Tag: writer

Grey rubble, green shoots

~ simonsylvester ~ 1 Comment

2024 then eh? Completed it mate. Somehow. This has been a really hard year for almost everyone I know. I’m not going to dig into the difficulties here – I’ll try to focus on the good things that happened and move onwards in good heart. The headline is that I’m ultimately fine, and so are my family, and I’m fiercely aware the same can’t be said for many millions of others. Enough to say that I’m quietly pleased to be moving to a new calendar.

The systemic implosion of TV and documentary commissioning has had a huge impact on my work this year. I understand this as a bit of a perfect storm, with the inevitable rebalancing of the post-Covid bubble exactly at the crisis point of new media’s schism with broadcast media – just as AI nibbles into post-production crewing. In truth the industry probably needs this time of reckoning, but it still hurts. Between January and June, in the absence of other jobs, and in combination with looking after poorly family, I instead wrote a novel and took on a term teaching at Kendal College. That carried me into the summer, and from there my editing work picked up. In recent months I’ve cut films for Cumbria Wildlife Trust and Beyond The View, as well as writing/script editing and cutting the trailer for Kendal Mountain Festival 2024:

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…I enjoyed that one – both the editing and the words, which I wrote in collaboration with outgoing festival creative director Claire Carter. Right after the festival I cut the KMF highlights reel, and also a brilliant performance by classical clarinettist Jack McNeill at an iconic Lake District location. I’m really excited for people to see that, but it’s Jack’s to share, so I’ll wait for him to release it before posting it here.

2024 brought more voiceover poems – the second for a map-making company in the US, and the third is here in the opening minutes of this excellent documentary about Sandscale Haws nature reserve:

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My biggest project this year was editing a documentary about the Refugees Rock charity, but that won’t be released until January – so I’ll share it and say more about it then.

Two of my highlights of the year came at concerts. The first was realising a 24-year ambition to see Godspeed You! Black Emperor live. Their seminal album Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven was released in the year 2000, immediately and completely transforming the shape and momentum of my listening. It was the first time I’d heard field recordings folded into music, and that returned me to my early teenage years, where I stayed up late with my radio, inching through frequencies, FM then AM then MW, seeking out broadcasts on the very edge of listening. That experience – snatches of voice and song like ghosts in clouds of white noise – made me a ghost myself, another traveller lost in static. Political, defiantly analogue, wild and ferociously human, Lift Your Skinny Fists is my favourite album, and I’ve loved almost everything GYBE have released since – but I’ve never had the chance to catch them live. I bought tickets the moment they announced a UK tour for the new record. Mon and I caught them in Manchester, and they were everything I’d dreamed of for those 24 years – by turns devastating and euphoric, utterly transporting, great walls and waves of sound collapsing into chasms of silence. The live concert took all the craft and the bones of the records and piled on blood and muscle and power. It was extraordinary. The title of this post – Grey Rubble, Green Shoots – is taken from the new album. Seems fitting.

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The second gig was neither wild nor fierce but was equally special. At the start of the year I spotted Orcadian composer Erland Cooper due to perform at St Mary’s Church in Ambleside as part of the brilliant Aerial Festival – an unambiguously artistic celebration of the connections between music and land that casts a spell across the Lakes every autumn. I already knew some of Cooper’s work, and his record Folded Landscapes is a core part of my writing soundtrack – more on this in a second – but I didn’t really know what to expect from this concert. It was the premiere of his new work Carve The Runes And Then Be Content With Silence – written several years ago, recorded onto a single magnetic tape reel which was then buried until such point as it was discovered. Read that last sentence again. Cooper buried the only copy of the recording – and when it was discovered and dug up, he rewrote the score around the warping and degradations of those years in the soil. Where the tape had stretched – that stretching was factored into the final score. Where the tape was destroyed, lacunas of silence now punctuate the piece.

Unapologetically rooted in the seas and skies of Orkney, Cooper often uses birdsong, field recordings, poetry and oral history in his work (much like Godspeed You! Black Emperor, now I think of it) and so it was with Carve The Runes, interspersed with snippets of poems by George Mackay Brown. Uprooted and planted again in Ambleside, the concert was a work of extraordinary beauty, movements both melancholy and uplifting. Performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the concert made me realise that I had never experienced live classical music before – by which I mean unamplified. The sound filled the church like air… it didn’t feel to me to enter my brain through my ears but to exist in my mind spontaneously through an act of communion with the people and the place. I’ve never experienced anything quite like it. Mon and I floated home as though carried by the fog.

That novel then. I’ve been brewing on it for years, and had about 20,000 words of notes to work from. I started writing in January and had a 90,000 word manuscript finished in May, which I think is pretty good around the other things I had going on. I sent it to a dozen excellent reader/writer friends, and took receipt of some strong and consistent feedback. My redraft now needs redrafting, but I hope to get through those tweaks and send it out in January. It’s more speculative/fantastical than The Visitors, but it covers the ground I wanted to cover. It’s the book I wanted to write – about loss, and change, and grief, and awe. I’m long enough of tooth to know that doesn’t mean it’s a book people will want to publish or indeed to read, and that’s okay. In the past I’ve spent years working on novels I didn’t believe in, but I believe in this one. Even if I can’t find a publisher I’m glad I wrote it.

I think that’s enough for now. It’s been a hard year, and I’m glad to shut the door on it. I go into 2025 with my family around me and a good sense of the things I’d like to do with my time in this world… I might even lay down another Resolutions blog post… not least resolving to write about things like Godspeed You Black Emperor when they happen, rather than accumulate the weight of so many things to write about that I never actually have the time to write them. Should probably have worked that out by now…

Much love to you people. Heading into 2025 like Lindow Man:

First with the berries, then with the blade,
third with the noose and then with the stave
baptised in bog and cast into drown
throne cut from sod, moss for a crown
so I go to meet my god:
headfirst in water
a mouthful of mud

Scraps

~ simonsylvester ~ Leave a comment

After a couple of weeks away, and on the back of notes from some excellent readers, I’ve started redrafting the novel. It feels strange and strangely comforting to splash back into that watery world of flooded hearts and flooded houses. I’m weirdly thankful for the industry slowdown that’s given me the space to write, but things are starting to pick up again, and I’m back to work editing some really exciting documentary projects. That means redrafting comes whenever I can grab it – odd mornings and evenings, scrambled hours here and there – and all the while, quietly, quietly, starting to think about what follows…

This is a picture of the cork board above my desk. Each of these scraps is the ghost of an idea. I don’t know what will happen with my current novel, and I don’t know where I’ll land next. Some might be screenplays. Most will likely go no further than this. I’ve reached the conclusion that every project is so distinct that writing a novel essentially means starting from scratch, every time, and learning to write all over again. Maybe one day I’ll stumble across some sort of process that allows for better structure to my writing and my time. Until then – scraps and pins.

Under the hammer

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A year at least, I think, since I posted anything; it’s been a time of change. In Easter 2023 I made the monumental decision to leave Kendal College, where I taught the Film Production course for 12 years. While I always loved teaching the students, the job itself changed radically in that decade, and honestly I was becoming unwell. Leaving was an exceptionally difficult decision… but also the right one. I’m a different person for stepping away. I didn’t realise at the time how heavy a thing it was to carry.

So what next? I’ve left to pursue freelance editing and to carve out time to write. I haven’t exactly stopped writing, but I’ve written far more screenplays than prose, and when I sit down with my novel it’s increasingly hard to pull the right words together. That’s a part of myself I want back, and I understand it needs work. My novel has been stalled at 30,000 words for over a year while other projects called me away; last week I sat down and wrote 500 words on it. That felt good. I want more of that feeling. Writing is a muscle: use it or lose it.

What else? I’ve finally released The Potter’s Field. There’s a lot I’d do differently if I was starting again, and overall the process confirmed I’m more of a writer and editor than a director – but I’m also exceptionally proud of what we pulled together on a shoestring. Particular shouts for Jenny Ann McKay and Marie Rabe, my sensational lead actors. They had incredible chemistry from the very first rehearsal, and it was all I could do to get out of their way. I’m proud to share The Potter’s Field:

I’m also thrilled to announce the release of Maggie, a short horror I wrote for the talented James Kennedy. James has done a phenomenal job with my script, and the performances by Shaun Scott (he of Moon Knight, The Bill) and Lukwesa Mwamba (she of Carnival Row, Doctors) are so good. The film won awards all over the world and has now been picked up by horror channel Alter, where it was seen by 50,000 people in the first two weeks – very humbling. I’m now working on a feature film based around the same characters. I’m not naturally drawn to horror, and I don’t mind admitting that plunging back into this world has given me a few sleepless nights…

I also wrote, co-produced and edited this promotional piece for Impact International. It was a challenging brief and I’m really pleased with how it turned out:

My other work of note was cutting 1h30m of drama scenes for the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. I put myself through a mangle to get the first cut delivered inside a week; a few months later, as I was teaching myself some new software, I went back to recut my favourite scene, Hand To God. Brilliant acting – mind the language though…

There have been some other commercial edits, and a little copyediting work – but the big news is that I’ve done some editing for the iconic BBC property show Homes Under The Hammer. It’s been an absolute blast cutting Homes – I’ve loved every moment. Back for another shift just before Christmas.

Now what? I’ve just finished a short doc called Red Needle that I can’t share till the new year; that’s some of the best work I’ve done, I think. I’m redrafting my feature script for Maggie – after a couple of months away and some good feedback, I can see that I need to cut some characters and some locations, to condense and combine and simplify. The core of the story is good, but I’ve added too much around it. I sometimes think that screenwriting is as much about the things you don’t write as the things you do.

There’s more to say – I’ve rediscovered a childhood hobby, I’ve been to France, I’ve started swimming in the Lakes – but I’ll keep the powder dry on that lot. I’d like to get back to blogging more often – use it or lose it, right? …and so I’ll leave myself some things to talk about.

The Potter’s Field pt.1

~ simonsylvester ~ 1 Comment

According to the good people at WordPress dot com, this is my 300th post, which I see simultaneously as an amazing thing and also an awful lot of words that no one’s ever going to read. As ever, though, I write this mostly for myself; it helps me to clarify my thoughts.

I’ve written before about my experiences with The Pitch. As one of the runner-ups, I was awarded a small production fund to do something with. After spending much of the last year not really knowing what to do with the budget, I’ve moved increasingly to the thought of making a short film myself; in and around Kendal, working with the talented people who live here, keeping the whole thing as local as could be. Without having a clear idea of what to work on, I started mulling on single images and scraps of ideas:

A hanging tree high above a valley.

A stack of flat stones on a riverbank.

A kite, bobbing, soaring, sliding on the wind.

A man with an axe, walking towards a small house.

This was an experiment in free-writing as much as anything else, letting ideas move through association. And there was no story and there was no story and then suddenly there was a story: The Potter’s Field.

Potter’s Field in Hart Island, New York, c.1890

In the Bible, after Judas betrayed Jesus, he tried to return the 30 pieces of silver, but the Priests wouldn’t take back the blood money. Instead they used it to buy a potter’s field for the poor of Jerusalem. A potter’s field is an area of land where all the seams of workable clay have been extracted, leaving a chaos of rocky trenches and holes. These fields are no good for farming, but all over the world they’ve been turned into pauper’s graveyards; burial grounds for strangers and destitutes. After hanging himself, Judas was buried in the same field his blood money paid for.

I found this utterly extraordinary. There’s a circularity to it, a Zenlike completeness, a sweeping up, a recycling of something wasted. It shapes a terrible betrayal into a coherent future: not righting a wrong, but filling a void: what’s broken can always be fixed, and what’s fixed will always be broken. I couldn’t find a moral in it, and that ambiguity sung to me. The ideas began to tumble, spilling like dominoes: a woman betrayed. A guilty man. A child. Two children. A river, a farm. Chickens and eggs. And a kite… the joy of flying a kite.

After months of chewing through images like puzzle pieces, suddenly and sharply the whole picture hung together. I wrote my first draft of the screenplay in about an hour, and was on my tenth draft in a week. It’s probably the most personal story I’ve written, and though I’m not in it, I’m also in every single line. Ultimately, the story is really simple: it’s about someone trying to say sorry, and someone else who isn’t quite ready to forgive.

Now I need to make it. I want to make it. That means producing and directing: the organising, galvanising, driving and delivery of a project from first idea to final edit. Finding a crew, casting actors, sourcing locations and kit, props and music. Insurance. Catering. Scheduling. There’s so much to do, it’s sometimes hard to know where to begin, and so I’ve built myself an armour of spreadsheets and lists. Spreadsheets for each of the schedule, shot list, budget, props list, costumes, research sources. There’s safety in those numbers. Making sense of the mountain; single steps on a journey.

I’ve surprised myself with how much satisfaction I’ve discovered in the budgeting, in the planning. At the moment I’m working out menus for a three-day shoot. How can I feed fifteen people with healthy food and snacks and teas and coffees and keep it on budget? These challenges are testing different parts of my brain, and I’m really enjoying the new processes. It’s good for me to learn. And I love cooking. Just like this guy:

Delicatessen

Along with the pragmatic work, I’m constantly divining a creative language for the story, thinking and feeling my way through how I want it to look. I’m lucky to have the gifted Dom Bush as my Director of Photography, and I’m already so excited at what we’re going to cook up. Dom has such an eye for a face, for a moment. The story is very intimate and I’m looking for emotional spontaneity in the scenes; I’ve been studying Normal People and Sound Of Metal and Beasts Of The Southern Wild, trying to better understand how those moments have been captured so wonderfully.

I’m still a writer, or trying to be. I’ve never wanted to be a director, but I want to direct this. There’s magic in film. It does things no other medium can do. This story is personal, and there are truths in it I want to tease out. In so much of my work, all of that happens in my head, my notebook. It’s a new experience for me to open it up, to share the process with others. I’m learning a lot. It’s good.

I’ve called this pt.1 because I’ll wrote more about this along the way. Same Bat time, folks, same Bat channel.

A clear road

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I haven’t blogged for a long time, and this post is mostly to acknowledge as much. I am actually writing quite a lot at the moment — busy with redrafts of two short films shooting in the Spring, and almost halfway through my third pass at 100 Days Of Writing. I’m working with friends Ali and Andy to maintain some momentum, and that’s completely rejuvenated my daily practice. I’ve done 100 Days twice before, though not for years — this is now day 48, writing longhand in my notebook, whether it’s a single line or ten pages. Writing by hand has been an immensely positive and creative process, and deserves a post of its own. It’s keeping me focused at a time when it would be easy to drift. Quite honestly, between college, children, my freelance work and these general global pandemic blues, I’m struggling for the time to do anything much.

It’s been six years since The Visitors was published. That feels like a lifetime ago. I don’t think of the book at all anymore, and I haven’t wanted to write another since my last draft of The Hollows. I thought I’d left prose behind. And now, after an entire year of only screenwriting, I’m starting to feel the pull of a novel again. It’s so strange. A stirring of embers in the soul. I can be quite blinkered sometimes, or set myself in particular directions, unwilling to change course — I’ve been thinking of myself as exclusively a screenwriter over these months, and it’s very odd to feel this twitch towards prose after so long away. I’m trying to see myself as a storyteller using different formats for different stories, rather than a writer in one particular discipline. That doesn’t sit especially well with me, but that’s the way it is.

I don’t know why I feel the need to define myself within one format. Existence is manifestly absurd and having reached half of my allotted time on Earth, I’m painfully drawn to the thought of walking a clear road in the second half. But in truth, of course, there are no clear roads, and there never have been. Understanding that is as clear as things get. The function of story is to organise the chaos of this life and turn it into something that makes sense, even if only for a little while. In doing so, stories fool us into believing that there is a purpose to any of this nonsense. Stories are a net that hold us high above the void; a comfort that keeps us from screaming. That’s true for writing them as well as reading them, which is probably why it hurts so much when they go wrong.

I just used a semi-colon and didn’t even notice until reading it back. I thought I was finished with those as well. Times they are a-changin.

Genre in focus: Horror

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Thanks to more excellent work from the good people at FilmHub North, I’ve just enjoyed an excellent online seminar from director Prano Bailey-Bond and producer Oliver Kassman, moderated by Anna Bogutskaya. It was a genuinely enlightening session on the warts-and-all experiencing of producing and selling contemporary horror, and I’m glad I was able to watch the discussion. Also really positive to see so many filmmakers in the chat window reaching out to network. I’m starting to understand that although there’s not a huge amount in Cumbria, the north has a thriving community of filmmakers.

I’m not good with horror as a genre — I get terrified at even moderately scary scenes — but at the same time I’m totally compelled to the genre and what it does… the way it reaches into that caveman part of our brain and gives it a squeeze. I’m drawn to writing horror, and one of the projects I’m currently developing is just that — a short film about a poltergeist. In particular, I find the resurgence of folk horror really fascinating — films like Midsommar and The Witch, Possum and A Field In England.

Oliver has just produced his debut feature with director Rose Glass, which I think I’ll give a go… if I can summon courage. It’s called Saint Maud, and it looks ace:

It was reassuring to hear both Oliver and Prano reiterate that the strength of a story is still and always of paramount importance. It gives me plenty to think about and focus on as I start outlining features.

Gravity

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I’ve been tinkering on my new book since the summer. It’s coming together, slowly, slowly — I learn more about the world of it every time I sit down to work. My writing days have been overtaken lately with a succession of film jobs and Real Life things getting in the way, but I’m still onboard with my second 100 Days Of Writing, and I usually manage somewhere between 30 and 300 words a day. One step at a time, right? It’s all going in the right direction.

After this morning’s writing session, I’ve been reflecting on how stories change. Halfway through The Visitors, the lead characters took me completely by surprise with the way they wanted to go. By the time I’d finished redrafting and rewriting, it was a completely different book to the one that started out. It’s sometimes only on finishing that I realise what the story actually is. That’s true of every long story I’ve worked on, I think, and it’s almost certainly true of the current book. The core idea has stayed the same throughout, but the characters have swirled about it like satellites, each waiting for the gravity of the plot to draw them in. The ones I thought would lead the story have drifted away into space, mute, watching the world recede into a dot of light. And others, characters I assumed had only minor parts to play, have crashed into the story like meteors, hitting hard enough to shake the orbit — to tilt the axis into something new.

If you’re new to my blog, please note that I love an extended metaphor.

Back in November, I cut the story from 35,000 words down to 15,000, as the characters corkscrewed into my head and the story revealed itself as something new. Having steadily built my way back to 28,000 words, I’m about to cut the first two chapters — they’re only short, but I thought they were important for backstory and building the world. (And actually that’s true — but only for me and my understanding of the journey I’m embarking on.) No one else needs them, not really. Instead I’ve come up with a single sentence that literally does the job of 2,500 words. Knowing that I’m going to dispatch them to the great black hole of deleted chapters feels rather freeing — like dropping ballast. Ballast has an essential function until the exact moment it becomes dead weight.

The book calls louder, the further I run with it. The relationship between the lead character and a very minor character has become the hinge on which the whole story swings, and it’s quietly stunning for me to sit back and soak that in — to think that it’s been there all along, and only now do I know why. Back to it tomorrow. 100 words a day. Steady away, lad — casting ballast, rising up.

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Objects In The Rear View Mirror

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I forgot to do this last year for a bunch of reasons I can’t completely remember, but I’m back on track for a round-up of my favourite things that have happened in the last 12 months. In no order, these are:

1. The kids. This year has been another cracker with my wee family. It hasn’t always been easy, but seeing Dora and Indy getting on with the world has been a treat. In particular, Indy learning to talk has given us such joy — almost every day now we get a new word, and with every word our communication grows, our interactions develop, our bonds become stronger. He’s funny, he’s happy. Dora is still mostly feral, but she’s finding her way, all the time, a few steps back and then a few more forward. She’s developed an addiction to Lego, she loves reading Ottoline and Harry Potter and the Worst Witch, she argues about pretty much everything, she laughs all the time. They’re good kids, and I love getting to know them.

2. Mon’s art. Mon’s finally, slowly, getting to paint again with some regularity. Like me, she doesn’t get nearly enough time to make her work — and it’s therefore brilliant that she’s finished off these astonishing paintings and started on some really exciting new work. After she lost so much time in Indy’s first year, it’s been a real thrill to see these pieces coming together, and I’m so so excited by the work she’s sketching out and backpainting. She’s a bloody genius, my wife, and I count myself beyond lucky to watch her art unfolding in the studio.

Dora in The Window At Allen Bank
Sjo Harta
Tiger Stripes

 

3. Kefalonia. I used to write long posts about my holidays, but don’t blog as often as I used to, and so haven’t. But we went to Greece for two weeks in the summer, and it was brilliant. We went swimming every day and collected pretty pebbles. There was a titanic storm that rumbled all morning while Indy stood at the window and thumped the glass every time the lightning struck, and the day broke into vast grey Miyazaki clouds that washed away into the bluest of sweet blue skies. Waves had painted the beach in perfect smooth sand. The insects were incredible — a praying mantis, big black bees with pearlescent wings, swallowtail butterflies, a great emerald beetle that zipped about my head and lit on my hand. It then bit me, which wasn’t quite as cool, but for a wee moment I felt like Dr Doolittle. I read loads, wrote loads, and threw Dora in the swimming pool about a thousand times. It was brilliant. This is the actual moment Indy fell out of the sky. We decided to keep him.

indy

 

4. Reading sea books. My original resolution was to read only sea books in all of 2017, and in this regard I’ve failed. I abandoned the task around August after finishing Moby-Dick, firstly because I stopped writing the sea book I’d been working on, secondly because very few of the sea books I tackled actually had much to say about the true nature of the sea, and finally because nothing else quite cut the mustard after the Melville. The stand-out was Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us, which is an extraordinary book and everyone should read it. Overall, though, I mostly felt relief when I decided to let it go and read some books that were not about the sea.

5. Wainwrights. As a family, we’ve started the long, slow process of sending Wainwrights. We’ve now walked about 16 of the 214 fells that Alfred Wainwright ascribed in his famous guidebooks, so there are clearly still loads of them to go, but we’ve loved every one we’ve done so far. The uphills are hard, the downhills are hard, but the tops are completely worth it — especially the plateaus and ridges, and earning a sense of having climbed up out of the world below. At some point Indy’s going to get too heavy for the sling, and then we’ll have to slow the numbers a wee bit, but for now — up we go.

6. Film and video work. This has been a fairly steady year for my freelance video work, but most of all I’m soaringly proud of my work for Kendal Mountain Festival. Along with my friend Dom Bush, I edited the trailer for this year’s festival, as well as copyediting the voiceover poem. The film edit was difficult and time-consuming, and I’m really proud of what we made:

 

7. Getting veganised. Come June 2018 I’ll have been vegetarian for 10 years, a decade in which I’ve eaten wider and healthier, become a much better cook, and made better decisions in spending my money. Taking that to the next step hasn’t been easy, but over the last two years, Mon and I have moved steadily towards a vegan diet. We’re pretty much dairy-free and I go weeks at a time without eggs — and again, it’s improved my cooking and my eating and my thinking about where my food comes from. I’m not quite ready to go fully vegan, but I am moving steadily in that direction (especially since working out how to make my own seitan, which is just tremendous).

8. British Sea Power. I saw my favourite band three times this year. First was in London, where I took my students on a college trip — on the Tuesday we watched Under The Skin with a live soundtrack by the London Sinfonietta, and the students all despised it — beautiful, discombobulating enigma that it is. But on the Wednesday, we watched BSP perform a live soundtrack to a collection of Communist-era existential Polish animations, and they were majestic. Their music was sublime and transporting and wonderful in every way. The second gig was on the tour of their new record, Let The Dancers Inherit The Party. It’s another cracking record — of course it is — that slots in perfectly with the rest of their catalogue. Fave tracks are Electrical Kittens, What You’re Doing, St Jerome and Bad Bohemian, but the whole album’s brilliant. Third and finally, Mon and I zipped down to Manchester to see them headline the People’s Festival in the Albert Hall, which was epic — Dutch Uncles and Field Music playing too — a heart-thumping whirl through their finest moments. Their music is consistently superb and in constant reinvention. They’re the best band in Britain. I hope I see them three times in 2018.

BSP

9. Moy’s 90th. My grandmother Moy turned 90 this year. She’s amazing. She’s travelled all over the place. Once, in her 80s, she sent me a postcard from a youth hostel on a glacier in New Zealand. For her birthday she wanted all of her grandchildren together, and so we went — Kate, Anna, Ali, Emma, Kirsty, Tim and me, plus partners Kees, Ian, Adam, Ina and Mon, plus great-grandchildren Tom, Jack, Dora and Indy. We descended on Aberfeldy in the rain and spent all day drinking tea or wine, and it was brilliant. I don’t get to see anyone in my family as often as I’d like to, and it’s always a treat to catch up. Anyway, Moy’s a badass. Here’s the squad:

20170819_0012
Photo by the bodacious Adam Seward

10. Writing. A year of ups and downs for me and my writing. Then again, aren’t they all? In the last 12 months, I finished my third distinct draft of The Hollows, decided against rewriting it again, and moved on with surprisingly few regrets. No regrets, really. The more space I put between me and that third draft, the less I like it, and the more I want to get the story right. I’ve now sketched out the plot for the fourth draft, which already feels more cohesive and engaging, but that’s on a back-burner until I’ve finished something completely different. To that end, I’ve been working on another novel since June or so, tapping away with 100 Days Of Writing. It’s going okay, by which I mean that I’m enjoying it. I very seldom had fun while working on The Hollows #3, and on leaving it behind, I promised myself that I wouldn’t spend all these hundreds of hours wallowing in my own head unless it was making me happy. Novels aside, my short story output and publications have been very few and far between — only half-a-dozen pieces here and there, with barely as many written again. I’ve mostly finished a couple of short film scripts, another flash collection and a ‘novella-in-flash’, but there’s nothing wrapped up and ready to go. I only get one day a week to write, and that time needs to go on the new book. And that’s okay. I like the novels best of all.

So that’s that. Looking ahead to 2018, there are a few things I want to do. Most of all, I hope to finish the new novel and another flash collection. And if, by hook or crook, I somehow manage to get those finished, then I’ll start The Hollows #4. I’d like to go back to a Scottish island for a bit. I’d also like to direct a short drama film, which is something I’ve had in my mind for a while. It’s about 12 years since I directed people, and I’ve learned a lot about cinema since then — and about people. Finally, I want to read more, because books are the best of things.

2017 has been a strange one. For all of the terrific things I’ve been lucky enough to have in my life, Brexit is still the batshit stupidest thing in the world, and Trump is still a howling sphincter. Those twin sprawling catastrophes have haunted and defined my year, and they both push me into furious despair pretty much whenever I think about them. It hasn’t got easier. It’s worse. The longer they endure, the worse they become. Maybe 2018 is the year we can put them both to bed and step back into the light. Please, 2018. We’re ready.

100 Days Of Writing

~ simonsylvester ~ 3 Comments

100-door-number

Yesterday was day 100 from my 100 Days of Writing challenge, or #100DaysOfWriting if that’s the sort of thing you’re into. It’s an initiative from the excellent Jenn Ashworth, who challenged herself to write once a day for 100 days and document the experience — as well as inviting other writers to work alongside her. I got involved after spotting all round top bloke Dave Hartley going for it, and tagged along with him. That was more than 3 months ago, and yes, I’ve written every day. Sometimes it’s only been a sentence, hacked out before bed or in the winter pre-dawn, and sometimes it’s been entire chapters. I’ve only once struggled to get anything at all down — while I was drowning in my video edits — but even then managed to grab a scrap of paper and claw something out of my brain. I’ve added 28,000 words to the new manuscript, and what have I learned?

  1. Writing every day is not a chore. And if writing becomes a chore, perhaps don’t do it. That’s okay.
  2. Writing every day forms muscle memory — pen in hand, fingers on keyboard, bum on seat — that makes it easier to write every day.
  3. Writing every day, even on the shitty days, keeps you in touch with the draft. You can’t possibly come to it cold if you’re working on it every day.
  4. I don’t feel quite right if I’m not writing. I knew that already, but this has completely affirmed it.

And no.5, I guess, is that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I’ve enjoyed this so much I’ve decided to crack on and do another hundred days. If I can add another 28,000 words, then the book will be close to a finished first draft by Easter. That might be wishful thinking — but I guess I’ll find out a hundred days from now.

Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me

~ simonsylvester ~ Leave a comment

Day 84 of my 100 Days of Writing! I’ve been steady away on the novel, and it’s been feeling pretty good. Managed to blast through 4,074 words, and I liked most of them, too. It’s been my most productive writing day in well over a year — a year of missteps and wrong turns, 100 words here and 200 words there, fuelled on the blind optimism that it would somehow work out in the end. It’s strange how these things go. After three versions of The Hollows, plus my very first, mercifully unpublished novel, I’ve now written five of the blasted things, of which only The Visitors was published — and that came after a torturous year of redrafts and rewrites. As much as I’d like to, I don’t know if I’ll ever work out how to write a long story in a single go. My stories seem to meander and discover things along the way. Characters change, plots change, I change — in particular, I change. Once I’ve lost faith in my writing, I find it hard to reclaim.

I needed a total break from The Hollows, and I have one in the new novel. Writing into the new and empty pages is my favourite part of the process — it’s like reading a book for the first time, and knowing I’m the first person in the world to read it. Possibly the only person, given how the stories stutter. So far on this book, I’ve already battled up to 35,000 words and then promptly cut 20,000 of them. No matter how it hurts, the last years have taught me to understand when it isn’t working — and why. If it takes all that pruning to discover the true shape of the thing, then not a word of it is wasted.

My soundtrack today has been a combination of Mogwai, Rachels, and Gavin Bryars. I first heard Bryars’ astonishing work Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me on BBC 6Music, and immediately set out to track it down. It’s twinned with the equally extraordinary Sinking Of The Titanic — two tracks soaring through 50 minutes of woozy wonder. Check it out, popsters: