historian, is based in London. ‘He and I go between the two cities,’ she says. ‘It’s nice to have gaps.’ Her next novel, the second of a two-book deal, will probably be set in Derbyshire, feature a child as its protagonist, and involve animals.

Though something of a celebrity in Sheffield, she remains resolutely down to earth. ‘The good thing about being an author is that, on the whole, you’re pretty invisible. That picture of me on the dust jacket of my new book was taken some time ago, so when I go out looking like a bag lady, as I so often do, I’m not recognised,’ she says with satisfaction. In her spare time Lewycka indulges in low-key, very English pursuits: gardening, swimming, baking cakes, taking a friend’s dog for walks in the surrounding Peak District.

It’s unlikely that Marina Lewycka will ever be accused of taking herself too seriously. As she wrote two years ago, ‘I’ve been a “successful” writer for almost five years now, but I never forget that I was an unsuccessful writer for more than fifty. It helps to keep things in perspective.’

(It's never too late to write a novel. Join The Peacock Project's online creative writing programme at http://www.peacockproject.net/, and get started today!)

How to write a bestseller: tips from 5 top authors

Some time ago, I asked five notable South African writers to share their advice on writing a bestselling novel. Their answers show that it’s all about hard work, humility and perseverance.  

‘I don’t think it is possible to set out to write a hit. Readers are smart: they can tell a con at fifty paces,’ said Margie Orford, author of the internationally bestselling Clare Hart crime series. ‘So, feel with your body, write with your heart, edit with your head. Write about what you know, but if you don’t know something then go it find out. Remember this: It takes a very long time to become an overnight success, so work harder than you ever thought possible. Then work some more. Don’t give up. Don’t complain. Just do it again. And then again. And if it’s not working? That thing about killing your darlings is true: if a chapter doesn’t fit, then cut it out, step over the blood and move on.’

John van de Ruit, author of the Spud series, said, ‘Forget about writing a bestselling novel. There is no magic formula for making your book reach people, and I would think that if world domination is your single-minded aim, you are setting yourself up to fail. Rather attempt to write the greatest book you can. Concentrate on the fundamentals of character, plotting, dramatic action, rhythm and subtext, and let the numbers take care of themselves. Don’t be precious about your words, nor marvel at your own ability. Remove ego from your writing, and remember you are a servant to your characters and the invisible presence with the power to captivate.’

‘Write your truth as you see it,’ advised Sindiwe Magona, whose novel Beauty’s Gift Beauty’s Gift was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. ‘Share the feelings that moved you to write about the subject. Submit yourself to the dream as it unfolds through you; with any luck, you shall be as surprised as your readers at what is revealed in the process.’

‘I wish I knew the secret,’ said Lauren Liebenberg, the former investment banker whose first novel, The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam, was short-listed for the Orange Prize for New Writers, ‘but this much I do know: you’ve got to take a sober look at every word you’ve written and ask yourself what would make your reader care enough to turn the next page. And the thing that jumps out and grabs readers by the throat is raw, gritty honesty; it’s what brings characters to life and what binds readers to them.’

‘I subscribe to Bessie Head’s words on writing Maru: “…I also wanted the novel to be so beautiful and so magical that I, as the writer, would long to read and re-read it,” said Kgebetli Moele, author of the award-winning debut novel Room 207, and The Book of the Dead. ‘If any section of the writing gets dull, I rewrite or delete, because if the writer cannot read it, how can he or she expect others to read it? There are a dozen good tales I left at the side of the road because they had turned dull and I could not un-dull them.’