How to make Raven cranky, version 1.0, and then a lot of chat about writing.

So I work in a bookshop, right? It's a small bookshop. No, it is really small. The kitchen I'm sitting in writing this has about the same amount of floor space. In a space that is about five by ten metres, there are four walls of shelves and two freestanding "aisles", and altogether, about a thousand books. It's one of two shops, and the other one, in Crosby, is being demolished in about four weeks. The owner of said shop, due to a monumental lack of forward planning, has just found out that he cannot hang shelves off the walls in his new premises because they will fall down. The walls, that is, not the shelves.

Consequently, at nine o'clock this morning, Sunny Steve and Mark-The-Handyman descended armed with drills, hammers, large painful screwdrivers and the will to use them all. You cannot just carry shelves out of a bookshop. They need to be dismantled. They need to be unloaded. The only way for this to be achieved is for three people to actually unload them. So, in temperatures of above thirty-five degrees Celsius, and I should mention that dense paper and plate glass, such as you find in bookshops, do in fact hold and radiate heat, in the absence of air conditioning, ceiling fans, windows to open or indeed any sort of cooling device whatsoever in a small space with four other people and whatever customers we were managing, I spent seven and a half hours lifting stacks of heavy books, stacks of heavy wooden shelves, and, periodically, a stepladder, out of the baking hot shop into the baking hot sunshine and back into the shop as the books were re-loaded onto the new shelves. And don't forget the sound of drills. A very small space and some very loud drills. It just gets better.

In other words, me = very cranky indeed. I mean, we would choose the hottest day of the year for this purpose. And a day on which we have no customers and so no distractions from our own pain, and also no kitchen roll omg, and a singular lack of coffee and Nancy Next Door trying to feed us all prawn mayo and Tony miserable because he's turning forty tomorrow, and did I mention thirty-five degrees (amchau observed yesterday that the sheer fact of external temperature almost equalling internal temperature renders the wearing of clothes a social but not really biological necessity) and really, the smell of petroleum prevailed throughout.

Anyway, I am £37.50 richer and if adversity is good for the soul, I am somewhat closer to redemption. And to be honest, it wasn't as bad as it could have been. At least it was joint suffering, and at least four fifths of the thrice-damned job is done. Tomorrow, I think will feature reshelving a lot of poetry amid slightly less heat, which will be okay-ish.

Enough of my work-related babble. I actually wanted to talk about something completely different in this post, but got sidetracked by thoughts of, err, kitchen roll and prawn mayo. I wanted to talk about something I haven't talked about for a while, which is writing. Which is important, and particularly important to me at the moment because I am actually doing some of it right now.

Um, before I launch into it, there is the caveat that I'm not sure how qualified I am to speak about the subject. Unlike a lot of my flist, I have never studied language or literature at degree level. I'm more and more aware of this lately, because previously I was an English A-level student just like everyone else. But now I dread to think how much more skilled others are than me, because basically, my only leg to stand on in debates about writing is the fact that I do it. Write, I mean; and I have written fiction pretty much incessantly for about ten years now. All I know about writing, I know from that experience. And it's painfully limited and unsystematic, but what can do you do, etc. I'm always wishing that I could have done English for my degree, because a) I'd be better at it than I am at PPE and b) I might enjoy it more, too. But PPE, sadly, opens more doors, and I am weak but I do want a key to those doors. So English was never for me, and English at Oxford paricularly so.

But again, I digress. I want to talk about writing because just recently, in the comments to "Come Morning, Come Night", I happened to voice a few moans to tau_sigma about how dissatisfied I was with the process of writing that story, and then somehow got into a very interesting discussion with hmpf about writing and how different people do it. And the discussion visited ground I always find fascinating, so here I am talking about it.

The basic gist of it goes as follows. I don't like "Come Morning, Come Night" because I don't like the way I wrote it. As I said in the comments, I wrote it by numbers - "prompt here, angst there, now a bit of imagery, then some more metaphor, now a specific unusual image, then a mention of the theme", etc.

hmpf asked, reasonably, isn't that what you do when you write? And I answered no, not quite; in my case it's not what I do, but what I end up doing. I always start a story with a kernel of an idea. It's usually a scene, or a particular theme I want to explore, and it's sometimes a single line of dialogue. And all I do with is think about it. And think about it. And once I've thought about it for long enough, I sit down to write it down. And the things mentioned above - themes, imagery, interesting use of language, even plot - just... happen. Which is a terrible thing to admit to, because it implies I have no control over the process, but unfortunately that is a given degree of true. I can probably write dialogue on demand. If I've got a given plot to write, I could probably do that too. (Which is why I enjoy ficathons and prompts so much.) But then, we have something like this:

( cut for length )

This, I didn't write with conscious intent. This just happened. I have a very clear memory of writing that first sentence all in one go and liking it enough not to edit it at all. Because of course I do edit with conscious intent, I refine and get rid of the stupid bits and sometimes make things explicit which were only being hinted at, but the main thrust of it comes out in one rush of writing. It's like a painting - you can tell what it is, and the editing is just the fine detail.

But It occasionally worries me that I can't do it on demand. I'm thinking about this now because I am, as already mentioned, currently writing a fic which is proving quite difficult. For one thing, it features a sex scene, which I don't generally write because I can't do it. And so waiting for the sex scene to just "happen" is difficult, but not fruitless, because it is happening. A few words at a time, but it is happening.

But that is, to me, quite silly; I mean, I don't believe in "muses" or whatever. Surely nothing and no one is responsible for my writing except me. But the fact I write better with music on, and much better when I am myself ill or overtired, suggests a peculiar mental process going on. I'm not entirely sure what this is. hmpf went on to explain that she - err, I'm assuming you're female; please correct me if I'm wrong! - writes in very different fashion, almost as a craftsperson or artisan. She uses words and devices as tools to painstakingly create a desired effect. I was impressed by this, as it suggests that she could write anything well regardless of circumstances, because she has the talent but also the tools. If I try and write like this, the result is like "Come Morning, Come Night", which is a story that is perhaps superficially indistinguishable from my others but feels forced and contrived to me. Now, I have no idea if this is evident to anyone else, but it definitely is for me.

It's come up before, as well. likethesun2 and I were once discussing the subject, a few years ago now, when she told me she didn't know what to think when a line of a story wrote itself, because that hadn't happened to her before. I was at once intrigued and impressed, because whilst her style of writing is not aeons distant from mine, she crafts it meticulously. I envy her that, and I think I'll have improved as a writer if I can at least say why such and such a trick works, and be able to deploy a tool deliberately that I can use unconsciously. But I'm not sure if that approach would, for me - always for me, here; I wouldn't dream of presuming about others' ways of writing - destroy something valuable, if indefinable.

Of course, the one thing the whole discussion highlighted was that everyone's ways of writing are different and valid. I guess I'd appreciate some thoughts on the subject.

(And now I go to wait on the next bit of the sex scene. Ah, the tragic life of me.)