Kim Neville

For a while now I’ve been pushing myself beyond my fears, because I’ve always had a lot of them and I’ve found that every time I face one my life gets a little better. In The War of Art, Steven Pressfield writes:

Like a magnetized needle floating on a surface of oil, Resistance will unfailingly point to true North — meaning that calling or action it most wants to stop us from doing.

We can use this. We can use it as a compass. We can navigate by Resistance, letting it guide us to that calling or action that we must follow before all others.

Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our soul’s evolution, the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.

I believe this. Following my fear has always steered me in the right direction. I’m afraid of fewer things. I feel stronger and more confident than I ever imagined was possible twenty years ago.

Lately, my intuition has been urging me to take the “do what scares you” advice quite literally.

I’m thinking about writing a horror novel. This is weird for many reasons, but mainly because I’m a huge wuss. I have a lot of nightmares. I mean a lot. Even thinking about my story idea makes me kind of jumpy.

But you know how it is when an idea takes root. You can’t just shake it off. It grows. So while one side of my brain keeps coming up with reasons not to write a horror novel, the other side is happily watering the little sprout and building a trellis for it to climb. And I find myself telling everyone I know that my next project is a ghost story.

But…but I don’t write scary stories.

But the nightmares.

But dead babies and stuff. What will my mother think?

My fears seem to have no power over this idea. If it weren’t for the fact that I promised myself I’d finish the first draft of my current novel-in-progress by the end of March, I’d be neck deep in research on post-partum depression and a fifty year-old murder case.

Nope, all my worries only make me want to spend more time nurturing my ghost story seedling. So, why not? The worst that could happen is I find out I’m not a horror writer. And I can’t help but wonder if all those nightmares are trying to tell me something, that maybe their cure is in releasing those fears onto the page. Guess I’ll find out.

Woah, it’s halfway through November. Time for a NaNoWriMo Lite update. I’m currently 11,000 words into a first draft. Not nearly where I need to be to “win”. But a lot further ahead than I was at the end of October (i.e. nowhere). I figure if I keep going at this rate I can make it to 25,000 words by the end of the month. I think halfway to 50,000 is appropriate for an admittedly half-assed effort, don’t you?

Something I’ve noticed since beginning a new novel is that first drafting gets me into a bit of a trance. A cranky trance. I don’t much feel like doing stuff that’s not writing fiction (including blogging, which is why no post last week). And when I’m writing fiction I get annoyed at how not-awesome it is. Leaving me grumpy, well, most of the time.

With this first draft I’m forcing myself to keep moving forward. No going back to fix scenes that might end up getting cut. I did a lot of that with The Glass Doll. It made cutting stuff that much more painful. Now, the pain is in letting all the sucky stuff stay sucky — for now.

It’s getting better. Now that I have an idea of how much writing I can sanely manage in a week, I’m getting into a routine. Routines are good. They keep me calm. And as more story comes out and the characters begin to come to life I’m having moments of excitement. There are even bits of scenes that I sort of love.

Who knows? Maybe by December I will be my usual bubbly, non-cranky self again.

See that book up there? I’ve had it for thirty years. It played a large role in my desire to write stories. Reading the Grimm Brothers versions of my favourite fairy tales was a revelation. Cinderella’s step-sisters cut off their own heels and toes to force their feet into that glass slipper? At Snow White’s wedding, the wicked queen was forced to dance in red-hot iron shoes until she was dead? Fairy tales were suddenly so much more violent and weird and disturbing and…cool.

If you’ve read any Grimm Brothers stories you know a lot of them are almost like summaries. There’s not a ton of description or character development, which leaves plenty of potential for interpretation and embellishment. I think one of the things I loved about reading those fairy tales was pondering all the questions they brought up for me. I wanted to know more, so my imagination would fill in the blanks.

Last week a couple of friends suggested a writing challenge. I promised I’d write a short story over the weekend. Knowing how much time I can waste mulling over story ideas, I decided to speed things up by trying something I’ve always wanted to do. I stole a plot from my big old fairy tale book and wrote an adaptation.

I learned a couple of interesting things from this exercise:

1) Writing from an outline didn’t kill the fun. In fact, I found there was plenty of room for play and discovery. Even though I knew all the important plot points, I enjoyed bringing the story to life. It was like adding organs, muscle, tissue and skin to a skeleton and then breathing spirit into it.

2) Writing a “meaningless” story for practice gave me creative freedom. I had no intentions for this story. There was no pressure for it to be good. Because of that, I wrote with confidence and it shows in the final product. It’s among my best short stories and it took me — by far — the least amount of time to write. It was a good reminder that I’m at my best when I’m having fun, and I should bring that attitude into all of my writing.

3) Putting my own spin on a favourite tale was personally satisfying. The story I chose was The Maiden Without Hands. I didn’t remember it when I picked up the book, but it was one of the ones I’d noted with two checkmarks in the Table of Contents, and as soon as I began reading it came back to me. What I love about that particular story is the maiden is a rebel. Her father is tricked into giving her away to a wizard, but she won’t go. Instead, she finds a way to save herself and then goes off to seek her own fortune. She’s not your typical fairytale maiden, and I like to think that’s what fascinated me about the story when I was a kid. (Probably, though, it was the gory stuff.) I named her Silver, and writing from her point of view was some fun. I felt like I tapped into my 8 year-old self for while, dreaming up answers to all those old questions. Did Silver really buy her dad’s story about being tricked by the wizard? What about after he cut off her hands? Did she believe him then?

After months of revising and now, weeks of planning and daydreaming, I haven’t done much actual writing of actual fiction lately. You know, laying down word after word until there’s a complete story on the page. I forgot how good it feels. So good I think I might steal another plot. What do you think: “The Nixie of the Mill-Pond” or “One-Eye, Two-Eyes and Three-Eyes”? Maybe both.