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Julianne

NaNoReWriMo: Energy Management

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Until September 2017, I worked part-time.

And I had done so for the previous four years. It was a choice I made so that I could spend serious time writing. When I’ve worked full-time, I’ve found it very difficult to write. I found it hard to stay motivated, to keep up my energy, and to keep my creativity flowing. I thought I wasn’t capable of writing frequently and well while holding down a full-time job.

I may revise this opinion in the coming months, but now I think that the problem wasn’t my own capability. It was those jobs.

I thought I was very good at making time for writing, no matter what, but now I realise that although I am great at organising my time and prioritising, even the best time management unicorn in the universe will be defeated by:

  • a long commute
  • work that is mentally draining
  • just being too damn tired from work by the time you get to writing

I took my current job for three reasons – all of which I knew would help my writing:

1. The intellectual and creative challenge

I find that the more I use my brain at work, the more I want to use my brain, generally. It’s all about the state of flow – it’s wonderful and addictive. My job presents me with a bunch of new challenges and learning opportunities and that keeps me creative. I really enjoy my job and I’m happy to go to work in the morning – and I’m much more productive when I’m happy.

2. I can worry about money less

I wouldn’t say I’m free of all financial woes – I’m a millennial living in London who feels the cold too much to even consider moving up north (plus, all my family, who I’m quite close to, are here, I’m a Londoner born and bred). So I will always face challenges, and worry about the future and whether I’m making the right decisions. However, now I’m less panicked about the near future!

As readers of my Charity Shop Tuesday series will have know, I am naturally thrifty, but even so, working part-time and never being able to save anything made me anxious. I could only afford to move out of my parents’ house because I moved in with my partner, who works part-time himself. I hated checking my bank balance and seeing that I’d spent some of my savings that month because my salary didn’t cover my outgoings.

The thing is, I like having money. Being a “starving artist” has never sounded romantic to me. I like being able to pay for meals out and to get the faster, more expensive transport option if I want to. Having more money means that I’m happier – and again, this means I stay productive.

3. I have my own office

This is a big one! I used to work in an open-plan office, which I didn’t mind when I worked part-time, because my colleagues are lovely people. But I am so, so glad to have my own office now. I couldn’t work on my writing during my lunch breaks, when I worked in the open-plan office, because a) I didn’t have the quiet I needed to concentrate, and b) I hate creative writing when there are other people in the room. Seriously. I’ve never been one of those laptop-in-cafe writers. I can do non-fiction projects, like blogging, and scripting ecourses, when there are other people around – I’ve gone to a ‘working brunch’ and got a lot done – but when I’m writing fiction, being around other people makes me feel painfully self-conscious. Also, I hate laptops. HATE. Why would you hunch over a miniature screen and type on an inconveniently small keyboard when you could write on a desktop computer with a full-size monitor and keyboard and sit in an properly supportive desk chair?

It also means that I can write after work, which has turned out to be surprisingly effective! I haven’t managed to get up early enough to get much writing done before work, yet, though this is something I want to try, but I’ve stayed in my office to write for a couple of hours after work several times now and it’s been wonderful.

It’s all about energy management.

I’m not wasting energy on being bored at work, on worrying about money, or on a long commute. I live close enough to work to walk home, so that’s what I do, and I write first, so that it doesn’t matter that the journey home will tire me out. I’m optimistic that these strategies will help me continue to write and edit and finish my NaNoReWriMo project!

Today, energy management was foremost in my mind because I have a cough and barely slept last night – so I made sure to write during lunch, just in case I was too tired after work.

Today:

I wrote 1255 words, during my lunch break.

I wrote this blog post in about half an hour, after I’d finished work.

 

NaNoReWriMo: Finding My Protagonist’s Voice Through Finding Her Name

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It must have been one of the first pieces of feedback I got on this novel.

‘There’s something off about her name – it seems shiny and fake’.

I’m paraphrasing. I could dig out the bit of paper – I still have it somewhere, with all the other papers and assorted handouts from my MA in Creative and Life Writing – but I’d rather spend the time writing. And that’s the gist of what it said.

At the time, I ignored it. My tutor didn’t dwell on the issue – it was a sentence, and if he brought it up in a tutorial we didn’t discuss it at length, because I don’t remember talking about it.

The original name, Betty, was the first thing that popped into my head, after the initial idea for the novel. I needed to name my protag, and Betty seemed right. It was the kind of name a girl in the 21st century would choose for herself, I decided, if she was Elizabeth on paper and she’d grown tired of Liz and Lizzie.

But now I recognise that it never quite fit her. It all became clear a couple of months ago when I was waiting for a train. I stood on a platform and I thought about how distinctive it was, and I thought about Eleanor Wood’s Becoming Betty, which had just been published, and how that had probably used up “Betty” for the next ten years. I thought, “Maybe I have to change it now”.

The shittiest of all first drafts

Technically, I finished the first draft of this novel a couple of years ago. Technically. I was never happy with it. It stopped going well, the words stopped properly flowing, about halfway through. If I’m being generous. But I didn’t know how to fix it, and I’d been told that I should finish something. I wanted to finish something. I wanted to get it done so that I could fix it in the edits, like all the advice said I would. So I followed my plot outline and made myself type out word after word. And even though my heart didn’t sing and I didn’t feel proud of what I was doing, I got it done.

Not long after, I bashed out another novel in a couple of months, a novel that worked. I finished that first draft and I was happy! I haven’t edited that one yet, but I still feel great about it. I’m pretty sure that the plot works and there’s a convincing emotional arc and all that good stuff.

Yet having written a second novel made me feel worse about the first one. Instead of being motivated to make it at least as good, I felt more disappointed that I hadn’t managed to get it to work. I considered shelving it, but I couldn’t accept that, as I still love the basic concept. I decided to leave it a while longer.

And longer.

Months went by and eventually I decided enough was enough, and I had to start editing it. I wrote a plan, I set myself targets – and I hated the process so much that I started writing short stories on the side.

I have nearly finished writing a short story collection.

I did not make it halfway through that novel edit.

Back to the train platform

I thought, “So what else can I call her?”

And suddenly, I knew.

The answer had been staring me in the face all along. She shares a name with another character in the novel, one who has been an massive influence on her life, though they have never met when the book begins.

As soon as I decided this, it was like a switch had been flicked in my brain. Everything made sense!

She started talking to me. She started telling me her story, in her voice. It was distinctive and funny and it picked up on all these details that had been missing the first time around. There had been snippets like this in the first draft – mostly in the early chapters – but I couldn’t keep up the style.

First person narration is my favourite, but only when the protagonist has a distinctive voice. Otherwise it’s the worst.

I can’t stand bland first person narrators. I think that if the first person narration doesn’t have a distinctive voice, if there’s no style, no idiosyncrasies, then why bother? The narration should reflect the character’s personality, and it should be interesting. In my opinion, it’s better to stick to third person than have boring first person narration that then makes your protagonist seem dull, no matter how interesting her life is.

The Betty-version of my protagonist had little sparks of interest, but overall her interior monologue was dull. The new version has so much energy I can’t help but want to keep it up!

And so I start NaNoReWriMo with trepidation and hope.

Will my enthusiasm continue? Will the words of the newly renamed Natasha Lane keep tripping out of my fingertips? Will I manage to write every day before or after work? Will I ever have an uninterrupted lunch break? Will I give it all up in four days time?

I hope not. I hope I keep up this level of energy. I hope I stay driven. I hope I finish this second first draft and find myself with something that fills me with optimism.

So, I’m doing this.

And if I don’t finish this month? I hope I at least like what I’ve written so far, and that it spurs me on to continue and get it finished by the end of 2017.

I’m going to be blogging when I think I have something interesting to say about the experience – check out the NaNoReWriMo category to see all the posts.