Research and Editing - an interview with Adam Connors, by Claire Fayers

 You may remember, in last month's post I talked about books on my reading pile, including the YA thriller, The Girl Who Broke the Sea. I was lucky enough to chat to the author, Adam Connors, about his research, writing and editing processes. It's quite a long read, but utterly fascinating. Enjoy!

Many congratulations on your first book. I’ve always been fascinated with the sea. What inspired you to set your story underwater?

Weirdly, I didn’t start with the underwater part.

I wanted to write a book about someone who feels like a bit of an outsider. Someone for whom social interaction doesn’t come easily. I wanted to write about the gap between the person we are inside, and the version of ourselves we let other people see.

I was a pretty socially awkward child, so I felt like it was something I could do a decent job writing about. And it also felt like something readers would recognize and relate to.

So I started with Lily, who on the inside is smart and resourceful, and funny and caring, but who doesn’t find it easy to get along with other people. And I had this phrase in my head which comes from my day-job as a software engineer: humans have rubbish user interfaces.

What I needed was to send Lily somewhere that she would absolutely hate. Somewhere that was enclosed and claustrophobic and had a really small community she absolutely couldn’t get away from.

I hit on the idea of a deep-sea mining rig because one of my friends is an ROV driver (Remotely Operated Vehicle, think: mini-sub) and it just seemed perfect. Cramped, stuffy, smelly, noisy. Everything Lily is not good at. 

In the early stages, I really wasn’t married to the setting. Maybe Antarctica would be better? Maybe outer-space? But space has been done to death, I didn’t want to set my book in space. 

It all changed once I started doing my research. Every time I learned something new about the deep-sea it just got more interesting. I started with a bit of Googling and ended up speaking to a bunch of marine biologists. I realised that I had never given the deep-sea that much attention before, and that there was such an incredible range of incredibly new science going on down there that I was completely unaware of. 

One of the marine biologists I spoke to told me that our ability to systematically explore the deep-sea is so recent that “they discover something entirely new to science every time they look”. 

That thought really blows my mind. 

I think it was Stephen King who said that books come together when two or more ideas find each other. That’s definitely how it worked for me.  The deep-sea started out as just a good place to make life hard for my main character… but if that’s as far as it went I doubt the book would have worked out. It only worked because the deep-sea had so much going for it, and it developed a life of its own as soon as I started to learn more about it, and then all the resonances between Lily’s character and her setting just started to pour out.

 

Lily is such an interesting character. Where did you get the idea for her and how did you develop her?

Quite a few people have called out the fact that Lily and her father are neurodiverse. I quite like that people see that in the book, and I was really moved when someone wrote an Amazon review saying: “It is really refreshing to see neurodiversity represented without being made into a problem or the whole story.”

That felt like an achievement.

But I didn’t set out to write a book with neurodiverse characters. I started, to be honest, with a socially awkward girl who was quite a lot like I was as a child; and a geeky, techie dad who was … well, me.

There’s a great saying which I always keep in mind when I’m writing: You don’t know what you’re made of until you’ve had the stuffing knocked out of you.

For me, character development is just that — start with a very rough outline of the kind of person you want to write about, then put them through all sorts of difficult situations and watch what they do.

The scariest and most exciting part of writing a book this way is that you don’t often end up where you think you’re going to end up.

For example, the idea that Lily breaks things when she gets stressed feels really central to the book now. It’s in the title for a start! And it frames Lily’s relationship with the sentient organism she encounters as part of the story.

But it didn’t occur to me that Lily would break things until about half way through my second draft — about nine months into writing. There’s a moment when Lily breaks a mug out of frustration and loneliness, and I put it in on a whim, but right away I noticed the character come to life on the page, and start to feel more real, and so I started exploring it more.

When you do that, some ideas stick, and grow, and some ideas don’t feel quite right and end up being edited out.

It was the same with Lily’s dad’s neurodiversity. I’d started from the perspective that Lily and her mum were going to this rig on their own, and I knew I wanted this to be the result of a family break-up. So I had to answer an important question right up front: what does Lily think about her dad? Does she miss him and wish he were here? Does she hate him for being really career orientated and never really caring for her?

I tried both of those and neither quite worked. I wanted Dad to be sympathetic, but I didn’t want Lily to idealise him because there had to be a reason why she didn’t just stay with him.

It only really came together when I added Chapter 3, which is where Lily remembers the day her dad moved out from home. Playing through that scene, and tinkering with it, making it feel authentic, it became clear that dad was neurodiverse. And again, making that decision, trying it out on the page, a lot of things I’d been doing with the characters subconsciously just suddenly started to make more sense.

I don’t know how it works for other people, but for me the process of writing is really that simple. Make life hard for your character. Then notice what makes them feel more or less real, what draws the reader closer to them or pushes them away. Then go back over the story again and rewrite it with that trait more clearly in your mind.

I think that the process of noticing is the main requirement of being a writer.

I loved all the technical details in your book.  How much planning and world-building did you do in advance and how did you tackle research?

I had a head start because my first job was as a physicist at the Large Hadron Collider, and I now work as an engineer for Google Research. I’ve always been a scientist. Now that I think about it, my scientific self was born in my grandad's garage very early on, when he gave me the single most important advice anybody ever gave me: If it doesn’t work, take it apart and put it back together.

Being a physicist, there’s a certain mindset, language, way of thinking, that’s woven into my outlook on the world, and is consequently woven into the book. So the technical language came very naturally — I doubt I could write a book any other way even if I tried.

But the deep-sea I knew nothing about, and I knew I’d need to do a lot of research to get it right. I didn’t want to write about a rig that was all slick and futuristic — I knew it would be too easy to accidentally set my book on an underwater version of the Starship Enterprise if I did that. I wanted the technology to be as close as possible to where we are now so it would feel plausible. And being on the edge of what’s technically possible creates a whole bunch more drama, of course.

There have been a couple of long-term underwater bases used for research (mainly so divers don’t have to decompress between dives) and they gave me a good starting point. Pleasingly, they’re all kind of cramped, and damp, and rusty, which I knew would be the best way to get the most out of Lily.

Aquarius Reef Base is one of the most famous permanent underwater bases and I read this wonderful description of life on board:

“Nothing ever really dries down there. This is [...] why Deignan applied ointment to a tiny scratch on her knee. In the pervasive humidity [...] infections are rampant. So is mould, and so are earaches. Some divers experience constant, hacking coughs.”

 The Deep, James Nestor

Compared to that, I went easy on Lily in the end.

I think I’m quite a lazy researcher, at least at the beginning, although this probably costs me more effort in the long-run. I like to start writing and telling the story, and when I get stuck I do a bit of Googling and sifting around until something gives me an idea and then I just barrel on. As soon as I found that passage I went: Right, great, got it! … and off I went.

My phone has this sort of automated news feed (it’s built into Android phones) which suggests articles based on my Google searches — so after a couple of Google searches my feed just morphs into a list of articles on whatever topic I’m writing about. Then I use Pocket, which is a handy app for bookmarking articles to read later, but it also recommends more articles based on what you save.

So you could say I’m kind of a grazer for the first draft or so.

My research gets deeper as I go through more drafts. At the beginning, I’m just looking for inspiration. Then later I’m looking for the details that I need to make it come alive.

Chapter 2 is where Lily gets shown around the rig for the first time. As soon as I started to write that scene I googled “deep-sea mining” and went: oh, wow, there’s a lot of stuff here… but I’ll come back to that.

I introduced “polymetallic nodules” (one of the things they’re looking to mine from the ocean bed in real life) in draft one, the first time I wrote Chapter 2. But I didn’t introduce the Clarion Clipperton Zone (where a million square kilometres of exploratory mining licences have already been issued) until draft 3, about nine months later.

By the time I was in draft four I was reading research papers on the impacts of deep-sea mining, and then emailing the most prominent researchers and begging for a bit of time to talk to them. They were all super-friendly and lovely. Marine biologists are really interesting people, they are kind of half-sailor, half-scientist hybrids. Think: tattoos and lab-coats.

Talking to real experts in the field turned out to be much more important than I’d (naively) thought it would be. All disciplines have their own jargon, their own way of talking and thinking, that really made the story feel richer.

Could I have saved myself some time if I’d done that level of research up front?

I don’t know. For one thing I might have over-egged my knowledge if I’d done that, made it too expositional, and it might have pushed the story in less good directions. I think it was better that I started with the characters and the story, and discovered the details organically alongside Lily and the reader. But that might just be an excuse. For another thing, I simply didn’t have the confidence to speak to actual real people until after I’d sold the book and I knew it was going to be a real thing.

It’s a really hard thing that you spend most of your time writing your first book with absolutely no idea if it’s going to get published. When I contacted marine biologists and told them I had a book coming out set in the deep-sea, they were all very excited and happy to talk to me. But I couldn’t have done that before I had a publisher.

You originally wrote this story for middle grade readers. How did it become a YA thriller and how did you go about rewriting it for an older audience?

In hindsight, I think the story always wanted to be YA, but I’d been told that YA was a difficult market to break into and best avoided.

The first version of The Girl Who Broke The Sea was written with middle-grade in mind, but middle-grade is a really broad bucket, and I had always thought of it as “upper” middle-grade. I had 12ish in my mind, which is right on the boundary.

I think it caused me problems when it went out on submission, a bunch of publishers came back with enthusiastic praise but: “no thank you.” One responded with a note that my book “didn’t fit into any of our strategic buckets.”

Now, I can rationalise that and I think it was because the book was unfortunately caught between the two age-brackets. Middle-grade: 8-12. Teen: 12+. I was just lucky that Scholastic saw what the book could be rather than what it was. I am grateful for that.

When Scholastic bought it they bought it on condition that I would rewrite it as teen / YA. It was a bit of a leap of faith on their part — again, lucky, and grateful!

What were the main differences for you in writing MG and YA? What did you have to change?

I got a couple of pages of really high-level notes from the editor at Scholastic explaining the key things he felt were needed.

The ending needed to change — my original ending involved a mini-sub battle and was kind of exciting, but also a bit frivolous.

Also, my character needed to be a bit more cynical and less “can-do” — I guess that one’s quite obvious in hindsight. And there needed to be kissing — all YA books are romance stories at heart.

But his main feedback was that I should take more time to explore my main character’s inner world. In middle-grade you’re always told: plot, plot, plot. Things need to move fast, it’s all about incident. The incident (and the way your character reacts to it) still needs to reveal their inner world, of course, but the balance is very different.

In teen & YA you can spend longer getting to know your character, it’s enough that their world (internal and external) is interesting, you can just follow them around for a little while before the action really kicks off.

I’m a bit of a structure wonk, and I have a classic “inciting incident” moment about a third into the story. In the version Scholastic bought, that inciting incident was on page 42 (out of 195) — 21% through, or about 10,000 words. In the version you read now the actual incident is more or less unchanged, but now it comes on page 119 (out of 314) — 37% through, or about 30,000 words.

That extra 20,000 words gave me time to get to know Lily and her classmates better. There’s more incidental interactions and general tension within the group. The great thing about that is that when the crunch points come later, there’s a much better pay off, because you know the characters so much better, you feel like they’re real, and you know what’s at stake for them.

Being able to do that was a massive relief, but I did mess it up the first time.  I didn’t know I was doing it, but in the first re-draft after Scholastic bought it, I basically just made my main character splurge her inner world, first-person, directly onto the page. It felt great when I was writing it, because I was coming to understand Lily much better. But when I sent it to my agent and editor they both told me in no uncertain terms that I’d royally messed up. Re-reading, it was obvious: Lily’s inner-world was smeared clumsily over everything. As a reader, there was nothing to do, no dots to join.

It took me about a year from signing with Scholastic, to handing in my final version for copy-editing, and about three months of that was this false start.

I had to go back and rewrite it all, but it wasn’t wasted. First time through, I was coming to understand Lily better, drawing out her character and making it clearer in my mind. Second time through, I turned that overly expositional narrative back into incident so the reader could kind of go through the same thing.

There’s something interesting in there, the idea that part of the goal of writing is to recreate in the reader’s mind the same joy of discovery and incremental understanding that you feel when you’re writing. That’s just the classic, show don’t tell I support — it doesn’t matter how often people tell us, it’s still too easy to forget it in the moment.

 

What’s your writing process like? Do you have a regular routine? A favourite place to write?

I am a bit of a computer nerd, and I did a little experiment while I was waiting for copy-edits to come back: I took every draft of my novel (my word processor auto-saved one every day) and I wrote a short computer programme to plot the differences between each version. Think of it like the track-changes view you get when you compare two documents, but condensed so you can see the whole document and every version all at once.

It looks like this: Version number on the x-axis, word position on the y-axis.

What this shows you is where in the document I was working at any point in time, over the full two years that I was working on the book. I sort of knew I was working like this, but it was really interesting to see it laid out like in a graph.

My process is really very simple: start at the beginning and work linearly through the story. When I’m finished (or I get stuck) go back to the beginning and work through it again.

Like Terry Pratchett says, the first draft is just you telling yourself the story.

It’s the second, third, forth drafts where you go back and make it come to life.

What I’m doing when I go back through is reading each scene objectively and trying to make it better. I’m watching how my character is reacting, weeding out the things that feel contrived or inauthentic, trying new things until I hit on the ones that resonate and feel real.

I find this a really comforting thought. I know that I don’t need to get it right the first time. I know that first time, in fact, it’s going to be a bit clumsy. But the process of going over and over it, making it a little better each time, is what makes it come to life.

I think most of writing is about reacting to your previous draft.

Or as Hemmingway (more succinctly) put it: writing is rewriting.

I’m a morning person, much more inclined to get up at 6am and write for a couple of hours before the rest of the family gets up and the working day begins. My partner runs a small psychology practice and I write in her consultation room — so it’s full of soft furnishings, a dog basket, a rug, and a pile of books about emotional wellbeing. It’s kind of perfect.

By contrast, I work four days a week in London, so I also do a lot of writing on my commute — forty minutes each way by train. It should be the worst possible place to write, but I actually like it. I think writing every day (or as near as you can get) is really important to keeping a story alive in your head, and so the structure of my commute and the habit of eighty minutes every day come what may, is really helpful.

 

What’s next for you? Any more books in the pipeline?

I have two ideas I’m really excited about and desperate to get working on. But I’m waiting for a little bit of feedback from the publisher to find out if there is one that is more likely to stick than the other.

In the meantime, I’m trying to do right by this book and Tweet and visit schools, and all that… The school visits are good fun. The Tweeting I hate with a passion and will never be good at. Sometimes I worry that my inability to face Twitter is ultimately going to be the thing that stops me being a writer.

The Girl Who Broke the Sea by A Connors is out now.  

Website: http://aconnors.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/a_connors_writes/ Twitter: @aconnors_writes