Origins of a Novel

I’ve been busy preparing a final draft of the first three chapters of my second novel, currently titled ‘Adam Strauss and the Three Sisters’, to send to literary agents and potential publishers in the hope of securing a proper book deal that will actually see my work reach readers. 

I’m inordinately proud of what I’ve achieved with this second novel.  I started writing it in December 2010, after a few months of thought, and wrote the first fifty or so pages through to mid-January 2011 when I stopped.  I was starting to write screenplays for the first time, and they took over.  Through 2011 I returned to the novel rarely, writing just ten or twenty pages before stopping again.  I completed the first draft of another novel in that time (a novel I can’t decide what to do with, as it’s good, but not great) and I wrote at least seven screenplays (three of which hit either the BBC Writersroom, where they recieved reader commentary, a rare honour, or The Red Planet Prize 2012, where I finished in the top 100!).  But always I’d return to this novel.  This novel was an itch I had to scratch.

Not an accurate likeness.  Image stolen from: educationcreations.com

I began writing again, solidly, in February 2012, after a five month break, and worked until I had finished the first draft.  This new burst of energy saw me actually write a new one hundred page opening and a hundred page ending to complete what had now become the middle of the novel, but had once been the opening.  Those first one hundred pages still read brilliantly, and apart from the first four pages that needed major work, have had little surgery – they work as they are.  They work well because I knew where they were going, what they had to achieve.  That is not how I usually work – I like to write blind, feeling my way into a work.  Often when I start I have no idea of where I am going to end up.

Let me elucidate: 'Adam Strauss and the Three Sisters' was born simply out of a desire to write about the three sisters that grew up across the street from me.  I was intrigued by them as a teenager, talking with one of them became the closest I got to actual contact with a girl my age at that time.  I worked for a while in a shop with another of them.  All three of them have gone on to live fascinating lives – BBC reporter, teacher in Japan – and I was fascinated by how these three girls had become the women they are.  So from the basis of three real world people I developed three fictional characters.  But writing about three sisters lives wasn’t enough; I needed some other glue to bind them narratively, some prism through which to see them.  This led to the creation of Adam Strauss, a boy who had been in love with one of the Woolf sisters as a teenager, but who hasn’t seen her for ten years.  Then one day he sees her. 

This sighting became the springboard for the novel.  I wanted to ask the question: What if you see, one day, the one that got away?  What if, for her, you were the one that got away?  Would love, born out of a decade old crush, survive?  And what if one of the other sisters fell headlong in love with you too?  It is by asking, and then answering, such questions that my novels are born.  In October 2010 I saw one of the sisters for the first time in ten years, and it was by first asking questions of who she might have become in my mind that all those other questions bloomed.  Now I have a novel, inspired by three real women but not about them.  I hope very soon you can read it too.

Inspiration (and The Wise Man's Fear Review)

First up: I’m back from my boozy weekend in Cardiff. I had a great time, in which I learned a great deal and stole an awful lot of stories that will one day worm their way into my fiction. I saw a woman I was crazy about for a long time, and about whom I’ve already placed in a novel, and seeing her bought that stagnant novel back to the forefront of my mind, and gave me the ending I so desperately lacked. So thanks for that.

On the train back, and during the rest of Sunday evening, I finished Patrick Rothfuss’s epic new novel, The Wise Man’s Fear, which I review spoiler-free below. I took a brief visit to Blackwell’s in Oxford where I picked up the Elizabeth Taylor novel my friend enthused about, and new book of essays from Orhan Pamuk. Nothing like a Nobel Laureate to get the brain stimulated.

Oh, and I finished the teenage science-fiction pilot I’ve been working on, and that was posted off to the BBC’s Writersroom this afternoon. Now I face an agonising few months waiting to see if they like not only the script but my writing style: I would like nothing more than to join the writing team on some big BBC show. So here’s fingers and toes crossed – I’d appreciate it if you could so the same.

Onto the review:

The Wise Man’s Fear (2011)

Patrick Rothfuss

Gollancz, 1008pp

Patrick Rothfuss burst onto the fantasy writing scene in 2007 with The Name of the Wind (which I previously reviewed on my blog) which was the first part of a trilogy that he had already completed. Since that novels publication, it has been a long wait for fans of the trilogy for this second volume, The Wise Man’s Fear.

Picking up where that first volume ended, we are reintroduced to the hero Kvothe. He is narrating his story to a figure known as The Chronicler, in the inn that he now run. The first volume saw his tale leading up to the end of his first year at university (aged just sixteen) – this volume takes us through to the age of seventeen, and another year at university, with a couple of side trips to mix with royalty, track down bandits and have sweet sensual sex with a fairy.

Rothfuss’s writing has always been quite spare – he gets to the story, quickly, without resorting to endless description or unnecessary world-building (a common problem with fantasy literature). In this the sparsely written prose makes the dramatic moments stand out in sharp contrast: the darkness is certainly creeping in at the edges of Kvothe’s tale, and by the end we know that darker things are to come. Never has a thousand page novel passed by so quickly.

There will be a lot of people that have yet to read The Wise Man’s Fear – or have come close to finishing it yet (it not been out a week yet) – so I will restrict myself from talking much more about it right now. Nevertheless, I will say that The Wise Man’s Fear plays up all the strengths of Rothfuss’s writing: a cliché here, but if you loved his first novel, you really are going to love this one. It is that rare thing, a better sequel. But I warn you: you will be left agonisingly waiting for the third volume which I guess we won’t see until 2015 if the gap between volume one and two is anything to go by. If Patrick Rothfuss needs the time to energise his novel, and make it the best he can, then the wait is worth it.

Music & The Creative Act

So yesterday I continued working on the most difficult pages of my new novel, Grass and Ember, a particularly harrowing four chapter arc that ends one characters story and propels the reader into the final third of the novel. I've been working slowly on these pages, as it seems each word needs to be precise, more precise than I usually go for. I like my prose to have looseness, almost like a conversation, but this needed the exactness of poetry, it needed to sing.

Now when I write I mostly do it in silence. I loathe distraction when I'm writing because I like to lose myself in the work. I see sentences rising up, a symphony of words, and a distraction can cause all those words to come tumbling down, and my reconstruction of them never feels as solid as the first elusive thought I saw. However, launching into this four chapter arc I found my resistance was up, I simply did not want to go there and write them, to think what my character would have to think for this sequence of events to even be remotely plausible. Using Spotify (a wonderful new way of presenting music to an audience, through which I've discovered hundreds of artists I normally wouldn't have and has led me to buying CDs I normally wouldn't) I came across an album by Ludovico Einaudi called Le Onde. I read that this orchestral work was inspired by Virginia Woolf's The Waves, and so I put it on and listened. Here is where the strange symbiosis began: as I was listening I could see the words rising up, the right words, the way into this arc. I kept writing with the music playing and when the album finished I began it all over again. This one CD has become the soundtrack to these chapters; I find I can't write without it playing, but I also know that when these four chapters are done I won't need that album again, because the nature of it will be at odds with where the novel goes next. I'm not sure how a piece of music can so affect another form, but it does. I've experienced this once before: when I was finishing The Inheritance of Things Past, I played Always on my Mind by Willie Nelson over and over during the last three pages, one song on loop.

If Einaudi's album helped me find the precision I needed, I wonder know if other works would help me find the precision for other chapters, other works. Is there a corresponding piece of music for every creative act? What piece would best suit a road trip, for that's what is coming next in Grass and Ember, through the Scottish landscape, up near Aberdeen, where the North Sea batters the shore, and the sky is overcast, the sun breaking through, spears of light, and the car racing forward, towards the unknown?

I wonder if other writers find music releases them in the same way. I remember reading that Ethan Hawke, when writing his novel Ash Wednesday, has music on loudly, always playing. Do you need music when you write? Let me know. I'm off to write the last chapter of this arc, and afterward I might just need something overly jolly to bring me out of the depth of despair the character is going through.