Kicking Ass

I woke up early this Sunday morning, glad to see the sun streaming into our part of the world, happy in the knowledge that a full day's writing awaited me. I was determined to work hard and work good.

'I'm going to kick some ass today,' I announced.
'Kiss my ass? Is that what you said?' teased my boyfriend.
'No, kick some ass. I'm going to get loads done.'
'Yes, kiss my ass. That's what you do.'
'Oh no, I don't. I kick your ass even when you don't know I'm kicking your ass.'
'Yes, you're an ass kisser, alright.'
And so the teasing rolled relentlessly on until I let myself out of the front door. Ah, domestic bliss.

But I have! I've kicked ass. I arrived at the Royal Festival Hall nice and early, after bumping into these Pearly Kings and Queen on the way in. I wasted the best part of 40 minutes surfing the net, gave myself a stern talking to and knuckled down. I have chopped and changed, cut and pasted, hammered away at the keyboard, scribbled pink notes in my lovely notebook, reread comments on the manuscript, treated myself to two skinny lattes and had a bit of a Kapow! moment as I suddenly realised what I needed to do.

'Backstory,' people kept saying. 'We need more backstory.' This one left me a bit flummoxed. Wasn't it there already? Didn't we know everything we needed to know? What was the point in going over stuff that had already happened? Ah. There's the rub. Perhaps we don't know everything we think we know. Perhaps everything that's happened isn't already in the story. A comment leapt out at me from the feedback I'd had on my main character: 'we don't know what she was like before.' No, we don't, do we? I thought. All that potential. All that unchartered territory. All that material waiting to be invented. Having planed and chiselled the existing story for so many months, here was an opportunity for me to invent something completely new and unexpected for my main character. Fresh material. And bam! There it was. My backstory. All it took was a leading question and an imagination craving something new to do.

The moral of the story is: don't take your story for granted. Even when you think you know everything about the novel you're writing, you might not. And listen. When other people are saying things, it's usually for a good reason.

I leave you with a photo taken on World Book Day at the Oxford Natural History Museum. That's a stuffed leopard watching the storyteller with all those children. A Kick Ass Stuffed Leopard.