In the wonderful Good Omens, there's a scene that muses on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. The answer being one, because angels don't dance except for that one time Aziraphale learned the gavotte only to be disappointed when it went out of fashion.

Which then got me thinking about how writing is exactly like an angel learning to gavotte.

While it appears a throwaway reference in the book, the scene in the series has around thirty seconds of Aziraphale dancing. Not only did they have to find someone who knew how to gavotte to teach Michael Sheen and the dancers how to gavotte, they had to source appropriate music and costumes for the scene. They had to rehearse to make it look effortless. All for thirty seconds of film.

None of that research or practice is visible on the screen, and if writing is done well none of it's visible on the page either.

It's also not a throwaway reference at all. It refers to an argument first recorded as early as the seventeenth century and probably even older which is still in modern usage. The narrator (God in the TV adaptation) tells us that "Aziraphale had learned to gavotte in a discreet gentlemen’s club in Portland Place in the late 1880’s". That discreet club was probably The Hundred Guineas Club, and exclusive gay club, given the other gentlemen's club in Portland Place at the time was a gambling club and probably not the sort of place an angel would learn to dance. It also ties nicely in with other references in the text to people assuming Aziraphale's gay.

Which is to say, good writing has layers.

And finally, fashions come and go. If you spend all your time writing to market (or learning to gavotte) you're likely to be disappointed when the trends change. Write what you love, and enjoy yourself as much as Aziraphale clearly does in this (slightly edited) video of him dancing the gavotte.

I read this last month, and like so many things meant to blog about it but didn't get around to it.

It reads more like a conversation than instructions. Lamott is both wise and funny. The main things I took from it were that it's okay to be a pantser (I seem to be having problems with this lately and have developed a fear of throwing myself in at the deep end) and it's okay to write a shitty first draft. Which I already knew but it was nice to have someone say it. So much of the writing advice out there these days is aimed at plotters, or pantser to turn them into plotters. Now I just need something to write a shitty first draft about.

I've also got Elizabeth George's Write Away on the TBR pile, and a book about writing crime and thrillers since I'm trying to broaden my horizons. And there's a stack of writing magazines I'm struggling to keep up with, although I'm thinking about giving up on some of those. That's a whole other blog post though.

Next month is NaNoWriMo. This year is the tenth anniversary of my first attempt, and I feel a little like I should celebrate by taking part. I'm not sure there's room in my life for a 50,000 word novel at the moment though. Certainly not one I write in a month. Although it would get me a shitty first draft.

I've always been a pantser, and love writing in that white-hot frenzy of inspiration that can come of this method of writing. However, it can result in a lot of words wasted as you end up excising scenes that aren't necessary, or cutting out waffle that was only needed to writ into the story in the first place. Case in point: the first draft of The Reflection of Memory came in a 17k. The printed version is a much more manageable 10k. That's a cut of around 40% of the original wordcount.

I've become a lot more risk averse as I've got older, and wasting time on unnecessary words is one of the things I'm trying to avoid. For a while this has manifested as a fear of writing anything at all, because there's not always a way to tell before you start if you're writing a dud. That's not healthy though, or productive if you actually want to write. So now I'm teaching myself how to plot. Trying to, anyway.

My first port of call is Evan Marshall's Novel Writing (called, I think, The Marshall Plan in the US). He has a handy breakdown of how many scenes and characters you should be thinking to put in a book of a particular length, how to structure the middle to keep it moving, and how to finish off. Some of what he writes makes perfect sense to me, for example where to add your "surprises" and plot twists to keep things interesting. However he thinks that there should be 5 viewpoint characters in a 120k novel (the length I'm provisionally aiming for), which seems like a lot to me. Especially since, in the 24 sections you get to start a novel at that length, the secondary characters come in at sections six, eight, ten, and twelve. That doesn't seem like a lot of space to get things moving. And you're supposed to plant the seeds of each one in the previous sections, but what if you're writing one of those novels with separate characters and plotlines that eventually come together?

It seems like this book is a good place to start, but I'm not convinced it will let me tell the story I want to. The next part is to dig into Jeff Vandermeer's Wonderbook, and all those random writing books I loaded onto my Kindle and haven't read yet. Maybe if I take the bits I like from each of them and shake I'll come up with a method of plotting that works for me.

Recently, I gave up trying to keep up with household and writing responsibilities for six days to binge read the Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins. It would have been less, except for the day job.

The first book was fantastic, the second slightly less so, but the third was a massive disappointment. I'm going into spoilers here, so if you haven't read the books you may want to come back when you're finished!

The turning point for me was when Katniss is rescued from her second Hunger Games at the end of the second book. During the first book, The Hunger Games, Katniss is full of agency. She volunteers to take her sister Prim's place in the games, and although she has no choice about taking part in them, or the media circus that accompanies them, she determines to survive if she can and not compromise herself if she can't. She defies the Capitol when she covers Rue in flowers, and when she suggests she and Peeta eat the poisonous berries when cheated of their double victory.

In the second book, Katniss is understandably floored by having to take part in a second Hunger Games. While she has agency, this time her choice is to attempt to keep Peeta alive at the expense of her own life. Again she has no choice but to play, and again she decides to do so on her own terms.

At the end of the second book, Katniss is rescued from the games by what turns out to be the rebellion she accidentally started. That's when she starts to lose her agency.

The rescue itself isn't the problem, although it would have been nice to see the supposedly resourceful victors rescue themselves. The problem is that after the rescue Katniss seems to spend the whole book being told what to do. No one told her about the rebellion, and she had no part in planning the escape. Later, her refusal to fit in with the routines of District 13 comes across more as a child having a tantrum than her choosing rebellion. Although she's allowed to make the choice as to whether or not to be the Mockingjay, and again does so under her own terms by making conditions, she's largely sidelined. She's the face of the rebellion, a media figure.

The sidelining of a child during a rebellion is understandable, although it's arguable that anyone who survives the Hunger Games is a child any more. She does, towards the end, decide to fight the rebellion on her own terms. However her unauthorised mission to assassinate President Snow doesn't end how she intended. Instead she gets to watch her sister be killed, and is rescued again.

This was the point at which I nearly threw the book at the wall. Katniss volunteers to take part in the Hunger Games only to save Prim. That's the reason behind most of her decisions. With that one mostly off-screen death, Collins manages to completely invalidate everything Katniss has done for the last three books. Sure, the Districts have their rebellion and throw off the yoke of the Capitol, but that's not what motivates Katniss. In that one stroke, she loses everything she's fought for.

She spends the rest of the book aimless. She makes one final momentous decision after which she's imprisoned, and not even told she's on trial, and then shipped back to the ruins of her home to live out her life. But she gets to have a boy and later his babies, so that's OK (/sarcasm). It may not be what Collins was going for, but the end of the book screams that rebellious girls can only lose, and are destined only to be wives and mothers.

I don't have a problem with happy endings, and Katniss ending up with one of her suitors will make at least part of the audience happy. But I'd rather have endings that don't wipe out all of the main character's achievements that came before them. I loved the beginning of the trilogy, and while I'll read books 1 and 2 again, I won't be revisiting 3. It's too much of a disappointment.