The creative writing PhD is all but done, so what’s next? - Rowena House

On the Monday this post is published on ABBA, I’ll be trying [again] to upload my completed creative writing doctoral thesis to the university website and saying goodbye to a big phase of my writing life. 

Hurrah! But also, oh heck.

The future just uncurled, stretched, and looked me in the eye.

So, what’s next? Another novel? Non-fiction? Different adventures entirely? It’s too soon to know, but that’s okay; thinking time is a big part of decision-making.

When I started to write this post yesterday, I focused on the past, trying to express some sort of preliminary judgement about the overall value [and downside] of writing an historical novel in my particular academic setting.

One thing I can say with confidence is that the university’s formal reporting requirements and supervisor feedback kept me going through tough patches. After an intense month completing the thesis, it also felt as if the seventeenth-century witch trial manuscript was the main output of the past six-and-a-half years.

The story is now a respectable 80,700 words, having been cut back circa 7K words in the latest edit over this summer, with 1K +/- new words added. Whether this is the version I’ll query agents with is yet to be seen. I’m hoping to find the stamina for a read-through on the iPad where I can’t fiddle with it. On the laptop, I can’t help but edit. It may need professional editing, but I’ll probably test the agent waters first.

However...

This morning I remembered that the critical commentary that accompanies academic creative writing is also a significant output. As are six-and-a-half years’ worth of ABBA posts, mostly honest snapshots of that month’s ups and downs. Together with Facebook diary entries and dozens of notebooks, that’s a lot of data.

Within this data, I have made many useful discoveries, like where exactly the creative process mostly happened: first, when planning via synopses templates [which I’ve written about often here before] and second, AFTER a planned scene got rejected by my inner editor-critic in the act of typing it.

While these scene setbacks were frustrating at the time, they were also the moments when the imagination worked hardest, and not just consciously: by asking the subconscious to consider why a plan hadn’t worked, creative epiphanies happened.

Or at least, pre-dawn musings on why I couldn’t move forward.

These early morning ‘thought-edits’ became a kind of auto-workshop, where the inner editor-critic negotiated with the planner-craftswoman and more intuitive [and more elusive] creator-artist. It happened a lot over the past month, during the intensive final phase of editing. This morning, for example, the five am slot reminded me of an idea that I wrote about here [or on Facebook or in a notebook] years ago: my process notes might make a book. Write, Think, Create or something more gentle and English.

It’s well known that mistakes are better learning opportunities that happy successes, so looking back honestly should illustrate where I went wrong and what, if anything, fixed it. An example is planning synopses, which in the early years I felt convinced were the secret to nailing the story. I blush at this from my ABBA post in May 2022 about John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story: 

"Among its many excellent features is a recommendation that rather than developing the main character arc from its beginning, better to plot backwards from the protagonist’s psychological self-revelation near the end. Intuitively, I wanted this to be ‘right’, partly because I’ve conspicuously failed to make progress by starting the current seventeenth century witch trial work-in-progress with Chapter 1."

That turned out to be nonsense. Plotting backwards didn’t work. The story evolved in the writing: start, plod forward, fail, start again. Sure, I needed a plan; without one, I waffled. In the end, what these synopses provided was direction, a theoretical map of where the story could go. Where it went proved to be more intuitive – but I needed a plan to divert from. No wonder it’s taken six years. But it’s good to recognise paradoxes and take comfort from irony, right?

Anyway, more nonsense from May 2022: 

"For most of this year I’ve been using template synopses to outline the WIP, including (at last) a full Story Grid for the protagonist’s A-plot, plus the detailed backstory of his wound and its implications, thrashed out during Jeff Lyons’ intensive Anatomy of a Premise Line online course. Truby, then, is the third leg of this stool: a way to check my workings before moving on.”

Oh, the confidence! OK, knowing an emotional wound might need healing was useful for the protagonist’s character arc, but again it was the writing, not planning, that led me to his psychological weakness and its consequent moral flaw.

Another howler from May 2022:

“Proof that [synopsis-based plotting] is helpful for subplots as well came this morning when I was reviewing my preliminary notes about Truby for this post, and suddenly found myself in the middle of the spontaneous creation of the best working outline of Beth's B-plot I’ve managed in two long years.”

I spiked Beth entirely as a point-of-view character in 2024. Sigh.

So, which writing guru would I go back to if there is another novel? All of them! Truby especially. His equation Weakness x Action = Change remains the single most useful thing I’ve ever read about character-led story development.

Truby also insists there can only be one core action per story. Luke FIGHTS to defeat the empire. My pamphleteer WRITES his way out of brutal group-think about witches. Whether or not any publisher picks up this manuscript, it’s internal coherence as a story is largely due to Truby’s equation.

Another constant in all these years of revision was James Scott Bell’s advice in Write Your Novel From the Middle. Deciding on a midpoint crisis and ‘mirror moment’ of deep self-reflection for the protagonist was the most critical milestone of this project. With this one pivotal scene in place – a gruesome one, as befits a story about injustice – the plot had a structure, even if the exact route to and from that moment remained fluid.

[As late as this August, I cut out the ‘mirror moment’ when the protagonist articulated his big change of heart. I trust a reader will get that it without me spelling it out.]

So, my current verdict on using synopses to plan? They’re invaluable testing grounds for ideas, but not story templates. If X doesn’t work, go back to the synopses and explore the consequences of Y without necessarily rejecting what came before or what had been plotted to happen next. Frankly, I can’t imagine how to write a story without them.

Had I picked a different ABBA post to compare ‘now’ with ‘then’, no doubt I’d be writing a different conclusion. Every post will have a story to tell. Hence Write. Think. Create. Or not. 

Meanwhile, yesterday’s pre-dawn debate yielded one firm decision: to attend the annual Folly Farm gathering of the Scattered Authors Society in January 2027. It’s been so tempting to go in recent years, but by New Year the retreat budget was always spent and the tax man was knocking. Now, I’ve got a big decision to take, HMRC can shove off for once.

What’s next? I’ve set Folly Farm as the time and the place to decide.

 Rowena House Author on Facebook.

On sandcastles and synopses - Rowena House

I love iteration, its back-and-forth, revisiting and refining ideas. It is the antidote to linear, post-fact rationalisation and a challenge to dogma, harnessing the fluid relationships between that and this, there and here, then and now.

Hilary Mantel’s posthumous A Memoir of My Former Self apparently traces some of the iterations in her thoughts, according to The Guardian’s review this weekend. * 

"We repeatedly see Mantel testing and circling ideas, developing her thoughts over time," says reviewer John Self,

I'd love her to have narrated the audiobook so we can hear her wry intelligence again.

Revisiting these ABBA posts has become a conscious part of my creative process as I refine the plot plan for the 17th century witch trial work-in-progress. From the rather scary place it's at – starting the first draft of Act II – I can see different uses for some of the plotting devices I’ve experimented with before.

For instance, the guru-inspired template synopses I generated last year (and blogged about here over several months) have now taken on new roles. At the outset, they were story development devices. ‘What ifs.’ With hindsight, the output of that process – distilled into roughly four discrete synopses for the whole manuscript – look more like glimpses into alternative futures, possibilities of the shape of things to come.

This shift in viewpoint – from ‘that then’ to ‘this now’ – put me in mind of a writing axiom that’s always sounded good in theory but which I’ve never been able to put into practice.

It is the notion that a first draft is a sand pit into which you pour your ideas, and only afterwards shape the sand into the castles of your story. It is a variation on ‘get it writ, then get it right’ (which, like iteration, I remember talking about here before).

The template outlines can, perhaps, be seen as half-way houses. Or half-way castles. Buckets filled with similar characters and events, each producing a different shaped story. Historical Crime is one shape, Literary Thriller another, and so forth.

Each synopsis poses a question: which genre, if any, best fits the characters and events of this tale, and is that type of story one I genuinely want to devote the time and energy needed to write it?

In the spontaneous moment when fingers hit keys, I don't think big questions like genre should matter. If they did, I doubt anything would get written at all. But outside that moment, after a break, wondering where the story got to and where it’s going next, a sand castle in a bucket turns out to be helpful.

You can pick it up and see what you like. What’s missing. What would be fun to do with it now. What doesn’t make sense any more.

For future reference – if there is ever going to be another story – template outlines have definitely earned their place in my writing tool kit.

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*I'll try to remember to put a link into the comments once I've found it! It was published on Saturday, 14 October 2023.