EL Doctorow \u2013 a genius \u2013 once said, \u2018Writing 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.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And that\u2019s 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\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This email offers no solution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But driving in fog is scary and it\u2019s easy to get off track completely \u2026 or to be bang on track but spend your days worrying that you\u2019re going wrong. So this email tries to address a fairly narrow question. Namely, what does it feel like when a book is going well<\/em>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n So here are some things you may be feeling, and here\u2019s what I think they mean.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe bit I\u2019ve just written seems poor. I\u2019m not that thrilled with the bit I wrote last week either.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n If you have any feelings along those lines, I\u2019d say they\u2019re just par for the course. First drafts ought<\/em> to feel a little ragged. If they don\u2019t, you may be spending too much time editing and too little time plunging forwards. (I\u2019m a big over-editor myself.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI\u2019ve got a plot niggle that I haven\u2019t been able to solve and it\u2019s doing my head in.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019t tell you anything meaningful about whether your book is heading for fundamentally OK or fundamentally \u2019orrible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Of my Fiona books, I\u2019d 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\u2019t, and one was a total mess.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Only the total mess book was, in my opinion, a bad one \u2026 and even then, it sold well and ended up being nominated for an award.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe book feels a bit laboured, a bit slow.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s positive if you feel that. Your book probably is<\/em> a bit slow, because you probably need to cut 10-20% of what you\u2019ve just written. But that feeling says nothing at all about whether you\u2019re on the right road. You can be perfectly on track and still have that feeling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Just write that draft, then cut it. Easy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI really question whether this voice is right.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n That concern really matters. You risk going quite wrong if you don\u2019t have the right voice from more or less the outset \u2013 just because a faulty voice will encourage you down lots of faulty pathways. That\u2019s definitely one to fix first. Don\u2019t neglect any concern along those lines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI just keep feeling unsure about whether this book even has legs commercially.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s a feeling that, again, you need to inspect with real care.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of my more popular books is a contemporary police procedural about King Arthur. (And, I know, modern police forces don\u2019t normally have a lot to do with Arthur, but \u2026)<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u2013 and that essentially gives us the denouement of the whole story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What I loved about the idea was the sort of double-switcheroo structure. That structure gave the reader three jaw-dropping moments:<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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<\/em>, a thoroughly entertaining and saleable book to be written.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you can\u2019t look at the core idea for your book and think, \u201cYes, this basically works,\u201d then you risk putting in a vast amount of effort to write something that even in its best incarnation<\/em> won\u2019t tempt an agent. So: take care. And (I know I\u2019m repetitive on this topic) make sure that the basic pitch for your book is sound.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI absolutely love writing this book. I think about it when I\u2019m walking the dog or washing up or (naughty me!) talking to my partner about admin.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n This is a superb sign, I think. Whenever that\u2019s been true for me, one of my best books has emerged \u2013 whether fiction, or non-fiction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You can write a good book without that feeling, but it certainly helps. A lot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI wish I weren\u2019t alone.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Well, yes, most people think that and it\u2019s 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\u2019t matter what you\u2019re writing or how good you are or precisely what your set of issues is. You\u2019ll find a friend on Townhouse and someone who cares about exactly the same things as you do. (If you\u2019re not a member, then do join. It\u2019s free and easy<\/a>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you\u2019re feeling like investing a bit more than nothing at all, then there are two basic options for you: mentoring<\/a> and editorial feedback<\/a>. On the whole, I advise against getting feedback until you are quite a long way down the line \u2013 simply because your own self-editing work will pick up most of what an editor would say. Once you\u2019ve written the book and edited hard \u2013 that\u2019s the time to get an editor involved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With a mentor, it\u2019s 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\u2019ve written successful books and know what you need to achieve to succeed. For another, they\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n FEEDBACK FRIDAY \/ Together and apart<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Two FFs again this week, one for those taking the Romance course, one not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Romance course version<\/strong>: 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\u2019re not sure which direction to take your story, share up to 3 potential story seeds. Look at other people\u2019s story seeds. Would you read them? Why\/why not? Share in the forum<\/u>.<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n