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My good friend Nick Ollivère once told me the greatest piece of advice a writer can ever hear: “If it’s boring to write, it will be boring to read.”

I have tried to live by that ever since. You want to keep yourself interested in your own project. But at the same time there are several competing aspects. Some things in your writing are, by their nature harder to do than others. I love writing dialogue. I could write dialogue until the cows come home. But I’m writing a novel, not a play. It’s supposed to be difficult. It is supposed to be challenging. And luckily it is. That’s the good news. But sometimes you get to a bit which is hard. It isn’t boring, it’s hard. I was faced with this yesterday afternoon. In the morning I had written 6 pages and while writing at all was starting to hurt my brain after this intensity it came reasonably easily. I didn’t feel any big desire to get away from the computer. After lunch I came back to it and almost immediately I hit a scene that was difficult.

The thing is that it wasn’t boring, I wanted to know what was going to happen to my hero as much as I hope you do. I wanted to know how they deal with the situation. It’s easy with boring because of Nick’s rule. I think to myself, “Well lets just try without the scene”. It invariably works. It’s a kind of magic golden rule. If you don’t obey it when you’re writing you’ll as sure as hell obey it when you come to editing.

But with difficult it’s quite different. I have thought about skipping scenes like this for a bit. Coming back to them later, but I’m really not sure. I read the magazine Private Eye and I really love it. Some other people I know love it but only read the cartoons. They get the magazine and then they read all the cartoons and then after that they never quite have time to read the content. I have a rule, I only turn the page when I’ve read the content. And that means that I save the cartoons until I get to that page. I read them first in one big sweep across the page. But before I can have more I have to read the content. It’s crazy really because I love the content. But I know that I’m lazy. If I didn’t have the rule then it wouldn’t happen. I’d read the cartoons and pretend I’d read the content.

So I can’t really skip forward. If I skip forward. then I’ll have a period at some point where I don’t want to face going back to the novel because all I have is the hard bits. The problem was that I had the hard bits on an afternoon when I didn’t have much time. I was going out too see a friend so I needed to get on with it.

Time is the most crucial thing it would seem. On Wednesday when I started I was constrained because I had to travel up to London and back, and I had to have dinner at a certain time and so on. Thursday was a horrible day for writing I felt, but it was easier because I could move everything around. I had no constraint. I wrote the last two pages in the last hour before midnight. But yesterday (Friday) was harder. I had to stop at five thirty in the afternoon. At quarter to five I had written 9 pages. Now of course writing 10 pages didn’t seem enough. I felt that I needed to write 13. I wanted to beat a full day of writing on a part day.

At five thirty I hadn’t quite finished, I pushed on, knowing that I would be late for my friend. By six o’clock I knew I had to start getting ready to leave. I had written 12 and three quarter pages. Close but no cigar.

I left the house and I could feel that my mind was mush. I spent the evening feeling very confused and strange. My brain was just exhausted.

On my way home I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to get home and finish that page. It was hanging over me. I arrived home at ten minutes past eleven and sat down at the computer. Only a quarter of a page to write.

And it was done. 13 pages. But I have no idea if I’ll be able to do anything today.

So day 2 is over now.

If you haven’t a clue what’s going on you may want to check out: The introduction and Day 1.

Yesterday was very tricky. I think I had tired out my brain with the writing that I had done on day 1. And as we all know a tired brain is a non-productive brain.

The morning was pretty hopeless as Katherine had to get up early to go to the airport and so I had to get up early too. And we had gone to bed late because of the packing that needed doing. So I found myself feeling very tired in the morning. I did not, as at least one person suggested and as many more were probably thinking have a hangover.

I wrote two pages and then at around 10am I went back to sleep for an hour. This is a real oddity for me. I think I can count on one hand the times I’ve gone back to sleep in the daytime in the last 10 years. I don’t like doing it as it makes me feel very strange – actually almost like I have a hangover. But this is a writing holiday and I was seemingly too tired to write so I figured I better do whatever it takes. So I slept. There was an added strangeness to it in that just before I had decided to go back to sleep my previous attempt to wake myself up had been to shower. So yesterday I woke up, had a pot of coffee, showered and then went back to bed. No wonder it was so very confusing.

I slept for about an hour. Which wasn’t enough to stop me feeling tired, but was enough to have added the weird strange almost like a hangover feeling. I showered again, dressed and then wrote another two pages and then it was one o’clock and I’d only written 4 pages.

This was not really very good. I figured that as the day progressed I would get more tired and therefore less productive. That’s what usually happens anyway, so I was quite despondent.

Although at least on the positive side that fourth page was page number 67 which meant that I had crossed the third way mark (I am guessing the whole thing is going to be around 200 pages based on the current pacing of the already written chapters and the structure I’ve planned).

The afternoon went better, but it was still hard going. At one point I accidentally deleted 3 pages as well. Luckily undo worked in the way it was supposed to. It was quite confusing as I’d seemingly managed to delete some, not notice and then write some more so I had to copy the new stuff and then undo back to the deletion and then add the new stuff back in afterwards.

I wrote the six pages that I needed to do to make my 10 for the day, but it was like pulling teeth. From looking at the statistics I wrote around 10.1 words per minute. That. Is. Slow. And I was writing for most of that time sadly. I was writing a sentence – and then thinking… Um… ah… What happens next? Um… ah? Um… Oh. Another sentence. And so on… for six hours. That statistic another way is 6 seconds between each word.

So after I made my 10 pages I decided to have a break and watch a movie. I watched Goodfellas. A total classic movie which I have seen many times before. The idea with these things is to provide a distraction by a known amount. I didn’t want to get too interested in a movie that I wouldn’t be able to sleep – or more importantly that I not write.

So after the movie finished I wrote 2 pages in 45 minutes. Now that’s more like it.

So yes if you’ve been keeping a running total that’s 12 pages. One more than Day 1 and two more than the target. That does make it sound like it is going to be 13 today, but I’m not sure.

Today is going to be more tricky as I am going out tonight to see a friend. This is my one scheduled outing of the 5 days, so I better attack the writing with relish:

So day 1 is complete. Don’t worry about all the flannel how many pages did I write?

I wrote 11 pages.

So 1 more than target.

Writing 11 pages was tough. I mean it wasn’t fighting in Iraq tough. But it was difficult to achieve. And I worry that doing another 10 today might be harder.

However Katherine left pretty early this morning. And that might make things easier or harder. It’s difficult to say. Yesterday afternoon I had agreed to be out of the house because Katherine was packing. And so I had…

stop snickering at the back…

I had to spend the afternoon with my laptop in the pub.

And the pub I chose happened to be the Lowlander in Covent Garden.

Here are some pictures:

Hey… I got my writing done didn’t I?

So the question is could I have done more if I had spend less time in the pub? Or did the pub loosen things up enabling more writing to get done?

And most crucially, has writing 11 pages yesterday made writing 10 pages today harder or easier?

I’ll tell you one thing though… There was zero correlation between how many pages I hoped to write and how many I did. I didn’t write 11 just because I planned to do 10. I hoped, secretly, to do 20. And wrote as many as I could get out of myself without being silly.

Anyway… Will I write 10 today? There’s only one way to find out… Check back tomorrow.

PS. Thanks to all of those who wished me well by the way, your thoughts have been much appreciated.

So. Writing eh? What larks, what fun!

Over the next few days I’m going to have my first ever writing holiday. Not a holiday from writing, but rather a holiday to write.

Katherine is off to Turkey to do some belly dancing* and so I’m going to attempt to get some writing done. I have five days off starting on Wednesday and ending on Sunday. And I am going to tell you how much writing I have done in a brief post on Gamboling each day so you can see my progress. And mainly so I can’t skive.

I am currently a quarter of the way through the current novel – yes I know that’s where I was last time I did an update. It’s bad isn’t it? I have written 52 pages and the novel should be about 200.

So obviously the answer is to write 30 pages a day and then I’ll be finished. But 30 pages of A4 is quite a lot to fill. You’re talking 15,000 words a day. And I’m not sure I’m up to that. My most recent speed has been 1,000 words in a month. I’d rather set myself a target that’s do-able and meet it than set something impossible and miss it.

So I’m going to go for 10 pages a day. That would take me to half way. That’s an achievable goal – I hope.

So, the rules:

• No Internet until Sunday evening except for these Gamboling articles
  and comments
• Katherine doesn’t go until Thursday morning so I’m not to get
  disheartened if the first day doesn’t work very well
• I’m not to get disheartened
• I will, on the morning after, tell you how many pages I wrote
  yesterday
• I will not try and catch up before I write that post.
• [and I can nag you from Istanbul! – Ed]

And so that’s it I think. Knowing that you are going to be reading this should make me hit my targets – I hope.

* Really. It’s for a hen do.