Firstly I must apologise to you dear readers - I wasn't able to post a Booklog on Sunday (I won't bore you as to the reasons why). On the bright side, the next one will be extra long... ;o)
Did you have a nice Valentine's Day? Or if you think it's a overly-sentimental waste of time that's favoured only by florists and card shops, did you have a nice Monday? Hubby and I always get each other cards but we held off on presents this year as a bit of a money-saver. We also stayed home and cooked a meal (tarragon chicken, potatoes and beans) and watched a film (Troy) instead of going out - more money saved! I don't like the overtly commercial side of the whole thing, but then Christmas, Easter and Halloween are exacly the same aren't they? I guess it's just the way things are these days. He and I know how we feel about one another and that's all that matters at the end of the day. :o)
And so on to today. My 'Romans' studying is ticking along nicely so I've been free to write - hurrah! It always feels like a little oasis of time when these days come round, as though the rest of the week is the metaphorical slog through the desert. I felt drawn back to Project Crunch and, inspired by this blog post I read over at Fear of Writing and also an article in Mslexia magazine, I decided that I would interview my leading lady. Might sound a bit weird? Surely I should be getting something down in the actual story to push up the word count? Well yes, that's true - and the obsessive word-counter/graph-maker in me desperately wants to force the Crunch line in an upwards direction - but I wanted to follow up the character profiling that I did a couple of weeks ago. I did that in bullet points as things occurred to me so it was a little haphazard, a cloud of random facts. It didn't give me her voice.
So I wrote down 'Tell me about yourself'. And she did! Tentatively at first, just the facts - height, build, age, that kind of thing - but as it went on, and more probing questions occurred to me, I found that she was gaining a voice of her own. I asked her about her job and what she was aiming for, why that was important, how she met her fiance and what she felt when he proposed, all sorts of intimate details. And she answered everything completely candidly...even questioning me back when she didn't like what I was implying! It was a lot of fun and pretty revealing - I've learnt things about her that I had no idea of before, so she definitely feels more like a real person now. And the best part is that although I did it most of the day, I didn't run out of questions, there is still more to find out!
One interesting thing to note is that I did all this with pen and paper, not the laptop. I read a while back on a blog (I forget what it was called, sorry!) that a study had been done comparing two groups of people - one writing and the other typing - to see how much time in a given period was spent writing, how much editing, what the end word counts were, that kind of thing. The typing group spent a lot more time editing as they went along, while the pen group wrote more and did one edit at the end (I'm paraphrasing/summarising greatly here of course!). I read that and thought 'ah, so that's the reason why I can't seem to stop myself self-editing as I go along - because I'm on the laptop and the ability to do is right there in front of me within a couple of clicks'. It makes it much too easy to make changes.
I hate crossing things out when I'm writing on paper (too much of a neat freak) and when I did this work today I found two things: 1) I chose my words more carefully, so as to minimise the likelihood of wanting to change them and 2) once I got into the magical zone where the right words were flowing and crossing out was not necessary, it really was as though I was just writing down what somebody was telling me. The feel of pen on paper and the fact that I wasn't making the odd unavoidable keyboard typo meant it flowed better...though my wrist was aching a bit towards the end - it's been a long time since I did a lot of hand writing!
I wrote 24 and a half A5 pages, so at about 110 words per page that's approximately 2695 words altogether. Not bad at all! Though I can't lift and drop it into the story as it is (that would definitely be a case of telling, not showing - a Very Bad Thing!), there will almost certainly be snippets that can be incorporated into conversations between the characters. And the rest...well, I'll save that for an 'interview with our heroine' blog post once the book is published... ;o)
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