Rewriting

I can’t come away from Writers’ Holiday at Caerleon ( or C’Leon as we Newportonians say) without doing something. Perhaps a couple of somethings. So here is a top tip from the week.
Top tip 1: If you have a problem to solve think about it before you go to sleep. Your unconscious may very well solve it for you.
Top tip 2: this follows on from top tip one. Have a notebook and pen by your bed that you can write down the answer as soon as you have it. Don’t wait for the morning or it will disappear and then you’ll have to do the thinking and sleeping bit all over again. Get used to writing in large untidy lines in the dark, I would.
I took a large piece of wallpaper from the roll left conveniently behind by the previous owner and not moved from its place in the wardrobe by me. I measured my bedroom wall widthways with it and cut a strip off. I had planned to stick it on the wall opposite my bed. It kept falling off. You have to imagine the antics here, stretching oneself from one end of a wall to the other trying to stick wallpaper up sideways. I tried using stickers to hold it- pretty ones, not so pretty ones, ones I wanted to get rid of. Nothing worked. Don’t tell me masking tape- I couldn’t find any. My roll of that is most probably in the car and it’s pouring.
So I put it on the bed and wrote my narrative arc on it in purple. I like purple. Then I thought, well, I can use this over again and went to find the post it notes that I was sure we had. I found the fluorescent pink notepads that have a sticky line at the back and decided I’ll use those. I plotted out the main scenes and stuck them on. A thin purple line with large pink notelets on it. The roll has rolled. It now lies at the bottom of my bed sulking. I may try green next time when I add in the extra scenes.
I am pleased though, despite all this I have reached my target of one chapter completed. This rewrite round.

Caerleon Day 3

Another hard morning’s work with Jane Pollard. I will pin a notice above my computer when I get home in blood: GO DEEPER. My head was bursting with so many ideas that as I walked down the Roman Way into town this afternoon, I was really in 11th Century Spain, not Roman Wales. I have found that I need a little bit of space between the input and the output to mull things through and ponder. My character was walking down the barracks with me, pointing out the latrines and the ovens even before I got there. Naturally I had to check her facts with the one information board, conveniently placed near the latrines. Wouldn’t you know it? She was right.
This means of course that when she speaks to me now, I will have to listen and write it down. I have to confess, I have been listening but not writing it down. My head has been nodding, saying, that’s really interesting, I should make a note of that and then I’ve moved on to the next thing that takes my interest, like sleep.
A change is in order, don’t you think? Instead of my morning pages and extremely intermittent dream journal- seldom kept, I have to institute a new regime, until she decides to leave me again.