JPS/fact

I finished the second novel I have written a week ago. It took me about 8 weeks, which is an absolute record for me. It is currently titled something about John The Baptist, but I don’t know what yet.  I flit between “Vs. John The Baptist” and “The Ballad Of John The Baptist” and “Touched By The Hand Of The Baptist” and something about Baptism, I don’t know. Some things happened between me starting to write it and finishing it.

1. It became a very straight-forward novel. I usually love playing with time and language and all that, but I don’t in this one. It is utterly linear, a straighforward progression of story with constant characters and nothing obtuse, not really.

2. It because a firm genre novel. It is crime fiction. There’s huge elements of what people would conceive to be literary fiction in there, but the basics of the crime fiction genre (criminal, detective, mystery, reveal) are all there.

3. It’s tight as all hell. A brisk 65 thousand words, it’s relatively fat-free (he says, before anybody has read it). 

I finished it last wednesday and have spent the last few days reading it over and over and making notes on stuff that I think needs tightening and changing and altering, and then on the next pass I am making those changes. I’m on the fifth pass now, I think, and I’m still finding things I know need changing, and I’m still unhappy with some of the changes that I make. I don’t like the ending (but no change there, as I didn’t like the ending of the first novel) and I am not entirely sure about what happens to the main character, but I suppose my test readers will either affirm or deny my fears. For now, I would like to record this: the two pages of notes based on the first two passes of the novel. They may contain spoilers, but then, if you worry about, don’t click to read them bigger, eh?

Next step: proper editing.  I’ll report back when I know what the readers say.

{I can’t remember the phrase today, for some reason, but I”m sure it features those contents.}

So, work continues apace on the novel. It’s currently at the mid-30 thousand word point, and it’s doing stuff that I’ve never had happen in my writing before. That is, I keep writing myself into corners - which I’m usually really good about NOT doing - and then digging myself out. I think this is because of the plan that I wrote. As I previously said, it covered the novel, which is something that I never do. I usually wing it. Well, the great thing about writing a plan is when you stick to it and it tells you where to go, what to do next. The bad thing? When you don’t follow it.  Here’s the next couple of pages of the plan.

(BTW, the blanked out bits are so that I can retain some surprises in the long run. I apologise.)

Now, as you can see, there are corrections and changes, and none of them really matter - you’re bound to change thing, yes? What I hadn’t counted on, however, was how quickly this part of the plan would go. These point, in the early parts of the plan, covered pages and pages per point. Some of these? Throwaway sentences. My own process of weeding out what was important, what was chaff, that’s seriously off in the planning stages.  

And look at the next page:

This section deals with THE pivotal moment, the turning point of the novel, and yet when I wrote it was just another thing. The novel has shifted almost wholly, where the plan went from the novel being about John The Baptist, and how he caught himself up in this character’s life just by virtue of his existence, to this novel where the roles are almost reversed, where Lawrence, the protagonist, finds himself literally unable to escape The Baptist - only, not in a physical way. I’ve reached that point where I’ve realised what it is that I’m actually writing - and, scarily, the relevance that it actually has to my own life - and I’ve realised that I sort of need it to write itself. 

The reason for the big gap in the plan, btw, is that I knew that Lawrence had to start seeing somebody, but didn’t know who.  I introduce a few possible foils for him, and there was always the possibility of getting him back together with his ex-wife, but I eventually settled on a lady called Eva. I feel sorry for Eva, because I think I know what has to happen to her, what has to occur to cap off the novel, and to allow Lawrence to finally face up to his fears. And that’s why this part is blank: it’s the one part of the novel I don’t want to plan, as I want their relationship to build organically, so that - hopefully - when fate catches up with her the reader is genuinely upset by it. 

Really, I think the point of this is that I don’t yet know where this is going, despite all my planning, all my thinking. I wrote a conversation the other day between Lawrence and the Baptist, a conversation that occurs over a telephone. 

Right now, I’m like the background actors in a film.  I kill you, Lawrence, or little Marie, and suddenly I’m the star.  But doesn’t everyone want to be a star?  This is about you, Lawrence. 

It’s meant to be histrionic - this guy’s a serial killer, lest we forget - but, for me, it really framed how the novel has ended up. What began as a serial killer novel, where a normal man was going to take the Marlowe part, the gumshoe role, and discover who the killer is, has ended up being a novel about a very lonely, very sad middle-aged man whose life, career, everything is collapsing and he simply cannot keep a hold of it, much as he tries. It still features the killer, but it isn’t about that. 

But then, a good novel never is really about what it says on the tin, is it?

I’ll get back to proper updates next couple of days, but for today, here’s a look at some Wordles that I made. The first one is of the first novel, Hereditation, and shows the top-1000 words in the novel:

I love that the names are the biggest thing.  

And here’s one for John The Baptist, currently at 30 thousand words…

This one looks like a fingerprint.  Hmmm.

Nobody ever told me to not use adverbs and adjectives.  I wouldn’t say that they were ever encouraged, per se, but there was no refusal to like them, and they made my language flowery and more like the way that famous people wrote.  So, when I was starting down this route - 8 years back, seriously, during the Creative Writing sections of my English Lit degree - I loved adverbs and adjectives.  And in my first novel (a phrase which will perpetually sound ridiculous until I get it published) I didn’t really think about it.  

This new thing, however, is totally different. I was reading the thing again from the start the other day, refreshing things in my mind, and I realised that there weren’t any.  And, coincidentally, I read an interview in the Times with Sebastian Faulks, talking about Ian Fleming’s writing style in which he said that it was

standard journalistic: no semicolons, few adverbs, few adjectives, short sentences, a lot of verbs,a lot of concrete nouns. These are the tools, and that’s literally the style.

Now, it isn’t as simple as that, to copy somebody’s style, but there’s a point there: it is journalistic.  It is matter-of-fact and to-the-point, and it does make the text drive itself forward.  So now the text exists as something that, I told a friend the other day, is almost script-like in how it reads.  It concentrates on a few characters and tells you nothing about them really, apart from what comes out through the story and in the dialogue (of which there is a huge amount, a startling contrast to novel number 1).  I’ve had to find other ways to develop verbs and nouns, and have discovered that the best way is to not bother.  For example: My main character, Lawrence Hall, picks up a ringing phone.  Why the hell do you care if it is red phone, or a loud ring, or if he picks it up with a flourish?  

And then I took it further.  Why do you care if the phone bores a metaphorical hole to his skull, or the person on the other end of the line shouts like a market-salesman when he picks it up?  You don’t.  A lot of this comes down to the present-tense first-person thing, this idea that you are somehow with this character for the journey that he’s taking, but I have also stripped metaphor and simile away from the text almost completely, aside from when Lawrence is making a metaphor himself, in, say, dialogue.  

What does this leave me with?  The fastest thing I have ever written, especially when combined with the fat-trimming time jump mechanism that I am utilising - you remember, ONE WEEK LATER etc.  This is almost pure action, even the simple scenes when somebody answers a ringing phone, because it happens on a real timescale.  I am writing it in the sense that, in the time it takes for that person to reach over and grab the handset you’ve read about them doing it, and not had to put up with sentences about the phone, the phone’s history, the sentimental value of said phone and plausible internalised monologous theories about who could be calling.  

The phone rings, and Lawrence picks it up.  Simple.  

So, my main character, Lawrence Hall, is a good man. He’s suffering an early-mid-life-crisis, and is getting divorced from his wife. He’s in New York, a city thousands of miles from where he was born, and he is finding it increasingly hard to sell his writing to publishers despite an enormous hit debut novel fifteen years back. He has one really good friend who is an absolute shit, and a neurotic alcoholic mother in England who is struggling to deal with the death of her husband. I’m writing him whole and formed, and trying to ensure that as a character he is sympathetic and relatable (something I am finding especially important in the whole Present Tense First Person thing).

But there’s another major aspect to his character - and this is spoiler territory, so beware, if you care - he is embroiled in a major serial-killer police case.  Why?  Because somebody that he started dating happened to be killed by the killer, which instantly makes him a suspect.  And really, this is a story about what happens when a city and The Press get hold of an idea and choke it until it dies: the terror that the citizens start to feel, the paranoia that they start to have (which is really shown through Lawrence’s sixteen year old daughter Marie), the ways that they can latch onto people and scapegoat them if they can find a way.  And it’s about how those people can scapegoat themselves, and start to question who they are, and if, maybe, they aren’t that person that the press seems to think that they are.  

And to get there I’m reading two things.  One is stuff about terrorism, because, really, this is thinly veiled, right?  And the other is stuff about split-personalities, because it’s such a thing now in fiction, that idea of unreliable narrators who maybe don’t know that they are unreliable, or who purposefully hide things from the reader only to reveal them later.  I mean, I can trace a line from The Murder of Roger Ackroyd through to Fight Club delightfully easily, taking in Pale Fire, American Psycho (and Glamorama, and Lunar Palace), and a book I loved from a couple of years back called The Basic Eight (Fight Club in High School, which is a wonderful conceit anyway).  And those narrative devices are expected now, that idea that somebody might turn out to be The Other in the novel, and I knew from the get-go that this wasn’t the case with mine.  But I want the reader to question that.  So I’m slipping in details that might or might not be signs towards my character’s true intentions, despite the fact that he is honest with the reader constantly throughout the novel.  

I’ve hit a point 13171 words in where Lawrence, for the first time, is about to wonder if maybe, just maybe, he might be the Serial Killer.  He knew the first victim, and was in the right place at the right time for another victim.  Could it be him?  And it’s actually really tricky, throwing pebbles down for the reader that they might in different ways.  I am having to retcon the novel as I go through, something I have never done done before with something I’m writing, as I usually wait until the end before tidying.  But there’s things here where I add a detail later, and I want to ensure that it is established earlier on for it to make sense. It’s good fun, actually, and it’s making Lawrence totally real, I think, giving him a sense of existence, as the details - traits, mannerisms - are developing far more organically and situationally than if I sat down and said, Well, what kind of man is he?

There’s also a sense of honesty in him that I really want the reader to pick up on and run with. I want them to trust him, no matter how many curveballs I might throw.  I want them to sit there and say, Hey, this chap sounds nice.  I want them, when he questions his own integrity, to wonder how he could think such a thing.  He’s a nice guy, right?  

So, remember the notebook from a few days back?  The one I am was meant to be writing in for this novel was the green one?  Well, I made some notes the other day in the tan paper one, so that has stuck, for the time being.  And I said that I plotted the whole thing?  Well, after writing yesterday - I’m now up to 4931 words, fact fans - I decided to go back over my plan and see where I strayed.  Because, whilst I did plan it, I did it in a way that meant I wouldn’t be following it rigidly, and would stray - I’d use the plan from memory and see where it took me.  Like I said, this is the first time I’ve planned something this rigidly.  

Well, the best laid plans and all that.  Here’s what the first page of the plan looks like now:

So, starting at the top, I have basic character development, and then going down I have some events that have to occur.  This page took up a quarter of the overall plan, but since I began writing I have discovered that it will likely be less than a tenth of the length of the piece overall.  The black pen represents the changes that I made to the plan yesterday evening, after my initial burst of writing.  The flow of the plan has changed, but the basics of the structure have remained.  By the end of the final draft I expect that this page will be almost entirely - bar the opening descriptive paragraphs - bereft of red pen. 

What I also find interesting is how this removes character and boils plot down to something that almost resembles a formula.  Without the grounding of the style of prose, or the other character stuff that is coming out as I write the text, this seems wholly dry and staid.  

*****

My friend, Holly Howitt, has a launch for her collection of microfictions, entitled Dinner Time, at the Hay-On-Wye literary festival this thursday (the 29th).  She’s a quite incredible writer, and fills her work with those moments where the mundane gives way to the terrifying in quite the most beautiful way.  Can’t make it to the festival?  Buy her book here!

Oh, and if you do go to the festival and are wondering how to choose what to see, the Guardian is - as always - your friend.

There are many, many ways to convey time in fictional writing.  Easiest is the simple “later on”, or writing that an events occurs after or prior to something else.  With any narrative voice this can work, simply because you are allowing the reader access to knowledge that the narrator has.  ”What happened between these bits isn’t important,” you are saying.  ”Ignore the time in between.  It’s what happens after this that matters.”

With a first-person present-tense narrator, however, this sort of shifts.  If you are assuming that this person is speaking as events are occurring, and knowing, as you do, that something must have occurred in the space that we aren’t being told about, you wonder what it was.  I - as writer - have deemed this person’s life important enough to talk about, so why are those bits different?  And, further to that, what happens when we open up those spaces?  Do we discover events that could crucially alter our perception of the rest of the text?

I’m settled into the second version of John The Baptist now, and it is totally and utterly different to the first.  I’m only 2270 words in, so it’s super-early days yet, but there is no way it can even slip into the same thing, aside from one crucial fact: the protagonist will be addressing the antagonist of the novel in person, and will be the only person that the antagonist ends up dealing with.  This is designed to open up questions that many recent novels have contemplated concerning identity, as I want the reader to wonder if I am using that now-classic technique of dual identity.  SPOILER: I’m not.  But those spaces in between the passages of narrative suddenly become very important to me (as writer), you (as reader) and to Lawrence (as fictional protagonist).  Because any story that concerns identity has to have the protagonist question theirs, and the very nature of somebody who has gaps in their tale means that they are innately unreliable.  He can tell you what happened in them, but if there is no alibi - if the reader wasn’t there to see it - then it throws that totally open.  His accountability falls squarely on his shoulders.  

But how to write about the passage of time and wrestle the control of that passage away from the first-person present-tense voice?  That’s a tough one.  If it ran as:

I walk over to the front door and wonder where Chen is, and when he’ll be getting here with the rest of the drinks. I do some stuff, and potter around, and suddenly the time has gone, and the party starts.

Four hours later I’m chatting to this woman in the entrance to the kitchen. Her name is Laura, and she’s Scottish, which means we immediately have something almost in common.

Well, that’s an issue.  He has just told you that four hours have passed, but he doesn’t bother to tell you where he is.  I want to keep track of the time, but there’s no way to do that unless somebody tells you, so I have chosen to break the flow of time with a secondary narrative device.  The text actually reads like this:

I walk over to the front door and wonder where Chen is, and when he’ll be getting here with the rest of the drinks.

FOUR HOURS LATER

I’m chatting to this woman in the entrance to the kitchen. Her name is Laura, and she’s Scottish, which means we immediately have something almost in common.

He - Lawrence - has zero accountability for where he was, because I - as the writer - have torn that away from him.  That gap of time is where I have decided you don’t need to know what has happened, and it means that when he tells you what happened - if he ever does - you are, in theory, more confused as to whether to believe him or not.  And some of the gaps are far longer - there is one before this is that is TWO WEEKS LATER, and one after it that is ONE HOUR LATER.  By allowing me to present Lawrence’s life as vignettes, almost, I can both show and hide what is important far more easily.

Can anyone tell me where this has been done this way before?  

So, as you know, I am writing a thing called El Lobo De Plata Vs. John The Baptist.  It’s a three-part novel: one part is the tale of this Mexican wrestler, one part is the tale of a serial killer, and the final part is the tale of the two of them together, and also The Press.  It’s mostly about heroes and villains, and what we see as being different to what is actually happening.  Anyway, I want the first two sections to work together but to be extant - you can read them without reading either of the other two and bang, you have a great novel on its own.  Theoretically.  

So, this post concerns the John The Baptist stuff.  He is a serial killer, and I wanted to originally tell his side of the story as traditional crime fiction - that is, his stuff runs through it, but it is really the story of the detective that is pursuing him, like (nearly) all crime fiction.  But as time has gone on I have gotten sick of the detective conceit.  I really find it tired when I am trying to tell this as part of a bigger whole, so I started to think about ways in which a serial killer story can be told without a) the main character being the killer and b) it resorting to Lector-esque horrors.  I wanted this to be something more human, where you can almost empathise with this guy, but not by being near him, per se, but by seeing his vilification in effect.  

After weeks of worrying this, over and over, I think I’ve finally got it.  Last night I was watching The Apprentice and I started thinking, well, hang on, why do I have to have this being an issue?  Why can’t I just write something, and the serial killer is a part of it?  What if there is a way for a character to actually start to build a relationship with a serial killer through the press alone, simply by virtue of his reading about him and seeing reports on tv about him?  

So, I’ve started writing a story about New York - a place I am fixated upon in my writing, for some reason - I suspect because of the research I did for the first novel - and the people that live in it, and the terror that could occur if there is a killer at large when the police have absolutely no idea who he is or where he will strike next.  But it isn’t about that: it’s about a man and his divorce and his drunkard daughter and his own terrifying identity crisis.  

There is a reason for me telling you this, however, in terms of my own process: I have planned the whole thing.  I don’t usually plan. I planned Hereditation from the middle of the book, and ignored most of the planning I did.  I haven’t planned the El Lobo De Plata section of this novel at all - that is just flowing freely.  But this bit I have planned meticulously.  I have bullet points, character names, time scales, plans for different character arcs, and all before I have written a word of text.  I have no idea if I can work this way, but this afternoon I wrote the opening section and I love it.  If you are interested, right now it is First Person Present Tense, which I have never written anything in before, so I’m enjoying that.  

Apparently, these are of vital importance to writers.  ”Write down EVERYTHING that feels like an idea,” I tell my students, and they don’t.  I do.  I currently have four notebooks on my desk.  All are Moleskines.  Here’s what they look like and what I write in them.

That one on the end was a gift from my girlfriend for my birthday, and has been embossed.  I am absolutely terrified to write in it.  This is important, as I mark everything, usually, like a dog.

Every time I get something to write in/on, I write something on it to spell what that thing is going to do. This computer, for example - I wrote a section of my first novel, Hereditation - a chapter about a man called Quaid Sloane, which ended up being one of my favourite things from that novel.  Here’s a bit of it, if you care:

Italy agreed with Quaid, and he grew fat and complacent over the months that he searched for the woman that he knew he would marry.  Eventually he found the publishers of the calendar in Rome and they pointed him down a side street, to a small diagonal house that barely 
stood.  Quaid knocked on the door and when she answered – and she looked better in person, he thought - he went down on one knee and showed her the enormous diamond ring that he had to offer her.  She saw the ring and his clothes and said “Si”.   

They traveled back to America the next day, and married on the ship.  At night they would lie next to each other as they didn’t speak.  Quaid wondered, out loud, if they would have anything to talk about if they could.  Then, ten days into their trip Quaid’s new wife – he thought her name was Filomena, but it could have been a variation, her accent was so thick and impenetrable – sat with him on the bed before they slept.  She kissed him on the side of his face, on his unkempt sideburns, and he could feel her saliva in the hairs.  They had sex then, sex that neither of them would ever remember, frantic and disquieting.  This was how Ezra was conceived.   

During Filomena’s pregnancy she learnt American (Quaid refused to call it English, so proud was he of his heritage).  Her favorite word was “Tomato”. 

And that set a tone for the rest of the novel.  I was a hefty chunk in - 11 thousand words when I got the computer -  but that was only far enough (in the way that I write) to really establish character and basic pacing of the novel.  That chapter decided upon a broader tone - that of a slightly more sarcastic and damning narrator than I had first conceived, one who was more willing to judge.  

And voice is on my mind, right now.  I am writing this new thing, this El Lobo De Plata thing, and the novel is in danger of taking a different voice than the one that I started with.  Trouble is, I love the one that I started with.  The novel is intended to be in three sections - here is the first paragraph from one of those.  

His father was a proud man, and when his mother abandoned them for a mining captain he decided to maintain a façade of the ordinary for the sake of his son.

“She is at the shop!” he would claim when Hector asked about her. “She has gone to Church, where she will pray to have her sins wiped clean!” For three months Senor Chavez kept the act up, and Hector didn’t realise. His mother was, for the most part, a mysterious woman. When he had been seven she had spent the three months immediately following Christmas cooking only food where the primary ingredient was soft, white flour.

“It will make your body strong,” she told him when he complained, and then showed him a sketch that she made which explained that white flour was the primary component of human bones. When, two months later she began to make only fruit based concoctions he asked her where the flour had gone. He told her that he wanted his bones to grow strong.

“There was a mistake in the research labs,” she told him as she kneaded plums under her knuckles, “and flour had no effect. For now, the thing that will work is the fruit.” She gave him an apricot, and that was the end of the discussion. 

I am thinking about this one in ways that I hate myself for thinking, concerned with frontloading the novel with excitement, and with things designed to make the reader  - in this case, and every case until I get one, I think, an agent - want to read more.  It’s an easy mistake to make, as a writer, and I am making it.  I know that I am making it.  I can sit here right now and say that I wonder about whether, were I to have rearranged Hereditation, some of the agents who said no might have said yes.  I can’t help but wonder.  It started, as I have grown fond of saying, with a conversation littered with casual racism between characters about getting shoes mended.  I wouldn’t read that, I don’t think.  

[So, we've gone somewhere other than notebooks.  That's fine.]

With most agents in the UK you get the chance to send them 3 chapters of your novel.  Or, rather, you get to send them the first 3 chapters.  And, based upon those chapters they work out whether they want to read any more.  But it’s tough: one of my replied said that they loved it -the three chapters, that is - but not enough to take it on.  And that love didn’t even make them want to read the rest, as they have too much to read.  So, you think about that open: cold or hot? soft or hard? There’s that hateful idea that the first line of a novel is the most important - that’s rubbish, by the way, utter rubbish - but I think, with agents, you can extend that to the first chapter.  Because if you don’t have them you have lost them.

So, for the last 2 copies I sent off to agents I mixed things up.  I changed that conversation about cobblers (LITERALLY LOL ETC) to be the second chapter, and added a prologue that was actually a bastardised and edited version of the final chapter.  It means that the concept of INTRIGUE is established from the get-go, and will hopefully will one of those two agents on to read more.  Hopefully.  

So, when thinking about this next novel, I am really thinking about how to grab the reader.  I hate gimmicks and stuff, and don’t want it to be a pointless grab, but there are ways, I think, to ensure that the reader wants to carry on reading, above and beyond Good Writing.  

Hm.

*****

This is going to be a rocky road, I’ve realised, for you and for me.  I think that we’ll get there, but you’ll have to stick with it, and that might mean reading more about MY creative process than perhaps you think is necessary.  Still, we’ll get there in the end, right?  Right?

I’m going to try and do this, then: this thing of making note of how I am writing what I am writing. This is awfully presumptive, and more than a little bit egotistical, assuming that anyone else might find what I am writing of interest, but I am hoping to really delve into the creative process here in a way that is utterly reflective of literary criticism movements of today. I’ll be looking at how this works for me, and for you, potential reader, and seeing where we can hopefully meet.

So, I shall start at the start. The plan for the novel is that it will be titled El Lobo De Plata Vs. John The Baptist, which is the title of a novel that I would buy in a heartbeat. It started around two years ago - the idea, that is - when I got a new notebook, an ordinary brown moleskin (”Gosh! I am a writer!” etc etc), and wrote a quote in it that popped into my head. At the time I was planning a short story set around a luchadore wrestling match, diving in and out of the match to tell you about their lives. Whatever, right? So, I wrote this thing, just what I thought would be a two sentence prologue to the tale. Here it is.

Now, I’m fallible, I get that, and the quote wasn’t meant to be LITERATURE, per se. Rather, it was meant to evoke a slightly clunky and archaic battle by immediately giving the reader an overly scripted language.

This is nearly moot: this isn’t the novel. There is a character called Hector, but doesn’t share that surname. But this is the first seed, and this was where it was sown.

*****

Eli over at Novelr has written a post about why you probably shouldn’t write a fictional blog. I agree with him, nearly. Write some fiction, see if it is good. Is it appropriate for internet posting? Want to post it on the internet? Great! Do it. Don’t force the form into the format and all manner of other evils.

Also, I posted this on my tumblr the other day, but it deserves more views: 

| View | Upload your own

It is taken from the Penguin Blog - the first Business-driven blog I have ever added to my RSS feeder, fact-fans, simply because it is frequently interesting - and it funny and true.