On Writing

The Genesis...

For me the genesis of a novel tends to be a combination of visual things, ideas that gnaw away at me, burrowing into my consciousness until I find I'm thinking about them a lot and making links. (I think those connections are what make you a novelist rather than a short story writer. )

I start with ideas, “what-ifs?”, but those ideas always seem to come with people attached to them and very often snatches of dialogue. (This is no doubt a throw-back to my days as an actress. I’m familiar with story-telling through dialogue.)

An example of this “vision” process in EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY was the “woman alone in a light white room” opening. I could really see the room and sense the atmosphere. I could see the woman but I didn’t know who she was or who she was writing to. When I wrote the letter in Chapter 1 I didn’t even know if the daughter Megan was alive. I thought she might be dead or even imaginary. I wasn’t sure when I started the book just how far "gone" Rose was.

Sometimes I think these visions must be visual puns or symbols with other meanings. The white room was both Rose’s home and her “cell” in the mental hospital, but it was also the deeply medicated blank space of her mind. I only worked all that out later. When the “visions” come I often don’t know what their significance is. I don't always understand what I've written, or rather why I've written it. I'm not sure I think that's necessary. I do think you need to be able to trust what you've written, which means trusting in yourself as a writer. That's the hard part.

Once I get these “visions” in my head I start trying to set them up as scenes, try to work out how someone could end up in that situation. That must be another throwback to my acting days. At drama school in improvisation classes we would sit in the middle of a circle of fellow students and be handed an object – a bunch of keys or a weird small ad from the classifieds - and then after a few minutes’ thinking time we would be “interviewed” by the tutor and other students. We would have to answer in character, a character that developed as a result of our response to the object and questions. (30 years on I can still remember one student's sinister school caretaker and the way he fondled a big bunch of keys.)

When I’m plotting, I just keep saying “What if…?”, trying to make things as complicated as possible. (You can always simplify later.) But I don’t think much actually happens in my books. I have complicated situations and relationships. My plot, such as it is, arises out of those.

It was quite hard keeping tabs on everything in EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY because the characters knew far more than they were letting on. Everyone had something to hide. I wanted to write a book that as soon as you finished it, you’d want to go back and re-read it to see if I’d cheated! I also wanted the book to read differently the second time round when you knew all the history. So a lot of the dialogue had to work on two levels, meaning one thing to the reader, but something else to the characters, who knew a lot more. (I used the same method in A LIFETIME BURNING which reads very differently second time around, when you know what the characters know.)

Fortunately, I don’t need a plot to start writing, just a situation and some interesting characters. The jumping off point for A LIFETIME BURNING was a puzzle I set myself which was about nothing/everything happening at one particular moment in time. I wanted to write a book, a key scene of which was a character walking into a room and seeing or experiencing something that made him/her re-evaluate their entire life. Not the wife in the arms of the postman because that would only make you reassess your marriage. I wanted to think of something that would shake a character to the foundations. But - and this was the killer! - I wanted nothing to happen. I wanted no-one to know, for there to be nothing happening on the surface. Life would just carry on as normal - apparently - whilst seismic shocks were still reverberating beneath the character's surface. In addition, I didn't want the reader to know what had happened! I thought of something eventually. When you read the scene "nothing happens". Only much later do you find out what was actually going on.

That kind of plotting fascinates me: nothing happens, but at the same time everything happens. I love the paradox. I always find what goes on inside the mind of a character more interesting than what goes on outside it.

...and Gestation of a Novel 

It’s a strange and elephantine gestation period writing a book. To begin is terrifying; to persevere can be fun (and in any case carries no great sense of responsibility - you’re only doodling anyway, the manuscript can be abandoned and another begun, no hard feelings.) But by the time you’ve written 50,000 words you can’t pretend you’re fooling around any more. The book means business and you wonder if, this time, you’re really up to it.

The only way to cope is to continue writing. That’s when you long to get to the brow of the hill so that you can see the valley spread out below and enjoy the scenery as you coast down…

There was a day when I knew I’d got to that significant point with A LIFETIME BURNING, a point when I felt I knew the book would be finished. It had taken me 366 pages, 115,000 words to get to the stage where I believed the book had its own momentum, that it would cross the finishing line without my cheering it on.

I’d written 25 chapters in draft and had 4 more (plotted) chapters to write. Months of editing lay ahead but it was a huge relief to emerge from the no-man’s land of wondering if the uncertainty would ever end, if I would ever feel the exhilaration of freewheeling downhill having spent 16 months pushing that fictional bike to the top of the hill.

Like an eclipse, this event happens only every few years and deserves, I think, to be commemorated. So I raised a glass and settled down on the sofa for a well-earned rest with a feeling – albeit fleeting! – of smug satisfaction.



 

Developing self-confidence as a writer 

As a writer I'm beset by self-doubt. (Show me a writer who isn't.) I can only keep going by setting myself problems to solve, pretending I’m not writing a novel, just an exercise, a few paragraphs on a theme.

That’s how EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY came to have the structure it has. I hadn’t written any fiction for 7 years when I started it. I’d trained as a teacher at 40, taught for a few years, become very ill as a result , then quit. To begin with I could only write a couple of paragraphs before bottling out, so I set myself the task of writing lots of short pieces that could be read in any order. If they told a story it would have to be cumulatively.

Eventually the self-imposed task evolved into “Can I write a book in a box - a novel that doesn’t need to be bound as a book because the pages can be read in any order?” That worked for a while. Chapter One underwent much shuffling because the small sections are self-contained, but in the end I realised it did matter – from a structural point of view – what order you read them in, so a final running order had to be established. (I carpeted my sitting room floor with printed sheets of A4, "designing" my book in much the same way I design quilts.)

My biggest problem as a writer – not just at the beginning of a novel, all the way through and even now, with three novels published - is not allowing myself to think:

1. Nothing I write will be original or worth saying

2. This is really a substitute for therapy

3. This is a pointless waste of trees

When those thoughts overwhelm me a good deal of mental castigation goes on as I berate myself for not getting a life - or at least more exercise. (It doesn’t help that my son refers to my characters as my “imaginary friends”.) But then when I’m in the shower or washing up or sitting on a bus gazing out the window, the book creeps up on me again and the characters start talking to me. I'm seized with some new idea, a piece of jigsaw finally fits and the real world just fades away. Then I just have to accept my addiction. (“My name is Linda and I am a fiction-writer…”)

I’m not sure what exactly I'm addicted to but these are some of the dubious benefits:
1. Exercise of power. (I get to kill people, sleep with them, mete out happiness, justice and retribution. Megalomaniac, moi?)
2. Risk-free assuagement of loneliness. (They are my imaginary friends!)
3. The feeling that I'm using 100% of my brain. (As well as being hugely enjoyable, writing is also mentally exhausting.)

Erica Jong (’70s feminist icon, author of FEAR OF FLYING and FEAR OF FIFTY) has written about the connection for her between creativity and sexuality. That’s there for me too - I think for many women writers. (Why else do women excel in the romance genre?) A disproportionate number of writers are female and middle-aged and I think that may be because, child-free at last, we have formidable amounts of energy, some of it intellectual, some of it sexual, much of it creative. All that has to go somewhere - especially if you don’t have a demanding career (or lover) and you do have an empty nest. It’s Shirley Valentine, 10 years on. Shirley’s the same, but she’s no longer sitting in a Greek taverna being chatted up by the divine Costas because she’s now 55, not 45. (She's still interested but, sadly, Costas is not.)

Maybe 55 year-old Shirley is now at home sitting in front of her PC asking herself, “What if…?"

In other words, she’s still talking to the wall.




LINDA GUEST BLOGS
Linda has written a guest blog about how she came to write EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY
on the US writers' blog Author! Author!



 

“£50,000 to get a book on recommended list” - SUNDAY TIMES

An article in The Sunday Times exposed the protection racket of publicity “charges” levied by booksellers, particularly WHS, for inclusion in catalogues, shop window displays and “Book of the Week” recommendations. It's widely known in the book trade that publishers pay for publicity but it’s come as something of a shock to readers, who now know the extent of this practice and the huge amounts of money that change hands.

But did book-buyers really think Waterstones put 50 copies of John Grisham’s latest in the window because the poor guy needed the publicity or because readers would like to see an artistic display of Grisham's complete oeuvre? Well apparently book-buyers trusted booksellers and thought “Highly recommended” meant exactly that. (I've been told that the hand-written "Waterstones recommends..." cards are staff's desperate attempts to restore balance and draw readers' attention to good books that don't have big bucks backing them.)

The financial breakdown of the price of an average £6.99 pb book is that a princely 52p goes to the author and 35p will be spent on the book's promotion. How much a publisher can spend is crucial to the book's success. As an impecunious author I don't get depressed by the massive talent of writers more successful than me, I get depressed by the size of their publicity budget. As Mae West said, "Goodness had nothing to do with it."

The Sunday Times article, by publicising what was in effect an open secret, will make book-buyers more sceptical about hype and books with a huge marketing budget behind them. Transita, a small, new-ish contemporary fiction imprint, depends on word of mouth and stands or falls on whether readers like our books and tell their friends. We suspect our readers are old enough and wise enough to be sceptical about the "pile 'em high" strategies of bookshops.

The psychology is that if you see a hundred copies of a book piled up on the floor of Borders you assume that's how many they will need, it's selling so fast... Are people really that gullible? I don't think so. The tide is turning. Book club members are telling me they’re sick and tired of hype and books that just don't deliver. (I once saw a cover quote that described a book as "heart-stopping". One can only hope it wasn't.) Bookcrossing.com, viral marketing and the reading group phenomenon are all part of a trend that will restore a balance and - dare one hope? - some integrity to the marketing of books.

Transita scored a publishing first by having a quote from a book club on the cover of my second novel, A LIFETIME BURNING. 15 members of Lochcarron Reading Group read ALB in manuscript and were asked for their opinion. We selected a cover quote from the things they said. (No money changed hands and they are not even my local book group, being on the Scottish mainland.) I don't know if anyone takes any notice of cover quotes. I certainly don't. But if I did, I would be more interested in what a book group thought than the opinion of a TV "celeb". Book groups can't be bought. (Although I have known sea-green incorruptibility to be compromised by homemade choc chip cookies.)

It's all a bit depressing, I know, but knowledge is power. Readers now know how the racket works and if you know how it works, you can't be manipulated by it. Book buyers will no longer trust flashy marketing campaigns. Research already indicates that what carries the most weight with readers is not cover quotes or even reviews, but personal recommendation, an opinion we trust. In the end, word of mouth can make a book like CAPT. CORELLI'S MANDOLIN or MISS GARNET'S ANGEL a huge, surprising and lasting success. So if you like a book, tell all your friends.

Power to the people, not the accountants.