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Category: writing (Page 16 of 16)

End-of-the-week thoughts

May 27, 2012 /

Weird. I see from these entries that it’s just about six weeks since I began work on what I thought would be the second draft of my novel. It feels much longer ago, probably because the book I’m writing now is completely different.

I did precisely one week’s work on that second draft before I realised that something was wrong. What was wrong was the entire first section of the book. I spent a day or so going ‘oh fuck’ (it was 35,000 words we were talking about, after all) before deciding to junk it.

It seemed the only thing to do. I didn’t think that what I’d written was bad, just that it did not fit. It was swinging the novel into a cul de sac. I still felt happy with the middle sections of the book, but I wanted to rewrite the beginning and I knew that if I did that it would mean rewriting the most of the final section also. In effect I would have lost three months’ work, possibly more.

‘Comfort’ may not be the right word, but what made me certain I was doing the right thing was knowing it was not the first time something like this had happened to me and far from it. I begin with characters and situations, never plots. The only way I can find out what one of my stories is about is by writing it, and sometimes – very nearly always – the story I begin with is not the story I eventually arrive at. A lot of words get discarded. It took me three false starts – about 8,000 unused words – before I got a proper handle on ‘The Muse of Copenhagen’, for instance. For a while it began to feel like one of M. R James’s infamous ‘stories I have tried to write’ and it’s absolutely true to say that it was only my attachment to the protagonist and his situation (oh, and my promise to Jon Oliver and his House of Fear) that kept me going with it.

Similarly with the novel. I had this core section – about 25,000 words – that seemed to me to be the essence of the novel, the book as I’d always imagined it, a narrator with a story to tell. I could not let her down.

I fixed my mind on that character, and started again at Page 1.

Now, six weeks on, I have a whole new Part One, and this week I made a good start on rewriting Part Four. The book’s SFnal quotient is significantly stronger and more defined, something that delights me immeasurably. Those who know me best know that I get terribly nervous and vague when talking about work in progress, but I think it’s OK to say I’m quietly excited.

The thing still doesn’t have a title, but I’m trusting that will reveal itself eventually.

Just finished rereading: M. John Harrison’s (dauntingly magnificent) Light and Nova Swing, in preparation for the third book in this trilogy, the forthcoming Empty Space. Next up: China Mieville’s Railsea.

More with the worldbuilding – literally

May 10, 2012 /

Reading this wonderful article in The Guardian about dollshouses and the people who make them, I was struck most especially by these words spoken by Jose Aleson, a guy from North London who fell into dollshouse-making by accident but now finds himself obsessed by it:

“It’s not to play with,  but you know what, there’s nothing more relaxing than sitting here at night, with the lights off, and all the lights on in the doll’s house, enjoying that moment. I like everything to be in order, and this is a kind of perfection. It’s like you’ve stopped time.”

For me this immediately conjured a scene from a story within a story: the man making the house and imagining it as a living entity within a world he himself has built, the writer writing about the creative dreamer who has built it.

There’s no denying the power that miniature houses exert over the imagination – the same pull that real houses have, I suspect, only distilled, concentrated in line with the reserves of imagination and commitment needed to create them. The finest dollshouses are undoubted works of art, but they are something else also. They are repositories of our dreams and sometimes also our fears.

I’ve loved dollshouse literature ever since I first read Rumer Godden’s 1947 novel The Doll’s House when I was eight or nine. Another favourite is Joyce Carol Oates’s tense and frightening short story ‘The Doll’. There’s something about this – the idea of losing control over a world you yourself have created – that is terribly frightening. But then there’s also that excitement of creation – of capture, of recreation of something lost – that feeds the maker’s obsession and makes him risk everything.

I messed around with these themes a little in my own story ‘Darkroom’, first published in Allen Ashley’s anthology Subtle Edens back in 2008. I remember thinking even then that I’d only brushed the surface of the subject  – there was Mr Ashley’s 6,000-word word limit to consider, after all. But the fascination hasn’t gone away and doesn’t seem likely to.

Something to think about on rainy days, no question. In the meantime I’ll be posting ‘Darkroom’ at the Featured Story page as a kind of placeholder……

Dolls house, 17th Century, German National Museum, Nuremberg

Jack in the Green

May 9, 2012 /

The Mayday Bank Holiday in Hastings is Jack in the Green day, a traditional or pagan festival that celebrates the ritual slaying of winter and the welcome release of summer into the world. It was a big thing in Hastings until the late 1880s, when the Victorians started grumbling that a more sedate maypole-type ceremony might be in order. A century later the old-style Jack was revived by the locals, and happily it’s now a big thing once again.

As I learned last winter when I attended my first Hastings annual bonfire parade, these rituals are taken seriously here, there’s a special atmosphere that surrounds them. Ancient rituals and beliefs feel very close to the surface. Everyone clearly has a great deal of fun – on Jack in the Green day literally thousands of bikers traditionally descend upon Hastings, the town swells to twice its normal size and yet the atmosphere remains enthusiastically inclusive, one-hundred percent family friendly – but beneath it all there’s something more than that, something old and ingrained, something whispered, elusive, mysterious. Walking around the Old Town and up through the Croft on Monday afternoon, what I kept thinking was: the thing, that indecipherable something we write about is still alive.

Taut bundles of leaves tied with bunting to the Old Town railings, banners featuring green images of Jack, a girl wearing a black velvet cloak and crowned with a circlet of flowers helping some guy start his motorbike, a biker buying a pint of prawns from one of the fish stalls down on the Stade. An odd, roughly made kind of magic, but magic definitely.

Motorbikes, Hastings sea front, May 2012

Shop window, Rock-a-Nore Road, Hastings May 2012

(And definitely not unconnected) I’ve been making progress with the book. Today I felt truly excited, with that queasy excitement you get when something moves you, when a piece of writing finally feels like it’s going the way you imagined.

I want to write more about this, to share more, but at the moment each time I try I pull up short. I guess everything is going into the actual writing. More on this soon.

In the meantime here’s Naomi Wood instead, talking about the inspirations behind The Godless Boys. I wouldn’t say the book is perfect. I feel it has something of an ad hoc feel to it, mainly because some of the rationale behind the central premise (OMG am I actually talking about worldbuilding here?) feels insufficiently worked out. But what remains with me, what makes this novel special, is its sincerity. There are some beautiful moments in the prose, and a genuinely affecting ending. It is a Good Thing and so is Naomi. Go read her.

Thought for the day

April 16, 2012 /

Irvine Welsh in today’s Guardian describes his approach to plot as ‘just a big mess’:

“I come up with a blurb at the beginning, but the book’ll always be completely different by the time it’s finished. They say: ‘Where’s the book you were going to write?’ And I say, forget about it, it doesn’t exist.”

I am so getting that right now……

Turing’s plaque

April 2, 2012 /

Blue plaque for Alan Turing at Baston Lodge

I’m now into the final 5-10,000 words of the first draft of the novel. I was hoping to finish the draft this week but I don’t think it’s going to happen. This final little chapter is very important, and trying to get it right, even with 95,000 words already written, even in first draft which I know will all be changed anyway, feels like bearing a heavy weight uphill. It’s an exciting challenge though, and I relish those. I know what I have to write, just not – yet, quite – how.

During the afternoon I took a break from the actual writing and went for a stroll in the part of town where the chapter happens. There’s nothing like roaming around the houses for setting loose a storm of ideas, for me anyway, and at the very least I now have a renewed sense of place at the forefront of my imagination. My walk took me past the house where Alan Turing spent his childhood. It’s a sad story – Turing’s father was based in India so Alan was semi-adopted by a friend of his, the retired Colonel Ward – and I can’t help feeling that such a sensitive little boy must have retained some sense of displacement, even though this was the only life he knew. The British establishment’s later treatment of Alan Turing fills me with an anger so raw that the only appropriate way of channelling it would be to filter it through a story, something I would very much like to try and do one day.

In the meantime I have this place, and the honour of sharing space with a unique mind. Baston Lodge, long since converted into flats, sits silently in a quiet corner of an unsung town. The writer Rider Haggard lived just down the road. This lunchtime there was no one about. I stood outside on the pavement, thinking about Turing and about my story and trying to imagine myself backwards into 1913.

Baston Lodge, St Leonards on Sea

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