William Essex
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Starting power

19/2/2020

 
My friend Patricia Finney advocates the “0th draft” as a starting point for writing fiction.

Fact too, probably, but Patricia writes mainly historical novels, so I don’t know. The 0th draft comes before the first draft, obviously, and what you do is, you write. You don’t faff around waiting for the perfect opening sentence – you start writing. With whatever you’ve got.

You start, and you don’t stop. The acronym that accompanies the 0th draft is BINMAD. The B stands for a six-letter word that I’ve just looked up on Google – because I try not to use certain words here and Google gives me alternatives.

Using the B-word’s second meaning in its verb form, BINMAD stands for Cause Serious Harm Or Trouble To Inspiration, Never Miss A Day. Never mind how bad you’re feeling, or how much more clearly you’d write if you just procrastinated for another day – you write.

You don’t stop, and you don’t look back. Don’t edit. Don’t read it over. Don’t circulate your opening sentence to a Facebook Group for comments.

Your commitment is to complete your 0th draft. From memory – Patricia and I haven’t had this conversation for a while – you then stick the whole thing in a drawer for a week or more (showing my age: I mean, close the file and take it off the desktop) and go do all the things you dreamed of doing while you were writing.

Then you read it. There’ll be a lot that goes straight in the bin, and a lot of what’s left won’t be in the right order, or won’t be right … and there’ll be bits that need to be there that aren’t there, that you need to write, and that character’s going to need more of a back-story, and if the plot went this way … and you’ll start writing your first draft with a much clearer idea of where your story needs to go.

And how it needs to get there. Hate those long sentences.

The 0th draft gets you past the blank sheet of paper (okay! I’m not young!) and it also removes the pressure of having to get it right all the time. If nothing whatsoever rides on whether or not you’ve chosen the exact-best expression of what you want to say, you’re free to create.

You don’t show your 0th draft to anybody.

Obviously.

I’ve just Googled “0th draft” and found other writers talking about it. Good ideas spread. Perhaps that’s the practical application of the annual NaNoWriMo event (National Novel Writing Month – which is November), which seems to celebrate splurging out a lot of words.

Okay, I’ve just put NaNoWriMo into my trusty search engine. It’s free, and the write-up does make the point that the whole exercise can serve as part of your creative process.

I’ve never written a 0th draft, but I did once spend seven hours waiting for treatment in an A&E department with only a copy of Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way for company. I’ve written Morning Pages ever since (approximately; I’ve missed weeks at a time and it’s actually a way of keeping a journal).

Morning Pages are distantly related to the 0th draft, except that you don’t have to be writing fiction to use them.

Start the day by writing three pages of whatever comes to mind. “Do not over-think Morning Pages: just put three pages of anything on the page...and then do three more pages tomorrow,” says the write-up at juliacameronlive.com.

Morning Pages are “the bedrock tool of a creative recovery,” apparently, and I won’t argue with that. They’re not a lot of help with physical injuries, but they do clear the mind.

Everything on the internet has to be oriented towards selling something, so I’ll pause for a commercial break here: Patricia Finney also writes as P F Chisholm, and if you put either of those names into a search engine, you’ll find any number of books to buy – er, read.

Okay, that’s enough online marketing for one day. I was talking to a young friend last Tuesday about the near-insuperable challenge of getting started on a creative project, and I suspect that some variant on Morning Pages, or writing a 0th draft, could be the antidote to a lot of procrastination.

Whatever it is, let yourself do it badly as a route to getting it right. Take the risk, don’t feel the pressure. Getting started requires an act of will.

This is turning into a self-help post. Sorry. I was thinking about 0th drafts, so I started writing about 0th drafts, and then I started meandering around Morning Pages and NaNoWriMo, and now all of a sudden I’m remembering my old friend David Phillips again, and his advice on how to end a magazine article.

“If you’ve got to the end,” David used to say, “just stop.”

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Yeah, okay, the caption obviously has to be something that puns on blue-sky thinking, but the vapour trail's a complication. Maybe blue-sky thinking with a scratch in it?

We think of electric-car charging stations as things like fuel pumps. You drive into a service station and pull up at the pump-thing and then insert a hose/cable into your car.

Shall we innovate? There’s electricity everywhere. It doesn’t explode if you light a match, so it doesn’t have to be kept in secure tanks under designated filling stations with state-of-the-art fire precautions.

Electricity runs along the sides of major roads. Traffic lights, lighting generally, those emergency telephones you see along the verges of motorways.

Pending the arrival of the self-charging battery – in the real-world sense of a battery that never runs out – how about installing sockets everywhere, akin to the hook-ups you find on caravan sites?

Pull in to a parking space and plug into the kerb?

I mean, imagine if you had to pull in to a phone shop every time you wanted to charge your smartphone.

I’m also haunted by the thought that cars don’t have to be cars.

If the internal-combustion engine hadn’t been invented when it was, but instead, a viable electric motor had been invented back then, what would cars look like now?

If we built up from the battery, rather than trying to fit the battery into a pre-existing great heavy hunk of metal and wheels, what would we build?

Would we invent something lighter and intrinsically safer, that goes not much more slowly?

Perhaps glides over the fields?

Without wrecking the world?
    Picture
    In a desk diary scavenged from a house of the dead, a man records his own experiences of the end times: what he has to do to survive; how he came to be marooned where he is; how he reacts to the discovery that he is not alone.

    Picture
    Over coffee, a young journalist gets The Message.

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    What happens here

    This site is updated weekly, usually on a Friday although I might change that (again). I write it because (1) I like writing it and (2) I like having a deadline. More often than not, it works out as a commentary on the week just passed*.
      There are no ads, no pop-ups and no tricky business with cookies. I don't take money for my own opinions. [Except when they come out in book form.] I write this for myself, without a set agenda, on any subject that catches my attention. If you're interested enough, it's not hard to work out my interests. Not impossible, anyway.
    *Although I seem to have gone away from that recently. Normal service may or may not be resumed.


    No data is kept on this website overnight. Blog posts are usually shared to my Facebook page. We can discuss them there if you feel so inclined.

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    There's a page for this, but maybe you'd like to see the cover here?

    Where are we now? We're hurtling round the sun, held to the ground by a weak force that we don’t begin to understand, arguing about trade deals between the land masses on a planet mostly covered by water.
       The dolphins must think us ridiculous. No wonder they only come to the shallow water to play with us, not to signal their most complex philosophies. More.


    Riddle. It takes two to make me, but when I'm made, I'm only a memory. What am I? Scroll down to find out.

    Is that a catastrophe I see before me? Could be. There was a clear sky earlier, but now clouds are encroaching from the North. We could be in for a storm. More.


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    Welcome. Thank you for coming. But am I the right
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    to meet some more.



    Read My Shorts?

    Here is yet another page of old blog posts and other writings. Sorry, but I need my metaphorical sock drawer for metaphorical socks. The link to the page is right at the end of the paragraph here.

    A very green picture. I can't remember where I took this.


    Roads without end

    Here is a passage from a review of the book The Road to Somewhere by David Goodhart. I haven't read the book (yet), but the collected reviews would make a worthwhile set of political arguments in their own right. More.

    Picture
    Also available in English. Look further down.

    State of the Union

    Several commentators today saying that they've lost confidence in the US. Making their point by talking up the glories of the past. After two weeks of this administration, they're not going back.
         Were they wrong, and they've seen the light? Or has the US changed? I guess the latter is the intended meaning. But we should at least acknowledge the possibility... More.

    Categories
    (Started 4th November 2017; forgotten shortly after that.)

    All
    Abuse
    Consent
    Media


    Kitchen parenting

    I have teenage children. When they're home, sooner or later one of them will come to me and say: "Dad! We're going to make a mess in the kitchen!
       "Great!" I will reply, picking up on the tone of voice. "What are you going to do?"
        "We thought we'd slice up some peppers and onion and bits of chicken and leave them glued to the bottom of the frying pan. Burn something in one of the saucepans and leave it floating in the sink."
        "Anything else?" More.

    Picture
    Variously available online, in a range of formats.

    No pinpricks

    Okay, so a certain President recently made a speech to his people, in which he told them that their country's military "don't do pinpricks". His intention was to get across that when those soldiers do a "limited" or even "targeted" strike, it hurts. But those of us in the cynical wing of the listening public took it the other way. More.


    Picture
    Ceased to exist. Sorry.

    Making mistakes

    We all make mistakes in our relationships. Some are mistakes that can be corrected with an apology. Sometimes - "if only I'd said that, and not that." Sometimes, they're mistakes that are incomprehensible even to ourselves, and sometimes, we do things that show us up as not quite the likeable hero of our own story that we want to think we are. More.

    Man down?

    There's a report by the Samaritans about men and suicide. It's titled Men, Suicide and Society, and it finds that men are more likely to take their own lives than women (in the UK and ROI). More.


    Not available for women

    Offending the status quo

    Looking at both the US election and the revived Brexit debate in the UK, the question is not: who wins? but: how did we get here? More.

    Thinks: populism

    Bright, sunny morning. Breeze. Weather forecast said fog, but it's a blue sky overlaid with vapour trails. Windy season, drifts of Autumn-coloured leaves. Thinking, on this morning's walk, about populism. More.

    Picture
    Early morning, Church Street, Falmouth

    9th May 2014

    On the day that I wrote this, the early news told us of a parade in Moscow to celebrate Russia’s defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War. Crimea remained annexed, and the Russia/Ukraine crisis was not resolved. At around half eight, the BBC’s reporter in Moscow was cut off in mid-sentence summarising the military display; the Today programme on Radio 4 cut to the sports news. More.

    Riddle. What are you? You're a conversation!

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No animals were harmed in the making of this website. Other websites are available online (and off). All the content here is copyright William Essex, this year, last year, the year before that and, you
guessed it, the year before that, although I don't have the time right now to hunt out that little symbol. This website uses organic ingredients and respects your privacy. Come back some time.