Katie Murphy

Speaking of ‘work’ (you may have read my previous post), I’ve been thinking of taking time off. More specifically, quitting my job for two years and doing absolutely nothing to bring in money, my only job being to finish Parts Two and Three of this book.

You can imagine that the resounding argument from my dear family has been less than satisfactory. But I’m in a reckless, impulsive time of my life, and if it doesn’t come now, then it’ll never come. I’ve given too much to the whole idea of maturity, and doing the right thing, and I’m bored. I’m just plain bored, and my argument is that I need to do something drastic and devastating or I’ll die. I mean, I’ll die anyway, but boredom is something I simply cannot stand.

I’m sorry. I’m going to have to change the subject.

We’re watching a simply awful film, and I’m having to sit here and pretend that my eyes aren’t peeling from the quality of the writing. As it is, I can’t leave without looking like an utter snob – which I am, but that is beside the point – and so I’ll sit here for the next 15 minutes to half an hour, try to type quietly into the evening, and wish I’d never sat down at the same time they’d turned on the bloody TV.

All I can think is, ‘why?’: why bother writing this script? What was the point? Why haven’t you taken the chance to say anything new? Why have you used the same sets, the same get-up, the same plot points, characters, resolutions, dialogue, camera shots…?

It seems that I am in the minority, however, and everybody thinks it is a wonderful show. I’d better keep quiet, then, and save my thoughts for this website.

It’s a unique kind of boredom that I’m experiencing with this film (which is now thrillingly facing all kinds of technical difficulties – I’ve never been more overjoyed to see the blue screen of death).

Maybe one day I’ll finish the point I started off with, but tonight is a different kind of night altogether.

A strange thing: we actually did something at work. While I get over the shock of that nonsense, that shift in affairs, it gives me time to bemoan the fact that I’ve not done any writing at all today.

Well, that’s not really true. I got up this morning, well before the others, and had planned out the full scene block by the time we left the house. I’ve done something, at least. All that I’ll need to do is get a cup of something hot (after dinner, of course, I still haven’t eaten), sit on my own in my room – or maybe downstairs at the dining room window – and basically write the mess that will be the first translated page of my efforts from this morning.

I’m so glad that the previous chapter is done. My celebration usually involves a happy dance, a quick cup of tea, and then a successful round of printing off the official thing and getting it stapled and into my Big Blue Folder.

Big Blue Folder is getting heavy now; it’s a collection of every chapter that I’ve completed already, and it’s really strange having it all in a physical format together, rather than flung into different notebooks and scribbled down in stages amongst other turgid material, or kept away on a Word document that only I know about, that never feels like it truly exists in the real world. There, the book is theoretical; here, I can see exactly what I’ve done for the past seven years.

Onto tomorrow. Hopefully there will be a bit less work this week, but we can’t always get what we want.

I’ll just have to cram it into the evenings like usual, and hope for the fucking best.

I’m very tired, as you might – or might not – imagine. I woke up this morning and felt it was the perfect morning to be getting up at that sort of time to write, with the sun coming through the trees and the room warm enough to actually want to get out of bed.

But the tragic tale is that I had to go to work and spend time with some very annoying people instead, which is not my idea (or anyone else’s) of a pleasant outing for the day.

The good news is that I managed to read through a few bits from my previously written chapters last night, and although they have bits to work on (they will always, before you start, have bits to work on), the parts that did not need work were everything I hoped I’d managed to achieve when I first set out to start writing. Sometimes it’s nice to have proof that a project taking a long time really is worth it. I mean, I know it is, but no one else seems to, and all the other writers I know are flying past trying to cram their first draft into three months or less and chomping at the bit to ‘get onto the next one’.

I suppose it helps that there really is no ‘next one’ for me. It’s this idea, and that’s it, and that’s the only funnel for my experiences and other stuff to go into. I haven’t managed to find a single topic of interest that won’t fit into it in some way, even if it’s only by a passing remark.

I know exactly what I need to do tonight: I’ve got a night off in-between other commitments (thankfully, neither of them are to do with work), so I’ll make the best use of it at home and potentially go swimming later on tonight. If I want to, that is.

But my tasks for this evening: briefly skim this Chapter 7 and be absolutely sure that you’re happy to move on to the next chapter; move onto the next chapter and start scrawling. I want my brain to run all over the page and basically splurge, because I’ve got a lot going on in my life right now and I always feel like writing is the best filter.

I never end up writing exactly what’s going on, thank goodness, or it would get depressing and dry, but I feel that I know – maybe for the first time, even subconsciously (God-allowing) – exactly where the hell I want to go.

I’ve done most of my writing goal today. I give myself an absurdly, stupidly low number to hit, and then it’s always a bonus if and/or when I go beyond it. Mentally, I freak out if I give myself about 500 words to hit each day – I always end up panicking about whether the stuff I’ve written is actually of any use at all – so I stick to a worthy little 300 words, and then I can take as long as I need in order to get the words right.

Have never been one of those writers who just likes to write random bullshit. It gives me the heebie-jeebies doing that, and if I have to scrap what I’ve done anyway, I’d like to know that I’d put effort into it in the first place.

Not long before we leave for the end of the shift, but I’m reasonably happy (ish) with the work I’ve done today. It’s still a process of translating the details I wrote in the first draft, and I’m about a third of the way through. The good thing is that not all of it needs ‘translated’, just about seven or eight sections that will need a bit of focus—and put into the correct tense (when I’m racing through the details of a first draft, I like to write in present tense instead of past).

Not much is happening at work, for which my writing is thanking me, Jesus, and the people who’ve sent us here.

Anyway, beyond that, I went for a run yesterday and hit a PB because I thought I was going to be late for dinner.

The circus continues.

So my method yesterday sort of worked. Not really, of course, and I wrote a dismal amount while still at work, but the fact is that I actually did write last night and effectively translated the first draft of Chapter Seven from absolute bullshit into something that might resemble a story.

I’ve been reading quite a lot this week so far, and although some of it is directly related to what I’m working on, I haven’t been able to gain much from it—it feels too close to the subject matter (more like exactly the same subject matter), and my best inspiration has always been that which I can get from a distance. It’s like people – I could never directly write someone’s personality into the book, untrimmed and unchanged from real life, because it would feel like the most inartistic expression I could muster up. Borderline sacrilege to the idea of art, in fact.

Anyway, we’ve got about twenty minutes left here, sitting and doing absolutely nothing, so I’m going to use that to upload whatever I’ve written and get on with translating this chapter.

Not much else to say at present. I’m due out for another run this afternoon, and it’s already freezing, so I’ll have to work out how to cope along the way.

Luckily have the kind of job where I can sit here not doing much – in theory, it’s supposed to be good for thinking about what to do for this book, except I’m no further along and I have no idea what to do next. A lot of thought needs to go into it, and my mind is at that stage again where it’s like a cloud – a good cloud, where you know stuff is actually in there and it just needs to be brought out – but a cloud, nonetheless. I need some way of putting it into speech or making it into a mess on paper or typed up.

This is a trial to see if typing shit out this way can actually help me. I’ve finished reading one book today (which I hated), and continued another, but neither has given me any clue on what the hell to do next.

I’ve also cleaned up the deleted scenes and rearranged the scene blocks regarding where they’re actually supposed to be – but it’s not clearing anything up.

I’m going to come back to this website because it turns out that none of my ‘writer friends’ ever actually write, or talk about writing. I don’t think I’ve met a single writer who ever wrote, in fact.

But let’s ignore this for now and get on with my own shit.

I am currently around two-and-a-half chapters towards the end of Part One (really, it’s all one book, but I’ve split it into the three major time shifts so that it makes sense in my brain), and I’m about to complete one of the scene blocks in that half-chapter today.

What’s a scene block?

I’ll maybe get into that later.

For now, all I have to do is add a few more transitional sentences, clear up the mess I’ve made into real-life English, and then save and back up that file. And buy more printer ink, because I like to have the physical draft beside me while I work.

Last night, I was reading a book about a guy who is a writer (and I won’t say who it is, or what the book is, because he’s still alive), but it wasn’t very good, if I’m honest. That being said, it was recommended to me by a friend, so I’ll shuffle my way to the finish line – just very quickly this time.

Thinking back to my own writing now.

Why am I still here? Why am I still alive? Is it to write this agonising crawl of a book just to say that I’ve finished a book? That’s the problem I’m facing. For better or worse, I am here whilst others (who are ultimately better) are not, and my aim or goal or whatever cannot be to ‘write a book’. It has to be a bloody good book, or there was no point to any of this at all.

Ha, you may say, you’ve discovered your own meaning of life, or maybe you haven’t.

I would say that I haven’t, to be honest. I’m just trying to make it to the end. Just like my book.

The difference being that I actually enjoy the journey of my book.

I’ve got a race to run on Sunday (I’ve gotten into cross-country running, didn’t you know?), and will need some proper trail running shoes, but after that I’m going to get this half-chapter out and spend the rest of the day either exercising or reading. Or both.

Okay, I’ll be honest – my skin is scrawling after reading that title. I swear I don’t want to make this into a clickbait-y thing, but we’re running out of options for material and I forgot about this website for a while.

1. That it’s okay to be a bloody-minded purist about writing and literature.

Who cares, right? Life is short and you’ve got to give a shit about something.

2. That you can learn from just about any book.

Please don’t ignore the classics. But also, you’ve got to read the fun, written-in-3-days, grammatical-errors-all-over-the-shop, nightmare novels about a love triangle that you’d never want to be part of in real life. Those are the best: it’s like taking a slightly dodgy car out on the back roads for a joy ride.

3. That there are no ‘rules’ specifically, even if other people claim that there are.

I don’t know what it is, but there’s a whole community out there that I don’t really fit into, and it’s all “10 rules for writing”, blah blah fuckin’ blah.

4. That the whole point of writing is trial-and-error.

So this turned into a list of four, and that’s the whole point of trial and error. I think I’m just frustrated about how clean and tidy people (well, writers, really) try to make an incredibly messy act (i.e. the act of writing a book), and then we all wonder why we get so many difficulties on the way to actually finishing it.

I’ll say it again (please, God, prove me wrong). I’ve never met another writer who I’ve actually liked.

I was saying something about a decision tree.

This is pretty much how I think on everything, with every way planned out as far as willingly possible. Sometimes if I’m really gripped by something, that tree can turn into 400 or 500 (I’m not being exact) different outcomes and events, and it gets absolutely insane. Apply this to the routine and often depressingly human condition of pattern spotting (fashion choices, speech patterns and accents, and other tiny, insignificant linguistical details), and I can single-handedly drive myself crazy without even trying. But it’s fine.

Anyway, I sort of use an intuitive thing like this when I’m writing. It’s not something I’m always fully conscious of, and a lot of the time my brain just seems to ‘know’ where to go. So what do you even call that?

That’s not a process.

Cambridge Dictionary says this:

“1. a series of actions that you take in order to achieve a result.

2. a series of changes that happen naturally.

3. a method of producing goods in a factory by treating natural substances.“

But there’s this as well (for the ‘writing’ half of our phrase):

“1. a person’s style of writing with a pen on paper that can be recognised as their own.

2. something that has been written or printed.

3. the written work, such as stories or poems, of one person or a group of people.

4. the activity of creating pieces of written work, such as stories, poems, or articles.

5. the skill or activity of producing words on a surface.“

I don’t know about you, but suddenly, that creates a much wider definition of the idea of a ‘writing process’ compared to the one we all know and love (i.e. get butt on seat and type, little monkey, type!).

We’ll continue this tomorrow whenever I’m not exhausted.

I’ve decided to continue whatever thoughts I had earlier in a separate thing.

Today has been an interesting one. I’ve spent the whole week in this state, and I’m having to cling onto that Steinbeck statement of “twenty hours of preparation for three hours of writing” because, Jesus.

I’ve spent the whole week trying to get Scene Block 33 (that’s what we’re calling it these days) into some presentable shape or form. I wrote the original idea for this section in 2020, and now I’m having to live with the awful consequences of my awful actions. Hartree is staring at me typing again, and I’ve decided to try and win the contest by looking straight back at her and going, “What?”.

She always hates being asked that question.

Scene Block 33 is an absolute disaster. That’s the real, First World source of my problems. It’s basically, Character goes from A to B, over several miles and two countries.

I’ve had to change the original thing from being too linear – it doesn’t seem to work well that way, and I’ve just done a whole swathe of a section of the main group of people where it’s been told in a way that’s “A then B then C”. The thing is screaming for some sort of change, so I had a little introduction sentence or two and then basically went “well, she’s already on her way to B, fuck you”.

Maybe this is something I come back to edit later on. I don’t like the idea of her scenes interleaving every other scene with the main storyline when, really, it’s not that significant. I sort of want to be done with it in one, two, or three blocks that are spaced sparingly.

This is my problem with the “just write” brigade. Sometimes it’s a significant structural problem, even when you’ve worked on it for so long, and what’s really needed is to sit for a week and think the whole thing through.