Draft 1, Book 2. Talk about tough! – Rowena House

It’s done! A 77,300-word first draft of the seventeenth century witch trial novel-in-progress is now backed up, awaiting printing and the start of the development edit.

What a blooming marathon. Five years almost to the day from starting the research seriously until I typed 'The End', even though I'm calling it 'An End' out of superstition.

Everyone says the second book is tough. Boy, they aren't kidding.

The biggest creative eye-opener of finishing the full draft was an entirely unexpected release of pent-up creative thoughts which arrived in a rush AFTER I spent a week tweaking the resolution. Years of fiddling with single sentence commercial pitches fell away, replaced by a solid plot one-liner (15 words).

More importantly, a character one-liner arrived out of the blue, too, which, with hindsight, I can see is the heart of the story, the universal wood hidden within the story trees. The specific character journey on which I had been fixated turned out to be a metaphor for something simpler. Wow. Good to know.

I’m going to stick my neck out here and say that feeling confident about the ending at this stage represents progress since (from memory) I didn't figure out the grand finale of The Goose Road until the end of the first of two rounds of development edits.

Back then, I had the luxury of working with a wonderful cohort of fellow writers on the Bath Spa MA, plus the insight of the inestimable Marie-Louise Jensen, my MA manuscript tutor. The Goose Road then went through a second development edit, requested by Mara Bergman, my editor at Walker, before she bought the manuscript. 

You could therefore say it's too soon to congratulate myself on reaching An End for Book 2 when I’ve no idea what the future holds for this story. Reworking the synopses has, however, been encouraging.

Which ever way I look at them, An End is satisfying. The rest of the story needs at lot of work to get there, but it is a worthwhile place to arrive at. Thus, An End has resolved a deep-seated worry of mine for the past five years that there wasn't a real story within the history I’m re-writing.

Basically, I’ve been afraid each iteration of ‘the story’ was a bolt-on, something to carry the external plot, and the protagonist merely a vessel for that plot. The universality of the character one-liner therefore came as a shock as well as a huge relief. There is a story in there after all.

The other main lesson I’m taking from finishing Draft 1 is just how much perseverance it's taken. The trade publishing environment has got even more precarious in the past eight years since The Goose Road came out, with advances apparently even smaller than they were, or non-existent. Thus the juicy carrot of an (imagined) paid publishing contract which kept me going last time simply isn't there. OK, this manuscript might get published, but there’s a good chance it won’t, and even if it is, we all know that’s no guarantee of anything in terms of marketing or sales.

On the upside, self-publishing has all but shed its second-hand status in the intervening years, so that option is now a matter of personality and whether one can handle all the marketing involved. Having perservered thus far, I guess I will just press on and worry about all that later.

Meanwhile, a delightful and very welcome surprise since I locked the manuscript away for the requisite four-to-six weeks is news that Sara Grant is publishing an editing guide with Writers & Artists, The Ultimate Guide to Editing your Novel, coming out in June. 

My copy was instantly on pre-order. The advice from her and her fellow tutor/mentors at Book Bound and Scooby were the foundations for developing The Goose Road into its publishable form. I've every confidence that Sara's new guide will become a bible for loads of us, me included.

What else to say in this pause between drafting and editing? 

Draft 1 owes its existence to a bunch of writing gurus, which I've talked about here for years, including Story Grid, Save the Cat for Novels, James Scott Bell's oeuvre, John Yorke's Into the Wood, Robert Mckee' Story, John Truby, and Will Storr to name but a few. Jeff Lyon's patterns of decline and elevation are also a good way of thinking about character development, imho. 

I'm also reviewing my own OCEAN-based personality profiling system - that's the Big Five personality traits openness, conscientiousness, extraversion/introversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism - which I developed for The Goose Road and blogged about here yonks ago. I've changed computers since then so these ABBA posts turned out to be the best archive for all that work!

This time, I'm linking OCEAN person-based traits to my protagonist's social identity as a lawyer, imagining how his in-group's group think about witchcraft influenced him, both in terms of his beliefs and his behaviour. I think this is going to be super instructive for the development edit, and I'll blog about that in the future.

So, there we go. Eighteen years of writing fiction on and off, and I can says with confidence that everyone sticking with their Book 2 is a hero. Solidarity to y'all. And a huge hat-tip to every author with a shelf full of titles. Awesome, guys. Just awesome.

@HouseRowena on Musk’s cess pit

Rowena House Author for a live Facebook diary about the WIP 

PS Apologies again for the lack of photos. I've got loads to upload, but whenever I try a big Google message shows up and just sits there, blethering about accessing cookies. Also, it's Easter Sunday and my dog is telling me in no uncertain terms I've been on the computer long enough. 

All the best!

What versus How: chicken & egg or plotting duet? - by Rowena House

The other day, while re-reading notes from a 2017 Arvon week on writing non-fiction, an idea for the structure of my fictional work-in-progress suddenly jumped off the page.

Why not start with Act III, where the conflict is at its most direct and life-threatening for the protagonist, and reveal the build-up of Acts I and II during the final climactic days of the story?

Up till then I’d been wedded to a linear, chronological narrative so this was radical stuff. But, like many writers, I’ve learned to trust flashes of inspiration; they’re not necessarily the answer to a creative problem, but usually they flag up something important, like signals from the subconscious warning of trouble ahead.

Now, it turns out that the ramifications of such a major structural shift are far wider than I’d anticipated (more about that in a bit) but what helped most in terms of understanding my own writing process was a second eureka moment.

This second epiphany came courtesy of Emma Darwin’s PhD thesis which I’ve downloaded from the British Library to flesh out her excellent introductory guide and aide memoire, Get Started in Writing Historical Fiction.

In her thesis, she quotes David Lodge’s introduction to After Bakhtin: Essays in Fiction & Criticism published back in 1990. In it he says creative decisions about structure and voice are taken “prior to, or at a deeper level than, the articulation of the text in a sequence of sentences”.

Emma Darwin links this to “problem finding” as discussed by Richard Sennet in his 2008 book The Craftsman: “Formulating a rational question is one method of problem finding, since the answer may be supplied from the deeper level by intuition.”

Thus, being aware of the need to find problems is a way to combine rational thinking about a story with the intuitive creative process which taps into our deeper levels of consciousness.

As a story planning technique, problem finding is therefore neither plotting nor pantsing but a fusion of both.

Which sounds pretty damn useful to me.

To test out this intriguing approach, I decided to apply problem finding to my Arvon-inspired, intuitive structural ‘solution’ and see where it led.

The first step was to turn the issue at hand into rational questions. So here goes...

1^st rational question: if my subconscious is offering me a solution to a problem which I hadn’t even begun to think about consciously, what is the problem?

Answer: a linear narrative will take too long to get to the central conflict.

2^nd rational question: OK, accepting that for the moment, is starting at the final act necessarily the best solution to this problem?

Answer: I haven’t a clue.

3^rd rational question: Can I find out?

Answer: sure thing. Back in a bit…

Now, it’ll take quite a while to work through the plot implications of reworking the action of the story into a series of revelations, plus flashbacks, within a tight timeframe.

Perhaps more importantly, however, exploring these two structural options is highlighting major questions about the core of the story itself.

For example, for my Story Grid (thank you, Shawn Coyne) Voyage and Return is pencilled in as the internal plot/genre. The Voyage is my protagonist’s journey of discovery and his Return the consequences of what he’s learnt.

I had imagined keeping the reader close to his lived experience of this journey, learning ‘truths’ alongside him. This would be Plot A.

The external genre, an Historical Why-dunnit, was in some respects meant to be a feeder plot to the primary story, providing the specific historical context for a timeless psychological journey.

In other words, the real story would be in the subtext, rather than the obvious historic events.

But what if a revelatory, unfolding plot could deliver this story in a more compelling, dramatic way than a slower, linear journey? Should the psychological narrative be the main story after all?

Certainly, whydunnits are mystery plots and therefore natural habitats for revelations and unfolding, unravelling stories. And my 17^th century mystery is rich in political machinations, desires and betrayals, especially among characters other than the protagonist.

 And aren’t desires, machinations and betrayals more fun that tortured inner journeys?

What if [scary rational thought] my subconscious knows a lot more about storytelling than ‘I’ do, and is wildly signally at me to stop being so bloody pretentious?

Which makes sense really. *every other writer rolls their eyes at this point and mutters, Just get on with the damn thing* [Which I would do had I the time and headspace as per the last ABBA blog.]

Anyhow, whatever the outcome of the structural debate, this episode has resolved a perennial chicken-and-egg dilemma: which comes first, content or structure, the What or the How of the story?

Neither, it turns out, not for this work-in-progress at any rate. The What and the How are a duet. Definitely. 100%. I just need to find out what song they’re singing.

Twitter: @HouseRowena

Website: rowenahouse.com

Facebook: Rowena House Author 

Tom Ripley, Campari and how technology can ruin a good plot by Tracy Darnton

Tom Ripley and I got reacquainted on a sun lounger in Italy this summer. Patricia Highsmith’s book written and set in the 1950s describes a time when an affluent American could decamp to beautiful villas in Italy for the price of a waffle and soda back in the U.S. and swan around collecting antiques and bohemian artist friends. And, *major spoiler alert*, Tom Ripley can pass himself off as the American he murders on the basis of a slight resemblance to a grainy passport photo.

I got to thinking over a Campari and a bowl of olives about how this could be made to work in the present day. Answer – it couldn’t. A five second look at Facebook and Instagram would have shown the Italian police exactly what Dickie Greenleaf looked like. His bank card would reveal what he’d spent and where. And mobile telephones would ruin the way Tom evades Greenleaf’s friends and family.

I should add that one of my sons kindly provided some impromptu research on how Ripley could exist in modern Italy by managing to break his phone, not remember our mobile numbers, have his wallet and bank card pickpocketed in Rome and still blag his way to the North of Italy with seven Euros and a half-remembered B&B name for our rendezvous. But somehow it didn’t seem very realistic. Too far-fetched to put in a book.

I’m currently editing my next novel – a contemporary psychological YA thriller – and, like my last one, I have to grapple with the omnipresence of tech and social media in the world in which my young characters live.

Thriller writers are already battling the annoying realities of forensics and police investigations. As a YA writer, I want my 17-year-old main character to have agency so must also side-line any pesky adults in positions of authority. The list of things to tackle and exclude is long and growing.

Short of setting everything back in the day of a temperamental telephone with a cord that could be cut, or in the middle of the ocean, I’m forced to tread a fine line between reality and plot to make the latter believable and current. All this needs to be achieved in a subtle and original way as we’ve all read books where we can too easily spot the moment that the author gets rid of the mobile phone to keep the plot going. 

As I gazed out of many train windows in Northern Italy visiting places like Trento and Bolzano half-hoping for a glimpse of Tom Ripley, I pondered another classic: Murder on the Orient Express. Poirot would be able to use the train Wi-Fi to check up on his carriage full of suspects and spot the link between them all. Since batteries have a longer life or a portable power bank to keep them running even longer, a mobile phone out of charge now seems hopelessly unrealistic, especially as even the train has charging points.

It’s not just the curse of the smart phone, all those plots involving actual letters would have to go as no one writes letters anymore. Like Tess of the D’Urbervilles where Tess’s letter to Angel gets caught under the doormat with disastrous consequences.  

Or the use of traffic cameras in The Great Gatsby would have shown exactly who was driving the car that killed Myrtle.

Books where characters get lost would be ruined by Google Maps,  and ditto for plots where people go missing and could be easily found by a track my phone App.  

Any dodgy hotels would be ruled out by a quick flick through TripAdvisor. Marion would never stay at the Bates Motel in Psycho. No one would move to 112 Ocean Avenue after a brief look at Zoopla’s neighbourhood guide and thus avoid The Amityville Horror.

But, surrounded by kids on trains watching cartoons or adults taking endless selfies of themselves, I was struck more than previous years about the need for all of us to unplug from our phones for a while. And when I read a book – the ultimate unplugging experience – I want to get away from all that. I don’t want Google or Facebook or Apps intruding on the story. I need a plot given time to evolve and breathe. 

I still hope for random meetings of strangers, letters written in ink, puzzles to work out for myself – and teenage kids to find their parents come what may. 

And I want characters like Tom Ripley to be reading newspapers and sipping cocktails in the sunshine, unplugged.

Tracy Darnton is the author of The Truth About Lies, shortlisted for the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize 2019. She has an MA in Writing for Young People.

You can follow Tracy on Twitter @TracyDarnton and on Instagram tracydarnton

Too Much Plot! by Susie Day

Reader, I have a problem.

I’m addicted to plot. I might start a new 9-12 book with all good intentions of a strong, clear A thread (sparky 11-year-old Billie wants to find out more about her mum, who died when she was five, and discovers more than she planned) and a fun B plot (she’s starting at secondary school). But then I go and give her brothers. Three big taking-up-space brothers. One’s getting married and wants her to be bridesmaid, so she decides to be their wedding planner. One’s having an existential crisis about packing lettuces in a Tesco warehouse (his first of six jobs, all of which he gets fired from). One’s struggling with being the school rugby star and all the girls who want to nibble his ear on the bus, when actually he’s not all that fussed.

Then there are her three new school friends: the one who can’t work out how to fit in at Big School either, the desperately anxious one, and the one who is apparently intent on making Billie’s life miserable (though , of course, it turns out she might be quite miserable too). And then there’s funny, self-sacrificing Dad who runs a greasy spoon... and lovely Miss Eagle at school whose Hero project sets Billie off on the quest to find out about her mum... and Dr Paget and Dr Skidelsky who live over the road...
 

It’s a lovely book, I think. It’s funny and serious, heartfelt and bittersweet and ultimately very kind - like the Pea’s Book series it spins off from. But it's a bit full. Pleasantly stuffed, but perhaps better if it didn't have that fifth roast potato. Too long to be class readers, except for an extremely patient class (and teacher!).

Could we pare it down next time, perhaps? asks my editor, gently, every time. I definitely will! I say gamely. And then I write the next one about two families blending together, and not just one family secret but a whole Year Seven classful of them, and a school performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that needs to be saved, and one entrepreneurial mum who runs her own company called Fairy Dusters, and one who might be a witch with magic powers (at least her daughter hopes so)...

The trouble is, I always write about big families; the sort of comfy, mildly chaotic collectives of that I grew up reading about. Noel Streatfeild’s Gemma books, with the effortlessly musical Robinsons. Arthur Ransome’s Swallows, and Amazons, and Ds. Enough ordinariness for there to be one character I could decide was like me, with all the oddball quirks and special talents to be just that little bit better.

But I never want to short-change any one character. Sketched-in background adults who occasionally mumble, ‘You’ll be late for school,’ are not for me. Same for siblings, and friends. I want there to be something for everyone to be doing, not just the protagonist. And that means an A plot, and a B plot, and then the entire alphabet.

I suspect, in part, it’s because I’m not all that fussed on heroes. Buffy’s great - but I care a lot more about Willow and the rest of the Scoobies. I always preferred Sally to Darrell in Malory Towers. I grew up shy; I think as I always saw myself as a sidekick - useful, even necessary, but never in the uncomfortable spotlight.

But I’ve resolved - since this is a New Year - to knock this nonsense on the head. Next, I’m writing a picture book, and there is no room in my 500ish words to cram in dozens of sub-plots. It’s the perfect creative exercise for me to learn how to trim. I’m starting with a cat, and the little girl who chooses him as a kitten to take home. With her brother and sister. And Mum. And Granny and Grandad.

Reader, I still have a problem...

Susie Day - books for kids about families, friendship, feelings and funny stuff
https://susieday.com/
Follow @mssusieday on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook

The 12 stages of the Hero's Journey – Are they real? – David Thorpe

This month I thought I would publish the slides from a presentation I gave this week at my writing course.

I wanted to delve deeply into the idea of plot and structure and then test the popular technique writers are taught that quest, discovery or journey type stories all have 12 stages. I did this by analysing two recent films and book that are very different indeed: The Girl On A Train and Doctor Strange. If you haven't seen these: spoiler alert! Don't read the penultimate two slides!

[David Thorpe is the writer of Marvel's Captain Britain, the sci-fi YA novels Hybrids, Doc Chaos: The Chernobyl Effect and the cli-fi fantasy Stormteller.]

My (12-stage, of course!) writing course can also be taken online. Contact me if interested.

Using Suspense to Mess With Narrative Structure – David Thorpe

So how do you make suspense work?

I'll tell you later.

First, the necessary info:

The #MSWL tag on Twitter stands for "manuscript wish list" and both agents and editors use it and the related website to alert writers to what they are looking for. It is extremely useful and greatly simplifies the process of manuscript submission and selection for both sets of actors.

Now, a flashback:

The other day, when I was monitoring the wish lists for manuscripts aimed at older children, teenagers or young adults I was struck by the number of requests for novels that had an unusual structure or played with the traditional narrative form, or even had unreliable narrators.

Why should it be that editors and agents think that readers in the age range from older children to young adults are looking for something other than stories with a traditional structure of beginning, middle and end, in that order? Perhaps they have had enough of such structures already in their short lives, or perhaps there is something else?

Writers nowadays have to compete with a plethora of other media – films and streaming television, Instagram, YouTube and video games – to grab the attention of teenage readers, who are hungry for an immediate hit and possess a comparatively short attention span.

Diving into the story at the deep end is one way to do this.

The traditional structure means that in act one, known as the set up, the writer takes the time to introduce the context and the characters before coming to the main problem which the protagonists has to solve. Several writers, including myself, on this blog have written about it before.

This takes time and maybe modern readers don't have the patience to plough through all this. They want to cut straight to the chase.

One way around this problem which writers frequently use is to open with a prologue containing high action that is either part of the back story or a flash forward (e.g. the Young Bond stories written by Charlie Higson) before  commencing act one. (This is a device often found in early Spielberg films such as Raiders of the Lost Ark.)

The disadvantage of this approach is that you still have a slow pace in act one. Modern readers are wise to this and the risk is that they may lose patience. For these readers there must be either almost constant drama or humour depending on the genre to keep them hooked.

Yet from time to time as storytellers we have to give the readers information such as descriptions of characters, places, and other incidental but necessary plot information. So how might we be able to do this while playing with traditional narrative structure? Conveying this information can slow the pace unless it is deftly mixed into the narrative flow like adding seasoning to a dish.

When the information is what would have been in the set-up it will seem like a flashback. The flashbacks are dropped into the main chronological sequence to add relevant backstory on an ongoing need-to-know basis.

Now writing courses will tell you that flashbacks slow the pace, but that isn't necessarily true. The key to good storytelling is to maintain the suspense, to get the readers turning those pages. What if we use flashbacks in order to keep the suspense going for longer?

Let's say you're telling a friend about something exciting that happened to you. Some way into your story you realise that they won't understand who a certain character is who has appeared on the scene, so you have to spend a couple of sentences filling in who they are. Then you pick up your narrative.

The listener will be grateful because it helps them understand what's going on but they will keep listening because they know they are going to find out what happens next pretty soon. It's the suspense that lets them do this. Of course if you spent too long telling the life story of this person they will end up forgetting where they are in your main story, or lose interest and walk away. So you keep the insertion as long as it needs to be and no longer.

So the storyline reaches a cliffhanger, which doesn't have to be a big deal, just something you know will make the reader pant a little to find out what happens next, then you drop in the flashback. The more of a deal the cliffhanger is the longer the flashback can be. All the time they're reading this they're also wanting to get to where the storyline picks up again.

That's the key to this form of playing with structure.

So how do you make suspense work?

Told you I'd get to it.

Suspense works on different levels of timescale. A short timescale may be, say: what is behind this door? Will the prisoner reveal the answers to the questions being demanded by their captor? Will the boy tell the girl how he feels about her? The longest timescale for suspense in your story is the one set up near the beginning that you resolve at the end. In between there are other ongoing questions being set up and resolved (or not) over different timescales, not just in your main narrative but in any subplots.

When looking at your structure you should be particularly aware of all of these suspense elements.

Here is a metaphor to illustrate this idea. Imagine a guitar fretboard.

At one end is the beginning of your narrative and the other end is the conclusion. Each fret is a plot point – the tension rises and the pitch gets higher as you move along the fretboard. All of the suspense elements in your book are like rubber bands stretched between nails hammered into the fretboard. (Please don't spoil a real guitar by hammering nails into it!)

These suspense elements (rubber bands) will overlap: some will be short and some will be long. The more you have and the more they overlap, the more of a page turner you have.

So, at each point in your narrative, on every page, you can ask yourself the following questions for each of the narrative strands:

1. What does the reader know?
2. What do they want to know?
3. When shall I tell them?

This will allow you to keep track of the suspense elements.

Okay, armed with this information we can go back and look at the structure of your book. Where are the moments of heightened drama? To keep high both the tension and the attention of the reader, you would need to keep these high drama moments coming thick and fast. But after a high point the reader needs to catch their breath. This is when you can insert the flashback containing the necessary back story information that the reader needs in order to make sense of what's going on.

Of course if these scenes themselves contain drama, so much the better.

This is just one way in which you could scramble the narrative structure. But whatever method you choose there needs to be a good dramatic reason for it, perhaps linked to the journeys of your main characters. It should not be arbitrary.


David Thorpe is the author of YA speculative fiction novels Hybrids and Stormteller.