Method writing?

Yesterday I had to go to Switzerland for work. Whilst waiting for my (delayed) flight in the airport, I wrote you a lovely little blog post about making the most of your travels. I was almost all done when my wifi connection ran out, and sadly it didn't save. Don't you hate it when that happens? Makes you realise the importance of backing up your work!

Anyway, I talked about not only going out and seeking inspiration (like on my field trips), but also soaking up the inspiration from all around. I've got a little bit Dawson's Creek about the whole thing, tending to over analyse everything I'm thinking and feeling, physically and emotionally. So now when I go for a run, I imagine what it would be like to run for long periods of time for the sake of a journey - how the air feels in my lungs, the way the ground blurs past, how the day sounds compared to the evening, how long there is between sunset and dusk, that sort of thing. And then I push myself into a sprint and try to feel what it would be like to be running away. How long can I sustain the speed? What does it do to my body? How does it affect my other senses?

It makes running more interesting, anyway.

Yesterday after I'd done what I went to Zurich to do, I walked for hours in heels and a pencil skirt, while carrying my 'luggage' of sorts. It's a world away from the experiences of my main character, Chase (hence the name of the book), and yet by the end of the day I was exhausted and my feet were so, so painful. In fact, they still hurt now. It feels like the soles are bruised. Chase is on the run from her captors throughout much of this novel, so even while I'm moaning about the state of my feet, I'm thinking - I can use this.

Is there such a thing as method writing?

So anyway, here is a picture of what I walked miles to find: a post-work tourist snap of Zurich for your viewing pleasure. Quite the relief to come across this after getting lost in the seedier part of town. Let's hope Chase has a better sense of direction than I do!

 

#amwriting

It has always been my ambition to be an author. I think at some point I must have nudged that dream into the category of 'fantasy', together with my other lifelong ambition to be besties with Kirsten Dunst circa. Bring It On. It's only relatively recently that I've thought, 'Hey, I could actually do this!' (Be an author, that is. I feel like Kirsten just isn't the same anymore. That ship has sailed.) So I wrote a book. It's called Half a World Away. It's a romance of the Katie Fforde variety, perhaps for a slightly younger generation (no offence Katie, I totally read your books, but I'm not sure many other people my age do). Of the several people I gave it to for general feedback, I think maybe three people actually finished it. No, four. And the feedback I received was not overwhelmingly positive. I was broken. I didn't actually do Dawson Leery crying, but I felt like I could. It was a punch in the gut.

Picture that bit in the second Twilight movie where Bella stares out of a window for four months.
That was me.

Anyway, despite all of that, the fact remained that I had written a novel. A 104 000 word novel, no less, proving - if nothing else - that I could sit and write 104 000 words, something I never knew about myself. And then an idea came for a new book, something completely different, and although I had a wedding to plan (did I mention I'm not the wedding planning type? That's not exclusive to weddings, actually. I am not good at planning), I couldn't help it. I started to write again.

The idea took root...I wrote the first few lines in an email to a colleague at work in June. I tried to put it off and focus on the wedding, but it was constantly niggling at me, like it wanted to be written. So when I got back from honeymoon, I started putting pen to paper. By 1 November, I had written 13 000 words. Then came Nanowrimo, and another 50 000. By January, the first draft was done at around 95 000 words. When I put the title at the top of the first page, I felt pretty good about myself. 'Hey girl,' I thought (my inner self sounds a little bit like feminist Ryan Gosling), 'You just wrote your second book. Congrats!'

Except this time around I knew I wasn't finished. I'd even saved the file on my computer with the file name '1st draft'. This time around, I was going to edit the beep out of this beep until it became the best beeping book you ever read in your whole beeped up life.

And so that's where you find me right now.

#amediting