thoughts

Keep Calm

19 September 2012 by villia Leave a Comment

Distractions. They are everywhere. They are the writer’s worst enemy. Someone said that genius was 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. It’s all hard work and keeping at it. An updated version of this quote was that genius was 1% inspiration and 99% avoiding the Internet. Keep writing, they tell us. Write daily.

But sometimes it’s not quite that simple. Work gets in the way and there is nothing we can do about it. We all need to pay our bills and buy milk for our babies. If we have no babies and need no milk, then we need to buy a computer every few years, a software to write on and coffee. Lots of coffee.

Then there is the self-inflicted time-eating stuff we subject ourselves to. Our attic needed attention. We had the dormers replaced and have spent the last few days building a laundry room. A typical day has been waking up at 4:30, being at work at 6:00, home at 15:00, hammering until 19:00, dinner and sleep a couple of hours later. Not that I like to go to bed early. I am a late-night person at heart. But days like this make it hard to sit on a sofa and stay awake.

Needless to say, any writing has been put on hold. I could possibly find an hour here and there, but there is no point. Writing when exhausted results in drivel, useless garbage that will need to be heavily edited later.

But all is not lost. Inspiration struck me a couple of days ago. I typed my incredible prose on the iPhone, only to find that it had watered a bit. As great as the device is, it isn’t the best way to write anything more than a simple message. A Little Black Book would have been better. So I’ll go and get me one. Technology may be fantastic, but its not the answer to everything. In fact, I recently found a twenty-year old book I had scribbled in. One page had info on a detective and it inspired me to make The Girl from Nowhere. Old scribbles can be a gold mine, inspiring and fun to read.

And when the attic is done, I will have a cosy and inspiring den where I can spend all those non-DIY hours writing my next masterpiece.

And so I don’t cry for the days and hours spent on home improvement. Yes, they are delaying the completion of my novel, but I will end up with a nice little place where I can sit in a comfy chair, burn incense and look out the large window at the clouds as I write sentence after sentence.

Or so I tell myself.

Inspiration

8 September 2012 by villia Leave a Comment

It’s Saturday morning and I’m sitting in my sunny garden, drinking coffee. Organ music echoes through the neighbourhood and black smoke rises from the old steam mill’s chimney. It’s Open Monuments Day in the village.

My five year old loves music. He asks me if I’ll take him to the church. He wants to listen to the organist. We get dressed and head around the corner.

As we sit there, the sun uses the stained glass windows to paint the walls in all the colours of the rainbow. A group of elderly people sit there, some with their eyes closed, enjoying the organ sound as it fills the space. And I’m looking at them. Wondering what’s on their mind. What they have gone through. What their life has been like. Ups and downs, happiness and sorrow. Different times. Times that I will never know. They are approaching the end, but they have experienced things I never will.

And I thought of a scene in Under the Black Sand, where the protagonist walks into a church. Suicidal, as all seems to be lost. And I saw the scene in a new and different light. I saw a way to make it engaging, colourful.

Inspiration is everywhere. We just need to get out the door and open our eyes.

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.