I’m just delighted to share the news that my good friend Iain Maloney has secured a publishing deal for his excellent novel The Wasting Embers. Having been lucky enough to glimpse an early draft, I’m really pleased and excited that this is going to hit the shelves next year.
Tag: publishing
Freedom
This is another post about editing. Until today, it hasn’t been going very well. A variety of things have built into a general malaise, and I’ve been struggling to get myself out of it. Yesterday, I read this from Matt Haig: “As a writer, you need to have a thick skin. But you also need to be a hypersensitive wreck to write in the first place.”
Well, for the last few days, I’ve been in hypersensitive wreck mode. I swing in and out of these phases. When a novel is going well, I’m buoyed up and float through life, with at least half my mind firmly in my story, and nothing else really gets in the way. But when it’s going badly, I obsess over and over again on all my many failings and how terrible the novel is, convinced that the universe is going to wake up at any moment and realise that I shouldn’t have made it even this far.
This is my half-term from college. Although I’d done a few line edits on The Visitors, I hadn’t had a chance to really get to work until this week, and it began really badly. I started by making the huge, ugly structural changes I was worried about, cutting and pasting and wreaking a sweeping destruction on the first third of my manuscript. And that left me really despondent. I won’t run through all my paranoias here, but I was really wallowing. There seemed an insurmountable amount of work to do, and part of the plot was now back to front. I convinced myself that I’d shattered whatever was good about it in the first place. I spent some time moaning on Twitter, and went to bed feeling very sorry for myself. At the end of the day, I listened to this about twenty times, trying to summon some strength:
…but to little avail. I started today prepared for more of the same. Scared of going back to the manuscript, I farted around on Twitter, and on Facebook, and read the paper, and spent half an hour trying to read all of the internet. I’d made myself quite genuinely scared of the novel, and was looking for distractions to keep myself away from it. Then I remembered reading about something called Freedom. It’s a program which blocks the internet completely, and can’t be disabled without turning your computer off and on again. It cost $10, and I bought it. I installed it, and I set it to run for eight hours. Then I opened the novel, returned to the redraft, and tried to spend the day at work. Here’s how it went:
There are obvious breaks – between chapters, mostly – when I used to check my email. I couldn’t do that. Instead, I had to keep writing. I used to post updates about my progress, or lack thereof – I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t build a Spotify playlist. I couldn’t read my students’ blogs. I couldn’t add to my Pinterest boards. I couldn’t check my bank balance, or look at lenses I can’t afford on eBay. I couldn’t blog about how shitty I was feeling. I could only work, and so I did. I only stopped for cups of tea and to feed the cats. I checked my email at lunchtime on the iPad, but otherwise went without. And it was brilliant. Immersed in the novel, without distractions, I worked hard, fast, and well. I was coming up with good stuff for the first time in a week, building bridges between ripped sections, smoothing out the prose, and even discovering new connections to expand and consolidate the plot. More importantly, I was feeling good about again. That feeling is so important. Without confidence in your story, it’s impossible to write with conviction.
Strange to reflect that I needed technology to rid me of technology. Freedom truly gave me freedom to work. I know it’s daft to spend money on something willpower should do for free, but Freedom even removed the choice. Even after a single session, I believe it’s the best money I’ve ever spent on my writing. To be clear, I don’t have a motivation problem. When I’m in the flow of my story, I can write continually for hours without stopping. But when I’m as full of dread as I was yesterday, I seek any reason to avoid dealing with the thing that causes me dread.
This redraft is hard. I’m making big changes, and some of them have left me feeling a little divorced from the story. One of my characters has changed her name, and it’s taken me a full fortnight to feel like I know her again. As petty as it sounds, I worked with MS Word’s ‘Track Changes’ function for the first few sessions, and it was driving me distracted, churning out balloons and dotted lines for every tiny change. Thankfully, Jane at Quercus gave her blessing for me to move onto a plain document. I know it’s daft, but that’s helped a lot.
I suppose that demolishing parts of the story was always going to be demoralising, and perhaps it’s no surprise I’ve found it so hard to stay positive about the redraft. But now most of the destruction is done, and I’m starting to rebuild, I’m feeling better all the time. When things go well, it gives me a surge of confidence in what I do, and where I want the story to go. I’m not all the way there yet, and there’s still an awful lot to do, but – for now – I’ve turned a corner.
Okay, that’s enough for now. Here’s a picture of a steampunk sperm whale hot air balloon. Writers – get Freedom. It changes everything.
Little paranoias
Jane Wood, my editor at Quercus Books, sent her notes on my novel this week. It’s a moment I’ve been dreading and craving in equal measure, and I wanted to take a moment to think about what it means now it’s actually here.
I’ve already done four drafts of The Visitors. Some of the drafts were very heavy, and some were extremely light. Redrafting is essential to all writing – I still, even now, return to stories published years ago to tweak and rework them. I have little paranoias about all my work, and can’t help but return to it. Sometimes I make changes of single words, and other times I excise entire scenes. Sometimes I catch myself totally rewriting published work, and I have to make myself leave it behind – I have to take stock and force myself to walk away.
On the second draft of The Visitors, I pussyfooted around Sue’s notes, making tiny changes, scared of diving in. When I came to a third draft, I made myself stamp on it, brutalising the manuscript with broad changes and moving onto the next alteration, no matter how ugly the massacre I left behind. Then, when it looked like a crime scene, I started rebuilding again. That’s what I’ll do this time, too, no matter how hard I find it. And I’m going to find it hard.
Whenever I come to editing and redrafting, I think there are two broad categories of change:
Cosmetic
These are the easy ones, often little more involved than line edits. Cosmetic changes this time include switching a character’s name, cutting some internal monologue and reconsidering some of the vocabulary used by my main character. I could blitz through that in a day, tops. Unfortunately, the other editing category is:
Structural
…and this is the big stuff. Making structural alterations means redrawing the map of the story while trying to maintain the same emotional trajectory, and that can be difficult to keep in balance. In this case, I have two substantial changes to make. Firstly, a minor character needs to become a major character, and he needs to appear much sooner in the story. I already know this is going to be awkward, because I attempted something similar in the third draft, and I struggled to bump him up the narrative even to his current position. It’s going to be tough to find or create somewhere to introduce him sooner.
The second change initially felt even more challenging, but on reflection perhaps isn’t quite so bad. Jane has suggested a different direction for the ending that I’m really excited about. At first I was really worried about it, but I’m starting to see it as a case of unravelling the current conclusion and retying the strands of story into a different shape of knot. This will involve more writing, but actually it’s less of a challenge – with the current ending gone, I’ll be writing into blank space. That’s a thrilling proposition at this late stage of the manuscript.
While it’s still a skeleton, a novel plot is essentially arbitrary. Things can be changed extremely quickly and easily. New characters come and go, and the story shifts like a dune, blown into organic and occasionally bizarre shapes by the wind of imagination. But the more developed a story becomes, the less arbitrarily it can change. There comes a point where making big alterations means breaking the momentum you’ve fought to generate, then patching up the holes and hoping no-one can tell the difference. That’s where a writer needs to have paranoid convictions about the emotional tone of their work, and strive to make it as cohesive as possible in plot, character, voice and soul, then work it again and again and again, hammering and thrashing and beating and combing through the manuscript until it’s carved against your optic nerve.
Editing is frantic. It’s really hard. Throughout the process, a storm cloud hangs over you, an implicit sense that you didn’t do it well enough the first time. Then there’s the crashing changes you wreak on something you loved. And then there’s the dread that whatever you make to take its place won’t come close to what you had before. It’s an exciting time, too, but the whole process is riven with a crawling, monstrous, excruciating anxiety.
This is mostly my load to carry, but I’m glad I’m not taking the journey alone. I’m now far too close to The Visitors to critically appreciate it, and working with other people helps triangulate my own perspective about the story. I’ve often stated my belief that writing is as much about the community as the individual – not least as it counts for little without a reader. When I write short stories, I read them to Mon, and I send them to writer friends. And I pay attention to what they say, even if I disagree. Working with other people – and working with Jane and Sue, now – has repeatedly shown me the importance of opening myself and my ideas to an audience. I have people I can talk to, and that makes me lucky.
Of course, I say this before actually beginning the edits. Try me in a week.
Photo lifted from ‘Minuscule Series’ by Maité Guerrero
What’s in a name…
This post is about names for stories. Sometimes I come up with a title first – I have a story called You Don’t Talk To The Driver, The Driver Talks To You, which developed entirely from the title. And sometimes the title is really obvious – The Lion Tamer’s Daughter couldn’t be anything else. Sometimes it’s lifted from a phrase in the story, like The First Time I Died. Sometimes it evolves after a struggle, like my novella The Year Of The Whale (which I will finish one day). And sometimes, I just can’t think of anything at all. And all this is relevant because we’ve just changed the name of my novel.
I’ve been calling it Riptide for the last six months, but my novel has had dozens of different names. I went through bucketfuls of working titles – occasionally to the point that I was changing it two or three times in a single writing session. Nothing stuck. I’d reached a point where the novel was finished, and I wanted to send it away, but it didn’t have a name. After another few days dedicated only to looking for titles, I called it Riptide Heart because it had to be called something, then sent it to some friends.
“Love the book, mate,” came one of my first responses, “but the title’s balls.”
In the end, a lot of people said pretty much the same thing. But no-one had any better ideas, so I sent it off to Sue as Riptide Heart. I used Dora’s grubby paw to click the send button. A week later, Sue got back to me, and here we are – a year has passed, and once more I’ve been driving myself up the fucking wall looking for a name for the book.
We moved on from Riptide Heart fairly quickly, and I was fine with that. Everyone involved has been calling it Riptide, because that’s better than ‘the book’ or the ‘the novel’. But the closer we’ve moved towards publication, the more important the title has become. Sue and Jane and I have been searching for a month. Churning through endless combinations of possibilities has turned my brain to mush. I’ve ransacked the manuscript half a dozen times and tried literally hundreds of potential titles. Last week it reached a point where not only could I not think of anything better, but I was no longer capable of judging other suggestions. That’s one of the reasons I’m fortunate to be working with such professional people at Quercus and Conville & Walsh. Linking wonderfully to the stunning cover art commissioned by Jane, I’m delighted that we’ve finally settled on a name which I’m happy with – my first novel is now and forevermore called The Visitors.
So, what’s in a name? A rose would smell as sweet, and so on… but a novel is like a child, and you spend so much time with it as it grows, learning what it wants to be, getting to grips with its tantrums and moods, guiding its ambitions, and being constantly surprised and amazed by what it becomes… I can’t imagine Dora by any other name. Knowing that Riptide was a temporary title hasn’t lessened the jolt of losing it; after so many months, it had become Riptide.
The Visitors grows on me by the day. It has the human element I wanted so badly, and it has a ghostly feel which I love. As my friend Iain pointed out, I spent so long looking for The Best Name Of Any Book In The World Ever Ever Ever – which doesn’t exist, of course – that I stopped being able to consider what was right in front of me. I’ve often used the idiom of not seeing the wood for trees when discussing writing – and writing novels in particular – and it’s proved true for this title search as well.
I can barely express my relief of being out of those woods…
Jane’s editorial notes have arrived, and I’m really excited about some of her ideas. Next stop: the final draft.
The horizon
What a couple of weeks. The start of college has been a bit rough, but we’re getting there. I’m spread fairly thin at the moment, and it doesn’t feel like I’m getting much done… but in the background I’ve completely redrafted my flash fiction collection Marrow, so that’s ready for typesetting when I find the time to get to grips with InDesign. Paragraph Planet published a 75-word story from that collection last week, too, which is pretty cool. I’ve also redrafted the longer short story I talked about in my last post, and started blocking out my new novel in the excellent Scrivener.
Even more exciting, Riptide is beginning to gather pace. I’m expecting notes from my editor this week, so I can start work on what should be the final draft, and I’ve just had a sneak peek at a rough of the cover art, which is scintillating. While I’ve been so busy drowning in real life, just trying to stay afloat, seeing the cover has been a timely reminder of what I’m working towards. The artwork is simply perfect, but I’ll wait for a final version before I share it.
The 200th Spotlight Club in Lancaster is looming on the horizon. It feels like only last week I was reading at their open mic night. I’m excited about performing there again, and hopefully catching up with old friends Rich Turner, Dan Haywood and Paddy Garrigan (pictured above) – Paddy’s playing out the night, which should be a blast. I have two or three new pieces lined up. I’m going to start with a short story about guinea pigs, and finish with a very short 75-word piece about avocados. I think there’s probably time for another story in between, but I haven’t decided what just yet.
After Spotlight comes the Brewery open mic, if I can get a spot, and then Dreamfired in October. By happy coincidence, my storytelling uncle Rich Sylvester is up from London that night. I don’t get to see Rich very often, so if we’re organised enough, I’ll try and knock up a quick video of one of his stories.
Who likes short shorts?
I’m between novels – making notes for the second while working on edits for the first – and as a result of this fairly disjointed workflow, I’ve also been writing a lot of flash fiction. I write flash fiction for three reasons. In order of importance, these are:
1. To keep my writing and imagination ticking over.
2. As a depository for the ideas I haven’t time to develop.
3. To create short sharp stories for readings.
However you feel about flash fiction – and there are a lot of people who deem it totally irrelevant – these reasons are good enough for me. Number one, in particular, is very important to me when I’m so busy. I can’t work on a novel if I have a spare hour – I need more space in my head – but I can write flash. For me, flash fiction is a fun and constructive way to write more often (notwithstanding J. Robert Lennon’s excellent ‘ass-in-the-chair canard’, of course).
Like most writers, I suppose, I started learning my craft with short stories. In the first two years, almost all of them fell between 1,500 and 2,500 words. This wasn’t deliberate – I was simply writing stories that told themselves in that sort of space. As my writing developed, the scope of my ambition widened; I wrote Meat (mentioned briefly here), abandoned a subsequent novel at 50,000 words, and started work on my extremely long-running novella The Year of The Whale, which I had almost finished when Riptide exploded in my life. Over the following year, Riptide was pretty much the only thing I worked on. By this point, my longer pieces had absorbed any time for short story writing, with flash fiction increasingly fitting into the small hours between proper writing sessions.
In essence, then, I’d stopped writing short stories. But I’ve had an idea nagging me for a while, and it clearly wanted to be a short story. I decided to make it a little more considered than my older shorts, and spend more time letting the character paint the world around her. I finally settled down to work on it last week, and I finished a first draft last night. In my head, I expected it to be about 5,000 words, which is easily double the length of my next-longest short story. It has been a very strange space to work in, especially after so long away from the form.
Some flash fiction packs a conventional narrative into a smaller space, and some flash fiction snatches at a single moment, a single voice – a heartbeat – and gives the reader just enough to fill in the blanks themselves. The short story expands on those themes (obviously), giving them greater room to grow, but for the form to have an inherent function, it needs to achieve more than simply stretching out those moments – more than filling in some of those blanks.
I seem to recall a quote – possibly by Chekhov, though I can’t find a source – declaring that all short stories are the end of longer stories. I think there’s something in that, and I like the abstraction inherent to the form. My best short stories – the ones I personally consider most successful – are the ones where I’ve managed to hardwire some sense of trajectory. I want my writing to have momentum. I aspire to a ferocity, a certainty of narrative. I don’t know how well I achieve that, but it’s what I’m working towards.
I have now finished this new piece, and I think it’s come the closest yet to what I’m trying to create. It’s abstract and a little dangerous, but I think I’ve generated the emotional whirlpool I strive for, with discontiguous strands of story focused to a single point. After so much time away from the medium, I found it quite difficult to write. Although I knew my character’s voice right away, and I knew what I wanted to achieve in the story, it took me a long time to untangle the threads and find my way. I’ve been plodding through it, whisky in hand, on odd nights for a couple of weeks. Last night I finally had the breakthrough, which involved redrafting the whole thing from present into past tense, cutting a couple of sections and writing a new scene. I’m now going to take a day or two away from it, and see if a little distance helps with the redraft. Happily, the first draft came to 5,220 words.
I’m now waiting for feedback from a couple of readers, but I wanted to write this post before talking to anyone about the story; I needed to get my own thoughts in order. At some point I’m going to write more about my ultra-flash fiction on Twitter, but I wanted to use my first short story in a year to have a think about why I don’t write them any more.
Sue Armstrong: spy
I’m delighted to share the news that my bodacious agent Sue Armstrong has been promoted to Senior Agent at Conville & Walsh. Now, first of all, this makes her sound more like a spy, which is obviously very cool. But it is also testament to her talent, character and drive. She has been unremittingly excellent to work with, helping me develop my ideas and secure the deal with Quercus. I’m so pleased for her: well done Sue!
Valve and Hound
170 unread emails greeted my return from holiday, and this almost passed me by in a whirl of administration – but while I was in France, I received the great news that Valve have accepted two of my short stories for the third edition of their excellent journal.
The first story is ‘When The Bough Breaks’. It’s a brutish, experimental piece about a life-term prisoner trying to deal with horticulture in his halfway house.
The second story is called ‘Hound’. I consider ‘Hound’ to be my only true story, so much as any story can be true; I wrote it when I lived in Manchester, back in 2009, and it’s about a stray dog that haunted the streets of Withington. For a month, or maybe six weeks, I saw him again and again, scavenging in the alleys and lanes around our flat. Mon and I would often stop to talk to him, though he became increasingly scared of people. When he finally vanished, as I think I’d always known he would, I looked for him; and when I couldn’t find him nearby, I searched for him on the city’s animal rescue websites. I never discovered what happened to him, but I’ll always feel guilty that I didn’t do more when I had the chance. We left about a month after the dog had gone.
Manchester was a strange time in my life. Three days a week I worked on my first book, a novel-length prose-poem called ‘Meat’, and three days a week, I worked in a bespoke veneer workshop in Stockport. I lost my job when the owner died suddenly from complications of swine flu. On Monday he was there, and on Tuesday he was dead. We finished the last order, then the workshop closed. Desperate for work, I applied for about a hundred jobs in a month: in delis, cafes, factories, shops, offices. I received two rejections and approximately ninety-eight silences. We packed everything we owned into a hired van and drove to Kendal twice in a day. On the second trip, dumb with tiredness, I had to do an emergency stop on the M6 near Preston. There were swans waddling across the motorway. Goddamn swans.
Each of my stories means something to me, but ‘Hound’ is special. Unlike the majority of my work, it is mostly true, and it records a turning point in my life. I had finished ‘Meat’, which took me to some extremely dark and upsetting places, but exorcised a lot of the poison I’d carried through my twenties. I received some good feedback on the manuscript from friends, writers, indie publishers and agents, but the consensus was that it was too dark for a first novel. I think this is probably fair. My reading and writing began to evolve again after Manchester, and ‘Hound’ marks the start of this change in my work: becoming more constructive, more concise and more direct. After ‘Hound’, I became interested in writing as a vehicle for immersive storytelling, rather than writing for the brutality of raw emotion.
As well as being one of my favourites, ‘Hound’ is also the most rejected of all my short stories. I don’t interpret rejection as a validation of the quality of a story, but I’ve been a little dismayed that no-one wanted to take it. I really wanted ‘Hound’ to go to the right home, and I’m humbled and delighted that Valve have taken it on.
I didn’t mean to write so much about this, or to get quite so personal. We only lived in Manchester for eleven months, but when I pull it apart, I feel surprisingly emotional about this point in my life. It marked a step change in who I was and who I am, and ‘Hound’ is a measure of that change. And this perhaps is mostly why I write: to interpret and record my world and myself.
Susan Armstrong: fo shizzle
Reasons why my agent rocks, number 162:
Susan Armstrong: fo shizzle
Reasons why my agent rocks, number 162:
Simon Sylvester 