A few years back, I used to live two or three hundred yards from the Thames. I swam a lot, often a mile or two at a time. In summer, I used to swim so long that my cocker spaniel, a particularly anxious and loyal dog, would start to fret. At a certain point, she\u2019d break out of the garden and trot down the river footpath until she had found me and \u2018rescued\u2019 me. Her relief and joy were always boundless.<\/p>\n
But that was summer. My first swim of the year was always May 1, a date which has a sunny sort of feel to it, but the water at that time of year still held the shudder of winter ice. There was often something literally breathtaking about taking the leap. Your chest clenches and your breath locks up and for a short moment you wonder whether any of this was at all a good idea.<\/p>\n
Now all this is to introduce a writing dilemma we\u2019ve all faced – a critical one.<\/p>\n
So: You have an idea for a book. You want to write the book. You start to develop your ideas. But when do you make the leap? When do you go from thinking<\/em> about something to writing<\/em> about something?<\/strong><\/p>\n These things have consequences.<\/p>\n Skip too fast over the planning phase and the risk \u2013 a huge one \u2013 is that you are embarking on a project that has no chance at all of ever being realised.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s say, for example, you want to write a crime novel. You think, yes, people always love serial killer novels. You choose a city (Phoenix? Liverpool? Chipping Sodbury?). You choose a weird and wonderful habit that the serial killer has. (Uh, let\u2019s say his murder methods combine exotic flowers and dangerously musky perfumes.) Then you pick a detective with a few little personal quirks (collects matchboxes, drinks too much, something dark in his\/her past.)<\/p>\n Boof! You\u2019re off to the races, right?<\/p>\n Well, yes and no.<\/p>\n Yes, in the sense that you could write a book like that, and get to the end, and do all your edits, and arrive at a completely competent manuscript.\u00a0<\/p>\n But also no, because why would any agent want to take this on? They get a ton of competently written serial killer stuff. Why take yours? The probable answer is that they wouldn\u2019t. They mostly don’t.<\/p>\n On the other hand, where the “go too early” risk is potentially lethal, the risk of spending too long in the writing \/ planning phase is rather smaller. The issue, really, is that you waste time and, perhaps, let a little air out of the inspirational rush you started with. Those risks are annoying and silly, but they\u2019re not quite as existential as the \u2018leap too soon\u2019 risk.<\/p>\n So when to start writing? How do you know? What is it like to judge that leap correctly?<\/strong><\/p>\n Well, I don\u2019t always know. I sometimes get it wrong. But here\u2019s an example of where I nailed it.<\/p>\n I was ready to write book #6 in the Fiona Griffiths series. The theme needed to tie in nicely with my Welsh setting. There had to be an opening murder. I wanted an underlying crime that was novel and intriguing. (Not just weird nasty guy being weird and nasty. Not just drugs. Not just prostitution.)<\/p>\n I googled around, looking for ideas about what crimes existed. Found something about art and antiquities theft and fraud. Discovered that this area is one of the world\u2019s most significant criminal enterprises.<\/p>\n Good. That felt like a nice idea to latch onto.<\/p>\n But Welsh history posed a bit of a problem. The history of Wales goes back a good old way, but it\u2019s never been the centre of British art or prosperity. If I wanted to write a book about antiquities fraud then Rome, or Avignon, or Cairo, or Jerusalem would all look like better settings than Cardiff.<\/p>\n Only \u2026 and this was Inspiration #1<\/strong> \u2026 maybe not. If I wanted to go really nuts, what about a story that involved King Arthur? He was an ancient Briton (that is: Celtic, not Anglo-Saxon) and there\u2019s plenty of circumstantial evidence to suggest that, if he existed, he was quite possibly Welsh.<\/p>\n (And, by the way, it\u2019s quite likely that he did exist \u2013 ancient sources on both the British and Anglo-Saxon side suggest that he did. He wasn\u2019t a king, though, nor was that ever suggested until much later.)<\/p>\n I liked the idea of Arthur and, if antiquities theft was to lie at the heart of my book, then that antiquity just had to be Arthur\u2019s sword, Excalibur. (Or, more accurately, Caledfwlch: there\u2019s no way Arthur would have called his sword by a cod-Latin name that was popularised around a millennium later.)<\/p>\n I loved this idea, but was worried that if I centred a contemporary police procedural on an actual Excalibur, I\u2019d just lose too much credibility. So the bad guys had to create a fake Excalibur, then find a way to sell it. Obviously that meant they had to find a way to \u2018authenticate\u2019 the discovery.<\/p>\n That felt complicated \u2013 but good-complicated. Crime stories should have a twisty, hard-to-follow structure. That\u2019s part of their yumminess.<\/p>\n But so far, I felt I had something credible \u2013 plausible \u2013 a nice idea for a book.<\/p>\n But did I have a stunning one? There was something still missing. So I didn’t yet start writing. I was still in the thinking \/ planning \/ researching phase.<\/p>\n I scratched away at reading source material. (Books on Arthur. Material on how to fake antiquities. Stuff about the Dark Web.) I made little notes about my starting murder. I had some nice-looking scraps, but I didn\u2019t have the courage yet to make the leap.<\/p>\n And then \u2013 and I remember the moment \u2013 I had Inspiration #2<\/strong>. How was my Fiona Griffiths going to catch the bad guys?<\/p>\n And it came to me. The best place to sell dodgy stuff is on the Dark Web \u2013 where you can find highly encrypted, super-anonymised eBay stores for drugs, guns, counterfeit documents, anything you like.<\/p>\n If you wanted to sell a counterfeit Excalibur, that\u2019s where you\u2019d want to sell it. So how would Fiona stop the bad guys selling their dodgy sword? Answer: by making one of her own! By selling hers as well! With two swords on offer, no buyers would want either. So the bad guys would have to contact Fiona to get her to remove her sword from sale. And bingo: with contact made, Fiona could catch the bad guys.<\/p>\n The idea worked perfectly at one level: it would introduce a totally unexpected mid-book twist, perfect for this kind of novel.<\/p>\n But it would work perfectly for my character too. Her audacious, three-steps-ahead, rule-breaking resourcefulness was just perfect for this twist. I remember bounding around the garden in my joy at figuring this out.<\/p>\n It\u2019s like I had the keystone that would lock everything else into place – bring the story and my character into perfect synchrony.<\/p>\n And for me at least, once you hit that sense of inspiration \u2013 the shape of the story, the keystone, the excitement \u2013 it\u2019s fine for you start writing immediately. If you\u2019re more of a planner than I am, then it\u2019s also fine to plan things out a bit more before that icy leap.<\/p>\n And I should say that taking the leap at the right point in your book\u2019s development doesn\u2019t mean that everything will run fine from there on. You\u2019ll still find plot knots that are desperately hard to untangle. You\u2019ll still encounter patches where you feel the book has lost all its energy and reason to live.<\/p>\n In the end, a powerful inspiration \u2013 the insight which secures your book\u2019s basic viability \u2013 still requires the whole discipline of craft and time and attention.<\/p>\n But for me at least, if I have the security of an idea I know I can trust, the rest never gets too far off track. I never wholly lose my appetite for the story I\u2019m telling.<\/p>\n Find the idea – so solid you know you can count on it. Then the leap into the water. That way round, every time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A few years back, I used to live two or three hundred yards from the Thames. I swam a lot, often a mile or two at a time. In summer, I used to swim so long that my cocker spaniel, a particularly anxious and loyal dog, would start to fret. At a certain point, she\u2019d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29292],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-harrys-friday-email"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n