Can't Stop Now, I'm Speed Writing… by Chip Dale

Having today finished a draft of a novel, I thought I’d reflect on what the last six months have taught me about writing, my writing, and novel writing in general. It may only be of interest to me insofar as all writing is a personal voyage and the tips and tricks you learn on that voyage are sometimes individual to the writer. However, I’d like to think that the things I've discovered might be helpful to others. Sharing paranoias, problems, and self-doubts is what writers do best over a cup of coffee and a free afternoon. Well, I have coffee aplenty and a free afternoon, so let’s settle down in this corner of Ms. Baroque’s blog and talk about writing a novel.

I’ve been writing my unpublished novels for more years than I’d probably like to remember. I began when I was too young, writing the opening to stories where I would copy the style of an author I particularly admired. It was a good exercise, though it got me nowhere. I wrote possibly hundreds of vignettes, now lost to the death of floppy discs and faded printouts. The opening ten thousand words of many novels that died early deaths.

And the thing that always killed them was narrative.

I have a very rational mind and probably suffer a mild form of obsessive compulsive disorder. I have silly tics that I play out in my mind: counting patterns and discovering order in things. Great books attract me when I see order within them. Conrad is a favourite because he usually writes on a huge scale that encompasses some structural theme. Nabokov does it too. Great writing, for me, is when the words at the level of the sentence fit with larger patterns that my mind find utterly appealing. Conversely, I hate books that ramble. I always say that at 200 pages, Jean Rhys’ ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ is the longest book I’ve ever read. It took me a month to finish, yet I once read both ‘War and Peace’ and ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ in half that time.

Narrative has always held this spell over me. I spent years reading books about the theory of narrative, looking to find the magic formula I was so sure lay behind all great stories. I’ve read structuralist critics, gone through the Joseph Campbell books on myths, and even as recently as twelve months ago, sat down with Christopher Booker’s ‘The Seven Basic Plots’. In my search, I’ve also tinkered with story writing software, filling in the characters for archetypes hoping that it would inspire me to write better things. I've read Stephen King's book, 'On Writing' (which is, actually, surprisingly good though it holds no secrets). For a time, I was an acolyte of Robert McKee's 'Story', sketching out plots in terms of the negation of the negative and all the gimmicks he so seductively peddles. I’ve also tried notecards posted to the huge corkboard I have pinned to my wall.

Of course, none of this helped me. I still don’t know how to plot a novel in advance. In fact, the very notion now seems a self-evidently pointless one.

John Brain, I think, advises us to write novels quickly and then use the first draft as a working model for the novel you should then set out to write. It’s not a bad plan. I think it was Patricia Cornwall (though I might be misattributing this) who said that she writes her mysteries with the killer in mind and then, at the last possible moment, changes it to a different person in the book. Her theory, so I understand it, is that if she didn’t know who the killer was, then there’s no way that her readers can either.

Are either of these systems? I hesitate to call them that but they are pragmatic ways of going about writing a novel.

This is the first thing I think I discovered after years of trying to work out how to write a novel: forget about writing a novel. Forget about the big indistinct Goliath you’re going to create. Just begin to write. Write out a scene, then develop another scene. Create some original characters, some exciting/funny/romantic scenes and play around with the world. Do odd things. Do clichéd things. Do things that you didn’t expect. Surprise yourself. Be crazy. Be serious. Do whatever you think fits the moment. Keep doing this, every day, 1000 words at a time, and in two months you have 60,000 words. It might not rival something by Greene, Woolf, or Forster, but it’s better than 99% of what is produced by people who say they want to be writers but fail at the first step by not completing a draft manuscript.

The second tip is important: don’t look back. Scaling the heights of a first draft, you must never look where you’ve been. Don’t think about how poor it is. Don't question your grammar. Don't even go back and spellcheck it. Just don’t question the choices you made. Simply look forward and press on. It’s a matter of blind faith but faith is important. It prevents you falling victim to self-doubt.

It’s a hard lesson to learn. My current novel isn’t the first I’ve completed. That one was written a few years ago when I was busy with other work. My first novel was in no way a disaster but I’ve been reliably informed, by what few people who have read it, that I polished the life out of it. I see it myself. Full of self-doubt, I constantly reread my opening chapter. Unsatisfied with it, I began to tinker with the beginning instead of getting the book finished. I wrote more jokes, funnier lines, expanded character descriptions, lengthened conversations. Then I added a prologue, and then before the prologue I added a preface. I then expanded both of these until… Well, you can imagine what I had: a first chapter that was 20,000 words long. It’s still as funny as hell but ultimately quite boring. It still makes me laugh when I read it, but, all the time, I feel sick in my stomach at what I’d done to something which might have been really quite good. It’s like seeing a once beautiful actress who has had a facelift.

And this is my third tip: first drafts are sometimes the best.

A second draft is often an improvement in that you've had chance to fix the word order of a few clumsy sentences. But beyond the second draft, you risk destroying what gave the story life. Be careful with your redrafts. Immediacy is more important than style. For example, I’m a sucker for comic alliteration and sentences with a catchy pace, but cleverness also introduces artificiality. In comedy writing (perhaps especially in comedy writing), this can ruin prose.

To overcome these problem, I set out to write my second novel in a rush. And I mean a rush. I wrote it at breakneck speed, partly just to see if I could do it. I would write as much as I could in a day, almost mechanically, and never looking back. After a month, I had 90,000 words of a very dark supernatural tale with (I hope) lashings of black humour. It lies under my bed untouched since the day I finished it. In a way, it is a mess. If over polishing my first novel destroyed the book, writing my second novel was a lesson in how to write quickly but poorly. But it was a success of sorts. It taught me that writing forward, with no looking back, is the best way to finish a book. You tap into the deep parts of your brain where archetypes and stories lurk. Everything can be fixed with a second draft. And I mean everything. But you must first have a completed manuscript before you even attempt this.

Before I could set out to rewrite my dark tale, life intervened and by the time I got control of my time, I had moved on to my next book. My third novel was the only book I’ve written which wasn’t a comedy. It’s a detective story set in Victorian London. It’s still unfinished because (yet again) life intervened. Oddly, it was a paid writing job, which ultimately led to my writing a screenplay for a drama that (naturally) never got made. (Another tip: if you’re ever asked to write a documentary, don’t write a drama even if you think and know it’s ten times better!) The book still sits at 70,000 words and needs another 30,000 words writing to finish it. I’ll go back and do that soon. It’s too good to abandon.

When the job came to an end, I needed to flex my muscles. I started my fourth novel. This is the book I finished writing today. It has been the most rewarding of all the things I’ve written because it was the first I’ve really worked on with a moderate confidence in my instincts. Again, I wrote the first two thirds of it very quickly (in just over a month) but I also wrote it relatively openly in the form of a now closed blog. And I haven’t revised it.

This is my final tip. If you struggle getting a novel finished, try writing it in the form of a blog. You needn’t finish writing in blog form, but by blogging you want into the novel, you are forcing yourself to work in a very practical way. For me, it meant posting the two thousand words I wrote each day for people to read. I had immediate feedback, when people could say what they enjoyed about the story. At first, you will find it frightening. You feel unsure about your skills. But that is the beauty of the anonymous blog. If you do fail, you fail anonymously.

Of course, this might not work for everybody. But blogs present writers with new opportunities to learn their craft. They also give us old problems which we can find helpful to tackle anew. Treat the daily blog novel as a form of the old serial novel. It is a frightening prospect for any writer. Dickens published his novels in installments spread out over weeks. Blogs demand smaller portions posted daily. They are not without difficulties. What you create at the beginning must be coherent with what comes at the end. Don’t write yourself into any corners. You can’t suddenly invent a doctor with a tricky ticker who is going to collapse in the final chapter, thereby solving the problem you’d written yourself into, if the doctor is seen frolicking with the nursery nurse in chapter one.

And that’s it. After you have your first draft, then its down to you.

Perhaps my tips mean nothing to you. They mean a lot to me. They have helped me get four books finished (or nearly finished), countless short stories, a few screenplays… And not all of it is probably as bad as I fear. Of course, getting published, motivating yourself to go out and harass editors and publishers, is a different thing. I’ve never been good at any of that. In fact, I haven’t done it for longer than I'll admit to. I’ve just been too busy trying to figure out how to write.