Treading Water

Swimming against the tide

I have a confession to make.

I have been finding it hard to write these past few weeks.

Usually, I just let that feeling stew, safe in the knowledge that the words will flood back. But this feels a little bit different. I know what I want to write. I’m ‘working on’ my dystopian manuscript. You might remember it. It is the 76,000-word product of #twobadpagesaday¹ Eighty days of regular keyboard tapping, a story plucked out of my imagination, pantsed into a start-middle-end arrangement that had all the hallmarks of being a work of substance.

It is was is a shitty first draft².

Which is just fine. It is a good place to start, they say … so it must be a case of ‘Just Edit, Right’ … wrong. It really is .. how shall we put it? Not. Very. Good.

Perhaps we should think more about ‘Just Rewrite, Right’.

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Before putting pen to paper on this fresh draft, I stopped with the pantsing and got serious about sketching out some details … who are the characters, what ‘world’ are we setting them in, what’s the story.

No surprises, things have changed. The breakthrough moment came when I realised the lead character wasn’t who I thought it was … well, it kind of was, but he shares centre stage with someone else. And I realised I was knee deep in ‘world building’ but forgetting to explore what the characters were up to.

Some details feel like they belong. A shadow’y security apparatus, the comfort blanket of an under-confident but brutal regime - check. Post-pandemic isolation - check. Sections of the community incarcerated ‘for their own protection’ - check. Elites who pay to maintain their lifestyle, turning a blind eye to the unacceptable face of the regime they are financing - hell yeah.

I think I can be way more confident about drawing the outlines without painting the full picture … more show than tell. I have a notion to drop hints about the backdrop through ‘intelligence reports’ and ‘directives from the heart of the regime’. There was breakthrough moment when I realised that letters written years before could explain how a situation arose. I am pretty confident I have the end of the story in my head. So far, so good. Why then, I hear you ask, are you not tapping away at the keyboard, Barrie, drafting this epic tale of power and resistance?

Here’s the rub.

I realised the other day that the story is not - as I had assumed - a tale of totalitarianism and a fight back against it. It is not evil v good played out in a world not dissimilar to the worst forecasts of the places the world is heading. My story is not a warning about the perils of extremist leaders offered power so entitled elites can maintain the hedonistic lifestyles they wallow in contentedly. Sure, there’s some of this along the way but it is not the heart of the matter.

No, the story is about a father and daughter. It is a tale of estrangement and misunderstanding. I need to write about emotions at the heart of a heartbreaking situation. The only reconciliation that matters in my story would be between the two central characters. To write this story, I need to unlock feelings that I have too often locked away. I have to understand and explain how these things happen and the toll it takes. I need to unlock my own emotions because I understand one side of that story all too well.

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“Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works”

Virginia Woolf

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So, there you have it … I am emotionally invested in my the story and I am having to force myself to address the truths at the heart of fiction that taps deep into my ‘writer’s soul’.

But there is good news. Starting again means I get to write another ‘shitty first draft’ and as Anne Lamont to eloquently points out:

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The first draft is the child's draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later. You just let this childlike part of you channel whatever voices and visions come through and onto the page. If one of the characters wants to say, "Well, so what, Mr. Poopy Pants?," you let her. No one is going to see it. If the kid wants to get into really sentimental, weepy, emotional territory, you let him. Just get it all down on paper because there may be something great in those six crazy pages that you would never have gotten to by more rational, grown-up means. There may be something in the very last line of the very last paragraph on page six that you just love, that is so beautiful or wild that you now know what you're supposed to be writing about, more or less, or in what direction you might go -- but there was no way to get to this without first getting through the first five and a half pages.

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But did you write anything, Barrie?

Yep … 1575 words … the first glimmers of a (re)draft … a decidedly shitty first (re)draft. But words are emerging. Oh, and I just said out loud that the blockage is me. That helps. Perhaps I’ll even start writing about feelings, emotions and the way your chest tightens when you realise how much better you should have handled things way back when. No one is going to be worrying about a tear-stained keyboard as long as some words appear?

Read on for a taster from ‘Against the Tide’.

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Photo by Scott Webb on Unsplash

Chapter 2 - Watched

There was a telltale whirring sound that older model cameras made as they swivelled. The more you heard it, the more powerful the waves of paranoid that battered you. Innocence didn’t come into it. The lines between compliance and a cold grey cell at sub-basement level were deliberately blurred to keep citizen workers on edge. Tide knew that. Everyone knew that. They wanted you to assume the lens was peering your way, tallying up traits that deserved a closer look. And you hoped - though hope was in short supply - that the all-seeing apparatus of the Regime decided to take a close look at someone else, that guy over there, or her. Anyone but you.

Tide heard the whirring. If he had been keeping a tally, he’d have guessed at double figures in the last two weeks. Even a minor cog like him knew that’s too many. Maybe it’s just background noise, part of the constant hum of scrutiny. Who knows? Part of him thought ‘who cares’. But someone did. Somewhere, information was being gathered and tallied up? He hesitated to call it evidence because he’d been force-fed Friday night show trials and a varied diet of punishment video compilations. Life had been reduced to the pathetic ambition of making sure you’re not in the dock or stepping out at the Arena to provide entertainment for true patriots.

He felt an itch and clenched his fists to resist the urge to rub at it. They’d called him Scratch at school, routine cruelty to deflect from their own shortcomings. The red raw inflammation of eczema became a beacon, drawing them closer and guiding their barbs. The cruel attention made it worse. The more he stressed, the more he scratched, an open wound to poke at. Those kids were brutal. They’d probably grown up to become the sort of soulless shits who operated CCTV cameras and logged details of failing citizens just to keep prying eyes off their own shortcomings. He knew he didn’t have the Credits to pay for the medicated cream that would clear up the rash. Maybe it was the run of late finishes or something unpleasant in copper-coloured water dripping from the tap on the rare occasion the mains work. Yeah, maybe. But it’s no coincidence that it got a whole lot worse when he started hearing the cameras.

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Thanks for listening in to the confessional.

Maybe you have a tale about getting in the way of your own creative practice writing. I would love to know how you got past it.

Til next time, happy writing.

Barrie

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Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash

1. It was the copywriters who made me do it … the wits and erudite souls over on X, the Artist Formally Known as Twitter. Start on 1 August and finish on 31 December. Just write two pages a day (who can’t write some bad pages?) and you’ll soon have a novel / completed story / bestseller / pile of printed out pages.

2. Anne Lamott ‘Bird by Bird’ (p51)