It’s shiny, that new idea. It whispers in your brain like a friend at the back of the classroom, distracting your attention from the main order of the day, which is, namely, to finish the project you’ve been working on for the past six months. But its voice, loaded with salacious detail, as tempting as a bar of chocolate mid-morning after the trials of a double Year 9 lesson, is persistent.
And you ignore it. You ignore it for weeks. Apart from a quick google when the style model for a character pops into your head. Or the temptation of “just five minutes to research the job that the main male/main female character might have” leads you down a rabbit hole of fascinating information.
But no. The current project must come first. So it does. And then, as soon as it’s off the desk and winging its way through the ether to your editor….
BOOM! It’s open season, baby.
All of those random tickles in the back of your mind (can I really justify watching old episodes of Emmerdale circa 2002 just because I have this notion of making Gary Turner and Samantha Giles the style models for this new book? But of course I can! How many times do I need to Google Bengal/Tabby cross cats to get the vision for a key character/adorable plot device before my search history will scream “Crazy Cat Lady”? How many ways can I invent and then inconvenience these two people before they’re eventually allowed to fall in love and live happily ever after?) start to shout at me, and before I know it, I’m 3000 words deep and feeling my way towards book 14.
And I’m telling you now, I’ve never, and I mean never, written two books the same way. Sometimes there have been plans. Sometimes I’ve known where it starts and where it ends. Sometimes I’ve known a character inside out before I’ve put fingers to keyboard and other times I haven’t had a bloody clue who’s who and what’s what until I’ve written 20,000 words. Sometimes I try to get them into bed too early and even they’re telling me to slow things down a bit, and sometimes I’m screaming at them to “just get on and kiss, will you?!” when they’re intent on going headlong into another tantalising near miss.
Sometimes, and if you’re one of my students reading this, please do as I say and not as I do, I just sit down and write. No plot. No handy 3, 5 or pyramid narrative. Nada. I. Just. Write. (Not a strategy I’d recommend for the imminent GCSE English Language exam, mind you, but since I’ve got longer than 45 minutes to write a story, it’ll work. For now. But then, six months ain’t that long to write a novel…eek!)
But just writing, at this early stage, definitely has its benefits. I can feel stuff out. I can work it through on the page. I can do the thing I tend to do at the start of a new manuscript and see what happens when my characters dance together for the first time (no, that’s not a metaphor – I literally do get them to dance, for most of the books I’ve written. The way they do it can tell me a lot about them, so it’s a useful writing exercise). There’s so much freedom and excitement at this stage. So much tingle. So much potential, and four months from now, when I’m two thirds in and losing the will to finish it, I’ll need to remind myself of that.
For now though, it’s new, it’s shiny and it’s exciting. And I’m not kidding about Gary Turner and Samantha Giles, who might just give me the creative nudge I need in the direction of the tentatively named Gray and Bella (names TBC, but for the moment they’re who I’m working with). For now, I’m just going to write. After all, it’ll all get sorted out in the edit, right?!
Fay Keenan 