4th July and nothing to celebrate?

June has come and gone with virtually no progress on my novel, and already it’s the 4th of July. So nothing to celebrate, then. Looking back over the past month my achievements seem mainly to reside in the garden: I built a log cabin for my mum (getting quite good at these things now) and planted some palm trees. And on one hot night we took my micro camper van to the New Forest and camped in it for the first time. It wasn’t a total success: I spent an hour inflating the airbed only for the valve to break just as I was ready to put it in the can, so we slept on the built-in rock’n’roll bed that came with it. The ‘double’ mattress was three feet wide and as soft as a slab of granite. Not exactly luxury.

Part of the reason for not writing anything last month:

buying, collecting and planting these two rather straggly trees on my front garden.

But the lack of writing during June meant that my brain recovered enough to find some inspiration again. I think I was getting overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the redrafting that still lay ahead, and one particular issue had prevented me from getting started: the flashbacks in the opening chapter.

It’s really important to start a novel well. We all know that. And that’s why I’ve rewritten the opening chapter to The Sphinx Scrolls many times. When I was working on the book back in 2001 I thought it would be cool to open the first chapter at the most dramatic point in the early part of the story – with the heroine facing execution. This inevitably necessitated a number of flashbacks to explain how she had come to be in this predicament, but the structure seemed to fit the situation because it was like her life was flashing before her eyes. So far, so good.

Things got messy during the more recent rewrites. I wanted to introduce a juicy subplot and add more depth to the novel, and this required more flashbacks in that opening chapter. Trouble was, the new scenes were jumping back all over the place in terms of location and chronology, and I had found myself with a first chapter that had become too long and too confusing.

The daunting prospect of fixing this chapter was the main reason for my literary procrastination for most of the last month. That, and the sheer exhaustion of building that log cabin under relentless and uncharacteristically blazing sunshine for two solid weeks.
 Today, however, I cracked it. I decided that I was not going to use my muscles today. No jogging, no construction work, and only minimal gardening. Today would be a brain day. It would have helped if Pooch hadn’t decided to wake me up at 6:20 am, but I compensated for my weary start to the day with a good dose of caffeine. My next trick was to allocate specific time to writing, and I scheduled three stints of two hours each, leaving time in between for essentials such as eating, watering the palm trees and watching Top Gear.

Having set out my plan for the day I decided it would be less overwhelming to extract the opening chapter and put it into a separate Word document. I knew it needed major surgery, but in case things went badly wrong I had the original version to return to. But if things went well I would be able to transplant the new, improved chapter in place of the old, rambling one.

The next step simply involved putting every jumbled up part of that chapter, flashbacks and all, into chronological order. I didn’t know if it would work that way, but at least it would tidy everything up and give me something easier to work with. That didn’t take long, just ten minutes or so, and as soon as I read the story in the correct order I realised how much the flashback technique had compromised essential detail. Parts of the story had been glossed over too quickly, creating a lack of credibility in places. Now I had a chance to build the story on stronger foundations. I decided to rewrite the first page entirely from scratch.

An hour passed. I had a sentence on the screen. Another hour: another sentence. Time for a break. Two sentences in one morning had exhausted me. Bearing in mind these were to be the first lines of the novel I didn’t feel that I’d wasted any time. It had been tough. I wanted my novel to open succinctly and memorably like The Day of the Triffids. I rejected line after line, word after word, until something started to emerge that I liked.

After lunch and a quick trip to the garden centre for fifteen bags of compost (so much for not using my muscles) I ploughed on with page one of the novel. Soon I had a whole paragraph. Wait – no, I had to scrub a line that didn’t work. The book went backwards for a while. Time passed while I researched the details of the scene on the Internet. I even watched clips of Guatemalan breakfast television to make sure I described everything correctly (I’ve never seen such a long-winded and pointless weather forecast for a country that’s always hot). Suddenly the lines were flowing again. I was achieving my goal of a more subtle, mature writing style. It was a huge improvement on the words I’d written ten or more years before. Into the third writing session of the day and I was getting a decent word count for this new chapter. By the time the electric guitar riffs of Top Gear dragged me away from my computer I had contributed almost a thousand words to the novel. No flashbacks so far, just an elegant introduction to the main character as she slowly becomes aware that all is not well in Guatemala City today.

So, after all, perhaps I do have something to celebrate today?