Spring Forward with Vocal

Trying to totally organise my life this spring would be like trying to stop water gushing down Niagara Falls. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not a hugely disorganised person, but I am messy, I enjoy having multiple projects on the go, and I have a short attention span.

Alongside my urge to be creative, these three things mean that I am always on the cusp of writing a novel. The cusp and only ever the cusp. Apart from during one flukey month when I was fourteen, when I managed to cobble together 59,000 words of complete and utter rubbish, and a few semi-successful run-ins with NaNoWriMo, I’ve never actually completed a piece of work even halfway resembling a complete novel.

This year, I’d like to change that.

Despite the constant creative chaos I live in, I'm pretty aware of what holds me back and what propels me forward. I'm just no good at moderating these influences myself.

I thrive when I have a good, solid writing prompt that can help me shape my work, but am forever struggling to choose a style, an audience, and a plotline. New ideas crop up incessantly, and I always prefer them to my old ones (even fifteen minutes of overthinking can make them feel out-of-date), and so much of my work often gets sidelined, forgotten about, and eventually loaded onto a USB and placed on a dusty book shelf, never to be read again.

But recently, thanks to the Little Black Book Challenge, I found Vocal.

Although you can tell from the contrast between my two LBB entries (Real Life and The Bird’s Book) that I still find it difficult to decide exactly which type of writer I am at any given moment, the challenge unequivocally recharged a flow that had slowed since finishing my Creative Writing MA 5 years ago. I devised my two plots, backstories, and characters quicker and with more determination than I have for years. And, though my entries (as expected) didn’t win, I was proud of what I produced in such a short space of time.

Which leads me to believe that Vocal is the platform that will pull me beyond the ‘cusp’ of writing a novel and into the realms of authorship.

But what, I hear you ask, have one-off challenges and prompts got to do with putting together a hefty, complex work of fiction that rambles on for 100,000 words?

The answer: the same thing that doing 20 crunches a day has to do with maintaining a six pack.

Here’s what Vocal can offer the budding novelist:

• A place to exercise your creative muscles. The more you use them for short written pieces, the better they’ll work when you sit down to tackle your novel.

• A community of talented writers, found in the many Vocal-focused Facebook groups I’ve discovered (The Vocal Creators Lounge, Vocal Creators Saloon, Vocal Media Creators Hub). These groups are amazing at offering support, insight, and constructive criticism. Though writing in a bubble might be an attractive idea to many, it is not sustainable and likely won’t see you produce your best work. Writing in conversation with other writers honing their craft will benefit everyone involved and spark plenty of game-changing ideas that would not have existed otherwise.

• A platform to ‘trial run’ important scenes. This is a big one for me. At times in the past, I’ve written what I’ve believed to be a killer scene, but, when I’ve shown it to friends and family they haven’t responded how I’d wanted them to. Upload a potential scene on Vocal, however, and get a real, unbiased insight into how much people respond to it via your Stats page.

• Deadlines. I am terrible without a deadline. I can put work off for weeks and months if it’s not urgent, which is very bad practice. There is always something more important to do. I firmly believe that the consistent deadlines of Vocal challenges are the site’s unsung heroes. With every challenge comes new inspiration and fresh motivation, and, most importantly, a restricted time-frame in which to put together your ideas. This is invaluable to me. While my challenge entries won’t ever make it into my novel’s first draft, the effects of this motivation, excitement, and creative exercise definitely will!

So, to organise my thoughts and propel myself towards a goal I've been putting off for years, my Spring Forward resolution is:

Post to Vocal every week and watch my first draft's word count start to increase.

I hope that by the time Spring is over and we're heading into Summer, I'll have made important headway in reinvigorating my motivation and pulling together a coherent story. And I can't wait to share my journey with Vocal!

If, like me, you’re an aspiring novelist, I hope this post has given you some ideas! If you enjoyed it, hit the heart button at the bottom of the page.

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