This week, we finally managed to install our new (not new ) item of furniture - a mid-18th Century grandfather clock. It's not bright and shiny like more modern ones, but a dark oak with a warm patina which the beeswax polish is drawing out. In order to set it up, we had to do a certain amount of research - how to hang the pendulum, where the weight went on the endless chain - and it got me thinking... where and when did certain divisions of time come from? The time periods which I have written either had household clocks or didn't, I have not written novels from the time of their invention. Clocks have been around for a long time, and the obsession with measuring time in an ordered fashion dates back to at least the ancient Sumerians. It was they who established a circular reading of time and, I imagine, the sixty seconds/minutes came about as much because it was an easy way to divide a circle as anything else. But it wasn't until much later that the precision of seconds ...
After the loss of NaNoWriMo, it did not take the Crowvus writers long to realise how much we relied on this structured routine for our writing. For me, November had become the only time I was guaranteed to do creative writing. In fact - if truth be told - I've done very little at any other point of the year. Consequently, we decided to adapt to our own interpretation: Cro(w)NoWriMo - the W is in brackets because there was some discrepancy over whether or not it should be in there.
The rules were simple: Write.
As November went on, the end goal changed slightly for each writer. Was it 50,000 words? Was it to write every day? Was it to write an entire book? For me, it was about finishing a book. I haven't finished an historical fiction book in ages - though I've started plenty! Now, with four more writing days left on the clock and into the final chapter, I might finally be able to lay the ghost.
The story I returned to was Poisoned Pilgrimage, the book I began as a submission for the Sapere Books call out for series. Not getting anywhere with the submission had not been enough to deter me, but over the months and years, trying to write a prescribed formula had killed my interest a bit. The truth is, I write better when I keep people guessing - myself included. So it's no surprise that, while the plot is loosely the same, there are plenty of things I have tweaked from that original plan. Not least amongst them was a crucial point where I had asked my main character, Francesco, to do something for the sake of the plot which was so much against his nature I could not write it.
This week, my two worlds collided as one of my pupils told me she had just bought The Year We Lived. After the initial excitement that I'd managed to sell a book to someone I actually knew, there was the inevitable worry over how it would be received. The best way to do this was to read the reviews, and remind myself that lots of people loved that book, particularly the twist at the end. It was only when I was doing this that I realised why I had been struggling to write the rest of Poisoned Pilgrimage: I was being too greatly governed by my original plan.
So now, Francesco has dropped the convenient change of character and embraced his pilgrimage, taking the plot on a slight detour, making the story a little bit darker, but - hopefully - keeping readers on their toes for a while longer.
What has Cro(w)NoWriMo taught me? Above everything else, it has reminded me that a plan is a fluent thing, and that writing to order - while a brilliant skill for selling writing - is perhaps not for me. I'll continue to trust my characters to guide the plot, not the other way around. And, who knows?! I might even manage to finish an Historical Fiction book in a few days' time!
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