Novel

Everything is Possible

6 September 2012 by villia Leave a Comment

If a book is good, or at least popular, chances are that someone will make a film based on it. But how often does the reverse happen?

Under the Black Sand wasn’t meant to be a novel. It started as a short film. I wrote the screenplay in the Netherlands, where I live, but the film would have to be set in Iceland. Being an optimist, I placed a message on a website where actors hang out. I found a male and a female. I met him and liked him. I had never met her before we started shooting. She had done some stage work and appeared in a TV series. Should be good enough, I thought. And it was. They were both perfect.

The film would need music. I was heavily into Mark Knopfler at the time. His keyboard player, Guy Fletcher, was dabbling in film music and I sent him a message through his website. Would he write music for my film? A stupid questions if you realise that I was totally unknown (still am) and he was the man behind classics such as Brothers in Arms. Strange things happen though. He saw the rough cut and sent a short message. “This film needs music.”

He spent his Christmas holiday writing music for my film. The tour was finished and he had worked on Mark’s live album. They would then go back to the studio in January. And still he found the time to write music for my short.

The moral of the story is that we should never give up before we try. The reasonable thing would have been to never contact him in the first place. Why would he even reply to my message, let alone spend time composing music for my Icelandic language no-budget film? That’s crazy talk! The man played on Money for Nothing and Calling Elvis. He worked with Tina Turner and God knows who else!

But he did reply and he did write music and and the results were beautiful. I can’t really describe the feeling when I play the album he released shortly afterwards and I hear the closing song. Black Sand Theme.

If you have an idea, try it out. Don’t give up. Never give up. Everything is possible.

Keep Writing

3 September 2012 by villia Leave a Comment

I have no time to write. I have just finished a nine-day working week and I’m tired. The attic needs attention before the workers come in next week. The kid needed to go to school. Maybe I should give up this novel-writing nonsense. Who am I anyway? Who am I kidding?

Kiddo was out the door at eight. If I go upstairs with my hammer and nails at ten, I’ll still have all day. That leaves two hours to write. Two hours that just ended, but I did manage to polish and fix a whole chapter. Instead of going upstairs, grumpy that life is playing me and stealing my opportunities, I now take that hammer in hand, knowing that the writer in me has been satisfied. I am that bit closer to the goal of finishing the novel.

So, no matter how life plays us, we can always write. It is not about having time, because we never do. Life is what happens to us while we’re busy making other plans. It is about making time. It’s about grabbing the little pockets of opportunities and making the most of them. Watch less TV, don’t let that mini-game on your smartphone eat up your spare time. Make the most of whatever time you find.

A clique, a well known and worn truth, but we sometimes need to remind ourselves of the simple things we already know.

Killing Your Darlings

29 August 2012 by villia Leave a Comment

One of the most painful things writers must do it killing the darlings. The scenes they worked to perfection. They may be inspired, beautiful, full of meaning. They may be the greatest prose you ever wrote. But no matter how special they are, if they don’t serve the story, they must die.

Under the Black Sand was originally written as an Icelandic screenplay. After the financial crash in 2008, little money was available for unknown filmmakers. A filmmaking friend suggested I write it up as a novel. It would be a work in its own right, unlike a screenplay, and if successfully executed, a producer might show interest and an open wallet.

The novel was written in English. It wasn’t just a straightforward translation though. It became an English story, rooted in Victorian Great Britain. It merged the Viking roots and the industrialism of modern England and Scotland.

I was pretty satisfied with the story. Happy enough to have five copies printed as paperbacks and read by people I trusted would not hesitate to tell me if it was shite.
The reviews were positive. The story was strong and worthy of publishing. One comment bothered me though. Why did I change the story from the original idea? Why have it take place in the UK, rather than Iceland? What is wrong with the Nordic countries and Scandinavia?

After thinking about it long and hard, I decided to rewrite the whole thing. Move it back to it’s roots. Back to Iceland. It will delay the completion considerably, but so be it. The modern scenes will be fairly simple. Both countries are modern societies and the changes will be subtle. The nineteenth century scenes will be vastly different. There were no railroads in Iceland. Very few mansions. Industrialists were unheard of. It was a rural society.

Scenes like the one below will have to be completely turned on their heads or cut completely. But that is the reality of writing. No matter what you think of the scene, if it has to go, it goes.

And so this scene will not be in the final version.

~ 1866 ~

The new railway station was making a real progress. It would be the most glorious thing he had ever created. He would be a hero to the common man. It was his crowning achievement. Peter Wollard, industrialist. Pioneer. Yet, it was the last thing on his mind. A vanity project, designed to make the humble man feel like he had conquered nature, that he had finally beaten the world into submission. Their new home was also coming along nicely. Only the roof needed to be fitted and the interior was being designed to their specifications. And yet it was no more than a hollow shell, a place to shelter them from the rain and wind. Any house would have done, but they had decided to build themselves a palace. A glorious place without a soul. Or so it felt, now that she was gone.
‘We will name the house in her honour’, he had said and Emily had squeezed his hand.
Their projects were the envy of all that had seen them. The two people standing here were the symbols of the new world. The rare breed that had made immense wealth, and still earned the respect of the people that worked for them. But nobody was working today. The hammers lay unused, the machinery was silent and the men were lined orderly behind the two people. The workers shared their pain.

The funeral was beautiful, but it paled when compared to the child that lay in the small coffin. They had known. It was inevitable. All the money in the world couldn’t prevent what would happen. They blamed themselves. They had used the stones, they had seen it coming. A few weeks after her first birthday, they had found the stones and little Florence was doomed. They had played with her, taught her to walk and talk and pretended that she would use her newly learned skills someday, that they would see her grow up to be a beautiful young woman. Peter would give his daughter away to a handsome young man and enjoy being a grandfather. She would never grow to be a woman and every day would remind them. Every time they saw her, ever smile, every tear could be her last.
She was doomed and they knew it. The light drizzle falling on his shiny hat could have been burning sun or pouring rain. They wouldn’t have noticed. All they saw was the small coffin as it disappeared into the grave. The man and the woman had brought her into this world and sentenced her to death.

Now they wished they’d never found the stones. How could they have known? How could destiny be so cruel?

Florence Woollard

1864-1866

Eternity lasts but a moment

This post, originally from 23 July 2012, was recreated on 6 January 2016, after my site got deleted as explained here.

Scrivener

21 August 2012 by villia Leave a Comment

I shouldn’t be writing this post. I should be working on the novel. But Scrivener has given me the chance to do both.

Under the Black Sand is as good as complete. I am going through it, picking up inconsistencies and typos. Nothing major, or so I though. But I did come across a sequence that wasn’t making much sense. It used to, in a much earlier draft, but now that I have added and edited scenes, this was out of place. I selected the scenes, using Cmd-click so that I could leave one scene in place. I then dragged the selection to chapter two, where the scenes make much more sense. This took a few seconds. I know the story and I could see, at a glance, where the selection would fit. Had I been using Word, Pages or any other linear – one block – editor, this would have taken much longer. In fact, I would probably still be copying and pasting. So, Scrivener has allowed me to work on the novel and blog about it.

Every once a while, you come across something that makes your life easier. Switching to a Mac in 2004 was such a moment. Learning video editing on Final Cut Pro was another. Heck, my first car did the same for me. It helped me do things faster and more efficiently.
Discovering Scrievener did that as well. My cluttered and messy ideas made sense. I finished the first draft of a novel. No small feat for someone that has the attention span of a fruit fly. It says something that when I set my system up from scratch recently, Scrivener was one of the first things to be installed. A computer with no Scrivener on it is a crippled computer.

Thanks for creating something special.

This post, originally from 23 July 2012, was recreated on 6 January 2016, after my site got deleted as explained here.

Thank You!

23 July 2012 by villia Leave a Comment

My novel isn’t quite finished yet. In fact, I don’t think any work of art is ever “finished”. It gets abandoned when the creator has had enough, has other ideas pushing for attention and deems that the current one is good enough. Under The Black Sand isn’t quite there yet. Give it a few weeks, a month, and I will happily abandon this story and send it off on its journey.

Under the Black Sand test copies

Most debut novels are years in the making. After a few false starts, endless rewrites and self-doubt, they finally emerge. This one is no different.

I think my first attempt at novel writing was Life Is A Bitch, which I started writing in 1996. It was as bad as the title suggests. It mutated into Plastic and could have become something, but it wasn’t to be. Then it became The Box. Vastly different from the first version, but still it didn’t rock my boat enough to finish it.
Fast-forward to 2005. I wrote a script for a short film, The Small Hours. It was the first thing I’d written that became something more than bytes on a hard drive. After film school, I wrote and shot another short, Black Sand. The idea was born after watching Mulholland Drive by David Lynch. Not that it bares any resemblance, but the film ignited a spark when combined with a real-life event from years earlier.

I got in touch with my favorite novelist, William Kowalski. He read the screenplay, came up with a few suggestions and I implemented some of them. The short wasn’t the correct format for the story. It was too big, too complicated. I wrote a feature length screenplay based on the short, but by the time it was completed, the world economy had collapsed and nobody had money for me. And so I followed the advice of a friend and fellow filmmaker, Hjálmar Einarsson. I adapted the screenplay into a novel.

It all seems fairly straightforward, but if anyone ever got to read the first drafts, they would’t recognise the story. There is also the small matter of being demotivated. When you have 60.000 words in a document, things start to blur. I had no idea how far I was, where the story was and how to move forward. I was copy/pasting dialogue from the screenplay and it was all turning very uninspiring.

Until I came across Scrivener. It is a word processor for writers. I imported my scribblings into the program, split it into chapters and I saw the light again. I had already written eleven out of thirteen chapters. I saw where the different parts of the story were located, how some parts were too short and some dragged on. Scrivener took me by the hand and helped me finish the novel.

There are no shortcuts. I had to come up with the story myself, I had to write it myself and I will have to push it myself once it’s “done”. But I doubt that I would have been able to finish it without the help, feedback and support of countless people around me. Thank you to all that helped, inspired and supported the effort, those that I did and didn’t mention here.

This post, originally from 23 July 2012, was recreated on 6 January 2016, after my site got deleted as explained here.

Little Me

21 July 2012 by villia Leave a Comment

Since the completion of the polished draft and the printing of it in a book form, many have said they admire me for achieving this and how they wish they could write novels. It seems there are wannabe novelists all around us. I use the word “wannabe” in the best and most positive sense, as I consider myself one.

When I ask why they don’t go for it, they say they don’t have the language skills (style) or a story to tell. That is nonsense, obviously. Writing is hard work, craftsmanship and a bit of talent. If you can write an email reasonably well, you have all the talent needed. The rest, you can learn.

The hard work is telling yourself to sit down and write. Simple as that. Reserve an hour a day, two hours, whatever you can spare. You don’t have to type all the time. Scribble an idea on a piece of paper. Come up with a name for a character. What is his or her job? Create crisis that the character has to deal with. Before you know it, you have the beginnings of a story. Draw from your own experience or come up with something wild. Inspiration will come to you if you stay at it.

Story structure is important, especially for larger works, and I may cover that in a later post.

The skills and writing style comes as you type. Like everything, practice makes perfect. Your first story may be stupid and badly written, but the second will be better. The third is the best yet. And so on. Hone your skill, find your style and keep practicing. Don’t write a novel just yet. Write short stories, small things you can finish quickly. The novel will come when you’re ready for it.

Many people that admire me for having completed a novel are 10-20 years younger than I am. Needless to say, I hadn’t written anything noteworthy at their age. So, I’m no better than they are. I’ve just had more time to do this and get where I am. Don’t compare yourself to someone that wrote a novel at age 17. You are not them. You are you and things happen when you’re ready for them.

We are too quick to stamp ourselves “little me”. I am not a novelist. I am not a prime minister, a rock star, a great thinker. I am just a plumber, a ground stewardess, a bus driver. This way of thinking is flawed. You are your experiences combined with character. Your job description simply states what you do to make ends meet and has nothing to do with yourself as a person.

Have faith in yourself and be what you want to be.