Day: January 16, 2010

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Annoying Space Bar Problem

My writing is suffering from a serious impediment. The space bar on the laptop I use most often has gone faulty and rarely works with pressure on the right hand side only. This is extremely irritating as I can sometimes type quite fast and I keep having to stop and backtrack to insert a space.

I did a bit of research on the web and it’s quite feasible to mend keyboards although if you cock it up you’re left with an unusable machine. It might be a precaution to order a whole new keyboard and install it myself.

The laptop is a Dell and is not very old. The keyboard quality is far inferior to an older Toshiba laptop and less robust than probably a plug-in USB keyboard that can be bought for about £10 at Tesco.

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‘The Angel’ Changes

I reworked the synopsis of ‘The Angel’ based on the feedback I’d received.

Probably the biggest change was that I gave James and Emma a different backstory that changed the start of the novel — I married them — unhappily of course as there wouldn’t be much of a novel otherwise. Actually, in terms of a catalyst for action, he doesn’t actually fully realise that he is unhappy until the relationship develops with Kim. Emma will have some good qualities but I think theirs will be one of those functional sort of relationships that people drift into, ready to be shocked out of them at some point.

Because James will be newly married then his relationship with Kim will need to start more gradually — and this will hopefully give her decision to run the pub with him some more plausibility. She’ll need to be running from something in London, however, as much as being attracted to the countryside. James and Kim can still go on their massive bender round London — that’s a slightly environmentally friendly approach as I’ve already written something very similar for an OU course (albeit as a screenplay). It should be good for location and setting, though.

Most of the middle of the synopsis has stayed the same but Kim’s story follows a simpler narrative arc — she arrives, settles in eventually, deals with some crises which eventually lead her to move away again — and at the end the big question is ‘does she come back again?’ She does undergo some change, however — a development of calm and spirituality.

I’ve cut some of the ending of the previous synopsis — the bit about the abortion and so on. It was a bit too rushed to properly do justice to in the synopsis and I need to think whether it’s appropriate in the light of the other changes. The way the synopsis now reads, she could be motivated to leave by the fire.

One thing that’s not in the synopsis that I’ve been considering is making Kim even more of an outsider by having her as a non-white character. I think it would make a negligible difference to the plot – but it might give the outsider theme some more resonance. It would also be a challenge to write — and a potential minefield.  However, I’ll carry on considering this as it’s not something I’d want to take over the novel.

I kept the locations at the end in (Tate Modern and Millennium Bridge) mainly to give some sort of sense of location.  In practice I may well go for something more original — or perhaps subvert expectations by having them set-up to meet on the Millennium Bridge but things don’t go to plan and they are reconciled somewhere else — the skateboard park under Waterloo Bridge perhaps?

I created a spreadsheet based on Emily’s list of questions/attributes for characters. I still need to properly fill it in but it made me realise another flaw in my synopsis — I don’t seem to have enough characters. I can see this might have been a reason behind some of the feedback. There’s really only two who play a role all the way through — James and Kim. If you don’t like them then you’re not going to like the book. I have Emma and her predatory father as additional characters in the synopsis but I think I need a couple more significant characters.

So I’ve simplified my original ideas but I think I need some new ones for the actual novel. The synopsis itself is much improved, however. Here’s the version I handed into Emily.The Angel Revised Synopsis v4 — Distributed Dec 09

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Revising Synopses

After Emily’s feedback I sent round the revised synopses to everyone in the class and we then workshopped both — the result being, obviously, that only half the time was spent on each one.

As with everyone else, it was an intense but fascinating and immensely valuable experience.

Having been the only one in the class to bring along two ideas we had a unique vote at the end of the session to see if there was any consensus about which should be developed further in the class. Surprisingly the vote was inconclusive — this reflected the previous discussion in some ways with certain members of the class having strong preferences for one synopsis or the other. I think this is positive as it shows that neither of the ideas was rubbish and also that there was a diversity of appeal between the two synopses.

‘The Angel’ (which I’d renamed from the working title ‘Pub Story’) brought out some fairly strong reaction. This is partly because, as Emily had picked up, it was a much more recently developed idea (in truth underdeveloped) and so it was more raw. That gave much more of sense of immediacy but it also showed a lot of defects. I needed to do a lot more thinking about Emma — James’ unattractive girlfriend.

I would also have a challenge to make some of the main characters appealing to the reader — the fact James was a drinking, rugby-playing headhunter branded him as the spawn on the devil to some people (in fact, I generally loathe such types as well).

There were also some comments on implausibility of parts of the plot — would Kim really follow James to the country on the spur of the moment? Also some of the settings were thought a bit clichéd – the Millennium Bridge, for example. There are plenty of other places I can think about while I write.

However, this is all good for the purpose of the course as it gave me a lot to revise and food for thought for the novel in general — and I’m still having quite radical ideas about changing it now it’s January (see later prospective later postings). I was also offered to be shown round Brick Lane and Hackney for my research, which sounds fascinating.

‘Burying Bad News’ was preferred by quite a number of people who liked the potential in the themes of wine and politics — useful comments received about making analogies to grape varieties and so on. Others picked up on probably the biggest question mark about this novel — that come May this year a lot of the political context may look like ancient history. Given the length of time still needed to finish a first draft then the subject matter could end up being quite stale. On the other hand it might appeal to nostalgia. I’ve been conscious of this while writing parts of the novel (I’m now up to 45,000 words of a first draft) and have been careful for a number of reasons to try and keep the political references incidental to the main plot, which is about human relationships. If need be I could probably change the political context that anticipated future developments, although it would take a bit of the fire out of my belly as I try to excoriate some of the excesses of New Labour. 

As a contrast to ‘The Angel’ some people thought the synopsis was a bit antiseptic and was a bit distant from the character. This might be partly because some perform roles that tend to have preconceptions — such as a scandal-hit MP and a dirt-digging journalist. It may also have been because I’m so familiar with the characters through writing that I’m taking it for granted that they will be similarly known to readers of a retrospectively written synopsis.

Even though I’ve worked a lot on this novel, I found the comments tightened up the synopsis itself immeasurably.

I revised both synopses in the light of the feedback. I worked more on ‘The Angel’, which I submitted to Emily as coursework because it was clearly in need of more development and I had used techniques learnt on the course to do this.

I found all the other synopses that were workshopped to be highly enjoyable and had great potential. It was interesting to see that some other writers were touching on similar themes. I loved Guy’s creation of a bohemian seaside community of exiled arty city types and was interested that they’d come out of the same sort of urban maelstrom that my artist character Kim does.