As I write this I am 13,000 words into the first draft of ‘Hidden Messages.’ It is going well. The wonderfully detailed plan is no longer wonderfully detailed. As I sat down to begin the first draft, I had an idea. It was, I’d like to say a twist but it’s more fundamental than that, the addition of an element that solved weaknesses I hadn’t realised existed. The moment it occurred to me I thought to ignore it. I had my plan, if I kept adding little things on a whim, I’d never begin, never mind finish. But second thought and third thought saw its necessity. Now I can’t imagine the story without that new idea being incorporated. What I didn’t do however is go back to the plan and alter it. Impatience took over. I wanted starting and I wasn’t going to wait for ever more preparations to be made.

I will pompously reference the adage about plans never surviving first contact with the enemy. The plan had gotten me this far. And when I hit a wall, and I surely will hit a wall, I will go back to that plan to find my route around or through it. But for now, I’m keeping that new element wholly in my head. I haven’t even gotten to it yet but I’m excited to discover how it looks and feels as I write it. I think, and don’t forget this is before I’ve written any of it, it makes the story more cinematic. I never make a conscious decision to make a story cinematic or otherwise, but I will wonder about this quality as I write it. When I finished ‘The Bucket’ the only other medium I could imagine it in, was some sort of play. ‘Blue Eyeshadow’ is perhaps a made for TV movie. This one though, I think has the bright visuals and large scope that would suit the big screen.

This isn’t an entirely redundant and self-indulgent form of escapism. I’m not writing a movie. I’m writing a novel that I hope will appeal to the cinematic part of our brain. I want it to be easy for the reader to picture the scene, as it were. The next novel won’t be cinematic, it will have a different appeal. Knowing what I am hoping to produce is as important as knowing what I am trying to write.

For now, I am enjoying myself. I am having to invent some scenes on the hop as I alter the plan in anticipation of the new element (possibly elements) to come and this is doing my confidence a lot good. It’s necessarily slowing me down but it is a heady feeling, spinning something out of nothing. While I write purely for the money and acclaim, it is just so wonderful to invent. To create. To shape. I know that even if no one reads this one, I will write the next one. And the one after that. The act of creating is addictive.

I am going to take a break from blogging the novel though. I have another 60,000 words or so to throw at the page, before phase two begins. I am in that exciting and boring, glorious a tedious phase of telling myself the story. And it’s going well. I wish I could hurry it up a bit, but there are about two months of this slog to get through. It is a weird thing, my confidence in the story is so high at the moment I just want it all down on paper so I can polish it. But I can only go as fast as I can go, a thousand words a day. The only thing of note I will be working on is seeing if I can somehow increase my daily word rate. When I reach the half way point, approximately, 35,00 words I’ll blog again.

Blogging about this process has thus far been a great fillip for my confidence as well as a source of motivation. So, thank you reading and see you in 22,000 words time.

Previous: There Be Progress Here

I’m actually writing a novel. Almost seven thousand words in a week and I’ve yet to experience a crisis. This obviously won’t last but opening a document that already contains thousands of words creates a sort of momentum. It’s better than the pages of notes. Better than the number of words you had the day before. And it is so much better than the blank page. It creates in one’s head the idea that you’ve already written twenty or thirty thousand words, it’d be a crime to give up now. Though I say that as someone who has on three occasions abandoned projects that had passed the twenty-thousand-word mark. But not this time.

This time I am working to a plan. I know what needs writing and where everything is and must go. It is a relief, it is a chore and it is fun. The only things getting in my way at the moment are; the little insidious doubts at the back of my mind telling me I’m an imposter, having to make a living, the weather, the dog, eating, reading, watching TV, the news, grocery shopping, Twitter, my little pieces of activism, thoughts about the next novel, existential angst and cutting the bloody lawn. But other than that, I’m OK.

My routine is a surprise to me. A recent IOS upgrade added a thing that encourages we iPhone zombies to go to bed at the same time every night and get up at the same time every morning. And if it’s on my Apple product then it must be good and wholesome. I have it set up so that it tells me to be in bed for 12.35 and to get up at 7.35. It has succeeded in producing something my mother so consistently failed to shape, a human being capable of aping adult behaviour. My phone tells me at 11.55 that I should consider getting ready for bed. I do this, because it is my iPhone telling me to do it. Then it tells me that I really should get up or when I check my app the statistics showing my sleep patterns will be out of whack. A simply terrifying prospect.

So, I do what my phone tells me to do. Sometimes Arwen gets up too, so I have to feed her then I have my porridge while watching whatever U.S. twenty-two-minute-long comedy show I’ve recorded. Breakfast eaten I write a thousand words. It’s probably only 9.30 at this point and I’m done for the day. No matter how hard I try I cannot sit down to write fiction again until the next morning. I can blog, but not fiction. It’s irritating, but it works. Perhaps in the future I will be able to increase the writing to two hours and two thousand words, but for now what I’m doing is working and I don’t intend poking it with a stick.

The most important thing I’ve learned, during this project, is that to create wonder and fantasy, one must be as boring and predictable as possible in one’s habits. This is not at all what I expected.

Previous: World Building

Well I finally finished the planning portion of ‘Hidden Messages’ and have begun the actual writing part. And it is going well. While it was frustrating to plan in such detail, I’m glad for every hour spent in that process. The amount of unnecessary time and words it is going to save me (wait for the blog post where I discover the planning was a waste of time, that’ll be a doozy) will, in my estimation, be enormous.

So, now I can write a little bit about one of my favourite components of novel writing, World Building. I like writing Fantasy and Science Fiction, so World Building is something I either get good at or just don’t bother writing. I think however, even if I wasn’t determined to be a writer, I’d still indulge in World Building. Ever since reading ‘Lord of the Rings’ I’ve imagined other Worlds. I’ve populated them, given them cultures and religions, and then made things as difficult as possible for them, just to see what happened.

Good sinister fun, but daunting to transmit with words. When I began writing I had two ways to deal with how intimidating and technically challenging this was. In ‘The Easers’ I imagined a very small World and told the story within that small space. In ‘The Bucket’ I told a very small story, within a much larger World. The World of ‘The Bucket’ is one that is almost fully realised inside my head, but at the time of writing ‘The Bucket, I didn’t feel able to visit it with tens of thousands of words. Thus, the brief visit, in the dark, that was Captain Yilda’s time in the dungeon.

Even ‘Hidden Messages’ is not a World wholly spun from my imagination. There are aliens but not as one might imagine, and that’s all I’m saying about that. The novel I will write after this is set in Kerry but the one after that, Gandalf willing, will be a full length novel set in Captain Yilda’s World. And the reason I’ve put it so far into the future is because I need to get a lot better at World Building.

There are two aspects to World Building. The first is all about inventing to the full extent of your imagination. And then imposing rules, consistency and a relatable logic on the World you’ve invented. It’s fun. And depending on your particular interests you’ll either concentrate on languages (Tolkien) or politics, cultures, relationships, economics, military conflict and magical systems etc. But no matter what gets you going the most, all the sociological, anthropological, geological and a dozen other ‘ogicals’ have to be accounted for. I bloody love it.

The second aspect, however, is where the writing skill comes into play. In planning your novel, you have to decide what is the barest of barest minimum of information the reader will require to understand the World in which your story is being told. Just think Tolkien, then do the opposite. Anyway, if your novel is a huge success you will get silly money to write books that contains all the World Building stuff you had to leave out. Console yourself with that. Until then, minimum of information necessary is the key. And even then, it is a lot of information to have to relay.

I recently read, ‘The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet’ by Becky Chambers and I was thinking about ‘Hidden Messages’ a lot at the time. I found myself examining her World Building. It was flawless. It was seamless. It was smooth and sneaky and surreptitious and it was delicious. Alien Worlds, future humans, alien species, interstellar conflicts, technology, economies and cultures all drip fed, while the reader is getting on with the story.

That’s the skill, insinuating your bloody enormous info-dump into a story, while avoiding the dreaded ‘e’ word. For exposition is death. Yes, Tolkien expositioned like it was 1999, but that was Tolkien. Even Terry Pratchett didn’t expect his readers to endure exposition and he was writing about the Discworld. We did end up buying the maps, cookbooks, atlases and encyclopaedias though.

And to make it even more difficult, you need to avoid exposition while also finding a way to pack the necessary information into the opening few paragraphs, pages and chapters. You have to find a way to situate the reader in the World you’ve invented without overloading them with information, because otherwise they will simply leave.

Most importantly, however, it’s fun. I’m surprised that I think so, but it is. In ‘Hidden Messages’ there is so much I know about the World that is informing the story but you’ll never see it. I, as the writer, get to decide that and then live or die by those decisions. It’s heady stuff to be honest.

So, that’s my take on World Building. I hope you enjoyed it. I have no idea what I’ll wrote about next week. Hopefully it won’t be a whiny 500 hundred words on why I can’t write novels. But it is a possibility.

PS Just in case you’re wondering, I love Tolkien. I write because of Tolkien. It’s just that he did everything wrong.

Previous: Want to Write Now                    Next: There Be Progress Here

The more I learn about writing a novel, the more I realise I don’t know. And the more I realise I don’t know, the more vulnerable I am to trying to know more instead of writing more. Which is leading me to the added problem of knowing so much about the novel I have yet to write, that it may no longer interest me.

This is where I’m heading. Though I do not say this as an expression of regret. While frustrating, it is also proving to be fascinating. My story, ‘Hidden Messages’ is now almost entirely clear to me. I have written three thousand words of plans and summaries. It’s coherent, structured and I think it has the potential to hold the attention of the reader.

The problem is, the more I delve into it, the more I understand how it must follow a certain path. The more I feel bogged down in, if you will, editing before the fact. I am seeking to hone it to perfect sharpness, before forging it.

And I say this again, this is not a source of regret. I wish I had undertaken this process before writing my previous novel. I think it would’ve been a better novel for it. I may have saved myself a year of plodding and dead ends. Or, and this is what concerns me about ‘Hidden Messages’ it may have remained unwritten as I tried to perfect it before writing it.

I’ll say this for the third time, though it screams of too much protesting, I do not regret this. I don’t regret it for three reasons. The first reason being that if and when I write this novel, it will be a novel. It will be a novel that from the first draft to the last, will require less hacking at than the application of polish. The terror of the rewrite need not sap my resolve.

Secondly, the novel I write after this will be better. I already know its name. I already know the characters. And even though it will be more complex than this one, armed with what I’ve already learned, I know how best to grapple with it. Precipitous pitfalls are replaced by scalable precipices.

Lastly and most importantly, I feel like a writer again. For a long time, I felt like an imposter whenever I saw my Twitter profile. Or worse, when anyone asked how the writing was going. I hadn’t realised I was not fully recovered from the disappointment of my previous novel.

I’d always regarded myself as thick-skinned. I’m not. I crave success and recognition. When that didn’t happen, I took it personally. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I didn’t realise the bang my ego and confidence had taken. I couldn’t understand why I was finding writing a second novel so difficult.

Intellectually, I knew rejection is nine-tenths of the writing experience but I had no defences against it. The only downside to being a cocky and self-entitled man, I suppose. I know that if and when ‘Hidden Messages’ fails to bring me status and riches I’ll be crushed. But I’ll know it is happening. I’ll be prepared. I’ll have already begun novel three. I have to do this because I already know what novels, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine and ten are. And the only thing, right now, that’s preventing me from writing them is writing this one.

Previous: Still Not About World Building