Cowardly lion? Drunken antelope?

When I’m in the car with the kids, especially if it’s with the boys, I play a game of “Which would you rather?”

The questions I ask are things like this:

• “Which would you rather be? A cowardly lion or a drunken antelope?”
• “Would you rather have the feet of a goat or the tail of a giant crow?”
• “Would you prefer to swim like a fish or fly like a bird?”
• “Would you rather speak like a croaky old man or have a nose as long as your finger?”
• “Would you like to smell like a flowerpot or feel like a turnip?”

And so on.

The kids ask questions too. Teddy – who is a wonderful child, but can be extremely boring – asks only football-related questions: would you rather score 900 goals for Banbury United (a less-than-wonderful team) or 90 goals for a Premier League side?

Tally, his twin, offers questions on whatever fantasy topic is obsessing her at the time: “would you rather be an air-element creature who’s afraid of flying or a water-element one who doesn’t like getting wet?”

Except for the whole football-related thing, journeys go quite fast and pleasantly. It’s striking how deeply engaged the kids get with even the most absurd questions. “Hmm, who’d win in a battle between a giant squirrel and a platoon of 12 miniature, but grumpy, sheep? Now, let me see …”)

It’s easy to think that this kind of nonsense is a model for writing books.

1. Come up with a wonderfully imaginative concept. (uh – a world where people walk around with daemons in the form of animals, Philip Pullman’s brilliant Northern Lights concept.)
2. Keep the strokes of imagination coming – a device for truth-telling, armoured bears, nomads who live on canals, gangs of child abductors, witches, parallel universes, a knife that can slice through those universes, soul-eating spectres, and more.
3. Write it all really well – quality of execution always vastly matters, of course.
4. Get a bestseller, a film deal, and about 200 tons of critical praise.

And yes. Kind of. But mostly no.

It’s conventional to praise the imagination of novelists – conventional for novelists to honour that aptitude, conventional for teachers to praise kids for their imaginative feats.

But imagination is easy. Our car-full of idiots spouting nonsense about goat’s feet and boozy antelopes is easy enough to create. A lot of the questions feel kind of dull, but plenty don’t. They have some bite. A proto-novelist concealed in the footwell could get enough ideas to fuel a fair few novels.

The real problem isn’t coming up with stuff; it’s disciplining it. There are at least three different disciplines which matter here.

Reality is one. I wrote a novel involving the manipulation of data in an undersea cable. That’s not an absurd idea: there are loads of cables. The war in Ukraine has exposed their vulnerability. There are plenty of companies who offer the ability to operate sub-sea robots to repair breaks and the like.

But (if you’re writing realistic, adult novels) you can’t just wave your hands at all that stuff. You need some measure of accuracy. That’s not really because your readership is going to know all about sub-sea cable repair. It’s more that your writing won’t smell authentic unless it’s deeply rooted in reality. The more you discover about the reality, the more you’ll find details which seem utterly compelling.

So that’s a constraint, a fierce one.

Next, novelty.

Your strokes of imagination are of no value if they feel jaded. Picking up Pullman’s ideas about daemons has no real use now: he’s done it. You could fool around with the exact definition of that idea (daemons take human, not animal, form; children don’t have them, adults do; only the evil or the powerful have daemons; etc), but no matter what you did, the idea would lack novelty. It would lack that sense of something fresh and compelling that readers (and agents) demand.

That’s another fiercely hard constraint to meet.

And then, coherence.

Pullman wrote two back-to-back trilogies about the same fantasy world, but (for my money) only the first of the novels really excels – that book is a true kids’ classic, one that ought to be read and honoured in 100 years’ time. The rest? Crikey, it just gets so baggy. It’s one thing after another. A cowardly lion, then a drunken antelope, then a 900-career-goals player from a north Oxfordshire town, then, what?, a boy with the feet of a goat and the odour of a flowerpot?

Having everything in your novel be new, compelling and yet also clustering round some meaningful central concern? That’s hard.

The difficult thing in writing isn’t imagination as such. It’s roping up those creatures of the imagination into an enclosure that feels realistic, new and coherent. That’s hard. That’s why we’re here, scratching away at these pages, trying to get them to feel right.

And you?

You’re doing something hard and something worth doing. And if you’re doing something hard, but worthwhile, then for the love of every goat-footed boy in Banbury, get help.

And …

Help is 30% cheaper in November

You can become a Premium Member for 30% off (our lowest price ever.) You get our library of self-paced video courses. You get our community. You get AgentMatch. You get live weekly events and workshops (including themed content such as Getting Published and Build Your Book). You get entry to all our competitions. You get query letter reviews (once a year). You get to Ask Us Anything. You get to be supported by probably the most supportive and expert writing group on the planet.

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FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Ingredients mix

What are the big imaginative strokes in your novel? Like what are the 10-15 biggest elements in your novel? If you’re writing kids’ fantasy novels, that’ll involve obviously imaginative elements like daemons and talking bears. But even if you’re writing perfectly realistic fiction, there’ll be some big elements that give flavour to the entire novel. So: list them out.

The questions I want you to think about when you review your work and give feedback to others are: does this list feel coherent and new? Does it all fit together? Does this collection of ideas feel like a novel?

Because this is a new sort of exercise, let me give you an example of what I’m after. If I were thinking about the make-up of This Thing of Darkness (my subsea cable story), I’d list the following big elements:

1. Cold cases
2. “Impossible” robberies carried out by elite climber
3. Locked room murder puzzle (Marine engineer found hanged in locked room)
4. Exam for sergeant
5. Exhibits officer
6. Ships, marine surveying, the American fiancée of dead engineer
7. Sub-sea cable and interference by hedge-fund types
8. Very good amateur climber who helps Fiona
9. Abduction of Fiona
10. Post abduction trauma and lots of dope-smoking
11. Burgling a young woman in London, smoking dope with her, losing shoes
12. Climax on a trawler in the Irish Sea. Bad guys. Guns. Fiona sinks ship. Rescue.
13. Post-rescue coverup (by Fiona). Arrest of elite climber

That all feels like a reasonable mix to me, except that the “exhibits officer” bit feels a little out of place. And honestly, reviewing the novel now, I’d consider ditching that exhibits officer strand. It added a layer of complexity and atmosphere to the novel which it barely needed. (My books don’t lack either of those things.) Otherwise, yes, that all feels like a nice package – imaginative enough, but also coherent and intriguing.

So: that’s your example. Now go and prepare your own list. Post into this forum on Townhouse. (Remember to log in first!) As ever, be generous with your reviews of others’ work.

Til soon.

Harry