World’s worst blogger

This blog is becoming rather like the Christmas diary I feared and predicted it would be. Those who praised it in its early days for the many gems of wisdom didn’t realise that those were gems which had been accumulating over some time, mostly during periods when I wasn’t writing a book and so had time and brain cells to kill. Since then, the decline of this blog has been pitiful to chart, petering out to the occasional posting when I have some self-promotion to do.

However, one can take the lamentable inactivity of this blog as a good sign. If I’m not writing here, it means I’m writing elsewhere. Which I am (although not at this precise moment, I admit). Yes, there is a new book in the pipeline, and the first draft is well under way. I am up to chapter 5, which experience tells me means that I have broken the back of this particular task, and it’s a live idea that I can see through to the end.

It’s not a Cat Kin book (thank heaven) but an entirely new idea, and in many ways it feels like I’m writing my first novel again, with everything or nothing to play for. What I am enjoying is the fact that it is the book itself demanding to be written. The characters want to run on to the next page. I’m writing not because I have a contract or a deadline or hope of money at the end of it. I’m writing because, frankly, I have to. And that’s a good thing.

The blog will just have to go hungry occasionally.

No way can I jump this

Annie Dalton left a comment a few weeks back on my post Laying the tracks. Fearing to lower the intellectual tone, she made reference to Indiana Jones & the Last Crusade, when Indy actually has to step out into the void, only to find that an invisible bridge takes his weight. It is, as he mutters to himself, a leap of faith. Starting a new book is very much like this.

I’m currently like Indy (minus the hat) standing on the brink of the abyss. Before me is my promising new idea, but from here it looks vast, dark and daunting, and I don’t see how I can possibly start writing when I can’t see what’s out there. On the other hand, I can’t really see what’s out there until I start. Oh, I know the basic plot, I know the major players and the big things that happen to them, but how it all links up, in ways that won’t feel contrived, is still invisible like Indiana’s bridge.

I know what I have to do. I have to start work on that first chapter, and then I’ll be able to see the bridge under me, narrow, transparent, vertigo-inducing, but there nonetheless. I know this, and it’s still a frightening prospect. What if the bridge doesn’t appear? What if it does appear but I fall off it? These are the questions that face anyone at the start of any major project, a book being just one example.

Then I remember something else. The being scared part of it is just as important as anything else. It’s the fear that concentrates the mind and helps you keep your balance. The fear is what provides the necessary thrill that makes writing so rewarding. This is why writers write and why climbers climb mountains. And why dashing if unshaven archaeologists gallop off in search of Holy Grails.

At what point do you know you’re ready? You’ll never be ready. Just step.

Who’s up for a metaphor?

A metaphor is a glorious thing,
A diamond ring,
The first day of summer…
Use them wisely,
Use them well,
And you'll never know the hell of loneliness

The quote above is from the song ‘Metaphor’ by the Sparks (a band who have raked in the money for over 30 years by being uncommercial). Metaphors are a subject close to my heart. I tend to use them rather a lot, both in writing and conversation. I am especially tickled by the scene in the fourth Star Trek movie when Spock asks Jim, ‘Captain, are you sure it’s not time for a colourful metaphor?’ In fact my use of metaphors borders on binge-use, and many is the time when my friends haven’t the faintest what I am on about, and even I may have lost the thread. (Now circle the metaphors in the paragraph above).
But metaphors are useful when writing, so long as I can rein myself in. ‘Metaphor’ is made up of two words that mean, respectively, ‘Over/across’ and ‘carry/bear’. They are things that can carry something across (and can also be overbearing!). I use them – I try to use them – to convey impressions or experiences that would be laborious, complex, or even impossible to describe in literal terms. Since I write a form of fantasy, this happens rather often.

Metaphors can also serve the function that the soundtrack serves in a film. Actually I have lifted this line from Diana Wynne Jones’s book The Tough Guide to Fantasyland – a merciless blitz on fantasy fiction clichés – specifically the part when she lampoons the use of topsy-turvy phrasing to invoke an epic atmosphere (‘sang they with eagerness and sang their swords with them’). But the appropriate use of metaphors can lift a scene from flat description into something mysteriously alive. If I’m writing a climactic scene, don’t be surprised if the metaphors go into overdrive. Think of it as heavenly choirs on the soundtrack.

After all, in the end, ALL words are metaphors. No word is literally the thing it represents. All are just vehicles that ‘carry across’. I think that the difference between ‘ordinary’ words and the ones we choose to call metaphors, is that metaphors are the experiments, the seedlings, the daringly floated possibilities. Metaphors happen when the writer turns alchemist, mixing colourful compounds in the hope of gold, new life, or anything better than the blank expression on people’s faces that I’ve learned over the years to dread.

Unknown unknowns

I’ve just finished reading a Helen Dunmore book. It’s set mostly before the Great War, but that’s no problem, for Helen owns a time machine, and has gone back to live herself as people lived then. I would estimate that her stay in the past lasted at least a year, to fit in all the experiences and details she picked up. Her narrator goes so far as to describe the particular difficulties of ploughing a field with a horse-drawn plough, or the way lighting a fire in one grate might be easier than in another. I once attempted to write a story set in another time (about the same period, give or take a decade or two) and found it a complete nightmare. With every sentence you risk putting your foot in it, mentioning an object that doesn’t yet exist, or revealing ignorance of some everyday thing like drugget, carbolic or bombazine.

The kind of research needed for such writing, what you might call immersion research, is a world away from the lazy internet-driven research that I resort to more than I would care to admit. It’s one thing to know what you need to know, type it into a search engine, and get the answer. But, if I can quote perhaps the only truly wise thing than Donald Rumsfeld ever said (though I’m sure it wasn’t original): “There are things we know we know. There are things we know we don’t know. But there are also things that we don’t know we don’t know.” Those last, the Unknown Unknowns, make up perhaps 80% of an unwritten book. Make that 90% or more if you’re writing fiction set in the past or in another country/culture.

What questions do you ask? How can you know what you need to know? How do you know, for example, that there’s a tricky knack to walking behind a horse-drawn plough? All right, I’m sure there are places still where you can try out this traditional farming technique. But how do you know you need to try it out? Wouldn’t most people assume it was fairly easy? Or assume the reader doesn’t care how easy or hard it is? What kind of person takes the trouble to wonder, to go and find out, just for the sake of a single short paragraph? Only an artist.

A proper novelist, I think, needs to immerse herself so thoroughly in her subject matter that she absorbs all those details like a sponge, and slowly acquires so many ‘Known Knowns’ that she can also see the gaps, the Known Unknowns, leaving as few Unknown Unknowns as possible. And this is what scares the hell out of me. Because that commitment, in terms of time and resources, is vast. And there may not even be a book at the end of it. This leads me to another point. There are two kinds of research and they are intertwined. There’s factual research, where you want to know (for example) what kind of car might be driven in 1926. But then there’s what you might term creative research, where you just have an urge to write a story with a particular setting, so you research that setting exhaustively and hope that, at some point down the line, an idea may emerge from all that you learn and experience. There are writers who do this. And if I had five times as much money and ten times as much time, I would start doing that tomorrow.

So how do writers like Helen Dunmore manage it? There are only 24 hours in her days, same as mine. I think the answer’s simple: such authors either have much, much more commitment… or they have time machines.

Patience

‘The patience of a writer, surely? Saints have nothing on us.’

For the quote above I have to thank a writer friend of mine, Carolyn Braby. If there is one quality or trait that I think all writers should have, it is not word power or wisdom or soul or wit. It is patience. Patience in abundance. Oceans of it. Great galactic nebula-spanning clouds of patience.

Michael Caine once said, ‘I get paid to wait around. Acting I do for free.’ A similar life awaits novelists. It’s enough of an effort to get to the end of a book, and no-one who writes the words THE END isn’t exhausted. Unfortunately, that isn’t end. It’s not even the end of the beginning, as Churchill might say. It’s merely the prelude to something that might, in fact, never begin.

Working is tiring. But how much more tiring is waiting, and doing no work as you wait because you no longer have the motivation. The submission process alone could grind a sandstone pyramid into a small packet of custard power. With my book The Cat Kin I was lucky, as regards getting an agent. Submitting the book to about half a dozen agents from the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, I had an offer of representation within four months. In fact I had two, but that’s another story. I was walking on air, confident that a publishing deal was mere weeks away. I went home and waited.

And waited.

Bear in mind, this isn’t ordinary waiting. It’s not like waiting for a late train, or for the gas fitter to come. This is waiting in the peak of anticipation, being as sure as you can be that your lifelong dream could come true tomorrow. And so I waited. Weeks passed. Months. Then more months. My agent never emailed, unless I emailed first. Publisher after publisher was crossed off the list. Soon there would be no publisher left who had not yet seen the book and rejected it.

Imagine a year made entirely of Christmas mornings; mornings on which you wake up to no presents. A Groundhog Day of disappointment. It’s not the kind of disappointment you get used to or resigned to, either. Because each new day refreshes it, like Prometheus’s magical healing liver™. You awake with the same maddening optimism, the same blind conviction that maybe the past six months have been worth it, because THIS IS THE DAY. And then, every day, the hope evaporates sometime between four o’clock and five, leaving a sour residue that is soon coating your whole life and turning you into a moody beast. You live on tenterhooks, stretched between two opposing forces: ‘Any day now’ and ‘Give it up’.

Patience, resilience. The ability to suffer in silence for months, years, or decades. Every writer needs it. And, sometimes, at long long last, it pays off. And it’s also good practice because, as I can now attest, it seems that published writers have to wait almost as long.

*Twiddles thumbs*

Why thank you auntie, what a lovely diary

What can an author blog about? I use up all my words writing books. Or rather, in writing sentences that may or may not end up in books. Writing an entire book, I firmly believe, is impossible. The fact that so many people have nonetheless done it is a testament to human endeavour, or bloody-mindedness, one of the two.

I also use up all my spare time writing, which means I have nothing else to blog about. There isn’t actually a lot of this spare time sloshing around, since I also have a full time job in London, a lengthy commute, a two-year-old son with a Lazytown and Balamory obsession and a rubbish lawnmower (the lawnmower is mine, I should clarify, not his, otherwise there would be another ‘and’ clause there, and there isn’t).

I only really got this blog so that I could post on other, far more interesting blogs that required registration. But now that I’ve got it (rather like being given a diary for Christmas by a well-meaning aunt) I suppose I had better put something in it.

For now, I will use it as a dumping-ground for all the little bits of writing wisdom that I pick up or dream up along the long, lonely road. Please, under no circumstances, take any of this as advice on how to write, or even as a description of how I write. It’s a notebook, nothing more. And if there are a few pearls among all the seaweed, I can’t take responsibility for them either. Chance are I nicked ‘em anyway.