When Books Collide (a confession)

Writers can be creatures of habit. We have to be if we want to write – it’s the whole drive of sitting down at the computer, typing out word upon word, be it short story, novella, novel or even blog. I’m not talking addiction here (as mentioned earlier) but stuck in the proverbial rut where you start doing one thing and don’t think about the alternatives.
For me this means starting a project. Prior to The Secret War I never planned a novel. Then I read a book called “How to Write and Sell a Synopsis” by Stella Whitelaw. I read it because I was never any good at writing summaries of books (it’s still a flaw in my craft – a three page synopsis always threatens to turn longer as I try to cram in everything that I feel is special about the story – I can never be concise enough). Apart from aiding me in that quite frustrating task, I learned that a synopsis can be used for something other than trying to impress an agent or a publisher: it can be used to plan your book.

When I started writing a short book (by my standards) called The Prey and the Haunted, I decided to get the whole synopsis thing out of the way from the beginning. I had an idea what I wanted to write – mostly character driven – and spent a couple of weeks knocking up a four page treatment. Two things happened that I didn’t expect – and both were at opposite ends of the writing spectrum. The first was that having a basic plan tacked to a pin-board in front of me meant I never once wrote myself into a dead-end. For the first time in my writing, the book flowed where I wanted it to. There was no need for sand-bagging, or channel digging; the story was obeying me.

But the second was something I haven’t understood – truly – until now.

It goes back to what I said in the previous blog entry, as well as David’s comment. Once you write down the story in whatever form, or once you tell someone about the story in summary, then the story is told. For the writer, there are no surprises – so why write it?
The Secret War was the tightest planned construct of my career at that point. Prior to it – with its pages of notes, secret histories and plots and sub-plots – I wrote in a free-falling way, being driven by my characters more than anything, though always wanting to reach a certain goal. I was young then, knew little of character which could be a reason why I was not published until The Secret War. But as Natascha McElhone’s badge says in The Trueman Show, “How’s it going to end?” I never knew then what would happen to my characters, or really the story – what surprises would come their way?
With The Secret War, I knew – through each step – what would happen to my characters before I wrote it. With so many twists in the story, I suppose I had to. Planning it from the beginning meant I could concentrate on historical research rather than worrying about what dead-ends lurked behind each page. And I think without planning, The Secret War would never have been written – nor, I guess, published. By virtue that Macmillan New Writing did publish the story means that I got something right that I didn’t with my previous stories, doesn’t it?
And if ain’t broke…

The Secret of Mhorrer was just as well planned, perhaps more so. Yet despite planning, I didn’t see certain flaws in the original story. It was only when I wrote the first draft did they appear – not dead-ends as such, but unnatural progressions. Characters were too reined in, sub-plots were suffocating, and the surprise at the end – well it wasn’t much of a surprise to me as I finally wrote it; it felt damp, rushed and diluted like someone who has read the same Whodunnit over and over, or perhaps like watching Usual Suspects for the one hundredth time (you know who Keyser Soze is… why force yourself into amazement, boy?!!).

Realising this, I went into the 2nd draft with a revised plan but with a different mantra: if it feels right, write it – and fuck the plan. And so the 2nd draft threw up quite a few changes, the key one being the death of a main character near the end which was unplanned for but felt natural. I even added a chapter, cut another and twisted character motivations around (because it felt right). Even though the ultimate denouement or “Faux Denouement” was not entirely unknown to me, there is a sparkle to it now I never thought a 2nd draft, nor any draft for that matter, could deliver from something so rigorously planned. To reiterate an early blog entry – the 2nd re-write of The Secret of Mhorrer isn’t just a different draft, it’s a whole different story.

And so to A Well in the Flesh… This has not been planned. I have no story really, just a few images, an ending of sorts and a host of characters culled from experience. It’s the first character driven story I’ve written since The Prey and the Haunted (way back in 2001) and I’ve learned a lot about character in the interim – not to mention writing. A Well in the Flesh is a collision with The Secret of Mhorrer, and wasn’t that the point? To write something so different in terms of tone, structure, even preparation (there wasn’t any, I just started writing it a few days ago) that wipes my imagination clean for the 3rd draft of the Secret of Mhorrer?
But this collision has taught me something – the beauty of having no control, of simply hurling yourself into the page. It’s a little intimidating, but there’ll be plenty surprises (the biggest one being if I can keep it below novel size – I seem to be suffering from writus-bloatus at the moment). And it should be fun too, I reckon.

There are no wrong ways or truly right ways to write. Just traps in every process that can snare a writer.

I’m not saying I’ll never plan again, just not so anally.