The White­board Dun­geon of Semi-Formed Ideas

Word­count = 85,205

And then, of course, in the second week the nov­elty wears off and the lazy blog­ger begins to post lacklustre mater­ial with decreas­ing punc­tu­al­ity, los­ing what few read­ers he had to the Her­ald Sun web­site, where Andrew Bolt can always be trus­ted to edify.

For­tu­nately for the reader (still not con­fid­ent enough to use the plural), I am not that blogger.

It’s easy in the first week. Hav­ing spent the past six months cork­ing his cre­at­ive juices, the first full week of writ­ing inev­it­ably leads to the writer extra­vag­antly unbur­den­ing him­self in the man­ner of an over­shaken jeri­boam of cheap pink cham­pagne on a For­mula One podium.

Mmm. This meta­phor is turn­ing unpleas­antly euphemistic, so I’ll aban­don it at this point. I’ll also calm down and stop refer­ring to myself in the third per­son. Draw a dis­creet veil over the pre­vi­ous para­graph and move on.

What I’m say­ing is that I had a lot of ideas in my head in the first week, and by now most of them have been com­mit­ted at the very least to the White­board Dun­geon of Semi-Formed Ideas, so the second week is where you need some sense of pro­fes­sion­al­ism. A lot of people have recently heard me pro­nounce that whereas hobby writers write when they feel inspired, pro­fes­sional writers write when they don’t. This is the part where I prove it.

That’s prob­ably being a bit harsh. I am still inspired, now as much as ever, but the last act, which you’ll be hear­ing a lot about should you deign to return to these pages, is a tech­nical exer­cise, and like Middle East dip­lomacy requires more care­ful plan­ning than wild adventurism.

Hence yes­ter­day. Yes­ter­day my plan was not to add a word to my manu­script, a plan which, I can now reveal, suc­ceeded beau­ti­fully. Instead of typ­ing, which can be con­fused with writ­ing, I cleared the nearest white­board and drew my last act. All of my major char­ac­ters are involved, and all the plot­lines get very close without touch­ing. There are some things the reader needs to learn. Not all of them are true. There are also many things the reader shouldn’t learn, and I have to be very care­ful not to let someone blurt them out in an unguarded moment. This is harder than it sounds because, although it is pre­cisely the kind of naff authorly pro­nounce­ment I exist to exor­cise, fic­tional char­ac­ters do not always do what the author intends. Gen­er­ally, they do some­thing much more interesting.

So I drew my map, placed my char­ac­ters on it then tried to work out what they might do to work their way towards the novel’s dra­matic, thrill­ing and, ideally, sur­pris­ing con­clu­sion. Okay, so if A goes here, B can make their way a bit more slowly towards there, which opens up some time for C to say what they need to say about D before D enters the room car­ry­ing the bloody, severed head of E, oh but then A hasn’t got there yet, and E is his sis­ter, after all. Back to the white­board. Right, what if B goes here…

It’s a long pro­cess which clearly I’m flat­ter­ing with the adject­ive ‘pro­fes­sional’. At least I didn’t make little card­board char­ac­ters and walk them around. As far as you know.

By Monday night, how­ever, I had a clear map of exactly where every­one was going, and there was plenty of room to have fun along the way.

Today was the begin­ning of writ­ing it. Although it will prob­ably end up as one or two long chapters, I’ve star­ted by break­ing it up into five, chapters 30 to 34, each with its own piece of plot. I’ll work on all five at once, as a way of stay­ing close to all the action. Later, when most of the work is done, I’ll knit them together as required, another method of stay­ing flex­ible right until the last minute.

Finally, last week I repor­ted that a friend was run­ning ahead of my word­count, drop­ping sup­plies. I reached the first mile­stone on Fri­day, and there when I opened my front door after lunch was his Woody Allen CD, just where he said he’d leave it at 83,215.

Today I over­shot his second drop, two Luck­smiths CDs at 85,023. I’ll keep my eyes peeled.