Taking on some of the aspects of a popular classification will add an important aspect to your coming book: a direction. You need that badge on your lapel not just because an agent or publisher will want to see it. Developing a clearer idea of the kind of story you want to write will also shape the progression of that seed of an idea germinating in your head. A first-time author isn’t simply trying to complete a book. He or she is unconsciously struggling to understand what kind of writer might lie inside them.
An idea of the genre you’re pitching for helps define the route ahead, and that’s going to be important because this is a journey with many different crossroads and turnings. You need to ensure you take the right ones along the way.
Let’s try to imagine some of the possibilities that could come out of the brief spark of a concept we’ve called Charlie and the Mermaid once we allow this germ of an idea to browse along a few different shelves in the bookshop.
Crime is a broad church, one of the most popular kinds of popular fiction around at the moment. Most stories in this field tend to be about revelation, about a search for truth, one that can often be costly for those involved. A crime writer could look at our starting point this way …
Charlie wades into the water and discovers a drowned child at the young girl’s feet. The police are called. The baby is hers. Immediately the police blame the girl and take her into custody. But she tells Charlie something before they arrive and he knows she’s a victim too, not that the police will believe him, and for some reason she refuses to make this plain to them herself.
The girl is released into protective custody. Charlie manages to see her again and his conviction about her innocence grows. He takes it on himself to find the real culprit, even though he knows this is dangerous and will lead him into conflict with the police himself.
Note: there’s no detail here. Nothing much to tell us what happens next or even where the story is headed. It’s implicit in this kind of book, as it is in most fiction, that the central dilemma – how can Charlie prove the girl’s innocence? – will be resolved at the end. But we’ve no idea how and that doesn’t matter. We’re not looking for specifics. We’re trying to get a general, fuzzy idea of the kind of book this might turn out to be and then use that to take the story forward.
Thrillers are so close in tone to crime stories the two frequently overlap. The key difference tends to lie in the thread that propels the story. In crime it is the hunt for the hidden perpetrator of some dark deed. In a thriller the narrative drive will come from something more immediate and pressing: an impending threat, a need to escape, a deadline that must be met. We’ll sometimes know who the bad guy is, even if we don’t know the full story about him or whether we should trust the information we have. None of this matters at the moment. Thrillers are there to thrill, to put the reader in the shoes of the protagonist as he or she tries to save their own skin, or that of someone else, and put the world to rights along the way. At this stage we simply need the starting point that propels our innocent into a new and threatening world.
Charlie wades into the water and discovers the body of a well-dressed man in a suit lying on the sand by the young girl’s feet, held down by lead weights. She stands there weeping, terrified. A group of scary-looking men are walking towards them along the beach. One of them pulls out a gun. The girl starts to howl. A fast inflatable boat emerges from behind. There’s a woman on it. She’s armed to the teeth and looks even more scary than the guys on the beach.
She holds out her hand and makes it clear: this is their one chance to get away. They take it and as they speed off hear shots from behind. Has Charlie walked into the middle of some kind of gang war, a bloody feud over some issue his rescuer is reluctant to divulge? Is the girl he thinks of as the Mermaid a player or a victim in the endgame ahead? And how on earth is he going to get his geography homework to Mr Postlethwaite in Form 5c and avoid detention for the third week running?
There are lots of kinds of thrillers, just as there are many kinds of crime story. Some start with a big bang on the first page and hope to hook you there. Others reel you in slowly with an air of mystery and menace. This would be one of the former I think, perhaps a juvenile James Bond-style romp about a spirited kid who finds himself trapped inside some nasty drama that’s deadly and threatening, but one that brings out his own character so he wins through in the end.
Fantasy covers a lot of fertile ground, stretching from gentle fairy tales to grim and visceral horror stories. But let’s try an idea that’s pretty low-key and ‘ordinary’ for this genre. No gates into other dimensions, no blood-sucking night creatures or howling werewolves. Just an unexpected rip in the fabric of the everyday world, one we can’t even begin to understand at this stage.
Charlie walks into the water to try to talk the girl out on to the beach. When he suggests this she becomes even more distraught. Close up he sees that she is, indeed, a mermaid. Human – all too human – above the waterline. Something else beneath. He wants to help her but she’s more intent on telling him something. She knows his name somehow and tells him she has a big secret. In order to hear it he has to come back to the beach that evening, in the dark, and bring three things: a silver ring, a candle and a set of Tarot cards.
Then suddenly, with the agility of a dolphin, not a human being, she turns and disappears back into the sea. He sees the flash of a silvery, scaly tail as she goes. He feels frightened but interested, almost elated too. She’s done something to him. His life isn’t ordinary any more and for some reason he knows exactly where he can find that ring, the candle and the set of cards.
Some fantasies take place in fantastic locations. Others, the most haunting occasionally, take place in the ‘real world’. Once again there’s no clue about where this idea goes next. Why does the mermaid want a silver ring, a candle and a set of Tarot cards? No idea. They’re just objects to seek, to provide waypoints for the future story, places I could head towards. A note like this tells me some important basics about the story. The Mermaid knows Charlie somehow; there’s a connection between the two of them. Does Charlie have an inkling what that might be? Is there a secret in his past too? Charlie has an interest in this girl, perhaps a romantic one. There’s some kind of magic involved and, given her demand for some strange objects, a quest of some sort. Quests are popular devices for driving along narratives of all kind, especially fantasy.
The wonderful thing about ideas is that they often spawn others. It’s tempting to replace one with what comes after. Resist. You’re trying to build up a collection of possibilities at this stage, not narrow everything down to a single, concrete plan. That can come later. Perhaps your first option will be a mistake and it was something you rejected that will work better.
Here’s a general rule you should apply to every scrap of information and inspiration you collect along the way. Never throw these things away.
There’s another take on this story that last snapshot suggests. Charlie is a boy. He’s met a pretty girl. There’s attraction on his part, and a natural teenage curiosity about physical matters. Sexuality is an important human drive. Charlie sounds a nice kid but hormones happen to everyone. If this were to go to the young adult market it would be rash to ignore the possibility of some budding relationship here, innocent, tragic or simply some kind of coming-of-age story. So let’s go back to the real world, and ditch silver, scaly tails …
Charlie walks into the water. The girl stands there sobbing. When he gets up to her he sees her clothes are ragged and torn. She doesn’t speak good English but they manage to converse. She’s lost something: a ring. He puts his head beneath the water and retrieves it. He thinks she may be east European – there are a lot of immigrants in the town, and the atmosphere between them and the locals is more than a little difficult – even incendiary at times. And Charlie’s dad is one of the biggest immigrant-haters of all. He’s a fisherman and he thinks the foreigners have been stealing his catch.
Sure enough, a boat comes along and it’s full of scary-looking men who speak a strange language and take the girl on board. She holds out her hand and for some reason he comes along too. They take him back to where they live, some shacks and huts beyond the harbour. They’re wary of him but he found the girl’s ring and that means a lot to her. Charlie eats with them, listens to them sing, sees the girl become a little more relaxed, content again. Then he goes home and he hopes he’ll see her again, though he thinks there’s more to her unhappiness than a lost ring. When he gets back to his house he realises his dad saw him in the foreigners’ boat and now he’s in big trouble.
There’s enough there for a chapter or two to see if this project catches fire. Why is the girl sad? Are the foreigners really living off illicit fishing alone? What will Charlie do when his dad says he can’t see her again? You can work out for yourself where a story like this could go. In several different directions, of course, but that’s usually inevitable at this stage. We’re not looking for an outline here, we’re simply trying to establish what kind of book this might be.
If you’ve started your story already you may have decided that by now. But it’s always worth standing back from your work from time to time and asking yourself frankly whether it’s proceeding the way you want. If you’re unsure, you may save yourself a lot of wasted time by pausing the writing for a while until the idea is clearer in your head. Problems in books are usually solved by thinking them through, not pounding out words at the keyboard, hoping salvation will miraculously appear out of nowhere.
Playing with these seeds of ideas should point the way. There are other key decisions that need to be made to stamp this narrative with a particular identity. We may have narrowed down the kind of book this could be. Now we need to know how, exactly, it will be related to the reader.