Positive Reinforcement

I was very excited to receive an email from Ian Watson yesterday. For science fiction fans, Ian needs no introduction. Film-goers might recognise the name of the film for which Ian wrote the screenstory: Stanley Kubrick's Artificial Intelligence: AI. Very kindly - because he is a busy man with lots to do and lots to see - Ian read a copy of my book. It turns out that there will not be a new edition of Déjà Vu on which to put Ian's wonderful blurb, but I've already begun to plaster it over my website. Here's a snippet:

I was enthralled and contagiously compelled to carry on throughout. The level of computerisation of daily life is plausible and handled with casual panache. It's gripping, fascinating, and powerful, and really well written, with wonderful pace.

Ian's name is definitely on my list of to-be-bought-a-pint people at this year's world science fiction convention, Interaction, where I'll be on a panel discussing the crossover between science fiction and games.

"Hello, Rooster. Hello, towel."

Oh, Belgium! I've gone and missed towel day.

The 'Once Upon a Time Business'

Doff of the cap to Philip Pullman, not a favourite author of mine but one I admire, who has won the Astrid Lindgren (of Pippi Longstocking etc.) memorial award for children's and youth literature. Full story in the Guardian. Apparently this is second only to the Nobel Prize for Literature. Not sure about that, but congratulations to Mr Pullman regardless.

Strrange luck

Good problems. I don't know why - though it probably has something to do with reaching the end of the first draft of Proper Job - but my mind is turning to aspects of the creative process. Some writers don't like to think too hard about these things; others write endlessly about it. I'm somewhere in between, I guess, but the one mystery that never seems to resolve is this: Why does the story only get written when I'm writing it? Why can't I plan it first?

It probably has something to do with the challenge. When you type into a blank Word document without any real notion of what you're doing apart from genre and the ghost of a character or two, you take a big risk that the novel will wander down a blind alley and self-destruct. This certainly captures my attention and engages whatever 'writerly' parts of my brain I've managed to develop so far. For instance, with Proper Job, I'm about to start the denouement (Robert McKee probably has a number for this part of the story) and I know that I have to resolve the plot in two or three important ways. Problem: I don't know how I 'm going to do it. A bad solution is to wrench the plot in a new direction using a deus ex machina, but this will cause my readers to throw the book across the room in disgust. The best solution is to have the denouement occur naturally as part of the behaviour of the characters, including the history of their behaviour up to that point.

How do you do that so late in a book? Well, partly, that's what a first draft is for. You can change stuff. But I expect things will just...well, fall into place. Something I've already written, months ago, will become relevant and suggest a solution. The reader - if I've done my job right - will think "Ah, of course, that's why such-and-such happened!" I, however, will just be slightly perplexed as I continue writing. Did I really know what I was doing at that point? Surely not. If I'm not consciously aware of the future of the novel, how can I be unconsciously aware of it? That seems absurd. The converse would be that the plot contains a number of ambiguous points that can be reinterpreted later but I honestly think that there are very few of these. I'm careful to write fast-paced stuff, and there's barely room in a moving plot for that sort of thing.

So, mystery unresolved. But make no mistake: if I can't get the denouement to work, the entire book will detonate and you'll never get to read it (notwithstanding the usual difficulties with getting it published). I am, however, confident that there's a denouement there somewhere, because I've always come up with one in the past. But how? Therein, I guess, lies the insecurity of the writer. What if the strange luck stops working?

Déjà Vu review

Steve Mazey over at Eternal Night has published a review of Déjà Vu, hot on the heels of the interview. It's a positive, encouraging review. Thanks, Steve.

Interview for The Eternal Night

Steve Mazey has dropped me an email to say that my interview has been uploaded to his sciffy website, The Eternal Night. Of all the publicity that I do as a writer, interviews are the best; particularly when I get asked for an opinion on things I know nothing about! (I'm thinking of Emma Lloyd's question about her grandmother.) Thankfully, there are few such questions in this Eternal Night Interview, and it's nicely presented.

Smoking suns

Continuing the theme of thoughts on creativity, Charlie Stross makes some interesting points about Chekhov's gun.

The hilarity continues

Warning: May contain self-indulgent material on the creative process. For anoraks only.

This week I passed the 70, 000-word mark on my new novel, Proper Job. It's funny how people will widen their eyes when I mention that figure. To a non-novelist, it probably sounds like 'a billion pounds' does to me: a large, brain-stretching number that can't be properly imagined. It's just 'a lot of money'. So I've written 'a lot of words' so far.

70,000 words is about 20,000 short of average novel length (I would guess). Stephen King regularly passes through the 100, 000 barrier, but Terry Pratchett often limbos his novel beneath it. Some novelists call time at around 50, 000 words. 40, 000? Well, that's novella territory.

When I was a kid of fifteen or so, I read a great deal of Stephen King. (I still think he is a great writer, with wonderful command of tone and suspense; but it's difficult to read him nowadays.) In the preface to one of his books, he said a few words about the craft of writing. I was surprised to read that King did not plan the novel before he wrote it. If you've read his extraordinary The Stand, then get this: he started that 200, 000-word sucker with a blank sheet of paper in his typewriter and a note on his pinboard reading 'Randall Flagg is a dark man'. His magnum opus unravelled from there. This fifteen-year-old Cornish kid, me, thought, 'Oh, so that's how you write fiction'. I then proceeded to write a novel myself.

It was unspeakably awful. Really bad. Each sentence straining under literary pretension and finally snapping because it lacked the strength of characterisation and literary drive. But my habit was set. I write without a plan.

When I start a novel, I have a little something in mind. It's like a dim star on the horizon; something to walk towards. Deep down, the knowledge that I have about story structure - keep 'em turning the pages, make 'em empathise with the characters, remember this is entertainment - bubbles away and suggests the ghosts of future narratives, but they can switch abruptly, like a river diverted at source. What I want, at all times, is to be in the place of the reader. I need to feel what it's like to read the novel first time, and I can only do this while I'm writing it.

Last night, I wondered what star draws me through the current book. Proper Job is the story of a ice-cream seller who needs to make money over his last summer before university. At root, the novel is about a character who copes - just about - with life but is constantly reminded of how bizarre it is. Everybody else seems to know what's going on while he does not. It's no stretch to call this autobiographical. Since I was very young, my parents observed that I had a 'warped sense of humour' (i.e. quite different from theirs) and that I lacked 'common sense'. Selling ice-cream involved a number of skills I simply didn't possess at the time: at 17, I could barely drive; had a dodgy sense of direction; didn't really have enough life experience to deal with sarky customers; and found it difficult to engage with a job that, obviously, was not going to be my life's work. Goodness no. I was destined for greater things (don't you know) and I read philosophy (as well as Stephen King) on rainy days in the van, and edited manuscripts in the gaps between serving customers.

That's my star for this novel: a point of view. It's a comedy because how else can that worldview be written? The narrative, of course, and the characters, are essential elements of the book, but I've put them on like clothes during the course of writing; the skeleton underneath has been that slightly naive, disconnected 'Is this life? Crikey' feeling.

The first draft is nearly finished, and then I'll give it up to an editor by the beginning of June. My reasoning behind this is simple. Déjà Vu was rejected by virtually every publisher in the UK (I sent it to all of them) in its unedited form; once edited, with the help of Aliya Whiteley, people have only good things to say about it. Well, some people don't, but most do. Once that's done, my next job will be start on the sequel to Déjà Vu, provisionally entitled Saboteur.

...And the downs

Well, I read my first negative review today. It's over on Cheryl Morgan's Emerald City website. While I recognise, on an intellectual level, that not everyone will enjoy the book, it is difficult not to feel sharp disappointment. I wonder why a negative review casts a shadow over the positive ones disproportionate to its value as a review. Perhaps it taps into anxiety. It's true enough that all the good work in Deja Vu is difficult to remember; its failures, where scenes didn't work quite the way I wanted, are much more salient.

Right. Well. I wrote three more paragraphs after this one, and now I've deleted them because they can summarised thusly: whinge whinge whinge. There's isn't much point in picking over the bones. At least the book was reviewed.

The ups

Yesterday I was lucky enough to a guest judge for the Paddon Award, an annual prize awarded by the University of Exeter convocation. The theme was 'Fifty years on' and the competitors submitted a broad range of prose fiction, poetry and journalistic non-fiction. One of the nice aspects of the day was hearing the work read aloud by the author (this was a stipulation of the competition). I gave a quick talk and helped present the prizes. Overall, I had a wonderful time. Thanks to all the organisers and the competitors.