Week 5 - A Capital Week

I have spent this week in London - a city that seems both to be full of writers and creative types while at the same time providing thousands of distractions from actually writing.

This week was always planned as a "rest week" as I knew I would be away and that as a result, my novel would not progress much. I have to say that I needed a break - especially as I am about to enter the next stage of writing where my aim will be to write a full chapter a week between now and Christmas.

Of course, taking a break from writing is a bit like looking forward to catching up on sleep on a Sunday. However tired I am by Sunday, I am invariably wide awake at some ungodly hour. Then come Monday, I am shattered.

Writing is the same. When I should have been hanging around trendy (i.e. over-priced) bars and cafes waiting to be chatted up by some supermodel type and introduced to her publisher husband, what actually happened is I kept getting ideas, or snippets of dialogue would pop into my head. This would see me scribbling furiously on anything close to hand (usually my left hand) and being the subject of pitying looks from laptop tapping fellow customers.

I could have explained that I had left my laptop in the hotel as I was here to relax, but as I probably resembled a demented green ink wielding madman, I thought better of it.

Still, I managed to come away from the capital with some nice character sketches (London is nothing if it's not full of mad, bad and just plain weird people).

I have the weekend to recover from taking a week off and then it's back to the slog for the next eight weeks.

Next week's tip is Find Your Voice. This is something that can be really hard for a writer. It's not just that we find ourselves writing with other people's voices, but sometimes we have too many voices going around in our heads (like Dickens, who dreamed of conversations with his own characters).

I am hoping that my week in London will have helped strengthen my own characters' voices - and that none of then suddenly develops a Cockney twang.