Brain dump, bread and backstories

16. Thursday 16 January 2026

My main aim for today’s editing was to rewrite one version of events of the death of one of the members of the Crime Writing for Beginners course. I had written it, rewritten it, tried to make it work and failed; today’s plan was to rewrite it and make it work.

                When there’s a section I need to write, particularly one which is almost a story within a story, I seem to find it easier to write it in a separate document. I decided to steno some thoughts first, points, to work through the backstory. Because I can steno as fast as I can think, though that wasn’t fast today, it reads like a brain dump. I was able to work through backstories of backstories, how certain people know each other, how events and people are connected. It was yet another reminder how nothing we ever do is straightforward, how we all have an individual connection to everything.

                In early lockdown 2020, I’d thought about applying to do an MA in creative writing. Long story, but I didn’t end up going for it. Instead, I spent about a year studying writing. I enjoyed it a lot. I read outside my comfort zone, wrote a lot, actually did the exercises in a few writing course books, watched videos and paid a subscription for Masterclass. One of the writers, I’m fairly certain it was David Baldacci, showed some massive lever arch files full of research. He said he’d studied them (I can’t remember how many full lever arch files, but at least three – apologies if this isn’t correct but that’s about right) and the result of all that research was one paragraph in that novel. The point he made, and one which has stuck with me, is that it doesn’t matter if the reader doesn’t know all that information, but he needed to know it so he could write that one chapter detailing what the reader needed to know to understand the point. I feel like that’s what I was doing with all the backstories I was working on today. I only stenoed a few pages, not a lever arch file.

                I spent most of the day either stenoing or thinking about the stories. I then sat down and stenoed the story. It’s far from being the version I’ll end up with but I’m mildly confident I’ve got all the points across and that I have an answer to everything.

                So, while I only wrote one chapter, it was a crucial chapter and I know that I’ve also helped myself enormously with another chapter that I’ll come to later on.

In other news, there’s actually very little today; I was at my desk most of the day. I didn’t even go out for a walk. I baked my fourth sourdough and prepared the fifth (I’m thinking the fifth will be the last for a while, I need a sourdough obsession break!). Chris and I had a slice and a crust (me) of hot buttered sourdough soon after it came out the oven – delicious. The only photo I took was of my sourdough, the first loaf cut with my new lame, the knife which made the (slightly crap) ear and the (very crap) patterns.

My sourdough patterns need work. Loaf #4.