Not NaNo November 1

There’s a thing called NaNoWriMo that I’ve taken part in over a few years. The idea is that you write 50,000 words of a novel in 30 days during November. That works out at 1,667 words a day, which is no mean feat in itself. But the big challenge is, of course, telling some sort of story. If you’re going to write a novel you need a tale somewhere in your head to weave the words around. This year I have nothing going round in my head at all. It’s not like me to have no idea of a way to entertain. I have been known in previous Nano years to start typing and hope for the best. Sometimes it works and other times it goes awry.

For instance, a few years ago I started what was supposed to be a comical tale about a magic necklace and its effects of the girl who bought it. The first few paragraphs started well and I found myself tapping the keyboard merrily and chalking up the word total without too much thought of what I was actually composing.

It must have been a couple of pages in before I realised that the story had taken a very dark turn. There was a body, for a start. The girl used a phrase I’m fond of: “Go play on a railway line”. Someone had annoyed her and she used the term lightly as her way to deal with the irritation. Much like I do.  Of course, no-one I’ve said it to (or about) has ever actually done it. But her victim did. The man went off into town and followed the enchantment. The next thing I knew he was hit by a train. Bam! Dead. You don’t expect that when you set out to write a comedy.

Then there was the year I started on an epic four generation tale of a family whose members never reach their 60th birthdays. OK, I admit that wasn’t ever going to be a laugh a minute. It had a few moments of wry humour but it was short on belly laughs. All was going well. The dates all fit together and I found some interesting ways to kill off some of the family members. One died of exhaustion after giving birth to about 14 children. (Most of them died young!) One was hit by a tram in the centre of Manchester. Another died in prison after one of the other inmates took a dislike to him and shanked him with a sharpened comb. Then there was poor old George. For narrative purposes he had to be so depressed that he killed himself by drowning in the canal. I got through most of his history but found that I was hating myself for the horrible things I was doing to him to drive him mad. Incidentally, it was his wife who was hit by the tram! I couldn’t actually bring myself to finish his chapter. That book still languishes on an old laptop somewhere, missing about 17 chapters. To be fair I was a bit stumped about how I was going to get around five of the family into one place so they could all be hit by a German bombing raid.

The book was historically accurate and the bombing raid really happened. I did a lot of research into the life and times of people from the late 19th century through to the start of the 21st. It should have been a very good book, and still would be if I could bring myself to return to it. But I can’t force myself to go back and torture poor George. While I leave the text alone he isn’t dead – even though he was born in about 1920! I’ve written the last chapter, so I know how the book ends. I just have a huge chunk of nastiness missing from the middle.

The magic necklace book ad a similar effect on me. I gave up on it after I’d killed off the guy on the railway line, but I went back to that one the following year. I did eventually manage to turn it into something readable and even got a few laughs into it. I managed to upset a friend because I based one of the characters on her. She was a very large personality and clearly recognised herself in the early chapters I let her read. Big mistake. She gave up reading. So she never found out that she was the heroine of that tale. A little bit like those 1950s school-based stories where a plucky first year saves the lives of a bunch of stupid sixth formers. She started out appearing to be a bit of an air head but in the end she was keeping a deep secret that helped her to overcome the baddie. I was a bit fond of my baddie in that story. He was an enchanted member of the fae who could use glamour to confuse people.  I’m not saying who he was based on, but |I’ve been divorced twice!

The good guy – or one of them – was based on somebody on TV that I thought was a bit of a looker.  Anyone who reads it and knows me will be able to work it out. Who it’s based on, that is.
To be fair I have a bit of a problem with what my characters look like. I’m usually pretty good at coming up with names (when in doubt I go graveyard hunting. You can find some corking names on headstones that you’d never invent yourself!). I can dream up back stories. If you doubt that just you read my collection of short stories about the retired  theatre dresser.  His back story is amazing and so are the backgrounds of several of the bit-part players. So I can string along a convincing narrative but the problem is I can’t start writing until I know what the characters look like. I cannot, to save my life, dream up a face.

Back in the day I would watch TV and pick out suitable faces from the also-rans. You can’t really use big names because people recognise them. So if you need a romantic hero from the Victorian era you can’t really use one of the Doctors Who. Except maybe David Tennant because he would make an excellent Victorian romantic lead and people would forgive you. So you need “that bloke third on the left in the jury in Law and Order the other night”. But these days it’s easier to find a face for my characters.  These days I go hunting online.

It’s surprisingly easy to put something like “blond good looking man early 40s” into a search engine and get a string of photos that look like an identity parade. With a bit of effort you can sometimes get a whole back story to use with the face. Some people are stupid about how much information they put online.  Take this as a warning. If you ever post a selfie from your phone make sure you’ve switched off the location data. Particularly if it’s in your back garden! Otherwise you might just find yourself being stalked by a frustrated author who liked the look of your face to be a serial killer in their latest book. (Of course it could be worse. You could be stalked by a serial killer who just likes the look of your face. )

Take care on where the hunt leads you though. It’s hard to avoid that ‘put your name into Google’ moment. Resistance is futile. That’s how I found out that I run a fire service in Canada; I work for an accountant about 10 miles down the road; I’ve written at least two history text books; and I’m buried in Cambridgeshire.  Scary stuff!

So what was the point in starting this exercise tonight? I don’t have a Nano novel in my brain and it’s not like I don’t spend all day at work writing these days. Why do I feel the need to write 1667 words a night to meet some self-imposed standard?  I don’t NEED to write anything. But somehow I feel better when I manage to keep up the pace. And you never know, I might come up with a workable idea between now and November 30.  Even if all I do is craft a few short stories along the way it’ll be more than I’ve done in a long time. I used to write regularly. I used to have ideas bursting their way through my skull. They knock on the inside of my head and demand to be put into data form. But not lately. I’m not sure where my inspiration went. In fact I wrote a poem a couple of years ago that was precisely about losing my muse. But that was inspired by a sculpture in Leicester Botanic Gardens. It was big and red and angular, I remember. The sculpture that is, not the poem.

I guess I need to have an outlet for my creativity, even if what I create is rubbish. There’s no such thing as wasted words. Any one of these sentences might be the springboard to something better. Or then again it might just languish in my laptop like previous efforts have.

It’s refreshing to know that I can keep up a stream of words until I reach 1,667 and that some people will be daft enough to read to the end. Not many, of course. The ones who love me; the ones who are curious; the ones with nothing better to do.  I just wish I’d noted down my start time to see how long it takes me to get to the target. Because I’m not far off now and I know I’ve been typing for at least half an hour.  Maybe longer. Now I just need 12 words to get to the end. Five, four, three, two, one. Yay!