How I do that thing that I do: part 2 – The God Complex, or how my characters decided to run off into the desert without the author’s say so

During the first draft of The Secret of Mhorrer, something odd happened. For no reason whatsoever, while writing a 3,000 word section midway through the story, my characters decided to go off on their own adventure and without the author’s permission. I was left standing in the desert shouting “Oi! Come back here!” like a scolding parent, or that sensible friend no one listens to, watching my main characters disappear over the furthest sand-dune.

Of course, I had no choice but to follow their exploits. But, dammit, I’m the author! I own them! I AM GOD…

…aren’t I?

In the Beginning there were two words…
…and those words were “Oh, bugger.”

When I wrote my first book way back 1993 – a teenage horror story called The Forever Chain (unpublished – but then I was just 18 years old) – I had little idea what I was doing. I knew roughly how to write - having written around a dozen short stories by then - but no real idea how to write a book. I simply had an idea and wrote in one direction. The Forever Chain was a simple book you see: girl meets boy, falls in love, discovers boy has amazing powers, but also a murderous twin, boy and twin fight it out over girl, destroys the town and then each other, before finally, girl realises boy and twin weren’t real after all but actually lost spirits from a dead schizophrenic kid killed many years ago… The End.

See, told you it was simple.

It ran to 120,000 words, was full of intrigue but only one subplot. I had an idea what would happen at the end so I just sat down and wrote with that in mind. I never had a plan – never really knew what might come up between the first words and the last (although, as in part 1 of this How I? Blog, I did start with a single image and in this case it was a teenage girl dancing in a cloud of bright yellow canaries, laughing so much she was crying).
The Forever Chain worked out quite well, even garnering some interest from HarperCollins, before interest bottomed out and nothing came of it. Shelving the book, I attended university, wrote an anthology called Necrodyssey, and then embarked on my second book with the same methodology of knowing roughly where I was going and just sitting down to write it.

This book was The Apprentice and the Stripper, and boy, was I wrong.

The book ran to 200,000 words, a hulking beast of a novel with characters all over the place. This was not some teenage fiction of girl meets boy, it was a Byzantine crazy novel with a plot that sprawled. Having not really planned the book out in any detail it became a project that took 2 years to write 2 drafts and many, many obstacles to overcome. I wrote myself into plenty of holes, scrapping whole chunks of prose (the biggest being 30,000 words in one sitting), being thoroughly drained and exhausted afterwards.

The Apprentice and the Stripper is also unpublished, but then I guess it was never even complete.

It was at that point I looked at my stories and knew if I was ever going to be that ambitious again (as I was sure I would be) then I had to spend more time preparing myself in the future.

Planning sometimes pays

I first started mapping out books after writing a synopsis for my third book, The Prey and the Haunted. I bought a How to book on synopsis writing and was struck by a great piece of advice: a synopsis is not only necessary when you submit to the publisher or agent, but it also informs your writing when you embark on the novel (or something like that).
In effect, the synopsis is a plan of your novel, usually written after you’ve completed it to hook the agent or publisher who usually only has two to three chapters in front of them. But this book was saying you can go further with it.
What if you wrote your synopsis before you started writing the book? Would that be any benefit?
So I gave it a go, and tried writing a synopsis for The Prey and the Haunted, a plan as it were, of what the story was about, the characters, the setting, the key points of the beginning, middle and end. Twelve pages later and my first book map was written – if not in a vague and sketchy way.
The Prey and the Haunted was 120,000 words long and not once did I hit a dead-end, not once did I fall into a black hole, and the only scrapping of prose amounted to snips here and there. I knew where I was going, where I had come from, and how to get there, and it took 1 year to write 4 drafts.
The book map stopped me from getting lost.

It was liberating, and began my love affair with planning books – with all the attention of a Napoleonic general, mapping out who would go where, what would happen, even planning the exit. Something that was extremely helpful with The Secret War.

Book Maps

The Secret War is quite episodic, and follows the two main characters religiously only deviating near the end. My writing eye is fixed firmly on them. However, therein lies the problem without any planning. The story again is quite Byzantine if you go into all the motivations, the many characters not to mention perilous situations they find themselves in. Without planning I could have prematurely killed off characters, lost villains, resolved the adventures too soon, even included superfluous characters and situations that would have broken the pace of the book. It is, after all, an adventure story and I intended it to be a page-turner, not a ponderous novel with fits of starts.

In writing The Secret War I completed another writing plan, setting out brief notes not only on the story but the contents of the chapters. For the story to flow I planned out where the scenes of action would be, the exposition, the key events and how they would travel to the end, building up the story as I planned it – I guess much the way James McKee does (but as one of David Isaak’s commentators says, this is just a less detailed way of writing).
And again it worked.
I didn’t write myself into a black hole, and the only great chunks that were ripped out of the book were due to the publisher not wanting to take on a 170,000 word novel from a first time writer, and they eventually relaxed on 150,000 words.
The Secret War is not a natural novel – it was never meant to be – it’s a complex adventure story and was planned that way. To write it any other way would have been a nightmare, and I wonder if it could have been written without planning at all.

And so to The Secret of Mhorrer, the follow-up to The Secret War, which is even more complex with two, sometimes, three character-group viewpoints during the duration of the story. And again I planned it, but this time I went one step further (as some of the more regular readers already know) and wrote 2-3 paragraphs on each chapter to map out the whole story. I needed to know whether the plot had the legs for the entire book, whether the subplot fit with the overall story, and roughly how big the book would be. I didn’t want another 170,000 word novel on my hands with a remit to cut the heart out of it due to the word limitation imposed by the publisher.
So I planned it the nth degree.
And it was working…

…for a while, until natural instinct intervened and then it went pear shaped.

Resistance to instinct is futile

So now we go back to the beginning of this blog entry, and where my characters are dashing off into the distance, the author in pursuit, huffing and puffing after them – cursing them as I look at the word count mounting up and the book map is ripped into tiny pieces. My characters are only doing what is natural to them – so who am I to tell them “no!”? You see, writing needs to be instinctual as well, and you can map and plan and do everything else to direct the characters to the end of the book, but sometimes planning misses something – a point, a motivation, even natural progression of the story, and it takes the characters to remind the author where the story should be going.

In the end the characters were right – even to the point that their actions, unplanned as they were, added a dynamic to the story that was previously missing. Now that I’m in the 2nd draft, their unplanned jaunt is very much part of the story, and what happens later is informed by it – making the overall ending even more satisfying. The book is longer than planned, but successive drafting will take care of that – and it’s worth the extra work. I didn’t see it before, but there was a hole in the heart of the story and this unscheduled jaunt has plugged it – by chance.
It's fair to say that I’m a believer that luck doesn’t only play a big part in getting published, but in writing as well.

Not really a god

Writers are not gods, or if they are they’re the flawed Greek Gods who don’t always get things right. No matter how we like to control things, sometimes – just sometimes – the writer needs to let go. And like the previous blog entry - if the above tells me anything, it shows not all methods fit all stories, and the writer needs to be flexible.

To summarise then:
“planning pays, but don’t be afraid to go off the map in search of adventure from time to time.”

Coming soon Part 3: Where I discuss more of my writing process but will no doubt become distracted by something else entirely.