Radio Silence

So far, in the two years it’s been up and running, I’ve committed just under 20,000 words to this blog, and enjoyed every damn one of them. But there’s a situation. Between now and the end of the summer, I have somewhere in the region of 50,000 words of re-writes to do; plus a hefty work-life-balance-threatening day job. Something, as they say in the song, has got to give.

So I’ll be bidding the regular readers of this fine internet institution – both of them – a fond and temporary farewell. Who knows; I might get the chance for a cheeky post, but I doubt it. I may not even get out of this with my sanity intact.

Whenever you’re kicking back; levering the cap off a chilly beer or catching up with a movie – spare me a thought. I’ll be hunched over a second-hand laptop in the spare room, goggle-eyed and feverish.

See you in the Autumn, good people.

Learning Curves

A strange and wonderful thing happened. I won The Times/Chicken House Children’s Book Competition. I know – it’s bizarre. Bizarre and brilliant. So anyway, that’s how I came to be speaking to a journalist about writing stories. During the course of this discussion, an interesting idea emerged. It concerned learning curves. I was sharing my literary disasters, talking through the mistakes that had got me to this point – and I suddenly remembered a graphic I’d used with students before. Here it is:

 

The neat upward progress that the word ‘curve’ suggests is misleading. This jagged, unpredictable sequence of triumphs and disasters is a more accurate assessment of the learning process, I reckon. There are months in which we write and write without any discernable development in style or progress with plot and characterisation. We plateau; we feel stale. Then there are those moments – and I’ve had plenty – when we might look back at old or abandoned projects and marvel at the quality of some of the writing. Christ, we think to ourselves. I’m actually getting worse. But then there are those points of extreme and accelerated learning, where suddenly, everything comes together and we gallop forwards.

I’ve had a few of these too thankfully, and it’s no coincidence they’ve all occurred when I’ve asked someone else to read the manuscript. This is worth bearing in mind. Don’t hide it away. Hand it over and wait for the moment of learning. Here’s one example; the first Sleepwell and Fly book. It was about 80,000 words long and in epistolary form. I'd finished it, I'd polished it, I'd sent it to agents. It was Spring. The blossom was out and the holidays were coming.

It got a right kicking. I was devastated.

But I got a splendid two paragraph brush-off which drew my attention to a massive flaw in my thinking. “Why the epistolary form?” wrote this helpful, insightful agent. “You’re writing for a generation of readers who don’t write letters, send letters, or communicate in any mode that requires more than 140 characters.”

I stared at the letter. The world went quiet. Dammit, I thought. She’s right. And that was the end of Sleepwell and Fly version 1. I spent that summer re-writing it as a regular first person narrative, but I was beginning to flag a bit – my heart wasn’t in it and I was getting new and better ideas. The whole thing went in the bin and I started again.

But here’s the key, good people. I began my next project at a much higher point on the curve. If you add together all these accelerated points of learning; imagine them queuing up in a neat line from your first ever attempt at writing; and you can appreciate how you might end up a significant distance further forward.  

So, find your critical friend and hand over that manuscript. You never know what lesson you might learn. Me? I’m writing my next novel in emails.

Rip It Up

Aside from being a fine author, Chris Wooding is remarkably frank about the writing process on his website. Remarkably frank too about the process of learning that writing essentially is. One particular issue took my eye – the regularity with which he confesses he has to abandon his current draft and start again.

It took my eye because I’ve just done the same myself. And I was feeling pretty gloomy about it, until I read of Wooding’s rip-it-up moments, all of which have an epic glamour that I can’t get near to.

Here’s what happened. I was 14,000 words through Sleepwell and Fly 2 – the ballpark area, I was hoping, for coming up with a proper title and changing the word document’s name from ‘What Next?’ to something more official – when I realised I pretty much had to ditch it all. So I did. I’m now working on a new novel called ‘What Next Again’ and regretting the time lost and the words wasted. Time, as my last post testified, is not on my side.

But next to Wooding’s catastrophes, mine are small fry. “Ever since I had started writing” Wooding says, “I had been alternating between writing books for Scholastic and making abortive attempts at adult novels that inevitably got out of control and collapsed.” The one that captured my imagination was The Cold Road, a novel that eventually saw the light of day as The Weavers of Saramyr. “I sent it to my agent, unbelievably relieved at having finally completed it” Wooding says of The Cold Road. “She didn’t like it. I was mildly crushed... Trouble was, after I got over my initial reluctance to change anything about the book, I agreed with her.” So Wooding started again, taking the final sections of the book as the starting point for a new one.

Next to the mighty trauma described here, losing 14,000 words seems like tossing away a haiku with a cheery whistle. But it does raise the question – what went wrong? Why, to use Wooding’s phrase, do some novels get out of control and collapse?

With me, I think, it boiled down to two things – pace and planning. Basically, I began at a point six chapters before a killer scene I’d already written. When I wrote my way back to the killer scene and re-read it, I loved it. It was better than anything else I’d done. Conclusion: my story needs to start with that scene.

But for all I know, I could be embarking on another fruitless journey. In six months' time, it might be all wrong again.

I can only hope.