Driving in the fog

EL Doctorow – a genius – once said, ‘Writing a novel is like driving at night in the fog. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.’

And that’s true. Give or take a few extreme plotters, essentially no novelist knows the full route their book will take when they start out. Worse still, it’s extremely hard to know if all your effort is even productive. Are you making this trip in the fog to reach a dead end? Or to reach the kind of literary nirvana, represented by a literary agent and a modest book deal?

This email offers no solution.

But driving in fog is scary and it’s easy to get off track completely … or to be bang on track but spend your days worrying that you’re going wrong. So this email tries to address a fairly narrow question. Namely, what does it feel like when a book is going well?

So here are some things you may be feeling, and here’s what I think they mean.

“The bit I’ve just written seems poor. I’m not that thrilled with the bit I wrote last week either.”

If you have any feelings along those lines, I’d say they’re just par for the course. First drafts ought to feel a little ragged. If they don’t, you may be spending too much time editing and too little time plunging forwards. (I’m a big over-editor myself.)

“I’ve got a plot niggle that I haven’t been able to solve and it’s doing my head in.”

That too feels to me so commonplace as to be hardly worth bothering about. I mean, yes, you need to solve that plot niggle, but the fact that you have a plot problem just doesn’t tell you anything meaningful about whether your book is heading for fundamentally OK or fundamentally ’orrible.

Of my Fiona books, I’d say that only one plotted itself without much headache. The rest were pretty headachey at times. With the novels I wrote before Fiona, two or three were very headachey, one really wasn’t, and one was a total mess.

Only the total mess book was, in my opinion, a bad one … and even then, it sold well and ended up being nominated for an award.

“The book feels a bit laboured, a bit slow.”

It’s positive if you feel that. Your book probably is a bit slow, because you probably need to cut 10-20% of what you’ve just written. But that feeling says nothing at all about whether you’re on the right road. You can be perfectly on track and still have that feeling.

Just write that draft, then cut it. Easy.

“I really question whether this voice is right.”

That concern really matters. You risk going quite wrong if you don’t have the right voice from more or less the outset – just because a faulty voice will encourage you down lots of faulty pathways. That’s definitely one to fix first. Don’t neglect any concern along those lines.

“I just keep feeling unsure about whether this book even has legs commercially.”

That’s a feeling that, again, you need to inspect with real care.

One of my more popular books is a contemporary police procedural about King Arthur. (And, I know, modern police forces don’t normally have a lot to do with Arthur, but …)

I had plenty of plot challenges with that book. Not more or fewer than usual, but plenty. But although those challenges, I remained absolutely confident in my core idea.

That idea was essentially this: bad guys create a fake Excalibur and a whole trail of fake authentication for it. They want to sell their Excalibur to the highest dodgy bidder. Fiona figures out that the only way she can get face to face with the bad guys, in order to arrest them, is to make a fake Excalibur of her own, and then seek to sell that. She knows that bad guys have to take her sword off the market before they can sell theirs – and that essentially gives us the denouement of the whole story.

What I loved about the idea was the sort of double-switcheroo structure. That structure gave the reader three jaw-dropping moments:

1. Wow! They might have found Excalibur!
2. Oh! They’ve totally faked Excalibur and all the things that authenticated it.
3. What?? Fiona’s built a fake Excalibur of her own?!

Those things wrapped around normal crime-novel basics (a decent amount of corpses and personal jeopardy) plus the sheer merriment of dealing with Arthurian Britain told me that there was, in principle, a thoroughly entertaining and saleable book to be written.

So no matter how tough the plotting issues got, I knew that there was a shiny, bright and enjoyable book at the end of it. The book might be tough to write at times, but I grappled with those challenges knowing that there was a prize to be had at the end of it all.

If you can’t look at the core idea for your book and think, “Yes, this basically works,” then you risk putting in a vast amount of effort to write something that even in its best incarnation won’t tempt an agent. So: take care. And (I know I’m repetitive on this topic) make sure that the basic pitch for your book is sound.

“I absolutely love writing this book. I think about it when I’m walking the dog or washing up or (naughty me!) talking to my partner about admin.”

This is a superb sign, I think. Whenever that’s been true for me, one of my best books has emerged – whether fiction, or non-fiction.

You can write a good book without that feeling, but it certainly helps. A lot.

“I wish I weren’t alone.”

Well, yes, most people think that and it’s not a dumb thing to think. I do think that the Townhouse community should be a real part of your self-care routine here. It doesn’t matter what you’re writing or how good you are or precisely what your set of issues is. You’ll find a friend on Townhouse and someone who cares about exactly the same things as you do. (If you’re not a member, then do join. It’s free and easy.)

If you’re feeling like investing a bit more than nothing at all, then there are two basic options for you: mentoring and editorial feedback. On the whole, I advise against getting feedback until you are quite a long way down the line – simply because your own self-editing work will pick up most of what an editor would say. Once you’ve written the book and edited hard – that’s the time to get an editor involved.

With a mentor, it’s different. There, you really are asking a wise navigator-cum-friend to come with you on that journey through the fog. That mentor has a few advantages over you. For one thing, they’ve written successful books and know what you need to achieve to succeed. For another, they’re much less invested than you in the detail and in the emotion of writing, so they bring a kind of wise distance to their advice. It can, honestly, be career-changing.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Together and apart

Two FFs again this week, one for those taking the Romance course, one not.

Romance course version: Come up with a story seed for your novel using the formula: Trope + Sub-Genre + Situation.  For example: Second chance + Small-town romance + School reunion. If you’re not sure which direction to take your story, share up to 3 potential story seeds. Look at other people’s story seeds. Would you read them? Why/why not? Share in the forum.

General version: I enjoyed last week’s challenge,so we’ll just go again with the same one. Obviously pick a new scene to look at, but otherwise the challenge is the same again:

Most books have got some kind of romance in them – or at least a deep bonding experience of some sort. So: let’s see a key scene between your pair (250-300 words). It could be falling in love, or rejecting each other, or first meeting, or any other key moment. As always, provide us with title, genre and any context we need to make sense of things. Upload your stuff here.

Til soon.

Harry