imagery – Journey Of A Novel

The tip of my tongue

Tanya V 15 February 2023

When lost in conversation, listening, sharing ideas and swept up in the momentum of back and forth I can have moments when the thing that I want to say, to share and express, is there at the edge of my mind but no longer fully formed. It was brimming in my mind not a moment before, but then wavers beyond my focus, and I have to wait because it will return. It’s on the tip of my tongue.

Wait, what was I going to say? Oh I just had it!

I smirk at the fact that the words I had formed in my mouth ready to speak are gone. I wait and let go of the need to speak and shake my head. The words will return when I stop searching my mind for them.

It happens to us all.

This same thing is happening to me now with my 4th draft.

It’s the first chapter that has me coming to my keyboard, pausing and looking off into space with purpose as if the words will appear there.

The beginning needs to be reworked. I have moved forward bit by bit making decisions for the start of the story to be stronger, imagery to be more on point, the character better introduced, and researched points to add. This is structural and detail though, the writing of it is challenging me.

Words elude me when I sit to write, I have a snapshot in my mind rather than a scene playing out.

So, the same as when the words are on the tip of my tongue I will wait for the scene to form clearly in my mind.

A numbers game

Tanya V 26 March 2022

Today I completed the 2nd draft of chapter two, and I have three people reading to give me feedback which is three times more than I had for my 1st draft. The word count is dropping as I slash away superfluousness with a flurry of backspacing, and I’m now frowning half as much when I read back over what I have written.

My love of words has taken a turn from wanting to keep them all to trashing every attention stealing syllable that could distract from story, narrative, or the focus of a reader’s imagination. After many years of adding more words, more ideas, and more story it’s time now to start taking away.

So, my writing journey seems to have shifted from the words to the numbers.

Getting it all out and getting it all down has worked a treat for me with room to play with my words on this second pass of my work. To do this I have made copies of my 1st drafts and named them as 2nd drafts so that I can edit away indiscriminately with only the story in mind while still having my 1st draft copies untouched.

The other main focus while writing the 2nd drafts is to restructure each chapter with an idea that I have for story formatting to assist with the flow between characters, settings and story stages – well, that’s the plan.

I can feel a new rhythm setting in now that I’m into 2nd draft territory and it is a relief. As I reached the end of my 1st draft journey I was beginning to feel disconnected from my work, I felt a kind of creative limbo caught somewhere between nearly done and ready to begin again afresh.

Handling shi(f)t

Tanya V 27 February 2022

I wrote about 500 words more since I last posted. Not a lot but still it is written and I’m happy with it. The chapter that I am writing has passed on to the next part; I had found it difficult to process where I am at in the story. Initially I had planned for this to be the last chapter, but that was long ago before I could envision where my words would lead me and now I find that I will need to write another chapter or two beyond this one to tell the tale.
The circle is almost complete in terms of the heroes’ journey formula with my character taking fresh steps on a trodden path with new insights. With that I have been mindful of capturing the change along with the familiarity and hope that I can do this idea justice.
Next is the ‘anticlimax’ for ‘final challenge’ where my protagonist will confirm above all else the change within by demonstrating innate change within their world. I want this to be more of an internal recognition; I want the protagonist to quietly surprise themselves with the change that they demonstrate. The best way that I can think to do this is by demonstrating an emotional shift in reaction to the world about them. An enactment of them handling their shi(f)t without the need for an external reference point.
The closer I get to the end the more keen I become to return to the start with fresh eyes after having written so many words since I began. There is a cohesiveness that I plan to weave through with imagery and themes and ideas. If I can pull off what I have in mind I’ll be happy with the result and that will be very satisfying indeed.

Another 1000

Tanya V 23 June 2021

I’m inching my way through chapter six’s first draft with a lot of new writing. I have over 6000 words written for this chapter already from past writing workshops and prompts but I’m not feeling this chapter the same way as when I wrote in the past. The bones of the story haven’t changed, I’ve added a character to create some depth to the action and I’m messing with the sequence of events a bit from what I originally planned. The way that it’s coming along I think that I will be able to integrate some of what I think needs to be added to chapter five. I’ve put chapter five on the back burner, but it keeps coming to mind with thoughts about if I should expand it to be two chapters making it chapters five and six and taking my proposed chapter total to ten chapters rather than the original nine chapters. These thoughts about chapter five haven’t stood in the way of me progressing they have actually enhanced the writing of chapter six with more consideration about theme and imagery and prompted me to write notes for previous chapters to work in when I go back to do second drafts.

The further into the story I get the more I realise what I couldn’t have known when I was starting out. The saying ‘a story writes itself’ is making more and more sense to me as I progress.

I’ve written another 1000 words for chapter six in the past week. I would prefer to have finished the chapter, but it is what it is and this chapter seems to require more reflection as I tip toe into the writing of it. When the words weren’t flowing onto the page, I resorted to writing a list of story points for the chapter to get the events that I wanted to happen solid in my mind. Rather than staring at a blank page, or the blank part of the page, I now have a narrative ’to-do’ list that stares back at me. The list has really helped as this chapter has my protagonist moving from one location to another in a way that isn’t planned so it felt disjointed in my mind and I kept getting lost as to where I was up to. The list in this case has provided a reference point rather than having to repeatedly wrap my mind around where I’m at.

I expect that for the rest of the chapter I’ll use some past writing of the 6000 words or so I’ve previously written along with some new work which will make up the end of chapter six. I also suspect though that I will have enough space in my wordcount before it caps at 5000 words to go back to the start of the chapter and write in some of what was unwritten in chapter five. This might work, it might not, I’ll have to see.

In the flow

Tanya V 19 June 2021

For chapter six I’ve written just over 800 words that I’m really happy with. It only took about an hour or so of writing to get them out and get them down, but it took nearly two weeks of thinking about it before that. Also, before I began to write I added to notes for the chapter development, revisited the chapter notes to the previous chapter and began a new file to charter the theme, imagery, and character development of the protagonist throughout all chapters. All that along with the angst that accompanies bouts of not writing, the guilt that underpins it and the self-involved dramatization of sense of purpose. My mind has been busy even if my hands haven’t been busy banging out the words on my keyboard.

Introspection has been a necessary evil to keep my headspace aligned with the protagonist as they too have been traversing their sense of self and coming to terms with their progress through life. My navel-gazing then has been of value in this respect. At the top of my list for honouring my process and progress is to mindfully observe myself, where I’m at and how I can integrate my human experience best into my creative experience.

With all of that in mind I sat myself down today and wrote. My approach was ‘don’t leave the room’ aka Limitless style. I found it hard to get started which is why I wrote notes. I’d been thinking about the notes I added for the past couple of weeks, so it was good to get them down and make space in my head for other words and ideas. Once I had the notes in order I had a clear picture in mind of where I am up too in the story and wanted to get writing.

I wrote about 300 words and stared disappointedly at the word count as I was certain that was all that I had in me. One good thing about that thought though is that I am often wrong so it became easy to ignore. I read over my 300 words and added more that needed to be there. The word count grew with the image of the scene in my mind, each word I wrote contributed to the clarity of my vision as the scene came into focus. The other side of the 300 words flowed out of me as I more than doubled the wordcount to write the opening of the first draft of chapter six.

Creating reality one question at a time

Tanya V 5 April 2021

The narrative in the part of chapter four that I’m writing is sparse. The section is based on a folklore tale that has lots of sketchy detail and imagery that is far from reality. How much weight in reality my novel has is something that I have struggled with in the past. It has previously tripped me up and stopped me from getting into writing. What is reality anyway? How “real” does a story need to be? Is truth stranger than fiction? In reality people believe in ghosts, some cultures honour their ancestors as if they still live, and people build their beliefs and values on things that they cannot see, touch or experience. When is something far-fetched? Does it matter? Can I write questions forever without ever answering any of them? All these questions and more plagued me for a long time but then I came to accept that none of the questions have to matter.

The world is made up of individuals who have unique experiences and are able to identify with others based on the shared experience of the human condition. That is my understanding and logic of what reality is, and based on it I no longer struggled over the idea of reality within the context of my novel and writing my novel began. I need to be clear about what I’m writing and not lost in the peripheral variables of the unknown.

So, I decided to skirt along the edge of reality making things questionable with the use of language and imagery. Just like life it may be hard to determine at times what is real or what is a vision. There are points where reality shifts through personal realisations and the world looks different. Characters will grow and change and transform in ways they could not foresee. People will face challenges that provoke a response in them that they would not otherwise have had causing transformation in both inner and outer worlds.

I’m still chugging through chapter four making progress but not at the speed I want. There’s been demands on my time and distractions taking my focus away from my novel but I am still writing regularly. That’s my resolve; even if I don’t have the blocks of time that I want to apply to writing I will still write with regularity, and I am doing this. I’ve added another 200 words which is not as many a I’d like but they read well for first draft work. The last few days I have been off track from my list so I’m back onto it with at least an hour writing each day at the top of my list. Research is up to date with this section so the writing of it is what needs to be done. Time for me to get real and get writing.

From one place to another

Tanya V 2 April 2021

Writing about landscapes… how they change, what’s different about them, what’s the same about them, how they connect and morph from one to the other. What lives there, how does life survive, how much imagery is needed to reveal the place, what details create a vista for the reader… there are a few considerations. There’s so much to consider when writing about places yet now that I’m getting into it there seems to be so few words to describe these same, but different elements. Traversing different landscapes with a feel for how they connect to one another takes a lot of focus. It’s left me contemplating what makes a place.

Chapter four takes my protagonist through a changing landscape into a harsh one and then onto a new land that is unknown. These places serve a purpose symbolically relating to the folklore tale as well as being the places where the story happens. In writing about them I want to capture what each place means as well as what each place is, which is tricky at times. The challenge is to not overwrite things for the sake of writing in what I want to convey thematically along with what is happening. As a solution I’ll write less and let some of the underlying points of story that I hoped to touch on slip by lightly with little emphasis on them. Making a point of every little thing will come across as heavy-handed if the reasoning is not clear to the reader; it may even come across as just plain confusing.

To move forward I’ll tread lightly through the story that underlies and place attention on what’s happening. I want the focus on actions to lead the reader through the story with the subtext providing a subtle richness that isn’t essential to understand the journey of the protagonist. Much like life really, we comprehend so much without ever fully understanding everything.

Another 1000 words have gotten me to this point in chapter four but at 1500 words in total this chapter I still have a way to go before I’m into the rhythm of it. Making the decision to let the storytelling elements that speak to the subconscious fall into the background where they belong has been an aha moment for me. I don’t have to craft things to the point where they are forced, I can let the words and action within the narrative have some breathing space. With this thought in mind writing many places has felt easier. It’s as if by giving myself space to work within, without so many elements intentionally worked in, I’ve also created space to stop and look around at the places that I’m creating in the story.