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Taking a story from Fragmented to Solid

5 February 2013 by villia Leave a Comment

Under the Black Sand started as a short film in 2006. It evolved into a screenplay in 2007 and was heavily rewritten and transformed by 2009. In 2012, a novel was completed, based on the whole thing. Although the few people that go to read it were enthusiastic, it wasn’t ready for publishing. There were too many loose ends, leftovers from the original short film. I wasn’t happy with it. I’m still not.

But it’s getting there. I was able to finish the novel after I installed Scrivener. Now, I am able to make it the best it can be, because of the way the software breaks the manuscript up in small scenes.

In the original screenplay and novel, Peter, the protagonist, was hell bent on building a new suburb. He defied and fought the city authorities and this caused all kinds of twists ad troubles. But it somehow didn’t click with the main story. It was a nice way to add drama and suspense, but it was like a second story. It didn’t seem to have enough to do with his relationship with the elusive Emily. Who she was and what lay buried under the black sand.

I needed to rethink and refocus the whole work. An impossible task in an ordinary word processor. Scrivener made it relatively easy. I made notes for each scene. What happens here and why? How does it add to the story? How does it drive it forward? How does it connect? And if it doesn’t, will it be removed or rewritten completely?

Much work has yet to be done, but with Scrivener, the road ahead is relatively clear. The final work is in focus.

The Glorious Problems of Rewriting

3 February 2013 by villia Leave a Comment

After the great eruption in 1783, everything was gone. The sky had turned dark and they hadn’t seen the sun for weeks. Black ash and lava covered their fields and the tiny cottage was buried underneath. The animals were all dead. Many of the people the knew were dead. The land was dead. Black, like an eternal night in hell.

The church doors were locked, but hell invaded through the windows. The priest said his prayers, his voice rising above the volcano and the rain. As the little church shook with the earth, they all embraced death. But death wouldn’t come. Not today. The lava stopped just before it reached them. They had been spared.

But the eruption continued for months. The rain burned the skin and ground. Livestock died, the winter was cold, dark and bitter.

The above text is brand new. It was not a part of the novel I intended to publish. It is now, and it plays a major role in the development of the whole thing. Oh, and the mass described really took place and the lava stopped just a few meters away.

As I’ve said before, Under the Black Sand is being completely rewritten. The original screenplay had the story play out in Iceland. When I wrote the novel in English, I moved it to the UK. I beefed up the back story be making Peter a nineteenth century industrialist. Now that the story is back where it always belonged, in Iceland, massive rewriting and rethinking was necessary. Iceland had no industrial revolution until after the second world war. We never had railways to speak of. Peter needed something else to catapult him from a poor peasant to a business prodigy.

Instead of an incident with a laird, the earth itself changed the course of history. A previously unknown volcano erupted in June 1783. It would go on for eight months and produce the greatest lava flow on earth since the end of the last ice age. It devastated farmland, leaving 50% of cattle, 60% of horses and 80% of sheep dead. Famine followed, killing 10.000 people, almost a quarter of the country’s population. Climate was altered for two years. Fjords froze solid and what crops that survived the fluoride, failed because of harsh weather.

Introducing this turning point to the story is a major operation. Many scenes need major revisions, while some have to be cut altogether. I did not write this post to plug a software, but I have to say that without Scrivener, I probably would have given up on the whole thing. Without the overview and structured workflow, such a massive rewrite would be all but impossible.

So there you have it. What would have become a tedious and probably impossible task, is now fun. The new story flows and excites me. No small feat after such a long writing process.

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.