Charlie goes to the library to unravel the story of Eric Whitby and Matt Giordano.At this point we enter dangerous territory. The storytellers’ ancestral graveyard, a bleak, grey landscape littered with the corpses of half-abandoned projects. Cinema folk wail about this stage of the process endlessly. Wander into any bar in a fashionable district of LA and you don’t have to wait long to hear some wannabe writer bemoaning his second-act angst to a bartender who can’t wait to respond with a whine about his failed audition. Novelists suffer the same agonies, though usually in silence. We know this pain is coming and the wise will anticipate it.
To recap: the second act begins at the point where our protagonist has seized hold of his or her problem and determined to solve it come what may. In Charlie’s case it’s his realisation that there’s something seriously bad going on in Sally’s life, something that scares her to the point where she may even be considering suicide. Charlie’s going to do something about that. He doesn’t have a clue yet what it might be.
Think of Hamlet’s second act, our melancholy Dane wandering around trying to work out how to respond to the news that Claudius murdered his stepfather. What to do? Go mad? Commit suicide? Wander round being a perennial pain in the butt for anyone willing to listen?
Hamlet, unusually for a protagonist, is aware of his own second-act dilemma. He speaks about it openly in soliloquy – here in Act 2, Scene 2:
O, vengeance! Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave,
That I, the son of a dear father murdered,
Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,
Must like a whore unpack my heart with words
And fall a-cursing like a very drab,
A stallion! Fie upon’t, foh! About, my brains.
You see the problem? The second act is discursive, fickle, uncertain, as you too must ‘unpack your heart with words’. This phase of the book is about characters wandering around in search of answers, and mostly failing to find them. It may require dead ends and red herrings, but not too many to confuse the plot. Characters will begin to reveal themselves, locations will grow richer and more convincing. And events … The possible steps and staging posts on the way to the next and final part of the journey will multiply constantly, trying to tempt you into countless different directions. There is, in short, enormous potential to turn the whole thing into a flabby middle of unresolved doubts, cul-de-sacs and circuitous meanderings.
Expect no short cuts, no easy solutions. You’ve probably sprinted to this point. Now you need to keep up a steady, measured pace to conquer the long, marathon laps that take you to the final dash to the close.
Let me repeat: writing a book requires focus and control. Those essentials are needed more during the second act than at any time during the creation of this tale. Perhaps without noticing it you’ve found some of that focus already. It’s certainly there in the synopsis for Charlie and the Mermaid. I don’t need to cry, like Hamlet, ‘About, my brains.’ Not yet anyway.
When I was throwing around some early ideas for this story I had a closing point for the first act in mind. Charlie and Sally would flee their unnamed seaside town and head for London, there to discover the world of magic and theatre, the threats and excitement of the metropolis.
Hmm … nah.
Charlie’s seaside town grew on me the more I thought about his scenes there. That burnt-out pier, the blasted promenade, the sense of decay and poverty in a place that once was grand and perhaps hoped to return to those glory days again before long – these were all ideas and images I felt I could play with and extend, hope to turn into something real. The place didn’t even have a name, but I was starting to see it, to hear the amusement arcades on the promenade, smell the salt tang of the sea overlaid with the greasy stink of the fish and chip shops.
Writers don’t just create that story on the page. We’re its first audience too, and you have to listen to your people and your world as they start to emerge from the shadows of your own imagination. Charlie’s town soon struck a chord as I thought about how it might look. I checked a few photos of other, real seaside resorts that could serve as models and pretty soon my mind was made up. London’s a great and wonderful city but there are a million different stories set there, and a million more to come. No one’s ever written about Charlie’s town. It’s mine.
If a location is vivid early on for the writer there’s a greater chance you can pass on some of that sense of place to your audience. Just as importantly, I’ve now narrowed my field of possibilities. We progress through this second phase of the book not just by developing ideas but also through killing those we don’t want. I’ve ruled out London from the story entirely. It’s gone for good. I know that Charlie’s town is all I have. The story begins, develops and ends here. I’ve focused.
As a matter of course I always check myself if I begin to wonder whether the story should move elsewhere. Sometimes – by no means always – that shift in location is a sign of desperation or bewilderment about the direction of the narrative. You find yourself thinking, ‘I don’t know what might happen if they stay here, but if I take them somewhere else something’s bound to come up, isn’t it?’
Possibly. But not, I suspect, for me. It’s not my style.
Some authors are telescope writers, constantly searching the distant horizon for fresh locations to inspire them, the linear narrative bumps you get when your protagonists are snatched from one world and placed in another. Telescope writers like rapid scene shifts, people getting on planes and trains, fetching up somewhere new and different where they’re strangers in a strange land. They’re excellent at chases that race across different landscapes, never standing still.
I’ve learned over the years I’m a microscope writer. I like looking at one small part of the world in very fine detail, then saying to my characters, ‘This is your stage. Make the most of it because it’s all you’re going to have.’ So when I set a book in Rome I deliberately fix on an area and lock the story pretty much to that place throughout. Most of the books happen in a neighbourhood you could walk around in an hour or so. They’re Roman stories, but the canvas is much smaller than the sprawling, polyglot city that encloses them.
I like the fact that, in ten books or so, my people have only got on a plane once. Working this way forces me to draw on their characters and the developing story, nothing else. All gardeners know that some plants require feeding, and some do best if they’re made to grow in stony, infertile soil. There’s something of that in the storytelling process too. Try to work out which side of the fence is your natural territory.
Now to get a grip on some control.
Depending on where we do our outlining we now have an Unplaced Scenes folder or heading. In a book journal or a word processor your plan for the book would look something like this …
Part One
(now complete)
Part Two
Part Three
Unplaced Scenes
I would probably have populated that last heading with a few ideas already. By the time I’m a third of the way through this second act, it should be bursting with potential ideas. This folder or heading applies to the remainder of the book. Most of the possibilities I will place in there will affect the second act. Some will never be used at all. A few could find their way into the third act. I’m not worried about positioning at the moment. This is note-keeping and brainstorming pure and simple. Since it’s in outline format it’s easy to rearrange anything there and move it into the book itself just by dragging the entry to a new location.
All I’m concerned about is setting down some potential events that will drive this story forward to the moment where Charlie, at the close of the second act, sees a solution to the problems that have beset both him and Sally and, through his own interference, started to become progressively worse. Charlie, you see, isn’t just the protagonist here. He’s the catalyst too, and during the second act he will become increasingly aware of that fact. At first he will be driven by his desire to do the right thing. But after a while, as he matures, he’ll come to understand that part of the wrong thing he wants to fix stems from his own meddling, his interest in Sally, his desire to be an adult, not a kid.
Some of the challenges ahead are so general I don’t need to write them down. I know I have to expand on the characters of all the significant players – Charlie, Sally, Eric Whitby, Matt Giordano and Charlie’s rather weak and probably untrustworthy father. Two characters will, I suspect, need particular attention. I need to develop Matt Giordano a lot more, since it’s obvious he’s the antagonist in this tale, the bad guy, the one who wishes Sally ill for some reason. He’s the dragon that Charlie must slay in order to free her. I need to get inside his head and understand why he has turned out that way.
The other difficult player is Sally herself. At the moment she’s somewhat slight, even unlikeable. She needs to find an individual voice, a sense of humour, a spark of indignant rage. Cold and unfriendly won’t work. Spiky will. It’s not enough that Charlie finds her very pretty. There has to be something else that makes him interested, some sharp, interesting aspect to her character that hasn’t yet come across in what I have for the first act. When I understand how to achieve that change I will need to go back to the first act and start the process there. She needs some warmth early on, through characterisation – the way she speaks and behaves – not through direct events. I can’t leave it till the second act. So a note will go into the ‘to do’ list in the book diary: make Sally more likeable early on.
It’s clear too that the world they inhabit will have to become more vivid, a touch claustrophobic perhaps. It’s a rundown, miserly place, one where they’re all trapped. But it’s Charlie’s home and he’s not the kind of fourteen-year-old who will easily take against somewhere he’s known from birth, the only town with which he’s familiar. He likes that cold sea and the way it enfolds him, pushes his limits, when he goes swimming. He enjoys his pushbike and the biting breeze against his face. I need to bring out the architecture of the place too. It wasn’t always dilapidated and grim. Some of the buildings are reminders of greater, glorious days, when England took to its own seaside and enriched those who owned the hotels and theatres they patronised during the summer. There’s a lost world here and I need to find it. The key to understanding Matt Giordano – and through him the true nature of the problem – lies somewhere among the ghosts left behind by the death of that rich and elegant seaside resort from another era.
Plenty to work with there. What else do I need? Waypoints. All stories are a kind of journey. Sometimes it’s a cerebral one, from ignorance to knowledge, adolescence to adulthood. Sometimes it’s a literal voyage, starting at one geographical point and visiting several others on the way to the end of our quest. Whatever its nature, this journey will consist of sections and pauses, a continuous line of discrete events that come to form the shape of the narrative. In the first and third acts the journey is usually short and straight. In both we know where we’re going and can’t wait to get there. In the troublesome second act the storyline will meander constantly as our protagonist struggles to see clear day through the fog of possibilities surrounding him.
Let’s try a different analogy. Imagine a book as an attempt to climb Everest. The first act is the march out of the foothills to the low mountain station where we’ll pitch camp. When we get there we stare ahead and see a panorama of higher peaks calling for our attention as they lead further and further towards the final destination. The battle we now face is choosing the right course through that endless landscape and, if we make a wrong turn, spotting the error soon enough to correct it without endangering the entire expedition.
That ‘Unplaced Scenes’ folder is where we list our potential waypoints, in no particular order at this stage. The first will be obvious. A few will be speculative in the extreme. All will lead us on to that great peak in the sky. But it’s best we don’t spend too much time staring at that right now. We may have an idea what it looks like and what we can expect to find there but there are more immediate matters at hand.
Here are some possibilities for unplaced scenes in the story ahead:
Charlie goes to the library to unravel the story of Eric Whitby and Matt Giordano.
Charlie’s father gets really scared about what’s going on.
The story of the pier is revealed – and the fact that Sally’s mother disappeared in the blaze, just a few months after Sally was born.
Eric Whitby shows Charlie more magic. He’s entranced, and surprised that Sally can perform magic tricks she’s learned too.
Matt Giordano tries to force Sally to come with him again. He’s her father, he says. He wants her to live with him in the one remaining big, posh mansion in the town.
Charlie tries to kiss Sally. He’s so bad she laughs at him, nicely, but not in a way that gives him much hope. This is unfortunate because he’s becoming progressively more obsessed with her.
After another confrontation Sally tells Charlie she thinks Giordano killed her mother that night when the pier burned down. Now he owns everything – but not her, much as he wants to compel her to live with him. Giordano doesn’t like the idea there’s something he can’t possess.
Charlie thinks there’s more to Giordano’s interest in Sally than this. He hears rumours about Giordano, and his obsession with children.
Charlie tries to talk to his dad about Matt Giordano’s past and what goes on in the big house where Giordano lives. His dad clams up.
Charlie will discover that his trust in his father may be misplaced.
Giordano does make Sally go with him into the big house. Charlie follows. There’s another confrontation, a shocking one, that will trigger Charlie’s determination to bring Giordano down.
At the close of the act Charlie hits upon a plan to entrap Giordano and make him confess to killing Sally’s mother.
The first three sound fine as openers for this section. Since this is a piece of fiction let me wave a magic wand and say: those scenes are done. The closing scene, vague as it is, looks right too.
Now what?
Now it’s the second act. We go away and write, trying to sort those unplaced scenes into an order that makes sense and invent more so that we can uncover our narrative.
We are, before long, stuck. Becalmed in an empty grey ocean, racked with doubt, unable to decide whether what we’ve produced is good or bad. Don’t fret. Every writer’s been there. It’s entirely natural to feel this way about your manuscript, especially at this stage.
I’ll pick up Charlie’s story at the end of this section. In the meantime let’s think of a few tricks to put some wind back in those sails when you find yourself becalmed.
Many things shoot down a book in the second act: a lack of self-confidence, too little time, poor advice from someone you’ve turned to for an opinion. Oh, and laziness too, or perhaps more accurately a dispiriting sense of fear over the size of the task ahead.
I told you not to look up at Everest, didn’t I? This is a time to focus strictly on the waypoints, making sure you choose the right ones. The big peak will let you know when it needs your attention – probably sometime around the sixty- or seventy-thousand-word mark when you look up out of the blue and think: ‘Oh, there it is.’
Don’t forget one other lurking time bomb: perhaps this really is a bad idea, something best junked to make way for a project with more potential. I wrote one much-rejected book and started several others before I finally found a publisher for Semana Santa. There’s no shame in deciding a project isn’t worth pursuing, even though it seemed a good idea when you started it. The real pity is in pursuing a lost cause, whether it’s a book that’s turned up its toes halfway through or a finished manuscript that simply can’t find a buyer. I’ve lost track of the number of would-be writers I’ve met who’ve produced one book that won’t sell and then spent years rewriting, retitling and resubmitting the manuscript to a dwindling band of agents and publishers, all of whom know a dud when they see one.
Don’t get sucked into this cycle. A turkey’s still a turkey however much you try to pin peacock feathers to it. If the world says your work stinks the world is probably right. Kill the thing and start something else. Don’t throw it away. You can always return for a second look later. Ditching ideas we at first thought exceptional is part of the experience of becoming a writer. Career authors obsess about many things but longevity is close to the top of the list. The heartless, ruthless abandonment of stories we once cherished is one way many of us stay published over the years.
Not that this is the biggest reason people give for giving up on a book project. Usually it’s something else altogether …
You never walk into a supermarket and have the person on the till say, ‘Sorry, I can’t serve you today. I’ve got checkout person’s block.’ Yet every day, every minute it seems, someone somewhere in the world dashes their hands to head and shrieks that the muse has mysteriously departed them.
At events I get asked all the time, ‘What do you do when you get writer’s block’? As if it’s a given, we all suffer from this strange and perhaps mythical ailment. Do I? No. There are times when I struggle for something to write. That’s not the same as being unable to work on a story at all. But the block thing is so commonly written about it must, in some sense anyway, be ‘real’, in the way Father Christmas and Bigfoot are deemed to exist too. I’ve even seen published writers bewailing their block in public, which is odd indeed. A word of advice: public bewailing by writers on any subject is best avoided, not least because we’ve got a very cushy job compared to many.
What should you do if you can’t think of something to write? Anything but stare at the computer pleading for help. In case you haven’t noticed, it can’t hear you.
Take a break. Mow the lawn. Walk the dog. Learn to speak Croatian. Give your aching brain a rest from being banged against the narrative wall. Do that and my guess is the solution will one day leap into your head at the most unexpected of moments and you’ll be kicking yourself over how obvious the solution sounds.
The ‘I don’t know what happens next’ ailment is the easiest to deal with. It’s like unblocking a drain. You just have to work to find where the obstruction is, then clear it. A more insidious kind of block is marked by a sudden collapse of confidence, a feeling that everything you’ve written so far may be inadequate or downright rubbish, coupled with a conviction that you have no way forward even though you may actually have a storyline written down somewhere that suggests otherwise.
Both are common signs of classic second-act angst. It can manifest itself over a simple mechanical turn in the story, but really that’s a symptom, not the disease. When you reach this state everything is starting to become more metaphysical: what the hell is going on here and does anyone care? Seen objectively – which is usually pretty much impossible for those infected by this condition – the whole idea is clearly ridiculous. Books don’t die halfway through; they get killed. By laziness, by ennui, by a lack of self-confidence, planning or care.
When people talk about block what they are often saying, it seems to me, is that they fail to have a direction for the story in question. They may have an end in mind. What they lack is a confident string of staging points. This is one reason why we’re putting down some possibilities in that ‘Unplaced Scenes’ folder. Simply thinking about how you get from A to B is one way of loosening the jam. You could even write that future scene, or the climax of the book if you like, just to keep you going.
Yes, you did read that correctly. There is no law that says a narrative, even a fast-moving and linear one, needs to be written in the order in which it is to be read. If the next five scenes are hazy but the sixth is clear then go and write that. You’ll probably have to change it by the time you fill in the missing steps to get there but so what? You’ll be back in the game. There are even people who try and write the final scene of the story part way through, or even at the beginning. Not me, though I could imagine doing that for a short story. We’re all different. If it works for you, use it.
Then there’s the book diary. Always remember: this is one way you can work on your novel without having to write it. If you’re keeping this, faithfully and lovingly, there may well be a note somewhere that fires an idea in your head. Even if there isn’t, you can go over your thoughts about the work as it progressed and try to understand where things went awry. Was a story thread lost somewhere along the way? Did you deviate from your intended path? If so, how can you recover the original route?
Blocked writers need to be dragged away from staring at that blank last page in the manuscript. Reading and learning from your book diary is one place you can still stay connected to the project without being constantly reminded of your inability to hit the daily word-count target.
Another tactic. Make a backup copy of your book so far then take an axe to a second version and slash out everything you don’t like. That’s right. It’s called editing. Cutting stuff is good for the authorial soul. It forces you to think about what’s important and what’s not. I once went to Italy with a 30,000-word manuscript and came back with it whittled down to 12,000, happy as could be. I told one of my author friends of my delight and she thought I’d gone mad. But that was progress. By pruning away the unnecessary I found what it was that I wanted to say.
Counting words is one thing. Counting words that matter is another. Cutting like crazy will also teach you one of the most important writing lessons there is. If you are blocked on some seemingly insurmountable problem on page 182 you can bet your last penny the problem, and its solution, actually lie way back in the history, probably around page 131. Tackle it there and you’ve a hope of finishing. Keep banging away at page 182 and you may well go mad.
Print out the pages so far and try and see them through the eyes of a reader. You’ll be amazed, too, how things look when they’re ink on paper, not dots on a screen. Moving from computer to a physical page will give you a fresh insight into the story and keep you engaged with it.
Ask yourself how it would look if it were written differently. What would it be like if you switched, say, from first person to third? If some of your characters were male instead of female, young instead of old, black instead of white? Dream a little, go off-piste.
Finally, use that outline function to the full. Drag some scenes around the timeline. What if this happened here instead of there? When authors wrote with pens and typewriters they would produce scenes and chapters in separate parts. They could play with the running order very easily – they just renumbered the page. It’s even simpler on a computer – so experiment and try to work out how your story might change if the narrative were rearranged.
This kind of problem can affect writers at any stage in their career. There’s a different kind of ‘block’ that’s reserved for the start. I wrote my first two books, Semana Santa and Epiphany, in a whirl. The first took a whole summer, the second just six weeks to produce a 160,000-word draft. I was on a roll. After years dreaming of being an author I finally discovered I could produce a book. It was hard work – I was holding down a full-time job in journalism at the time too. But it was achievable.
Then came book three, the final one in my then contract. I sat down and I had absolutely no idea where to go. There wasn’t a storyline. There wasn’t even a frame of reference. I didn’t know what kind of writer I was trying to be, what kind of book I was hoping to produce. The clash between journalism, which was paying the bills, and fiction, which I hoped would one day do so, was getting unbearable. I was working too hard at both. So I banged out something that was rough, misshapen, unpublishable, and got it thrown back at me. What was going on?
Something pretty much every author will encounter somewhere along his or her career once you begin to get published. Most writers spend years dreaming of finishing a book before they ever get to complete one. When you reach that milestone you think you’re there. Truth: you’re not. You’ve scarcely begun. The hardest part is still ahead because your first one, two or three books are works that have been sitting festering inside you for years, waiting to be vomited up into the world. The core material is there already. Once you find the gagging trick it will come out relatively easily. Then, after a while, there’s nothing left inside. Suddenly you’re dry-heaving and that’s never going to be pleasant.
What happens at this point? Let’s be honest: a lot of people give up. They find it too hard to get past that rock. They look at the meagre amounts of money they’ve made for all the work put in and wonder if it’s really worthwhile having to start from a truly blank page.
Stubborn old sods like me persist (stubbornness is a key virtue for writers in case you hadn’t guessed). I dragged myself out of that pit the hard way. I read the manuscript I’d produced, worked out that somewhere in it there was a kind of sci-fi thriller, then rewrote the whole thing several times until it resembled something like a conventional story. It came out as Solstice, did pretty well and got me published in the US for the first time.
If you hit that rock and want to get past it the only way is to grind your way through. Learn the basics of the craft, which probably escaped you in the mad rush to produce your first couple of books. Try to work out what kind of writer you are and how much that matches what kind of writer you want to be. Get your head down for the long term, because chances are it will be long – have you noticed how few of those authors who have big hits with books one or two are still getting published at all ten years later?
Make sure you keep the ideas tab in that book diary open. One day – and it may be years away – you could be very grateful for it.
Lots of people struggle to find the time to write. I know because I’ve seen them in their thousands going on Facebook and Twitter to tell the world how very difficult it is.
My advice here is going to be brutally short. If you can’t make the time to write a book then there’s no point in trying. Writing is about commitment and hunger. It doesn’t matter whether you’re doing another job, engaged with a family, or have some other responsibility that takes up a chunk of the day. If you can’t find the space to write, the book won’t be finished.
When time is short – as it often is for all of us – what matters is that the work remains alive in your head, even, or perhaps especially, if you’re not writing a word. We need ways to keep it bubbling away somewhere, getting richer, firing your imagination, gathering more possibilities that will draw you back to the page.
How do you maintain some life and enthusiasm in these circumstances? You keep it with you, always, like fluff in the pocket, something that never goes away. Serious writing must mean the dividing line between work and leisure is pretty much gone for ever. If you’re not willing to accept that, give up now.
I take a little laptop wherever I go. I also have a note-taking application on my phone, a camera and, when things get desperate, pen and paper (though since I lose physical notepads all the time those definitely come last). When I see or think of something that’s relevant to my current work I make a note about it there and then. No procrastination. No ‘I’ll do that later after I have lunch or mess around on the internet.’
I’m deeply lazy at heart. If I postpone things either they don’t happen at all or turn into an afterthought that’s nowhere near as complete as it was when the bright spark first lit up.
We have so many ways of setting down thoughts these days. Through a computer, a phone or just a simple voice note. By keeping that idea you do two useful things: preserve it for the future, and subtly remind yourself there’s still a work in progress.
Budding authors come up with a million excuses why their books stay unfinished. No time, someone sick in the family, a crisis of confidence, problems at work, someone else’s manuscript to read in the book group. But the biggest reason book projects die is a very simple one: people simply stop working on them.
Yet you can still keep that idea alive very easily, without writing a word, away from your desk, sitting on a bus or a plane. If the book means so little to you that it doesn’t merit that amount of attention, do you really think it’s going to work in the long run?
Here, though, is some good news.
I once heard a fellow author say out loud that a daily bout of writing is essential for anyone who wants to be an writer as if it were jogging or some other muscular exercise. If it works for you, fine. It doesn’t work for me, or lots of other professional writers I know. Not only do I not have to write every day; I deliberately avoid doing so. This is a job, one I do five days a week, Monday to Friday, from around eight in the morning to six at night. Weekends are for other things. I need a break from the book. I want to go back to it on Monday morning feeling fresh and enthusiastic.
That’s not to say I don’t think about the manuscript at weekends, or do some other work then. Research, thinking, reading. But not writing. The Monday to Friday, morning to evening thing, is a habit I’ve got into over the years, and I happen to think that habits, when it comes to work, are very good ideas.
Are there exceptions? Rarely. When a book is approaching its conclusion I will sometimes work weekends because I can’t drag myself away from the narrative. Equally when I’m on the road normal patterns go out of the window so every day becomes a potential work day. But even then I will always try to make sure there are days when I do not write. I like the idea of separation, of some temporary distance from those tens of thousands of words.
When I was running two careers – as a journalist and an author – I would sometimes set books to one side for two to three weeks because of newspaper assignments. At the beginning I worried about ever being able to pick them up again. In truth if the idea’s strong enough, leaving it for a while poses no problem. Sometimes it improved the manuscript because I came back with better, fresher ideas.
Writers are all too often portrayed as dreamers staring into the distance, like our old chum Dante Alighieri, musing away on a hillside. But consider this: Dante was a trained pharmacist, a diplomat, a politician, a soldier. He read obsessively, in Italian and Latin, as you can tell from the obscure and scattergun references in his masterwork, The Divine Comedy. Would he recognise the standard portrait of him, as an aesthete whiling away a sunny afternoon with his head in the clouds? No. We all need thinking time. But without doing time it means nothing. Dante was too busy to spend much of his life staring into the distance.
Busy. A great word to describe what turns wannabe writers into actual ones. Here’s another: routine. You don’t have to write every day, but you do need to set aside some part of your life as time for writing.
Here is what routine means for me.
For almost the first ten years of my writing career I did two jobs – as a journalist for the Sunday Times and as a writer trying to produce one book a year. This isn’t a situation I’d ever want to go back to. It was hard work, involving long hours, seven-day weeks and few holidays. But I had no choice. Writing novels didn’t pay the bills. It was either two jobs, give up the dream of being an author, or starve.
Most people will try to start off this way. You’d have to be pretty brave or foolish to abandon the day job and declare to the world you’re going to be a writer. Even if it works, you’re probably looking at a couple of years before you see much income, so best make sure there’s plenty of money in the bank. Let’s assume you’re like most writers and start your novel alongside another career. How do you make both work?
You need a routine and you need to stick to it. Mine worked like this. I angled my way into freelance journalism after a staff career on national newspapers. Freelancing meant I controlled my time, not someone else. After a while it resulted in a contract with the Sunday Times which meant I could rely on guaranteed income each month in return for a guaranteed amount of work.
Once I got into that position the division between books and journalism almost defined itself. When it comes to fiction I discovered I work best in the mornings. That’s when the creative side of me is most alive. So I gave over mornings to the novels. In the afternoons I worked on journalism. Five days a week. Seven when necessary. It was difficult at first. After a while it became second nature.
It’s important to integrate the job – or chore if you like – of writing fully into your life. To allow that part of the day or night or both will be given over to working on a novel and nothing is going to get in the way.
We’re surrounded by so many distractions these days it’s easy to lose sight of priorities. For the writer there’s only one: keeping the work in progress alive and kicking, and growing organically a little each week. Anything that drags you away from that necessity is the enemy, a monster that can leave you a wannabe author for ever.
My distractions are different these days – emails from readers, events, promotions, interviews and the necessary task of communicating through the web. But they’re still distractions that need to be contained, pushed always into parts of the day when I would never be writing on the book.
Here’s my home routine, Monday to Friday, around eight a.m. to around six in the evening when I knock off.
First hour of the day. Deal with overnight email, read newspapers, check the web.
Around eight-thirty till twelve-thirty. First, read anything I wrote the day before, revise it, try to cut what’s not needed and add in anything that should have been there but wasn’t. This will usually take me to ten. Break for a coffee briefly. Come back and write, maybe a few hundred words, maybe more, until I feel the day’s output has taken hold to the extent I know where it’s headed. Take dog for a twenty-minute walk around eleven, then back to work. Around twelve-thirty break for lunch till two.
Afternoon: two till six. Email again, though nothing substantial is written during this period except the book. Will be hoping to hit two thousand words if this is a writing phrase. Pleased if it gets to three thousand, which it does maybe one time in five. Always pack in at three thousand. Always end on a scene conclusion, not mid-scene if possible. I hate picking up unfinished threads the following day. At six, knock off and do nothing more on the book though I will come and check emails in the evening since they come in from all places and time zones.
Weekends: be a normal human being mostly, but do the maintenance stuff – filing, websites, any boring work.
And that’s it. The timing doesn’t change much any more because, well, it works. This is my routine. Yours will be different. Find it, then stick to it.
Why are routines successful? Because once you find the one that works you no longer have to ask yourself, ‘Shall I write?’ You do it because that’s the time of day you devote to your novel. Routines take away the conscious decision to write or not, and if you’re as fundamentally lazy as I am that’s a wonderful thing.
Did Dante have a routine? You bet. Just wish I knew what it was.
If you’re keeping that book alive, it’s inevitable that you will, before long, find a very bright light bulb going on in your head. You have an idea. Not a small, developmental one. A big idea. One so huge that it changes the nature of the project entirely, transforms it into something else.
It may not be much to write. Perhaps a morning’s work at the most and your struggling narrative is set on a new track.
Here’s the dilemma. Do you … (a) step in straight away and commit that change to paper. Or (b) sit on it, think about the change for a while, then try it out tentatively another day?
Those of you who answered (b) go buy yourself a lollipop. The (a) people can stand in the corner and ask yourself: ‘What have I done?’
Trust me. I’m an airhead whose mind is constantly spinning with ideas, possibilities, changes, alternative versions. I have been through this quandary a million times. And if I’ve learned one thing over the years it’s this: never, ever act on impulse.
First reason: you may just be plain wrong. Today’s bright idea is tomorrow’s ‘How could I possibly be so stupid?’ revelation. Impulsive notions always seem attractive when you have them. We’re built that way. It’s our brains rewarding themselves for being so clever in coming up with the idea in the first place. It doesn’t mean they’re right. And the worst thing of all is this: bright ideas invariably mean some substantial shift in the direction of a story which we’d hoped, only the day before, had been firmly set on track. A new facet to a character. A different way forward for a narrative thread or even the whole book. Commit that idea to words and you’ll find you can rarely undo it just by taking out the bits you wrote after the idea hit. You’ll usually have to unpick all the difficult threading that went before and was rewritten to make the genius notion feasible. This is rarely a good use of your precious time.
Second reason: bright ideas mid-story inevitably involve adding things. Making something longer and, yes, more complicated. As a general rule books are improved more by subtraction than addition.
When I have bright ideas I treat them like this. They go in my book diary immediately as a possibility. I sit on them for a day or two. Then I look at them in the cold, hard light of day with the slightly jaundiced eye a little time brings to that bright spark moment. If I’m really convinced they’re worth trying, they go in. If I’m not sure, they either stay out or I save a copy of the draft as a backup and try a fresh version with the spark in to see if it works.
Bright ideas are great before writing and after you’ve finished. But when they crop up mid-book they need to be treated with caution because sooner or later you will hit that ‘I know – the guy could be an alien zombie!’ moment.
Best avoided, honestly.
I hope you spotted the good news in the preceding section. I was, believe it or not, encouraging you to do less work on your book, not more.
When I was starting out as a writer I felt that every word was precious. There seemed something magical and fragile about every paragraph. I was grateful they even appeared at all. That made me very reluctant to mess with them beyond rewriting, and incredibly loath to cut them out altogether. They did get excised in the end, of course. Those manuscripts went on to sell and when they met a publisher an editor turned round to me and said, ‘This needs to come out.’
That doesn’t happen so much these days because I write from an entirely different perspective. Instead of trying to put in everything I want in a first draft, I try very deliberately to leave things lean and spare. Physical descriptions, dialogue, action … the lot. I try to keep it shorn of detail as much as possible, instead of throwing in everything I have as I used to in the early days.
The main reason for this is practical. Putting things in is easy and more productive than taking things out. If you read your first draft and think, ‘Hmm … I need to paint this character a bit more clearly,’ you’re engaging the creative right side of the brain and introducing, hopefully, some new texture into the project. If you spend your time hitting the delete key then … you’re just cutting stuff. Slashing verbiage is a good idea but better still if the verbiage isn’t there in the first place.
And here’s the truth. Work this way and you will end up with a tighter book than if you overwrote and tried to slim it down afterwards. Honest. As a general rule every book out there is capable of being cut without suffering any harm. Underwriting is one way you can get closer to the goal of not a single wasted word.
There’s also the issue of simple artistry. I’d rather spend the hours available to me on work that is creative and enriches the story, not ploughing through every paragraph thinking, ‘We can do without that, do without that …’
Think about art. Painters don’t produce a finished canvas and then start improving it by removing what they’ve just produced. They can’t. So they work slowly, building up their vision first with pencil, then with a little ink, then, when they finally know what they’re doing, coming up with a finished version.
In writing this is an imprecise process. There’s always, always something that can be cut. But if you set out to underwrite you will spend less time slashing and more working on the parts that matter, putting some finesse on the bare bones that are already there.
Here’s another argument for being spare with your prose. When your work reaches an editor, he or she will have important input for you, advice that should help you produce a better book in the end. Editors, like writers, have limited time. I want to hear from mine how I can improve the book I’ve given them. I’ll get much better value from them if they’re telling me I need a little extra here and there rather than listening to them list the bits that ought to be removed.
Underwriting should get you much better advice from an editor. Overwriting simply burdens them with needless hours spent wielding a red pen.
When I wrote my first real book, Semana Santa, I did so in secret. Told no one – no friends, no colleagues, not even my wife. This was primarily because I didn’t want to admit to anyone it had failed, as fail it must because every other attempt I’d made at writing a novel wound up that way.
Today not much has changed. When I’m working on a book it’s just me in there. I rarely show part-finished work to anyone. I don’t see the point. I’d never try to sell a book on the basis of an opening few chapters. Seems a bit odd to me. How does anyone know you’re going to finish it?
More than anything I do not seek opinions until there’s an actual manuscript, beginning to end, to be read. Lots of professional writers I know work this way. Probably most. Lots of people who want to be writers don’t. They constantly share scraps of work with each other in writing groups or informally. Is this a good idea? Or is it a way never to finish a book?
It depends, of course. I’ve never been part of a writing group. I’ve never attended a writing school except to teach. To my mind everything you need to know about the craft of writing is out there already, freely available in a very obvious format. It’s called ‘books’.
I learned to write by reading them. Yes, I’ve picked up ideas along the way listening to other writers talk about their working methods at public events. But I’ve never set out to ‘learn’ writing, or to seek assurance from others, part way through a work, that I’m not barking up the wrong tree.
Yet writing groups abound. Sometimes they produce authors who go on to greater things. Sometimes they simply seem to involve an endless round of work for enthusiastic novices, many of whom never quite get round to finishing their novel. You write a chapter, hand it to twelve people to read – then, while waiting for their opinions on your work, read their draft in return. I find the whole idea baffling. It’s difficult enough for me to hold one book project of my own in my head at one time. Writing group members seem to attempt to stay on top of multiple nascent manuscripts by different authors, often in a range of styles, and get on with their own stories too.
It’s not all bad news. One of the great benefits of writing groups is the companionship they provide and the discussion that takes place about style, working methods, tactics and the rest. They obviously provide support and confidence, and I’m sure that if you have someone on board who is a professional author, able to give you the benefit of their experience, that can be useful for insights and tips.
My principal misgiving is a practical one: what most budding authors lack more than anything is time. Writing groups can, if you’re not careful, devour that in spades. If they overload you with so much reading that it interferes with your own writing, they’re counter-productive. And – sorry, I have to say this – you have to weigh up what those mutual opinions are worth. This is a bunch of people who usually haven’t made it as writers yet and probably don’t even work in publishing.
Why is their view on where you’ve succeeded or failed relevant? How do you know if they’re right or wrong? Even professionals in this business – seasoned writers, agents and editors – disagree over what constitutes a worthwhile book. If they can’t manage a consensus, what real value can you place on the views of people who are still looking to be published themselves?
If you’re in a writing group do ask yourself occasionally: is this helping me finish my book? Or would the time I’m spending going to meetings and reading other people’s work perhaps be better spent working on my own instead?
Like it or not, the business of writing is essentially solitary: it’s between you and those words on the page. Best get them down first then invite the world in to see what it thinks.
There’s a little fairy tale that runs through the head of every budding author when they start writing. It runs something like this …
A book is one hundred thousand words. I can write two thousand words a day and work five days a week. That means ten thousand words a week. In ten weeks I have a finished novel. Yippee!
Yes, we’ve all been there. You don’t honestly think it’s as simple as that, do you?
We all want to know how well we’re doing, whether we’re writing a book, working on a painting or just doing the day job. The question, always, is how do you measure that? Particularly with something as oddly intangible as a novel.
The blunt way is that daily word count. Hit your target and you’re bound to get there in the end, aren’t you?
No, not really. Word counts are useful because books are finite objects. They will run to a certain length – in my case usually between 105,000 and 125,000 words – and must do their job within that span otherwise something has gone wrong. Any way you look at it you need to monitor the extent of a book and its individual components – scenes, sections, parts.
Let me repeat myself because this is an important point. Books aren’t simply written. They’re created. Writing means putting words on paper. Creating entails building a story and polishing it to something hopefully approaching perfection. Cutting five thousand unnecessary words from a draft manuscript is a creative act. Writing five thousand wrong ones isn’t.
A blunt word count will whine that the former is a backward move and the latter a successful one. This is the first step towards self-deceit, a trait the author above all people must avoid since you are your first reader and editor, two jobs that demand frankness above all else. Daily word counts in particular can be highly deceptive. That number is useful but not vital, and certainly not an infallible indicator of how a project is proceeding.
Instead of obsessing about word counts you might want to try basing your writing habits around scenes. I find it difficult to leave a scene in mid-air at the end of the day, whether I’m writing or editing. Generally speaking, my scenes run anywhere between 800 and 2,500 words. So I’ll tend to crack on until that scene is finished, or left with sufficient notes to complete the following day.
Yes, I keep an eye on the scene word count. But that’s mainly to check it’s the right length for the book, not to convince myself I’m getting some work done. I generally set a 1,500-word median length for the average scene (or chunk of scene). I want to know I’m not going too much above that or below it (usually the former) too often.
Possessing some idea of a project’s direction and eventual conclusion is much more important than counting the number of words you’re typing. Change your measure of productivity from words to an assessment of scenes and you will get a more accurate measure of how well the book is progressing.
Here’s a familiar situation. You’ve got a few sequenced scenes leading to some pivotal event, say the close of this second act. The content works fine. The people are right. So are their actions. But there’s something not quite there. An indefinable element is missing. The manuscript needs more work before you can go on. What do you do?
The temptation is always: something big – introduce a new character, rewrite an existing one to be someone else, scheme in a new key event that will reshape the narrative.
All of these actions can work, and may be necessary. But before you embark on what is, inevitably, going to be an enormous amount of work, possibly derailing the original concept for the book, ask yourself this: isn’t there an easier, smaller way?
Stories are delicate, complex constructions. Chaos theory applies to them just as much as it does to ecosystems. A tiny shift in something in one place can occasionally have a direct and welcome effect elsewhere.
Here’s an example. During the writing of my last book I hit just such a problem. The scene in question took place during the morning, directly after a pivotal event in the previous chapter.
When I thought about it I realised there was nothing wrong with either scene in principle. What drained them of their effect was something very simple: the time of day. So I fiddled with the timeline to make them occur at night. This made the drama more atmospheric and better suited to the kind of section denouement I had in mind.
Moving those events by just eight hours also left space for a brief scene at the front of the next section that served a few useful purposes. It allowed me to feed in some essential information for the narrative. It also acted as a buffer to the rhythm. The previous scene ended at quite a pace. Some writers try for a constant beat. I like variation. This was the ideal way to get a reflective pause in before the next rush of adrenaline.
The whole change entailed little more than one morning of rewriting. Small changes, big effect. Remember the mantra: there’s no way to make writing easier, but you can make it less difficult. Look for simple, easy solutions to narrative problems before you embark on long, complex and possibly dangerous ones instead.
A series of compelling events, revelation of character, place and the gradual unfolding of the mystery that will lie at the heart of the story – that’s what I would be looking for from this second phase of the book. Success will demand that you overcome some classic second-act demons such as story drift, lack of confidence and a growing awareness of the size of the task you’ve undertaken. That’s why I’ve tried to focus on stratagems and ploys to get you out of the hell of this stage of the story. Most of us need a little help at this point in the game.
After a few stabs I’ve worked out what I think is going to happen to our cast of characters as they progress through this section of the narrative. The second act began with Charlie taking on the job of finding and fixing the dark mystery surrounding Sally, his ‘mermaid’. It progresses as our protagonist searches his world for a solution. It ends when he thinks he’s found it.
Charlie sets out to unravel the story of the pier, of Sally, Eric Whitby and Matt Giordano. He tries to talk to his father who gets even more scared at the mention of Giordano. So Charlie goes down the library and pulls out old newspapers. It’s all there. Sixteen years earlier the pier burned down in mysterious circumstances. One body, that of a man, a pier musician, was found. Nothing more. Whitby and Giordano were the two big acts that year, popular performers with their own TV show for children. They never worked together again. Sally’s mother, who had a baby the paper says, disappeared in the blaze, which started in the theatre just after a performance. She was a bathing beauty, winner of a number of diving medals and – Charlie shivers when he reads this – nicknamed ‘The Mermaid’.
Charlie reads on. Eric Whitby’s career enters free fall afterwards. Matt Giordano leaves show business and begins to buy up hotels, restaurants and pubs, houses and shopping arcades as they come on the market at rock-bottom prices when the seaside resort economy collapses. Eventually he even buys the pier. Charlie begins to understand why his dad is scared. This is Matt Giordano’s town now. He lives in the biggest house, a sprawling mansion in a park at the edge, once a kind of stately home. Charlie starts to see things differently, not as a schoolkid any more. He’s aware he’s growing up and he’s not sure what he thinks of the process.
He goes back to the swimming pool repeatedly, trying to get to know Sally better, trying to get out of her what she was doing in the dark water beneath the pier that night. She doesn’t say, but she doesn’t put him off. One time, very awkwardly, he tries to kiss her. She laughs and pushes him away. The idea’s too ridiculous. After this light moment the black car emerges and Matt Giordano orders her to get inside. Charlie stands in the way, though it’s difficult. ‘The Man Who Can Make You Do Anything’. Giordano, a big brute, full of power, leans down, extends his black leather fist and asks: does Charlie want more trouble with his dad?
No, Charlie says. I want more trouble with you.
Giordano laughs him off, as Sally did when he tried to kiss her. Then he turns on Sally and says: ‘I am your father and you’ll do as you’re told.’
She’s in tears, Charlie tries to stop her. But she runs away, with Giordano trying to follow. Charlie loses them both but thinks Sally escaped.
He goes to Giordano’s mansion, breaks a window and gets inside. It’s a creepy place, full of old show-business memorabilia. And photos everywhere of the three of them – Eric Whitby, Matt Giordano and Sally’s mother. Smiling in that artificial way show-business people smile. In strange clothes. Sally’s mother almost naked in some of them. Charlie walks around the place, horrified as he comes upon photos of Sally, some clearly taken surreptitiously, some at the pool, in her bathing suit. Prurient, nasty photos. He hears Giordano coming back, then starting to rage like a madman around the vast empty mansion. Sally did escape him.
Charlie manages to get out through a window. He goes to see Eric Whitby and demands the truth. About how Eric and Giordano were partners, but Giordano cheated on him in so many ways: with money, and by pestering Eric’s daughter, Sally’s mother, constantly. Then, that night on the pier.
What happened? Charlie asks. Eric says he doesn’t know. There’d been a row between him and Giordano. Sally’s mum was staying with Eric. She wouldn’t live with Giordano. She’d come to hate him but money meant they had to work together. She stayed behind to clear up in the theatre. The place burned down. She was a good, strong swimmer. Everyone assumed she could have escaped by jumping into the sea after the boardwalk collapsed. But she was never seen again. Sally took after her in many ways: pretty, headstrong, loving the water. Eric is aware that Giordano’s been telling her he’s her father. She still wouldn’t go to live with him, even though he has so much money. She was the last part of the town Giordano couldn’t buy, and the part he valued most.
Charlie tells him what’s just happened. About Giordano following Sally around. About how she walked into the sea looking suicidal, and how she’s run away. And about what he found in the house: the photos, the obsessive ranting of Giordano, crying out for Sally.
Eric takes a deep breath: he knows he’s got to do something and regrets he didn’t face up to this years ago. He treats Charlie like a child, says thanks and tells him to go home, a grown-up will deal with it. Charlie bridles at that and insists he is a grown-up. This is a big moment for them both. Charlie’s fed up with being treated like a kid – by his own father, by Sally, by Giordano. He’s also aware he’s responsible for making a bad situation worse, and feels guilty about that.
Eric looks at him and sees something the others don’t. Then he tells Charlie that what he’s about to hear now is a secret between them. Sally doesn’t know and mustn’t. Matt Giordano isn’t her father after all, and Giordano knows it. Sally’s mother was two-timing Giordano, having an affair with another man at the time, a musician in the band. A bad man, like Giordano. Sally’s mother had a liking for bad men, which is something Eric would rather keep from his troubled granddaughter. Giordano knew about the affair, knew she was someone else’s child, and that made his possessiveness all the worse.
Eric thinks that her mother and Giordano had a row at the end of the pier, with the musician too. ‘Did he kill them both?’ Charlie asks. Eric just says it was the musician whose body was found. He was a rough, unreliable type. A few thought he was to blame for the fire.
‘We have to do something,’ Charlie insists. ‘I will,’ Eric Whitby promises. He thinks he knows where Sally is. He says he’ll find her, then confront Giordano and tell them this has to stop or the police will become involved. ‘My dad’s a good man,’ Charlie tells him. ‘Scared of Giordano like everyone else in town, but not the kind who’d stand by and allow something wicked to happen.’ Whitby smiles and says, ‘Best leave the police out of this, Charlie.’ It’s as if he knows something.
The next morning Charlie wakes up to the news that Eric’s house has burned down. Charlie races round there on his bike. His father is there with the fire officers. Eric’s dead. Sally is distraught outside the house. Matt Giordano is with her. In the brief time they’re allowed to talk she tells him, not looking in his eyes, that she spent the previous night in Giordano’s mansion. He caught her in the end. Now he looks as if he owns her – and she’s nowhere else to go.
Charlie is convinced the fire was started deliberately, just like the one on the pier. Giordano has murdered Sally’s grandfather, as he murdered her mother and her lover.
Later, at home, Charlie takes his dad to one side and tells him everything he knows. He appeals to him: you’re a policeman. This is wrong. Even if Giordano does own everything he doesn’t own the law, does he?
His father’s torn. Scared. But appalled too. We can trap him, Charlie says, making this all up. We can make him confess, he says.
How? his father asks. He’s Matt Giordano. This is his town. I know how, Charlie insists. His father listens and agrees. A trap will be set.
In the dead of night Charlie rides out on his bike, posts a note through Giordano’s door, rings the bell then rides away.