sharplittleteeth

From the shore, they look like rubber, like shiny black bicycle tires bobbing in the waves. But then they spout, or roll a square-edged fin into the air. And you realise no, those are whales.

The size of them is joyous.

We spent three nights last week in Warrnambool for my birthday. Work has been grinding me down lately, so it was good to get away. We walked along the beach. We visited the historical maritime village. And we saw the whales. Even with binoculars they were mostly just rubbery black streaks in the waves. But they were still magnificent.

On the train down, I finished Keith Gray's The Fearful, and started reading Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House.

We stayed at the Lighthouse Lodge. At night, the house creaked and moaned in the wind, and I would wake up in the dark, unsure if someone was walking down the corridor outside our room.

I spent a lot of time thinking about ghost stories.

At the Melbourne Writer's Festival, American author Junot Díaz talked about writing short stories. If you don't know how to end your short story, he said, you need to read a thousand stories, and then you'll grow the heart for short stories, and you'll know how to end it.

There was a lot to love at the Writer's Festival: teen blogger Tavi Gevinson's keynote on the importance of being a fan, Magda Szubanski's story about her father, who at age 16 was an assassin for the Polish Resistance, a masterclass with Scott Westerfeld. And I felt proud for Lisa Dempster, the Festival's new director, whom I met through the Emerging Writer's Festival.

But afterwards I felt hollow and pointless. Because I'm not writing, and haven't written anything for months.

Writer's block is not the absence of ideas. Writer's block is the feeling that all your ideas are shit.

I'm trying to write a ghost story. It's not working. It floats dark and shapeless inside me.

I can't pull it to the surface yet. My heart is not yet grown.

I had my first ever interview about my writing last week, for the TaleTeller podcast. It's up now on their website, and subscribable through iTunes: http://taletellerpodcast.blogspot.com.au/2013/04/episode-7-david-whiteveen.html

Listening to it is a bit weird - do I really sound like that? I also talk too fast, and repeat myself. I was nervous, and concerned that we wouldn't have enough to talk about. But actually, the hour flew past pretty quickly.

We talk about writing horror, zines, the Emerging Writers Festival, the Young Adult field, why I don't drink coffee, and the influence of the Rowden White Library on my work. I think I managed to say some interesting things, in amongst the blather.

So. First ever interview.

TaleTeller are also looking for other writers to interview. If you're interested, I can give you their details.

Today is A. and my 12th anniversary. To celebrate, I drew a sloth on her morning cup of coffee.




That's right, isn't it? Twelfth anniversary is sloths?


Meanwhile, in writing news:

Passed the 5000 word mark on my new novel this morning. It's another fantasy YA, about a bullied teenager who finds a wizard's tower hiding in the back streets of Box Hill. Think Narnia meets Summer Heights High.

My previous novel, the grunge thing, is currently sitting in big submission pile at Hardie Grant Egmont's Ampersand Project. If you think I've started a new novel to distract me from thinking too hard about the previous one then congratulations, you're exactly right, have a drawing of a sloth.

The Emerging Writers Festival, my favourite festival in the world, is coming up. I've booked my ticket. I've also proposed another collaborative writing project for EWFdigital. But that's been spun off into a standalone festival this year, so I've yet to hear back about that one.

And finally, I've volunteered for a whole slew of panels at Melbourne's spec fic convention Continuum in June. My panels are: Reinventing the Fairy Tale; Plot 101; The heroines of YA; Marvellous Melbourne; and Misappropriations. Expect some blogging on those topics while I straighten out my thoughts.

I... I better go do some research.

http://www.myspace.com/thestrayswans

(as prompted by kitling )

Today's the first of July. Which means today I start Draft Three of the novel.

I wasted ten years trying to write my first novel. What actually happened was I wrote the first 20,000 words, got stuck, deleted everything, and started again from scratch.

And then I did that FIVE MORE TIMES.

That's ten years of my life as a writer I'll never get back.

So with this novel I had a plan. Three drafts. Each with a specific focus, and a list of things I wasn't going to worry about. And each with a specific end point: producing something that I can SHOW other people.

My breakdown was this:

DRAFT ONE: IDEAS

Dig up the ideas, get them down on the page. Don't worry about style. Don't worry about plot. Just get the raw ideas down. This draft was like a painter's rough sketch -- all about the mood and the possibilities. The details would come later.

Draft One took about three months to write. Only one person ever read it.

Because it was a mess. But it was an interesting mess. A mess with possibility. Which is where Draft Two came in.

DRAFT TWO: STRUCTURE

For Draft Two, I took all the rough, raw material from the first draft, and beat it with a sledgehammer until it formed a coherent plot.

This draft was all about the plot. If I had to write a clumsy sentence to get a scene moving, I'd write a clumsy sentence. Style can be fixed in draft three.

Draft Two took about 10 months to finish.

It was hard work. Mostly because I'm an overambitious idiot and decided to write a plot that alternates between the present and the past. Except I wrote all the past storyline first, then all the present storyline, then had to play chronological Tetris to make the two storylines fit together.

Hint: Don't do this. Save yourself the headache. Start at the beginning, and write forwards from there.

I gave Draft Three to lots of people. I wanted a wide sampling of feedback to see which reported problems were actual problems, and which where just the reader's personal preferences.

(I also wanted lots of people to tell me my book was wonderful and therefore I'm a worthwhile human being. But I'm a writer. We are inherently insecure like that.)

I received lots of great feedback. Two or three big problems were reported by pretty much all readers. And I learnt that everywhere I thought I was being subtle or understated, I was actually just being confusing. This is good to know. And so now I'm embarking on...

DRAFT THREE: FINE TUNING

Draft Three is where I a) smooth off all the plot-bricks so they sit snugly together, b) polish the prose so that it's exciting to read and c) fix all the damn typos.

I'll get a friend or two to proofread it when it's done. But mostly, Draft Three is about producing the manuscript that I will send out to publishers.

I'm hoping it will take about a month.

I'm hoping it will take about a month because the Text Prize is announced at the end of July, and I entered the second draft of my novel into it.

I don't expect to win. Entering was more about having a big, immovable deadline that I had to meet, and the subsequent feeling of progress when I did. But the moment I know that I didn't win, I want to send my book out to other publishers.

And then I start writing the next one.

The Emerging Writers Festival begins today.

Which means Melbourne by Dusk begins as well.

Melbourne by Dusk is a mixed-media story-telling project being run by Angelica and myself as part of the Festival.

It's urban photography meets urban fantasy, flash-fiction faerytales inspired by photos taken around Melbourne. The first few stories will start appearing over the course of the day.

And it's open for submissions. We're after photos, stories, and other Melbourne weirdness. Details are at that link.

We'd love your contributions. Come and play.

We saw David Mitchell talk for the Melbourne Writers Festival tonight.

He was funny, and charming, and smart. His interviewer's Scottish accent was pretty charming, too. A. has never read any of his books, and she enjoyed it too.

He talked about his process for building a novel, comparing it building with Lego. His early novels were so crammed with ideas, he said, because he was afraid of being boring.

His take on difficulty of writing historical novels: if you write them in modern language, people say "hang on...". If you write them in the genuine language of the time, it sounds like Blackadder. So he had to develop what he called by-gone-ese.

An audience member asked him if he found writing a lonely task. After a simple "yes", Mitchell elaborated that any writer complains to you about his work, you should punch him.

Afterwards, I queued to get him to sign my book. "David," he said. "That's a good name." And my brain went Huh? Why's he saying that? Ohhh.

I was, admit, a bit star-struck.

I told him I found his first novel both inspiring and intimidatingly good, as someone who is attempting to write. He was generous enough to offer me some advice: if you have a problem, write what the problem is down on a piece of A4 paper. The solution will be there in the problem.

A quick sneak preview of the project A. and I will be working on for the Emerging Writer's Festival:

http://melbournebydusk.tumblr.com/

I'm not saying this will work for everyone.

But so far? Redrafting this book by rewriting large chunks of it from scratch is actually working very well for me. Certainly much better than editing the original text word by tedious word to fit into my revised plot structure.

...I just jinxed myself didn't I?