Looking Back Down

Ten things that helped me write a novel

After just over two years steadily climbing towards this point, my first novel is finished and ready for the next step. It’s an odd place to be. Along with an odd sense of vertigo, I can see a lot from this hilltop: there’s the next book to decide on —all those other hills— as well as that publishing mountain looming on the horizon. But for now it’s just nice to sit here and admire the view, to look back down at some of those paths, guides and handholds that have helped me get to this point. The route hasn’t always been straight or easy, but I’ve found my way.

Here are some of the things that have helped me get here:

1. Doing a Course.
Doing some kind of course in writing, even if it is a short semester at the local community college, will provide invaluable grounding and experience, as well as offering a boost to the confidence of anyone thinking of writing professionally.
In 2009 I began a Masters degree in professional writing through University College Falmouth, I graduated in 2011. I cannot say enough about how much this has changed my understanding of writing, the industry and what it entails to be a writer. I feel privileged to have worked with the combination of staff and fellow students for that time.

2. Having Good and Supportive Mentors
Writing is a lonely activity; one in which self-doubt and second-guessing can creep into your thoughts as easily as over-confidence and blindness to fundamental errors. Having the right mentors at the right times will not only help you continue with your work, but will hopefully give you the right perspective on it. A mentor does not have to be the all-wise sensei of the martial arts films, simply a person whose knowledge and opinion you trust. Though, as in the films one should always respect such individuals and never pester them with trivial questions.
I was lucky enough to work with some first class tutors as part of my MA, but I’ve also had other mentors both from my background in the film industry and new ones I have encountered since starting out as a writer. Finding mentors is not as difficult as some might believe; experienced writers will often answer queries through social media and a little research can turn up a whole plethora of experts in various fields, who are often flattered to be consulted as long as you are sincere.

3. The Notebook
As an animator and illustrator I learned to use sketchbooks to record interesting things that I encountered as well as ideas as they occurred to me. My sketchbooks also were also where I worked out and developed rough concepts and images. I would also note and develop any script ideas. So much, in fact that I began to realise that I got more from the writing than I did from the drawing. But notebook or sketchbook, the point is the same; I have a lot of ideas, some good, some rubbish and some a little outlandish, but if I don’t record them somewhere I’ll forget them as soon as new ideas arrive to push them out of my head. Even if an idea isn’t going to fill out to my next novel it may still form a scene, make a short story or flash fiction piece.

4. Research
It goes without saying, but there are still times when I have felt unable to progress because I didn’t fully understand something. This has occurred both with the technical aspects of writing and also with such things as background for characters or places.
Public libraries, or better still sneaky visits to university libraries are always rewarding, buying the relevant books is even better if you can afford it. For some elements of research it is worth investing the time and visiting places, or interviewing people with direct experience. That said, we live in an era of unprecedented access to information and  it is possible to look many things up on the internet within minutes or visit a location through Google Earth. Such research should always be double checked, but it’s saved me a lot of time and frustration.

5. A Professional Approach
Though there are times when we all slip; when we could be more thorough, deal with people better or remember important details; everything undertaken as a writer should be with professionalism at the back of your mind. Whether tweeting, blogging, updating a website or sending an email, you should be conscious of who might read it.
It is not just the copy, the content, editing or structure that is important to being professional: it is how the process is approached. I made a decision early on that if writing was going to be part of my career, I would need to dedicate a portion of my life to it. For the last two years that is exactly how I have worked, dividing my day in two, with mornings reserved exclusively for writing. It is part of my job and I try to discipline myself to work as if I’m being employed to do so.

6. Understanding Yourself
This is an odd one that won’t appear in many books, but finding out about your writing foibles and working with them can help your productivity as well as avoid frustration in your work. I’ve done a fair amount of research into what makes writers tick (more about that another time) and the conclusion is that we really do implement different thought processes for different writing tasks. These can be divided roughly into freeform creative writing and analytical editing. Like many people I’m not able to perform the two at the same time. I’ve learnt to accept that my creative brain can’t spell, uses punctuation like fairy-dust and insists on inserting apostrophes into embarrassing places, but I can come back to the piece later and let my analytical mode give a long suffering sigh and sort it all out.
I’ve learned that I’m a very focussed writer, but a lousy multi-tasker: if I’m working on a project, I need to shut myself away from outside distractions. I also find it far too easy to jump between different projects then end up in a tissy about which to work on. To avoid this I’ve taken to prioritising my projects and keeping at it until I’m finished.


7. Keeping Going
I’m not a volume writer: Nanowrimo is not my thing, but I like to think I’m an inspired writer. Unfortunately there are inevitably days when the muse doesn’t feel like pushing me on to the next sentence or when the narrative demands I write an event or character interaction for which I feel no magic tingle in my fingers. Sometimes I’m not inspired, sometimes I’m daunted by what I’ve set out to achieve. My usual solution to this, perhaps after a short walk or a coffee, is to just get on with it and brute it down on paper with intentional recklessness. This sometimes yields surprising results. On other days I’ve sat and written a list of four very easily achievable tasks: write the next sentence, write what Mel says, check the time it takes to fly from Heathrow to Bordeux, finish the paragraph. Once the list is complete I can feel good, get up, reward myself with yet more coffee and then write another list.

8. Understanding Structure
Prior to my MA my knowledge of structure for both scripts and stories was a vague belief that there should be a beginning, middle and end, coupled with an instinctive seat-of-the-pants approach to the way a narrative unfolded. To be fair, my instincts weren’t too bad, but on several occasions I had to abandon projects that had gone awry. With hindsight I now know this was caused by a lack of understanding of the necessary structure. On my MA course, I had a genuine moment of epiphany when I realised how different narrative structures could be used to work through any story, novel or a script. Thanks Aristotle, Michael Tierno and Joseph Campbell.

9. Getting into Character
Characters are the story. It is their struggles and reactions to what gets thrown at them that make the magic happen; make the reader love them or love despising them. Trooping out a set of caricatures is passé for animation work let alone your novel. Characters take time to distil and develop. Research helps, but it can still tend to be a bit dry and remote. I’m lucky I have a background in nerdiness; I’m not ashamed to admit that I play roleplaying games; it’s an enjoyable and social pastime that also gives me regular practice of getting behind the eyes of different characters. I found it useful to develop back stories for such characters and have even created a questionnaire that asked for details of a character’s early childhood, adolescence and life as an adult. This works perfectly well for my book characters as well and can be used to develop character complexities as well as explain existing quirks. Getting a friend to hit you with questions while ‘in character’ can also throw up some useful material. Much of this will never actually come out in the book, but the more time you spend playing around in your characters’ heads the better rounded they will be.

10. Having a Story Worth Telling
Well, duh! But this is a more actively applied process than most people imagine. It is very easy to have a great concept, but a concept isn’t a story; it’s merely the premise to a story. I have notebooks full of such premises, I also have bits of storyline concepts, characters  or situations which are all good material, but not actually a story. Being able to tease a concept out into a worthwhile story is a good skill to develop. Being able to recognise which concepts to pursue; which will make a full novel, which a short story, which will actually be saleable and which a white elephant; is equally important. Developing this skill in choosing what to write next could make the difference between being an earnest hobbyist or an earning professional.

The route to the top of the first hill is probably different for each writer. Are there any hand-holds that have helped on your own journey? The gallons of coffee and small Chocolatey rewards, along with the support of family and friends all go without saying.

Second Draft

Now I’ve begun the second draft stage of writing my book, I’m finding it as much of a challenge as the freeform creativity of the initial draft. I’m much more aware of the pitfalls in the writing, the structure of my scenes, what they are contributing to the narrative, and how they flow within themselves. I’ve also had to write tailor made scenes, to fit the specific needs of the overall plot –something I’ve found quite difficult to do whilst still trying to maintain a natural flow to the writing.

In this draft I’m also aware of some of the format constraints I’ve created for myself. The book, as I have written it, has a form of framing set up by the opening chapter, with the character speaking in first person –this has now lead to me writing all the flashback scenes in first person. The trouble with this currently, is the tense, I keep flipping between wanting to write all the flashbacks in present tense –which sounds better– or wanting to write them in past tense –which makes more sense in terms of reported experience. Present or past, flip-flip? I’m aware of the need for consistency, but at some point I will need to draw a line under it and stop re-writing.

This is a tiny flashback scene that appears very early in the book, which I have just updated to past tense, but as I write the subsequent flashbacks – concerning Melanie’s experiences at school– I’m beginning to wonder if it would be better as present tense after all.

Sugary Treatments
“Outside the big sash windows the wind shook red and yellow leaves from the trees, toying with its prizes as they fell, inside within the white painted room, with it's lofty ceiling and chipped edged desk, everything had a clean look to it, not sparkling-clean like the kitchens in adverts, but the worn-clean of things that get scrubbed almost daily. A hint of antiseptic tantalised my nostrils. I’d been here, or somewhere like it before, but those recollections were less clear. It probably wasn’t long after my third birthday.
Other than the desk and the wooden chairs the only other items in the room were a wheeled stainless steel cabinet against one wall and a high examination table-bed. The sort I’d often been lifted onto as the different doctors made clicking noises with their tongues or breathed loudly through their noses, checking me over –just a little test, it might feel a tiny touch cold, this won’t hurt a bit.
Maman would tell me ‘I’m a very patient patient’, which always made me giggle. Sometimes, if I’d been extra good, one of the doctors gave me a sweet in a wrapper or a lollypop, sometimes.
The room was on the second floor of a grand old Edwardian building that must, at some point in it’s long history, have been turned over from luxury mansion to austere health service clinic; with its high ceilings and wide halls that made ghosts of every footstep on our way up via a once grand staircase, lost beneath stratified gloss paint and linoleum.
I dandled my legs beneath the adult sized chair, attempting to pay attention. My parents either side, a comforting mass of texture and warmth. Daddy holding my hand, giving it an absentminded squeeze now and then. Maman elegant and straight backed. They were talking about me; grown-ups did that a lot. They listened with serious expressions, nodding occasionally at the specialist's turgid medical parlance. In my imagination each word became a long hairy caterpillar crawling about the neat desktop. He talked about some sugary treatments from America, I wondered where he kept them, perhaps the desk drawer, or in the metal cabinet.
Maman leant forward, her mascara painted eyelashes looking dramatically long from my low viewpoint, and interrupted him. Her tone suggesting she'd had enough of his caterpillar words. She wants me to be happy, she says. Then asks if it can’t wait until I’m older, old enough to understand what could happen, old enough to make my own choices.
The doctor tells them, that the choice is theirs, I’m bright and otherwise healthy, my quality of life shouldn’t decline. He stood and walked over to the shiny metal cabinet. I craned my neck to see as he opened the doors and pulled a folded paper object from a stack on one of the shelves, shaking it open with a flick as he brought it over to me. I glimpsed a pair of holes cut into the front as he lifted it and, not ungently, slid it over my head, using a word unfamiliar to my three year old hearing, a word I understood as something like ‘prophecy’, though the actual word was most likely prosthetic, or even prophylactic; neither of which is technically correct, but ‘prophecy’ was what I remember hearing as my head was enveloped by that first bag.”

Boost Your Blog -Start an Argument.

How can being wrong drive more people to your blog?

I read lots of blogs and articles that tell me how to drive up my blog hits and followers. Most talk about regular blogging, insightful and well structured posts, and slowly building a following that trusts your opinion. Needless to say, writing blogs about how to get more hits on your blog seems like a good way to achieve this –though I don’t expect a huge groundswell as a result of this little offering.

But something happened earlier this week that made me realise that there can be another way of rapidly upping blog hits. I posted on a relatively new blog I’d established at the end of last year, I'd written a short entry that was to be the first of several about the subject of the website it was linked to. It was simply intended to be a quick introduction, with more meaty and informative posts to follow. I was surprised then, at how quickly I got a number of comments, and how quickly the number of hits shot up. I assumed this was partly due to the fact that the first person to comment was well known and respected in the subject about which I was blogging. Another thing I noticed was that his comment strongly refuted the subject of my blog, and so did all the others. I knew I’d written something a little provocative, but I didn’t think I was so wrong that absolutely no-one was prepared to agree with me. Believing the argument was too one-sided I spent a couple of hours writing a good argument to defend my position. As a check I re-read my original blog and it was only then that I noticed I had made a mistake.
I had intended the piece to be a little provocative, to pique people’s interest, but when I re-read it, I realised that what I had actually written was an order of magnitude more provocative than what I had intended. This explained the comments. I felt a terrible embarrassment; how could I have published something so stupid in front of the very readers I was attempting to impress? Then it dawned on me; far from putting people off, it had drawn people in, and the hit count had risen far beyond my expectations.

So from an embarrassing mistake, my blog provoked discussion and interest. No news is bad news, as Hollywood agents are wont to say. It won’t work for everyone, and it shouldn’t be overused, but posting a blog entry that people disagree with can be a quick way to boost your exposure. So go on, start an argument; you might make new friends.

The Bridge

Photograph ©John Spivey

I've been hard at work writing my novel, with a set daily routine of writing in the morning, leaving the afternoons to continue my illustration work. It's easy to forget, in this head down cycle of industriousness, how important it can be to get out and watch people, or soak up the atmosphere of a place. To be somewhere and write what comes into my head, not worrying about work, or other pressures, but just taking pleasure in the expression of my immediate thoughts and ideas.

The following two paragraphs were written a couple of months ago, during a reflective walk down to the river near the place I had called home for the previous two years, and was shortly set to leave. I came across them, jotted down in my notebook, while searching for some notes I'd made. It doesn't sum up the village, but my first view of the place was across that bridge, and it will always be lodged in my memory.

It could be on almost any worthy river in continental Europe, but it is not, this is England, and it languishes in lazy arcs between Devon's red and green hills. The bridge leaps across the somnolent waters in a single, elegant span, yet is wide enough for two trucks to pass between the low, cream tinted walls that run between the ball topped decorative pillars at either end. It has a feeling of solidity. The first bridge to be built from concrete, or so I'm told. A plaque on one of the pillars reads 1908 in cast metal relief.
Traffic continues to cross with intermittent regularity, not pausing to notice the clear deep waters flowing beneath. Further downstream a gull paddles along the lip of a weir, dabbling for morsels of food, seeming to walk on the water's smooth mirror, that carries the inverted view of tall poplars that march in jaunty procession along the left bank. On the upstream side, on either bank, stand twin buttresses of broken stone, the slightest curve at the very top of each, a hint of their former purpose: a ghost from before 1908, the remnants of the old bridge, demolished a hundred years ago, a victim of progress. A dead tree now lies submerged in the waters between, it's sunken branches caught on the tumbled stone that remains on the bed beneath the loosely swirling surface.


I must remember to take the time, to give myself permission, to sit, relax, observe, and write. It is from this calm state that the best ideas will germinate.


For any further images of this place, It's all here on Google Maps.

The Ancestry of an Idea

Character test render from the film Static © 2001 G.Boulton & S.Cornish

It is good to understand how ideas develop, evolve and combine.

I believe that no ideas are wasted even if they get nowhere in their original form. The novel I'm writing didn't just spring fully formed like Athena from the forehead of Zeus; it has a history. It has parents that lead to a sort of conceptual conception, and a long long gestation during which it began to develop features such as characters, and a storyline. It's some way from it's debut yet, but it's been kicking for a while and it's definitely turned and engaged with the birth canal.

So let us begin with the parents. Back in 2000 I was a partner in an animation studio called Artgeek. Things were going well; we had landed a rather good deal to make a short film, with a working title of Static, funded by an insurance company. It was a good idea and my co-director Greg Boulton and I ran with it. We could afford to; the budget was colossal. It was an adaptation of a short story about disability, originally written by Stephen Duckworth, illustrating what it might be like to be the only hearing person in a world where ears hadn't been invented (as an artistic decision we also chose to design every living thing with wheels, resulting in a world that was subtly geared around wheeled access).  To cut to the chase, it got canned at the end of pre-production. After the whole 9/11 thing, insurance companies globally had to tighten their belts. It was gutting.

The other parent is an idea that struck me as I was sitting outside a coffee shop on a sunny Brighton afternoon (don't ask me why there and then, but it was shortly after being knocked back on an alternative funding bid for Static, over to legal concerns). I had an idea for a black comedic live-action short film, in which a child was so ugly that his parents actually stuck a paper bag over his head.

I discussed the idea with a friend and filmmaker at yet another coffee emporium and from that realised I had an idea that was big enough to develop into a feature script. In my usual style I wrote up a few scenes (which were very good scenes), but the resolution and character needs didn't quite work on the rough treatment and I shelved it. It was In some ways too comic for the direction it was headed.

Over the following years I would visit those scenes in my mind more than once. But it wasn't until I began serious writing on my MA course that I realized that the essences of the two projects might be combined. Taking away the physical reason for the protagonist's stigma in Ugly, whilst giving the readers the lack of comprehension that the other citizens had felt for the character in Static, would leave the pure prejudice and preconceptions of both the other characters and the audience. This immediately enabled the message from the earlier projects to gain a redoubled power and meaning, and I knew that I had a strong story to work with for my Novel.


If you are interested in more blogs about how writers develop their ideas Back Story is definitely worth following.

The Muse is messing with my head again

I have two problems with my writing: over-confidence and lack of it.

It works with my underlying mood. There are times I'm on top of it all, cock o' the heap; I'm focused, I see clearly what needs to be done, I write as the words come to me. I play with the text, I experiment, it feels like I'm painting emotions and experiences with words. Sometimes when I read back through what I've done, I can't believe it was me that set it down. Really, I have no idea how I could have conceived it that way. Then there are the other times I question everything; I make false starts and lose confidence in what I am trying to say and how. Over and over again, different failed ideas die as I try to put them down, like lifeless insects spread across the page. I can't sleep properly, worrying that I'm going round in pointless circles. Any excuse interrupts the work; children, traffic, the weather all are blamed for my inability to concentrate. Criticism is doom; I'm self-conscious about everything, and nothing is worthy.

This isn't writer's block; the one comfort I can take when my mind turns listless, is that my muse is busier than ever. All those false starts are simply the seeds of new ideas. Embryonic creations to be mulled over by my subconscious for a few weeks or months, before they can be brought to term, to be born from my eager fingers in one of my cyclic periods of productivity.

I have learn to accept that this is the way I work, but I love hating it and hate myself for loving it. The sickening tedium of sustained dissatisfaction in exquisitely hideous contrast to the intensity of my over-stimulated brain, tearing me apart, leaving me hurt, exhausted, and craving more.

My muse may be good but she is not kind.