Composting, Dreaming & Other Hard Work

You know it's too early to start the heavy planning or the first draft, but what can you do now to help your brilliant new idea?

Not for the first time, I’m contemplating going back to an earlier project. Not, heaven forbid, re-working the text, but writing a new text built on some of the same ideas and situations. One of the advantages of doing things this way is that the researched material has mulched down nicely in the back of my head, in the sense that Rose Tremain talks about here. 

If you’re anything like me, you are therefore dying to get on with pinning down this exciting new project, starting the first draft, Getting On With It? Not least because it’s so much more fun than the fourth draft of the current project, not to mention the laundry, the house-repairs and the tax return? But equally, a) you don’t have diary-space at the moment for the long stretches of dedicated time that first-drafting takes, and b) you know that actually it will would be the better for this pre-drafting stage being slower and gentler.

So is there anything you can do to help the process of mulching down, without dropping all your other writing and diving in prematurely? Are there compost accelerators?

Photo by Gabriel Jimenez on Unsplash

As a killer of spider-plants I’m not the best person to pursue horticultural analogies, but I do know one thing: making compost is a process of sometimes turning it over, and sometimes leaving it be.

LEAVING THINGS BE

Ignore the project

• I sometimes think of this as not-thinking: don’t direct your thoughts towards it, just wait until its claims on your attention reach a clamour

• The character who keeps claiming your attention, the situation that you endlessly puzzle over, the period which won’t go away … as I was saying in The Value of Forgetting) these are almost always worth pursuing.

• But to be sure it is that kind of character, situation or period, you need to walk away from it and do something else. When you do let it reclaim you, you’ll have picked up all sorts of other things which change and enrich the possibilities.

• If it turns out to fall away and not nag at you, then you know it’s not for you.

Write something else

• This is the quicker way to push a project to the back of your mind and into the dark so that it can get on with breaking down.

• This is one reason I’m positively pleased to have two projects, at different stages: working on the other novel isn’t necessarily writerly adultery.

Be patient

• If you turn compost over it too often it cools before the separate elements can mulch together, but if you’re someone who deals with desire by going headlong for it (don’t ask me how I know this!), you may experience your impatience as frustration.

• Recognise that frustration, at bottom, as a form of fear - in this case that if you don't grab the project, ideas, characters, now, they’ll somehow escape. The nice thing about writing ideas is that they’re usually just as good years from now. As Sophie Hannah suggests, be very wary of any idea or plan which will only work if you do it now: there’s a reason that salesmen/women and fraudsters work that way, and it’s not for your benefit.

• Recognise that the longer you leave starting this project, the better a writer you’ll be.

TURNING THINGS OVER

One way of dealing with urge to commit all your time to this project prematurely is to let yourself do some turning-over.  Not, I’d suggest, as part of a time-tabled progression towards the moment when you start drafting the novel, but in a looser and more free-form way that encourages stuff to ‘rise into the anarchic, gift-conjuring’ part of your mind.

Reading round

• When you’re reading a book about the topic, I suggest you avoid making notes: this is all about feeding the compost, not about providing a traceable bio-chemical analysis later. Notes help you to remember, but they also pre-determine what you will remember.

• But if it’s my own copy I might write headings in the margin (e.g. CLOTHES Children). I think of this as ‘indexing’; later I can flip through to confirm what I’ve remembered, or make notes in full.

• In reading fiction it’s much the same. Yes, I read like a writer but, as when I was reading Wolf Hall, I’m not revising for an exam, I’m trusting that my intuitions about storytelling are being fed and grown.

• Try other kinds of reading: to explore the themes and feelings the story seems to involve: poetry, myths, folk tales.

• Try different kinds of experience which might evoke similar things: music, paintings, landscapes. But, again, remember that this isn’t organised research.

• Having said all that, do keep a list of what you read and which library you got it from; there’s nothing more annoying when you are finally first-drafting than to find you’ve no idea where an important element came from.

Dreaming on Paper.

As I was discussing here, the kind of thinking-on-paper which you could call planning can actually be a way of doing some much more free-form imagining. In a workshop we listed all the different things you might do to play with irresistible ideas

• freewriting

• family trees

• sketch-maps

• spider-diagrams of tensions and relationships

• plans of buildings

• clusters on characters or images or themes

• rhymewells on important words

• lists of names

• quotations that seem to resonate

• possible titles if they occur to you

Then there are the things which are slightly nearer to actually writing.

• pen-portraits of places and characters

• a short story that brings someone or something into focus, or catches a voice.

Just remember these are not trying to be first draft: they have a different purpose, and you will want to keep in open, relaxed, receptive, freewriting, mode.

Brooding on the story, not the plot.

• This is about the journey you make, not the route you take. 

• Again, this needs to be very free-form - very much dreaming, not building.

• I try - though I don't always manage - not to let myself be lured into beginning to work it out in an organised, logically connected way.

And if I really can’t help myself - if it all seems to so ready that I really must start planning my route - my plot - or die, then I let myself. As with your characters, so with your stories: you’re in control, but sometimes you have to hear what they’re telling you to do, and do it.

A version of this post first appeared on Typepad in 2013.