Hey! Over here! ... My Electric Eye

Zero: tree-shaking and jelly-making

“I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.“
Oscar Wilde

I’m in the throes of writing a novel at the moment, which is fun but also a bit intimidating because it’s something I’ve started a couple of times before. The first time was a couple of years ago and that time I scribbled down ideas, arranged them in a pretty pattern like shiny little pebbles and the started to write them. And then all of sudden I ground to a halt. I didn’t know what happened next. I sat around waiting for the characters to tell me what to do. The characters sat around waiting for me to tell them what to do. Nothing moved.
 

Second time around I thought, okay, I’m clearly not a writer who is able to bang it out by the seat of their pants. So, I thought, I need structure, structure and a plan. If I plan things I reasoned. I can make sure there is enough depth in my characters and a compelling premise that will support a longer narrative. So I outlined and brainstormed and resolved not to put pen to paper until I was absolutely hundred percent sure of exactly where I was going and with whom.
 

And that time the problems were two fold: firstly I found that outlining just led to more and more outlining. Secondly, writing linear outlines never seemed to generate anything very intriguing plot-wise. Consequently, I never could come up with an outline that looked sufficiently detailed and complete for me to think that I might not run out of steam halfway through it, nor interesting enough that I would want to write it. More importantly, outlining is a lot less fulfilling than writing. (Let’s face it. No-one ever goes to a dinner party and says, “Me? I’m an outliner.”)

So, armed with a smidgen of hope and a search engine I sniffed about to see if there was anything that might get me out of this conundrum. That's when I came across the concept of the Zero Draft. Using this method you get a shortish outline together, set yourself an overall target of words for the project and daily quota. Then you just open up your word processor and have at it each day until you’ve reached your target.

So this is what I’ve been doing for about a week. Admittedly the first couple of days where hard, but that’s because I have a well established way of working, one that flies in the face of Zero Draft. (My internal editor is a very loud and obnoxious individual who likes nothing better than shouting, “yes, but this is poo!” while I type.) Thanks to the support of a couple of lovely individuals I stormed ahead anyway and have come to the key realisation that what I'm writing is more an exploration of ideas and characters than anything else. It isn't supposed to be a definitive anything. Once I committed to that, the words have come easier and don't seem to have been utter shit.

Let’s see how long it lasts, eh?

Related/useful links : 

http://thewritingwheel.blogspot.com/2010/03/draft-fast-edit-slow-zero-draft.html
http://www.carolewilkinson.com.au/news/2009/06/05/writing-process-3-zero-draft/ 
http://justinelarbalestier.com/blog/2009/11/02/nano-tip-no-2-the-zen-of-first-zero-drafts/ 
http://fuzepublishing.com/tapping-the-muze-010-the-zero-draft 
 

New Dawn fades*

I'm aware that this may all be quite academic, now that the dust has settled and our tanned and toothy overlords have settled into their high castle, but this was the first election for a long time that I felt obliged to get involved in (in an admittedly microscopic way), and (perhaps sadly) my motivation had more to do with a wish to stop the Conservative Party from winning rather than from any particularly positive feelings about what the Labour Party or the Liberal Democrats had to offer.

So, I did a load of leafletting and on polling day was posted to a station half-way across town. I'll admit that I felt a little exposed and uncomfortable standing there with my Labour Party rosette on (but at least it went with the colour of my eyes). The main reasons for this were my reservations about the Iraq war. Certainly, if someone had come up to me and asked me to justify supporting the government that had perpetrated it, there would be little I could say.

The big and hairy "but" that floats around these sentiments though, is the fact that the Labour Party has actually done a lot of good over the thirteen years. Yes, yes. There are a lot of things it could have done a lot better, but I can't imagine that (god forbid), if the Conservatives had been in power for at least a small portion of that time that things would have improved to the extent that they have. Yes, the gap between richer and poorer is bigger than it's ever been, but can you imagine how much worse it would have been if Major, Homunculus Hague or IDS had got in?

Britain is a more liberal society than it was when Labour came to power. Witnessed by the fact that the political centre of gravity has shifted leftwards to the extent that the Tories felt the need to detoxify themselves (image-wise at least), in order to have any hope of winning power.

For better or for worse we have a new coalition government in place now, and while its civil liberties agenda is laudable, there is a lot of breathless guff circulating about the dawn of a "new politics". The truth is though, the coalition could not be more rooted in the establishment. Far from being new, the coalition sees us return to a form of patricianism that we've not seen in Britain since the time of Macmillan. I'm sure that I'm not the only one who finds it difficult to stomach declarations of a "new political era" from a cabinet that contains eighteen millionaires, let alone the austerity doctrine or superficial declarations that "we are all in this together". To paraphrase Orwell, some of us are more "in it" than others. (Easy to trash the Child Trust fund when it's not going to impact your milk-fed princelings. Eh, chaps?). New politics? This just sounds like the same old power and money game that's been going on since Julius Caesar was unexpectedly ventilated on the way to the senate.

*with apologies to Joy Division fans everywhere.