The icy leap

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’d break out of the garden and trot down the river footpath until she had found me and ‘rescued’ me. Her relief and joy were always boundless.

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.

Now all this is to introduce a writing dilemma we’ve all faced – a critical one.

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 about something to writing about something?

These things have consequences.

Skip too fast over the planning phase and the risk – a huge one – is that you are embarking on a project that has no chance at all of ever being realised.

Let’s 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’s 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.)

Boof! You’re off to the races, right?

Well, yes and no.

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. 

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’t. They mostly don’t.

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’re not quite as existential as the ‘leap too soon’ risk.

So when to start writing? How do you know? What is it like to judge that leap correctly?

Well, I don’t always know. I sometimes get it wrong. But here’s an example of where I nailed it.

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.)

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’s most significant criminal enterprises.

Good. That felt like a nice idea to latch onto.

But Welsh history posed a bit of a problem. The history of Wales goes back a good old way, but it’s 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.

Only … and this was Inspiration #1 … 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’s plenty of circumstantial evidence to suggest that, if he existed, he was quite possibly Welsh.

(And, by the way, it’s quite likely that he did exist – ancient sources on both the British and Anglo-Saxon side suggest that he did. He wasn’t a king, though, nor was that ever suggested until much later.)

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’s sword, Excalibur. (Or, more accurately, Caledfwlch: there’s no way Arthur would have called his sword by a cod-Latin name that was popularised around a millennium later.)

I loved this idea, but was worried that if I centred a contemporary police procedural on an actual Excalibur, I’d 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 ‘authenticate’ the discovery.

That felt complicated – but good-complicated. Crime stories should have a twisty, hard-to-follow structure. That’s part of their yumminess.

But so far, I felt I had something credible – plausible – a nice idea for a book.

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.

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’t have the courage yet to make the leap.

And then – and I remember the moment – I had Inspiration #2. How was my Fiona Griffiths going to catch the bad guys?

And it came to me. The best place to sell dodgy stuff is on the Dark Web – where you can find highly encrypted, super-anonymised eBay stores for drugs, guns, counterfeit documents, anything you like.

If you wanted to sell a counterfeit Excalibur, that’s where you’d 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.

The idea worked perfectly at one level: it would introduce a totally unexpected mid-book twist, perfect for this kind of novel.

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.

It’s like I had the keystone that would lock everything else into place – bring the story and my character into perfect synchrony.

And for me at least, once you hit that sense of inspiration – the shape of the story, the keystone, the excitement – it’s fine for you start writing immediately. If you’re more of a planner than I am, then it’s also fine to plan things out a bit more before that icy leap.

And I should say that taking the leap at the right point in your book’s development doesn’t mean that everything will run fine from there on. You’ll still find plot knots that are desperately hard to untangle. You’ll still encounter patches where you feel the book has lost all its energy and reason to live.

In the end, a powerful inspiration – the insight which secures your book’s basic viability – still requires the whole discipline of craft and time and attention.

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’m telling.

Find the idea – so solid you know you can count on it. Then the leap into the water. That way round, every time.