Finding my feet (they were always attached to my body)

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Birlinn, Duncan Williamson, Inspiration, literature, Momentum, Scotland, Short Stories, speculative fiction, The Drover, Tired metaphors, Writing

If there’s anything I’ve learned about writing over the last few years, in particular relation to my own behaviour, it’s that I work best with momentum, but like any engine I start with difficulty when cold. And the longer you leave me to gather dust clogging up my spark plugs (just let me run with the tired metaphor, apparently ‘tired metaphor’ is a search phrase that brought a visitor to my blog so I don’t want to disappoint the fans…) then the harder it is to get me going again.

I hadn’t completed a first draft of a story since some time last autumn, I believe. I have written since then – two unfinished first drafts that were quite painful. And an awful lot of avoidance and self-doubt. Last night I finally completed a first draft of a new story, and I’m already 500 words into a new one, which I might actually be enjoying! Stranger things have happened.

This momentum feels good. It creates its own pathways. Ideas form and evolve and the act of sitting down and writing begins to feel like something that I look forward to doing, instead of the monolithic escarpment needing scaled it had become.

So the new short story is a nice light-hearted story of two young heroin addicts and the depths their exploration into themselves reach. Okay, it’s a depressing tale with some unpleasant body horror and drug use and why the hell does my mind take me down these weird avenues? Current title is ‘Love as Deep as Bones’, which I’m quite liking and may well stick.

Next story is something utterly different and a little tester for the fantasy novel idea about Scottish Drovers that’s been rattling around my head for over a year now. This short story is mainly an exercise in voice and how to pare down the plot of the novel to its skeletal basics and tell it in the style of a Scottish Traveller tale, with its everyman protagonist in a battle of wits with the Devil. Thanks to Duncan Williamson’s excellent little collection of Scottish Traveller’s tales – “Jack and the Devil’s Purse” from Birlinn, which has inspired the voice and mode of storytelling.

Keeping the momentum going is always the challenge. My ability to focus on work seems to be worse than ever, but it’s all positive currently and I’ll continue blogging as I roll forward.

Energy efficiency

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Chess, Creativity, Edinburgh, Inspiration, Novels, Sci-fi, Short Stories, speculative fiction, The Drover, Writing

And no, I’m not talking about my gas/electricity bill, but a personal plan for streamlining the ideas/writing/rewriting process. It’s nothing alarmingly new, and is based purely upon advice I’ve already seen repeated a thousand times (it is possible to spend more time reading advice for writers than breathing).

After a few months of staring in quiet desperation at unfinished and unrevised stories, and at a burgeoning ideas file in need of fertilising, I seem to have found a returning passion for the craft – at last. I fished out the 3900 words of uncompleted SF story I started over two months ago and immediately found my way back into it. Three separate ideas all glowed with possibility, and I have just about reached a final draft on “Down the Back of Donald’s Couch‘, my surreal, existential horror tale about the sanctity of living room furniture and losing yourself.

So the plan is to have a three-pronged attack on the go (all until I can finally complete and prepare the research and plotting for the Drover novel).

1. Work up an idea into a writeable story.
2. Write another story.
3. Revise an already written story.

Simple and well-tried, but it keeps me busy and focused, and never without work. The emptiness that follows completion of a draft is often a difficult void to fill, but we’ll see if my plan can work.

And at the same time I’m enjoying the wonders of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and today will hopefully play a little street chess (and likely lose in a most humiliating manner, but it’ll be fun.)

Back to reality

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Creativity, Scotland, Short Stories, The Drover, Writing

Not that I haven’t been in reality these last couple of weeks, but it has felt like a trip to some fantasy land – camping in the North-West of Scotland. Picture above is of the end of Loch Maree with what I believe is Beinn Airigh Charr  (the large dark mountain to the left of the loch).

Back to reality, but what I really need to be doing is getting back to fantasy and writing stories. It’s difficult to attribute any major inspirations from the recent trip but it’s all brewing in there waiting to burst forth like some coronal mass ejection onto the page. Certainly I have a great deal of visceral experience for the Highlands-set novel – the damp, the midges, the bizarre, jutting mountains – each one different to its neighbour, but I’ve no doubt a couple of additional trips will be necessary to secure certain details.

Focus for the moment is submitting some short stories. Three sitting within very close range of final drafts. I shall blog some more about the trip at some point, and post some images.

Whisky and some words

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Edinburgh, Inspiration, Malt Whisky, Novels, Scotland, Short Stories, speculative fiction, The Drover, Writing

An American tourist asked me the other day if I was a whisky drinker.

“Yes,” I said, puffing out my chest like the upstanding Scotsman I am, after all that’s the answer he was looking for. I hate to disappoint the tourists.

“What’s your favourite?” he asked, although I had the feeling he wasn’t looking for a recommendation as such and probably knew more about single malt whisky than I did.

“Well that depends,” I said sounding as worldly wise as possible. “Everyone has their own palate…” and then I went off on a colourful speech about the differing qualities of Islay malts to Speyside, but eventually settled on Aberlour. A bottle of which I am very slowly working my way through at the moment – 15 year old, sherry cask.

What struck me was the romantic associations whisky has –  and I’m twisting this back around to writing here – with the creative impulse. The well-worn image of the writer at his desk, glass of whisky at hand. It worked for Hemingway (although I’d imagine whisky was only one of many tipples he enjoyed). I went through my wannabe 1920’s writer stage, reading Miller and Hemingway and Fitzgerald and smoking Lucky Strikes and drinking cheap whisky. Bringing this over to the novel I am researching, it seems that not a moment went by in a Drover’s life when he wasn’t enjoying his ram’s horn of uisge beatha. Every market and business transaction was coloured by the alcohol, and these guys walked miles every day over hill and through glen with little to eat.

I had a dram last night while puzzling over a new short story, and I can’t say it was the whisky that helped, but 770 words appeared on the page that I was reasonably happy with. At least, I hope it wasn’t the whisky that helped. That could become expensive.

The tourist turned out to be fairly knowledgeable about malt whisky, and had the preference for the peaty burn of West coast malts, those Islay and Jura whiskies that to me, I’m afraid, are like drinking TCP. But I don’t claim to be a whisky connoisseur. Perhaps it comes with age, that preference for a more complicated flavour, something challenging to the  jaded palate. For the same reason that I now enjoy the taste of asparagus and olives – things I  found disgusting as a younger man.

I’ll save the more complicated flavours for the days when my writing has matured to a similar degree.

Field work

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Books, Fantasy, Inspiration, Novels, Scotland, Scottish History, speculative fiction, The Drover, Writing

A recent trip to Perthshire allowed me to visit Crieff, an old market town in the heart of Scotland. Once upon a time that was a beating heart, with Crieff the site of the largest cattle market or ‘tryst’ in the whole country. All of this is pertinent to the novel I wish to write this year, and in essence I have begun writing it. Pages of notes are emerging, but I need to do a lot of research into the historical period I’m setting it in (18th century Scotland mainly) and the background to the character’s professions (drovers – intrepid, hard men who walked hundreds of miles for a pittance and kept the main industry of the time alive).

Unfortunately, all that remains as a standing monument to the legacy of the drovers in Crieff, and to the yearly trysts, was a building out the back of the horrific 1970’s visitor centre (an entire wall of porcelain dogs anyone? Just what you want to buy on a visit to Crieff) with a 15 minute DVD about the history and a few placards on the wall telling the story. At least there was something, but it wasn’t exactly much to inspire the casual visitor about a time in Scotland’s (and the UK’s) history that shaped the land and the politics. That, and the drovers themselves were truly amazing men surviving on little more than cold oatmeal, onions and whisky to drive hundreds of cattle across the hills and glens. The only ordinary men at the time legally sanctioned to carry weapons.

Not that my novel is to be purely about the history. I want to weave in the folklore and fantasy, Celtic and otherwise, and tell a story – a mystery – that I’m gradually getting quite excited about.

Mulling over titles – ‘The Drover’ seems obvious, succinct, a little dull. “The Drover and the Well of Sciehallion” seems a mouthful, intriguing, a little Harry Potter. They are all I have at the moment. It’s coming together. Watch this space.