A Writer's Life

How y'all been?  Busy, I hope.

What have I been doing?  Well, today I sent my new novel out into the world, to find representation and love.  It's called 'Shadow of the Mountain', and it's a contemporary novel about love and faith, about what leads a young man from a small town in Wales to fighting a war in Afghanistan.  I'm incredibly proud of it.  I spent two years writing it, poured everything I had into it - and then some emotional reserves I didn't know I had besides - and the result is something I hope you, and many other future readers, will want to buy in the not too distant future.

It's hard work, writing a novel.  It's not something you can truly do just on weekends, around your other jobs and hobbies and social life.  I mean, I know many do - many even have success doing it his way - but you do have to make sacrifices.  For two years I've barely been out socialising.  I've spent most of my free time bent crooked over a writing pad, putting this feverish dream of a novel that was in my head down onto paper.  Okay, sometimes you go out, because you need a break away, for an evening or so, but in that time you won't escape that novel burning inside you.  If you're anything like me, you'll spend that outside time cornering some unfortunate friend in the corner of a pub and babbling incessantly about plot twists, character development and the themes of your novel.   But when it's all done - when it's out there, letting others read it, and for the first time in months your free of it... that's a great feeling, that rush of freedom bubbling through your veins.  You might even look at all those pages, the multiple drafts on your hard drive, the scribbled notes left behind, made on beer mats, and waiters dockets and scrap paper, and think: never again.  But you're a writer, this is who you are, and so...

I began writing the next novel yesterday, in the pause between finishing Shadow of the Mountain and sending it out.  It's been at the back of my mind for some time now, an idea growing, shaping itself in the subconscious, and now it is a life, ready to be transcribed onto the page.  Who knows what she'll be like in two years.  I can't wait to find out.  Such is the life of a writer.  Please don't think me as mad as this blog post has undoubtedly made me sound.  If I do happen to meet you out in a pub, I promise not to corner you and burble wildly.  Can't promise you won't start, though, because this writing lark: it's infectious.

Starting a Character

I started a novel in December 2010.  I talked about its genesis in an earlier blog post (“Origins of a Novel”).  Now the screenplays I’ve written are out in the world, trying to find buyers, I’ve returned to the novel.  Here’s the thing: the few months away from it have allowed me to see it in new light.  It’s funnier than I remember.  A few pages I thought worked really well are actually quite clumsy (and unnecessary) and have been done away with.  For the majority of its 300 pages, though, ‘Adam Strauss and the Three Sisters’ works a treat.  Yeah, it needs tidying up.  A few scrappy lines here.  A missing scene of explanation there.  But the base, it’s solid.  Its walls are strong.  The whole thing works.  The titular characters work, their interaction is strong, and there is a real sense of romance, loss and tension between them.  

I want to talk about the three sisters of the title:

It’s interesting: they were inspired by three real sisters, albeit only very, very loosely.  If they ever read it, they wouldn’t recognise themselves.  My characters do and say very little that the real sisters would do or say.  They have entirely different personalities, world outlooks, and histories.  The only common point of connection is they used to live across the street from a novelist and one of them did one day knock on my door.  That knock on the door, aged fifteen, inspired much of the novels content.

So why did I use them?  Or claim to have used them?  Because when I write I need a physical model to get started: the same way a screenwriter might write for Johnny Depp.  They picture him and his mannerisms, they use their perceived image of him to get the role just right.  I use physical models for my central characters because it’s a way in, a cheat.  I picture someone that I know and instantly half the work is done for me.  What happens next, though, is the interesting part.  As I write my fictionalised version of this real person, the fictional version takes over.  By the time I reach the end of the novel I have to rewrite the initial scenes so the characters conform to who they now are, not who they were inspired by.

It is a little creepy, though, this habit.  I have to use people I don’t really know very well – if you’re my close friend, I’m not going to use you. If I knew you once, for a while, and you’re out of my life, there’s a good chance I might fictionalise you.  In ‘Adam Strauss and the Three Sisters’, Adam is a novelist and this approbation of another’s life for fictional ends forms the final third of the novel – Adam uses the lives of the three sisters (or at least two of them) – and it’s how they react to that.  Badly, if you’re wondering. 

I still live across from the house where these three sisters lived, and where their parents still live.  I see them coming home from time to time (they all live hundreds of miles away most of the year, living lives I know nothing of) and when they do return I don’t see them, I see my characters.  But if I speak to them, which I sometimes do, I see them, the real sisters.  This strange double vision between reality and fiction infuses much of my life – I live in this other world.  I prefer this other world.  But sometimes I have to join the real one.

All this feeds back into a question writers are always asked: where do your ideas come from?  ‘Adam Strauss and the Three Sisters’ was inspired by seeing one of the real sisters in a shopping queue and remembering the time she came to my door.  None of what happens in the novel is real, but everything could be.  It’s not the big things that inspire us, it’s the little things.   Seeing that little divergent path in a life and following it.  Discovering what lies at the end of that ‘what if?’ moment.  It’s following the thread into the other world.  Taking the other path.  It's about starting at a point in reality and changing something, sometimes even the smallest of things.

Left: Fiction                 Right: Real Life

Using real people for the basis of fictionalised ones might not be a method that works for everyone, though.  But if you’re struggling to get a piece of fiction off the ground, it might be because the characters aren’t working.   If so, it might be a good idea to ask of your characters what would they do if…?  If you don’t know, then they’re not working.   This is another reason I use real people as models, right at the start – because I can then ask: What would ‘she’ do if…? And because I know ‘her’, in real life, I can picture her actions and reactions.  By the time I’ve written the character's action or reaction, I’ve already begun sublimating the real person with the fictional person.  The process of erasure of the real world has begun.  The other world is finally living and the work is moving forward.

It might not work for you, as I said, but it’s always worked for me.

Notes on Character

To fully understand the genesis of a novel, you cannot begin with the moment the first words are typed.  A novel might have lived inside its author for decades.  It is often noted that first novels are often veiled autobiography.  This observation is sometimes nothing more than assumption from the reader.  Many readers of my novel, The Inheritance of Things Past, have presumed that it is autobiographical, that I am in some way its central character, Will Hargreaves.  Indeed, the comment was even made by one of the examiners in my viva voce for my PhD.  It is a question that has haunted the background of all readers’ exposure to my novel.

The Inheritance of Things Past

My novel was loosely inspired by a real life situation – the suffering and eventual death of my cousin.  I was not close to Ian Dutton – in fact his existence was unknown to me until just two years before his death.  His father, my uncle, had fallen out with my father back in the 1960s and they had not spoken for three decades.  I saw Ian only a handful of times, usually at family events, and in reality must have spent only a dozen or so hours with him.  His death was not even the first significant death in my family, as my grandmother had died in 1996.  I think simply it was that he passed away so young.  As it is, the real life of Ian Dutton resembles, in no fashion, the life of Will Hargreaves.  His father read my novel and commented that he did not see his son in it or in Will.  Their attitudes, behaviour, and life story are significantly different.  Neither, though, does Will Hargreaves in any way resemble me.

Will Hargreaves is born in 1966.  I was born in 1979.  Will Hargreaves is a career minded individual working very successfully in the film industry, co-director of a film company.  I am a writer, spending too long living in penury.  He has a best friend, David, an openly gay man who is also his boss.  I’m not even sure I could tell you who my best friend is; I’m not even sure I have one.  Will Hargreaves grows up in Oxfordshire, he attends Cambridge, he is diagnosed with cancer.  I grew up in Wales, attended university, yes, but have never been diagnosed with cancer.  The biographical details at no point connect with my own.  Will falls in love with a girl called Sarah at university – and it is true I too fell for a girl named Sarah at university – Will dates her for three years, I was rejected the moment I finally plucked up the courage to ask her out.  So biographically the life of Will Hargreaves is not the life of Ben Dutton.

“[The novelist] desires to make his readers so intimately acquainted with his characters that the creations of his brain should be to them speaking, moving, living, human creatures.  This he can never do unless he knows those fictitious personages himself, and he can never know them well unless he can live with them in the full reality of established intimacy.  They must be with him as he lies down to sleep, and as he wakes from his dreams.  He must learn to hate them and to love them.  He must argue with them, quarrel with them, forgive them, and even submit to them.  He must know of them whether they be cold-blooded or passionate, whether true or false, and how far true, and how far false.  The depth and the breadth, and the narrowness and the shallowness of each should be clear to him.  And as, here in our outer world, we know that men and women change – become worse or better as temptation or conscience may guide them – so should these creations of his change, and every change should be noted by him.  On the last day of each month recorded, every person in his novel should be a month older than on the first.  If the would-be novelist have aptitudes that way, all this will come to him without much struggling – but if it do not come, I think he can only make novels of wood.”

Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography

Anthony Trollope wrote about the creation of fictional personages in his Autobiography [1883], and his comments have relevance to our current argument.  Will Hargreaves is a fictional personage, as are all the characters that populate my novel, and they lived and breathed in my memory so vividly.  I knew how each of them would act, or react, in any given situation.  It might be a cliché to say this but I feel I knew them better than I knew myself.  So when a reader comes to a work, and if the writer has done his job well, the characters on the page will appear as real as anybody they know.  Here, the supposition of the reader comes into play: the supposition being that there can be no way in which a writer created such a believable, living, breathing figure unless the figure was himself. 

The Little Moments

The Pirate Weekend

A late posting today, only an hour before the end of the day, following a nine hour shift following a night out on the town.  But this is exactly why I set myself this challenge.  After such a stressful, busy-busy day, the last thing I’d want to do is think, creatively or otherwise.  But now I need to write something, it has me thinking about other things I’d like to write.  It has awakened a part of me that has remained dormant throughout the day.

It has been the kind of day where there is little of note upon which I can report.  It’s been a pirate-themed weekend in our little town, and hundreds of people have dressed up, carrying out pirate-based activities.  Saturday morning I was woken by cannon fire – how often does that happen?  Today we’ve seen hundreds of kids with painted faces, mock-sword fights in the shop, and an lot of very happy faces.  It is such occasions that bring out the sense of community, that remind you why it is sometimes a blessed thing to live in a small place.  Pirate weekend has bought people together, commonly, in good natured fun.

As a writer such a weekend is an insightful experience.  Creative drama is all about conflict, about things not working out.  When I sit down to write a story, or a screenplay, I am looking at how best to put my characters into conflict: what has A got that B really wants?  What has A got that B will kill for?  We become receptive to drama and conflict in the real world because we’re so attuned to it in our creative lives.  But, as writers, we need to remember there is light as well, that humankind can come together in charming, surprising ways.  The look of delight on a child’s face as a pirate captain warped a balloon into an animal.  The way in which friends mucked about in pirate costume for the entertainment of others, and for no pay – not even officially part of the festivities, just getting into the spirit.  Wonderful.  And you have to remember these moments exist. They might be moments that have little place in the conflict of a script, but such moments, deployed well in a fiction, end up making the fiction seem more human.  More real.  More honest.

There are little moments from this weekend that I’ll treasure in memory, that I will work over subconsciously, and that one day my end up feeding into something else I write, further down the line.  So writers, be open.  Be awake to the little moments.  Not just to the conflict, but the joy as well.  The joy can be as important as the conflict in making your work sing.  They can be the difference between an average piece of prose, and something magisterial.

Mission Statement

A writer writes.

This is what a pen and paper looks like to you digital age apes

That’s the common adage we hear.  Sometimes we writers aren’t writing though, but we are thinking about it.  No, really we are.  Thinking is just as important to a writer as the actual writing.  And since we’re deconstructing that adage, rewriting is actually more important to a writer than writing: it is though rewriting that we find the truth of what it was we were trying to say.  But we write, we have to write.  It is compulsion.  We should try and write every day as well, even when we don’t feel like it.  Even when we’d rather pull out our own fingernails than consider putting pen to page (or fingers to keyboard). 

So this is my proclamation.  That for one month, and one month only to begin with (we’ll see how this goes), I will write a new blog post every day.  I might talk about utter rubbish, I might talk some sense, I’ll probably try and crack some dreadful jokes and I might draw you another terrible picture in Paint (see a few posts down for illumination (or don’t)). 

So I actually started this yesterday with a review Gwendoline Riley’s wonderful new novel Opposed Positions (what do you mean you haven’t bought it yet?  Go – go buy it now!  Wait, finish reading this blog post, then GO BUY IT!) so I’m one day up already.  And I know that’s cheating – what are you, the blogging police?  Wait, you are?  Sorry, sorry, I won’t do it again officer, I promise.

My rules for this little exercise:

1)      Each blog post must be between 400-500 words in length.  Long enough to give some depth, short enough to read while eating a sandwich.

2)      It must be in some way related to the creative process.  I’m a writer, so I’m best able to talk about writing (or reading) – in fact, it might be all I’m able to talk about.

3)      It will be one new post a day.  No cheating by posting two in one day.  I have to write even when I haven’t really got the time to (such as when I’m working a ten hour day stacking shelves to earn some poor amount of dough – yes, they pay me in flour and water.)

So there we go.  One month of blogging nonsense to look forward to.  I know, I’m excited too.  You’re right, there should be fireworks.  And a marching band.  And… oh sod it, see you tomorrow.

See, I said there should be fireworks - and lo, there are!