Your name is Charlie Harrison. You’re a teenage boy walking in the shadows of a burnt-out pier on the seafront of a run-down English resort, watching shyly from the shore as a pretty girl stares back from the water, the still grey sea up to her waist. She’s wearing a cheap, colourful cheesecloth shirt and her hair is soaking wet as if she’s been swimming. The girl is crying uncontrollably and refuses to come out. She seems to want to say something but she can’t quite bring herself to utter the words. A stray, bizarre thought occurs to you: she’s actually a mermaid, someone stranded and in trouble, for reasons you can only guess at.
An idea, a seed is sown …
All books start like this whether we realise it or not. A sight, a few casually spoken words, a line on a page, an encounter with a stranger. That trigger may lay dormant for years then one day, summoned usually by something you can’t quite place, it emerges. Finally, you say to yourself, ‘I am going to write a book.’
And so a long, strange journey begins, one that ends for so many in failure and frustration. We know intuitively there’s a story inside us somewhere. We have to believe we have a tale worth telling and of sufficient interest to others to make the effort worthwhile.
Why, then, is it so difficult to bring this blurry narrative to light?
In part because we often approach the problem from one direction only, that of writing, of production, of hunting for words to fill the void of a blank page. In our ignorance we think that staring at a dead white monitor will, through some magical intervention, bring forth a solution. We bang our heads against the same hard wall repeatedly wondering why we can never break through. Or if we do get to the other side we wind up asking ourselves what cruel turn of fate made the way ahead just as foggy and impenetrable, as devoid of reason and progress as the grim place we came from.
Writing is never easy, but it can be made less difficult. Some of the answers lie in understanding the process that brought you to the point at which you said, ‘I have a story to tell.’ Starting work on a novel is usually the culmination of years of reading, thinking and dreaming, most of it muddled and unfocused. In other words a hotchpotch of ideas suddenly fighting to come together in the form of a long and convincing narrative.
Books don’t enter the world from a vacuum. Nor can they be shapeless, without some kind of form, structure and direction. Bringing a full-length story to a satisfactory conclusion will require more than a single bright spark of inspiration. You will need to understand the nature of the obstacle course ahead, the skills required to negotiate it and the crucial decisions every writer will face along the way.
The seed is important too, of course.
Who is Charlie Harrison? What is his relationship with the girl in the water? What happens next? What kind of story could a starting point such as this one prompt?
Only one of those questions has an answer at the moment. That’s the last one and it’s dauntingly vague: any kind. This could be the opening for a tale of young love, a thriller, a crime story, even some kind of fantasy or gothic horror. The seeds for books are the same as those in your garden. You can never know what might emerge from that small brown husk when all you see is a tiny green shoot just starting to poke its way out of the top. Rose or thistle? Precious flower or not-so-welcome weed?
The temptation, always, is to seek the answer by sitting down at the keyboard and hoping some revelation will flow from your fingers. You may be desperate to get that first page out of your head and on to the screen – and if you are, then do it. Perhaps you’ve written it already and started to wonder … what next?
To finish a book, though, you need, at some stage, to walk away from the computer and try to think through some of the long and complex tasks ahead.
Don’t worry. The words in your head won’t disappear overnight. Why should they? If this is your first book they’ve been festering inside you for years, hidden away, murmuring in the dark, nagging you one day to try your hand at writing. They’ve been patient for a long time already. They can wait.