Killing Darlings #2 The Nightmare

Here lies yet another of my writing darlings I've found necessary to cull in the latest revision of my book. 

It did serve a purpose, but the whole section no longer fits the rest of the book. Writing about a character's dreams shouldn't be completely taboo (I've read writer's advice which says otherwise, but anything goes if it works for the book you are writing as far as I'm concerned), but as things stand this little section and its surreal descriptions has to go.
I wrote this surreal nightmare scene fairly early on intending to show the main protagonist's doubt about pressure she was being put under to have some form of corrective surgery. At the time I wrote this there was to be a lot more dream imagery in the book, mostly because the story was being told from a point in the future (where the girl is dying and under the influence of drugs). As the first draft took shape, I pulled back from the idea and much of the dream experiences were transmuted into backstory, leaving this section stuck out on its own. It was also interesting to see that my style has changed a lot since writing this; I was trying a too hard to seem like a sophisticated writer, yet coming across sounding like a pretentious amateur. Over-description, alliteration and an excess of adverbs are some of the obvious issues.


The Nightmare
The unlit hospital corridors seem oddly familiar, from somewhere outside shafts of sodium street light enter through the infrequent windows casting muddy islands of illumination into the seas of darkness between. Melanie shuffles along hesitantly, one hand feeling for the guiding solidity of the wall. A further step and her uncertain fingers clutch at empty space and she stumbles forward into the hollow opening of an adjoining corridor.  Melanie's eyes strain to pierce the menacing blackness, a subtle dread clasping her insides with primitive fear. Sensing, rather than seeing them: spindly, angular and many limbed, attenuated metal insects exuding the ozone scent of stainless steel, dry joints squeaking as they reach for her with bladed claws. Melanie's fear only holds her fast for a heartbeat before giving way to flight. She runs, seeking escape through the maze of corridors, a breath behind, the skittering surgical creatures dance through the shadows on pointed feet. Ahead she sees a light. The bright outline of a doorway. Melanie throws herself through into a space of blinding illumination and in that moment of confusion she finds herself upon an operating table, her heavy limbs refusing to obey her, numbed by anaesthetic. Up above, looking down from a gallery, she can see the faces of people she knows: her Dad, Howard, Sue, Robbie, and Cynthia, their comments floating down into the echoing room.
"Yes, it's just a little procedure."
"She'll be a new person afterwards."
"Oh, she'll fit in then; she never did fit in."
"There's hardly any risk."
Around her the mechanical insects reach towards her, their pincers, blades and forceps glinting under the light.
"It's only a paper bag after all."

It is daytime now; golden sunshine shines down on beds of brightly coloured tulips outside the front of the hospital. A crowd of people stand around the front entrance clapping as Melanie is wheeled out wearing a bag, upon the bag is drawn a big smile. The specialist leans over and plucks off the bag with a flourish. The crowd cheer as the new Melanie is revealed, her face, neck, and head covered in Frankensteinian stitches, the corners of her mouth drawn downwards, like a clown, her eyes expressionless and vacant hollows.

When Did You Last Back Up Your Writing?

I know how precious my work is to me and I know other writers feel the same. What I don’t understand is how they can go day after day challenging the odds of losing it all.


So here’s the scenario: your masterpiece has taken months, years even. You’ve collated volumes of research, made your fingers ache from typing, poured your soul into those passages; but just as the end is in sight, or the deadline looming, you sit down one morning, switch on your trusty computer, and it makes an odd noise. The screen remains blank – or worse, it displays some terrifying error message. Concerned, you try turning it off and on again. This time it makes the sort of mechanical grinding noise that you’d expect if you stuck a pencil into a hairdryer and the true realisation hits; whatever unfortunate mechanical failure your (no longer so trusty) computer has just suffered, it is of almost insignificant concern compared to what you’ve potentially lost on its hard drive – months of work excised from existence at the whim of whatever hairy ape passes for a god of all things digital. 
Exactly this scenario happened to a friend recently; she lost all the work for her master’s project and goodness knows what else. Hopefully a data recovery service may be able to retrieve the data, but it all costs money and takes time. While I commiserate with her (I really do feel for you Kelly), it’s time and money that shouldn’t have been lost. But any writer could just as easily lose the whole lot by leaving a laptop on a train or having it stolen from a car.


Ask yourself: just how precious is my work, how much of it can I afford to lose? A few sentences, a page, ten thousand words? Now be honest here: when did I last back everything up?  If you do back up regularly, well done – have a high five and a warm, slightly smug moment. If not, it’s a habit that I guarantee will save your digital bacon at some stage.
It comes down to this. If you are writing, or aspire to write professionally, you need to think of your equipment, and the files you create with it, in a professional way. It’s okay, you can still arrange fluffy toys along the top of your monitor, or cover your laptop in Zombie Boy™ stickers; but you need to get into the habit of backing up your work and making archives periodically. 


The road to hell, as the saying goes, is paved with good intentions; most people have them about making backups, but remembering, or figuring out what they should back up and how, can often mean that when disaster strikes they haven’t actually got round to it. However, some simple options are available that can be set up to provide automatic backups, as well as some very handy online solutions which should ensure that when the inevitable crunch happens, you’ll be breathing a sigh of relief, rather than a whimper of despair.
If you are intending to preserve your whole computer system, including all those family snapshots, video tutorials (or in my case huge chunks of uncompressed digital film), you will need to buy an external hard drive that has the same memory capacity as the one inside your computer. Yes, it will cost actual money, but think about what you are protecting here, and these days big USB external drives are fairly cheap – less than 50 quid, or 75 bucks down at the local supermarket.
If you own a Mac, this external drive can be set to be the Time Machine drive via the Time Machine settings in the System Preferences. This will not only make an hourly backup of any changes on your computer, but can also be used to hunt back in time and restore previous versions of files you may have saved days, or even weeks, before – so no more worries about accidentally overwriting a file.
On a PC running Windows, a similar automatic system can be set up by opening the Control Panel, and then clicking the Backup and Restore option. This allows you to schedule the external drive to back up daily, or whenever you click Backup Now. It may also be set to schedule a backup for a single folder or file, which can come in handy if you are working from a laptop away from your desk, as a small USB pen drive can be used instead of an external hard drive.
Other interesting methods of ensuring your precious work (and arse) is protected from disaster utilise some of the new cloud computing solutions that are available. Many ISPs already offer a storage service as part of their broadband package, but there are numerous free online backup services available such as those from Mozy.co.uk or IDrive.com. 
However, the best solutions for writers are those that offer synchronisation, like Sugarsync or Dropbox. Both of these services work with most operating systems and devices including tablets and phones. Each works in a similar way, allowing you to set folders on your computer to be automatically backed up online. If you make any updates to the files in those folders, it will be backed up as soon as you do so. Even better, you can set other machines like your laptop, or ipad to synchronise with the same folders, so your work is not only updated on all your devices, it is backed up at the same time. The free offering from Dropbox gives 2GB of space and Sugarsync 5GB, but if you use their pay service you could easily backup your entire drive. It is even possible to share selected folders with family or clients.
Provided you can access the internet, this ability to rove and get at your files from anywhere makes it very easy to ensure your current project is always backed up – hopefully before you manage to douse your keyboard in skinny frappelatto.

I’ve mentioned just a few ways to protect your work, although there are numerous other easy to use solutions out there, so there isn’t any excuse not to be covered (I’m always interested to hear about more, so please let me know). Whether you are a novelist, journalist, non-fiction writer, poet, scriptwriter, editor or just enjoy getting your thoughts down on digital paper, if it means something to you, for goodness sake, make sure you look after it! Back it up and make an archive of your work. Do it today, and thank me tomorrow.


Backup Trivia: the accepted forms are backup as a single compound word for the noun, and two separate words back up when used as a verb.


Further Useful Links:
http://www.adrive.com
http://www.dropbox.com
http://www.crashplan.com
http://www.idrive.com
http://mozy.co.uk
http://www.spideroak.com
http://www.sugarsync.com
http://www.wuala.com
http://www.zumodrive.com

Illustration©Simon Cornish 2010

Killing Darlings

The 'Kill Your Darlings' advice attributed to both William Faulkner and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch is generally interpreted as telling writers to be objective about their editing. It recognises that writers need to be particularly brutal with those passages that they have fallen in love with in the first draft; chances are those will be the passages they will indulge far beyond their usefulness to the story.

I've been doing this a lot recently. Heck, I may even be turning into a serial killer. The fact that, whilst I'm slicing bits of text off salami fashion from one end of this draft, I'm sneakily scribbling new scenes  elsewhere, is neither here nor there. I'll wait for the third draft before I start hacking those down to size.

But in the meantime, I thought it might be good to share some of these lost souls of novelistic fancy. Summon them up from digital purgatory and allow them a few brief moments of freedom before they fade from existence.

This one is simply called The Duck Dream, I'll give it no further qualification that that.

Is this part of it? No, I think it's now; I'm sitting on a bench in a trim English park with ornamental trees, the sun is warm and I can smell the grass. In front of me is a path that circles a big ornamental pond. On the pond are ducks, lots of ducks. At the other end of the bench sits an old lady, feeding the ducks bread from a big brown paper bag. One of the ducks, a large ugly looking black and white brute, with wrinkles of puffy red flesh about its eyes and beak, peers up at me with that hopeful look that animals have when they think someone might feed them. I look back at it.

'Sorry,' I say, 'I don't have any bread, go to the lady at the end, she'll feed you.'

The duck carries on looking at me for a bit, then opens its beak

  'you have a bag, is there nothing in there?' it says.

'No that's to cover me, I'm different.'

'Seems like a waste of a good bag to me. Why are you trying to do what everyone expects you to, why don't you accept what you are?'

'What do you mean?'

'Look, you wear a bag because everyone else expects you to, they have assigned a place to you in society, you conform to that because you want to fit in and be accepted.'

'Well, yes, I guess so.'

'So, you are effectively letting your own kind down by trying to fit in to the society of the normals, trying to behave like one of them.'

'What? You hardly seem qualified, you've got to be the ugliest duck on this pond and you are behaving just like the others. Apart from the talking bit.'

A passing pug being walked on a long extendible leash trots up some meters ahead of its owner scattering the ducks in all directions.

'Ignore the duck, he's got it all wrong,' the pug says, looking at me with divergent eyes; 'if you want to get anywhere in this world you've got to integrate, be like them, fit into their expectations, if you can't be normal, behave the way they expect you to as a diff. Show them gratitude if they offer help even if you don't need it, laugh at their ignorant jokes, respond to their awkward questions, and pretend you're stupid, there's no point in fighting it.'

Second Draft

Now I’ve begun the second draft stage of writing my book, I’m finding it as much of a challenge as the freeform creativity of the initial draft. I’m much more aware of the pitfalls in the writing, the structure of my scenes, what they are contributing to the narrative, and how they flow within themselves. I’ve also had to write tailor made scenes, to fit the specific needs of the overall plot –something I’ve found quite difficult to do whilst still trying to maintain a natural flow to the writing.

In this draft I’m also aware of some of the format constraints I’ve created for myself. The book, as I have written it, has a form of framing set up by the opening chapter, with the character speaking in first person –this has now lead to me writing all the flashback scenes in first person. The trouble with this currently, is the tense, I keep flipping between wanting to write all the flashbacks in present tense –which sounds better– or wanting to write them in past tense –which makes more sense in terms of reported experience. Present or past, flip-flip? I’m aware of the need for consistency, but at some point I will need to draw a line under it and stop re-writing.

This is a tiny flashback scene that appears very early in the book, which I have just updated to past tense, but as I write the subsequent flashbacks – concerning Melanie’s experiences at school– I’m beginning to wonder if it would be better as present tense after all.

Sugary Treatments
“Outside the big sash windows the wind shook red and yellow leaves from the trees, toying with its prizes as they fell, inside within the white painted room, with it's lofty ceiling and chipped edged desk, everything had a clean look to it, not sparkling-clean like the kitchens in adverts, but the worn-clean of things that get scrubbed almost daily. A hint of antiseptic tantalised my nostrils. I’d been here, or somewhere like it before, but those recollections were less clear. It probably wasn’t long after my third birthday.
Other than the desk and the wooden chairs the only other items in the room were a wheeled stainless steel cabinet against one wall and a high examination table-bed. The sort I’d often been lifted onto as the different doctors made clicking noises with their tongues or breathed loudly through their noses, checking me over –just a little test, it might feel a tiny touch cold, this won’t hurt a bit.
Maman would tell me ‘I’m a very patient patient’, which always made me giggle. Sometimes, if I’d been extra good, one of the doctors gave me a sweet in a wrapper or a lollypop, sometimes.
The room was on the second floor of a grand old Edwardian building that must, at some point in it’s long history, have been turned over from luxury mansion to austere health service clinic; with its high ceilings and wide halls that made ghosts of every footstep on our way up via a once grand staircase, lost beneath stratified gloss paint and linoleum.
I dandled my legs beneath the adult sized chair, attempting to pay attention. My parents either side, a comforting mass of texture and warmth. Daddy holding my hand, giving it an absentminded squeeze now and then. Maman elegant and straight backed. They were talking about me; grown-ups did that a lot. They listened with serious expressions, nodding occasionally at the specialist's turgid medical parlance. In my imagination each word became a long hairy caterpillar crawling about the neat desktop. He talked about some sugary treatments from America, I wondered where he kept them, perhaps the desk drawer, or in the metal cabinet.
Maman leant forward, her mascara painted eyelashes looking dramatically long from my low viewpoint, and interrupted him. Her tone suggesting she'd had enough of his caterpillar words. She wants me to be happy, she says. Then asks if it can’t wait until I’m older, old enough to understand what could happen, old enough to make my own choices.
The doctor tells them, that the choice is theirs, I’m bright and otherwise healthy, my quality of life shouldn’t decline. He stood and walked over to the shiny metal cabinet. I craned my neck to see as he opened the doors and pulled a folded paper object from a stack on one of the shelves, shaking it open with a flick as he brought it over to me. I glimpsed a pair of holes cut into the front as he lifted it and, not ungently, slid it over my head, using a word unfamiliar to my three year old hearing, a word I understood as something like ‘prophecy’, though the actual word was most likely prosthetic, or even prophylactic; neither of which is technically correct, but ‘prophecy’ was what I remember hearing as my head was enveloped by that first bag.”

Time to Draw

Is being self-employed ruining my creative potential?

I just drew the image above. It took me about ninety minutes. No reason, no mulling it over, I just picked up the stylus and let my hand put down what it wanted. It's been a while.

Sometimes I need to remind myself it's all still there, ready to be used. The reason why I don't do this kind of thing very often is simply that I don't allow myself to. Somewhere along the line I was programmed to see anything that was ultimately not going to pay the gas bill, or the shopping, or the astronomical cost of running the car, as bad, a waste of time that could be better spent on promoting myself or writing 'the book'. My self employed dream has become a bit of a nightmare. If I can't take the time and the pleasure to draw nice little concept doodles, how can I afford the time to do the same with my writing. This is something I need to address before it's too late.

I hate to admit it, but I think, that whilst self employment has offered a great many freedoms and benefits over the years I think the security of a salary in this current climate would be a good idea, though it would need to be a job that allows me enough spare time to sit down and appreciate the simple pleasure of being creative. Is that too much to ask for?