The strange pleasure of writing fiction
Oh dearly beloved, I have news, I have news.
This isn’t news of some new lovely Jericho thing; it’s the opposite. I’ve been busy for a long time with all things Jericho. Admin, tech, staffing, products, finance, blah. And now, those things are all still busy and thriving. But –
Increasingly, those things don’t need me. I have people more capable than me in most of the roles that matter. When we have weekly e-meetings, and someone asks me, “Anything from you, Harry?”, I mostly now just say no.
Oh the bliss of that no. Because, for well over a year now, I’ve had a half-finished Fiona Griffiths novel on my computer. It’s a novel under contract too, albeit contracts with deadlines that I’ve felt able to ignore. (Douglas Adams said: “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” – that’s never been me before, but Jericho hath made it so.)
Any case, point is, I have some time available again and I have restarted work on the book that will one day be THE HOUSE AT THE END OF THE WORLD. It’s a joy to be writing again. It’s a joy to re-encounter the whole set-up I’ve built for myself – Fiona Griffiths has to investigate a crime that seems to emanate from a secure psychiatric hospital on the west coast of Wales. She’s had some bad personal experiences of psychiatric hospitals herself. And this one is stuffed full of ex-Special Forces veterans, with scrambled brains and a remarkable capacity for violence. And – well, there’s a whole plum pudding of ingredients, which I’ve assembled mostly because I think they’re yummy.
So: it’s a pleasure to be back.
The biggest pleasure? It’s to be with the characters again. Fiona especially – she and I have walked together for three quarters of a million words so far and there’s plenty of road still ahead of us.
Coming back after this long away, I realise that the relationship we writers have with our characters IS a real relationship. That is, it has elements of actual love in it.
You think that because the character isn’t real, the emotions can’t be either. But they can. It’s not like parent/child love, or romantic love, or human/dog love, or anything like that. It’s its own thing. It’s writer/character love, and it’s one-way only, but it’s real. If by some weird twist of brain chemistry I was prohibited from “seeing” Fiona again, I’d have a real bereavement, a genuine loss. And now that I’m back with her, writing actively, not just thinking wistfully, it’s like an old friend has flown in from Australia after years away and we can pick things up again, almost exactly as they were when we left off.
To have that kind of loving relationship on tap is a kind of gift. Writers have it. The rest of the world (poor saps) are forced to rely on real people, with all their flaws.
That’s not the only pleasure. For me, there’s a pleasure in writing. There’s a painful pleasure – or a pleasurable pain – in plotting. There’s a lot of pleasure in editing and re-editing. I like most of the stuff around publication too, whether trad or self-pub. And, though I’ve been off the circuit just recently, I love the crime writing scene. I love the writers and the gossip and the booze and the inclusive insiderishness of it all.
By about this point in an email, I occasionally check myself. Have I actually delivered any actionable and useful advice, or have I just waffled around talking about boxes full of elegantly dressed women and other such nonsense?
Mostly, I pass my actionable advice test with flying colours. This email, so far, flunks completely.
Useful advice for you to take home and cuddle at night:
Nada.
Zip.
A big fat socially-distanced zero.
Except, here’s the thing.
Your happiness – your many and varied sorts of writing happiness – all matter. You need to cherish and nurture them. If you notice one of them wilting, you need to figure out what’s going on and fix it.
Partly, that’s just a question of good life management. If a thing doesn’t make you happy, then twizzle it around until it does. That’s all the more important with things connected with writing. Writing is, in most cases, badly paid enough that you have to love it for its own sake. If you’re a hedge fund manager who doesn’t much love (erm) funding hedges, I’m sure the other compensations are plentiful. That’s not the case with writing.
But also: you will work better and faster and with stronger outcomes if you love what you do. Take the editing process. If you love that, as I do, you’ll be reluctant to leave the task until it’s really truly done. Things that were not quite right in the first or fourth draft manuscript start to glitter and shine. If editing is just a chore to get through, you’ll almost certainly end up finishing a good bit before you should.
So find your happy.
That is the actionable advice of this email. Find your happy. If you love some parts of the writing process and hate others, then look to see how you can transform your experience of the parts you don’t like. Do you gamify it? (“Hmm. I don’t like editing, but today I’m going to see if I can find 5,000 words of unnecessary text to cut. Ready, steady, go…”) Do you just add kindness? (“Right. I don’t usually let myself work in a coffee shop, but while I’m editing, I’m going to do it with coffees and muffins every day until I’m done.”) Do you just add self-love? (“You know what? I didn’t like this, but actually I can see this book starting to take shape and I’m genuinely proud of what I’ve accomplished.”)
Or whatever. But find your happy. Your work and your characters will be grateful for it.
Here endeth the epistle.
But what about you? Do you love writing? Or is it more pain than pleasure? What parts do you love and which would you willingly ditch forever? let me know in the comments, and we’ll all have a Heated Debate.
Loved this post, Harry. A good few LOL moments. Only left me worried that Harry and his wonderfully entertaining posts might be one of the things to go as Fiona takes hold of him again.
What do I love about writing?
1. The inspiration – that moment when an idea comes from absolutely nowhere and it is imperative that it is set down in some form no matter how flimsy before it flies off never to be seen again.
2. Editing and seeing the development and changes.
3. Getting to the end of the story (short or full-length novel)
What do I hate about writing?
The self-doubts… those days when everything on the page seems like utter tripe.
“…forensicated…”? Is that even a real word?
But that wasn’t what I came here to say. You mention, Harry, that the rest of the world (poor saps) are forced to rely on real people. Shouldn’t you be saying that the rest of the world are forced to rely on the characters we – the writers – give them? That as well as having the pleasure of an intimate relationship with these characters, we – the writers – have a responsibility, a duty, to present the best ones to the world, in all their flawed beauty…
Thanks, Harry. As always, you’re giving us stuff that’s amusing but full of insights. I’m glad you like to meet Fiona again, and am encouraged by the fact. I’m in the middle of my second novel, the sequel to the first, which is self-published on Amazon. So…. not a lot of sales yet (!) but, as I keep writing, I feel I’m starting to build that body of work that all your advice suggests is necessary to make a success of self-pub.
I’m also relieved to learn that I’m not (too) odd! At least, planning the plot for this one was something I worked really hard on: it was a grind and not enjoyable, as you suggest. I am enjoying writing the book, though, and feel good whenever I manage a tweak or cross-reference to improve on the plot outline: and every time I go back and edit/improve a section, it’s intensely satisfying.
I was a little worried that my pleasure at coming back to my central character (first person) and his close associates was a sign that it/I was a bit cosy. You’ve set my mind at rest.
So, feeling encouraged, I’ll head back to 13th-Century Bologna before gin o’clock!
I’m with you Harry. A bit of a pain plotting but love my characters and the editing afterwards. I like to escape into different worlds 🙂
Fab post, Harry, and the ‘actionable advice’ is both useful and wise. And something I know I’m guilty of forgetting often enough that the reminder was much needed.
If I’m honest, I’ve always enjoyed the end result of the writing more than the writing process itself. That’s been true for all my creative endeavours, though, regardless of the medium, whether it’s art or music or anything else. It’s seeing and (perhaps more importantly) sharing the result of all that sometimes (to me) hard slog that gives me that dopamine hit that makes it worth while.
That’s not to say I can’t find pleasure along the way; that moment when just the right word slides into a sentence, or when a particularly resonant link between two plot elements suddenly clicks into place and unlocks a whole new level of exploration, or when a snatch of dialogue between two characters elicits a smile as if it’s been overheard in passing rather than typed… those are the things that keep me going through the frustration and creative doldrums. Sometimes, they even manage to silence that constant, venomous, whining little voice from my inner critic telling me it’s all never good enough.
As for loving the characters, oh god yes. Yes! Particularly the long-standing ones that you’ve lived with for years. They’re like best friends, and, like the very best friends, you know them intimately, even if they can still occasionally surprise you.
The only problem is that you get to like them so much it’s hard to knock them down… even when you know you’re going to help them back up again when the time is right!
Glad you’re back writing Fiona again (and I love the title), and also glad that you’ll still (by the sound of it) be entertaining us all with your posts here too. Thank you!
You’ve summed it up brilliantly, Harry. I was just saying yesterday to someone on Facebook, who was complaining about being lonely in lockdown, how great writing is for that. You have friends around you all the time. OK, they’re imaginary and some of them may be sociopaths, but they do become a part of your life.
I’ve found that when I’ve slotted characters into real places and events I know well, I miss them not being there in real life. They become, for me, an integral part of that place or event and it feels wrong that they’re not there. The real people who are there feel, just for a fleeting moment, a little disappointing. It’s that process of creating characters and learning about them which I love most about writing. Now just need to learn how to plot the damn things…
“You think that because the character isn’t real, the emotions can’t be either. But they can. It’s not like parent/child love, or romantic love, or human/dog love, or anything like that. It’s its own thing. It’s writer/character love, and it’s one-way only, but it’s real.”
Thank you for acknowledging this! I have felt this quite keenly in my current writing project and I think that this is what gets me excited to write plots and timelines and brainstorm dialogue and how to weave between the main plot and sub-plots. It makes me want to have good, interesting things happen to my characters. We’ll see if it ever gets published!
I laughed out loud at the Douglas Adams reference, too; I’ll have to quote that the next time I miss a deadline at my day job. That will go over well, I’m certain!
Deeply immersed Harry, deeply immersed. One thing I do know; if you are creative and you don’t create, you won’t be a happy bunny, it gnaws away inside you trying to eat its way out and won’t be content until it does and sees the sun and feels the breeze of freedom.
The wine merchant was so outraged by the shaky old town-house-member’s clumsy Spillage of a landmark vintage he couldn’t stop himself from lashing out with the nearest blunt instrument he could find. Poor thing, I feel for him.
Great post thanks.
Kerry
Well the odd thing was that the dead man had his pockets full of gold doubloons stolen from the Townhouse’s Map Room. If you’re stealing gold, why hang around in the library? And the pre-WW1 vintages are all kept in one of the locked cellars, to which only I and three other trusted associates have the key. And – strange to tell – the house parrot was found dead in its cage with a strangely coded message in a ring round its claw. The mystery thickens …
I’m Very much afraid those doubloons were the self same doubloons that the wine merchant’s eccentric father used to carry around in his tasting kit. In his last iliness he rambled about the theft of them and raged against the dishonesty of writers, publishers and other ‘charlatans’. I bet the doubloons were kept in the locked wine cellar too. In fact there is a little light in this cellar now.