HOW I CAME TO WRITE A NOVEL AND WHAT IT TAUGHT ME
How I came to finally write my book. Or advice for fiction writers on how to develop the skills, techniques and mindset required to write a novel.
After many years of talking about it, I finally got around to writing a novel. It’s a thriller called The Ninth Death of Zachary Green. It wasn’t necessarily the novel I thought I was going to write. But I wrote it and the process taught me more about writing than I could have ever imagined. It’s why I’m going to be posting updates on here. So that I can share what I learnt about the experience with anyone who wants to write a novel, has started writing one, or is struggling to get one finished.
OK, confession time. I’m a journalist by trade. I’m not proud of the fact, but I am and have been for a long time. As a journalist, I’d assumed that writing a novel would be easy. Well, maybe not easy, but at least something I was equipped to tackle. I mean, I’d written all sorts of copy for all sorts of audiences on all sorts of subjects. For years, I’d churned out stories on everything from the Second Boer War to how to cycle down a hill. So honestly, how hard could it be to knock out a work of fiction?
The answer, it turned out, was VERY hard. Comparing the techniques needed for journalism to those required for fiction is like comparing maraca playing to conducting an orchestra. Sure, both types of writing require you to be able to spell and use grammar, but that’s about where the similarities end.
WRITING FACT VS WRITING FICTION
The arsenal of tricks and techniques I’d built up as a journalist over the years proved to be of scant value when it came to writing a novel. Little in my career had prepared me for what was to come. I had no idea, for example, how to create plot twists, dramatise dialogue, or manage time shifts. And I was just as clueless when it came to developing character arcs or constructing effective exposition.
In fact, a couple of months into the project I realised I was out of my depth. I mean seriously out of my depth. By then, though, it was too late. By then, I couldn’t have turned back if I’d wanted to. I was so far out, the shore was no longer in view. You see, the more I worked on my manuscript, the more I could see what was wrong with it. And the more I could see what was wrong with it, the more I found myself needing to fix it.
Now, when I say need, I really do mean need. Writing it became compulsive. It was like being in love. Not in a gooey, sunshine and birdsong sort of way. But in an unhealthy way. In the way I’d imagine a stalker obsesses over someone who’s taken out a restraining order on them. I just couldn’t leave this ugly beautiful thing alone.
I’d work on it during the day, every day, and at all sorts of odd hours, too. I would find myself making excuses for not going to bed so that I could stay up late and be with it. Especially when it was treating me like shit. Then, when I did turn in, I’d frequently get up again just to check on it. I even slept with a notebook next to my bed. That way I could write down all the thoughts about it that would be queuing in my head whenever I woke up.
I wouldn’t have minded, but this wasn’t even the book I wanted to write. The book I wanted to write was a noble tale about a doomed boxer in a rigged fight. Which, ironically, was how writing The Ninth Death of Zachary Green often made me feel. A point that brings me to my first piece of advice for fiction writers.
KNOWING WHAT YOU WRITE VS WRITING WHAT YOU KNOW
The novel I ended up writing had nothing to do with my own life or any of my experiences. It didn’t even directly draw on any people I know, which might have made it easier. Instead, it was inspired by a place and an idea.
The place was a luxury hotel. And the idea was that it was an ideal setting for the lives of the deprived to collide with those of the wealthy. A place where a billionaire might have tea served to him by a disturbed kid from a South London estate.
I’m not a billionaire, thankfully, and I’ve never worked in a hotel, either, as the young narrator of my novel does. Hell, I’ve never even worked behind a bar. In short, I was as clueless about what I was intending to write as I was about how to write it. Not a great place to start from admittedly, but that’s where my experience as a journalist came in.
A bit of advice that often gets doled out to anyone trying to write a novel is that you should only write about what you know. But that’s ridiculous when you think about it. If writers only ever wrote about things they have a direct experience of we’d never get stories about Martians. Or time travel. Or honest politicians. A far better bit of advice if you’re planning to write a novel – in fact, any writer – is to know about what you write. And if you don’t know about it, to make a point of finding out.
DO YOUR RESEARCH
Thanks to the digital revolution, there’s more information available than ever on just about any subject you care to go looking for. Unfortunately, there’s a downside to this. Because while there are oceans of information to explore, they’re just as choked with garbage as our planet’s polluted seas. Which makes reliable research as essential for creating a novel as it is for, say, writing a solid news piece.
So, I leaned on my years as a journalist to make sure the real-world information that made it into my book (the stuff I didn’t make up) was as accurate as it could be. Because if my day job has taught me anything, it’s to scrutinise the information I’m presented with. To ask lots of questions about it, to cross-reference the answers and to check the credibility of the sources. Even information from trustworthy outlets like a mainstream media agency or a government department shouldn’t be taken at face value. After all, people are people. People make mistakes. People have agendas. People lie.
The consequences of bad or questionable research for journalists can have fatal consequences, as anyone who remembers the Dr David Kelly affair will know. For a fiction writer, the consequences of dropping a bollock (to use the technical term) are less serious. They can still render your story implausible in the eyes of your reader, however. And that can be lethal for your story. So remember, accuracy is important. Accuracy lends your work authority. Accuracy counts.
CAPTIVATE YOUR AUDIENCE
When I was younger, a very bright boss I had told me ‘make sure your copy is inhalable.’ I recognised this as an updated version of ‘write so an 11-year-old can understand it,’ which was supposedly an instruction Alfred Harmsworth first gave to his hacks at the Mail and the Mirror in the 19th Century.
Both are sage bits of advice for fiction writers and journalists alike. But being able to write clearly and simply isn’t as easy as it sounds. It takes a lot of practice. As a journalist, I was lucky. I got paid to develop that skill over many years. And it was something I found incredibly useful when it came to writing fiction.
You see, one of the (many) things I became obsessed with as I wrote my novel was working out how to keep my reader on the page. Ensuring my writing was always as clear and as easy to read as I could make it offered a foundation that I could build the rest of my story on. I needed that, because for large parts of the process I didn’t have a clue what I was doing.
From my love of reading, however, I did know that a successful work of fiction is also a magic trick. One with the power to captivate and mesmerise. I’ve failed to get off at the right bus stop because of novels. I’ve wandered off of trains, still reading, and into pillars and people. Heck, he has no idea of course, but the Canadian author Douglas Coupland (@DougCoupland) once even caused me to miss a date. The bastard.
When I started writing my book, I wasn’t sure how that magic trick worked. I suspected, however, that it had as much to do with the quality of the reading experience as did with the story. With its smoothness, if you will. And so for that reason, I endeavoured to make sure that there was nothing in my writing that would jar with my reader. That there was nothing in it that they couldn’t immediately get or process. Nothing that would break their connection to the story or bump them off the page. I wanted it to be as polished and as frictionless as I could make it. Because I wanted to give my reader what other writers have given me. I wanted them to get lost in my book.
REMEMBER YOUR READER
Another bit of advice for fiction writers that you often hear is write for yourself. The quote originates with Patricia Highsmith and While there’s some truth in it, I personally believe a writer’s first duty is to their reader. Because if their reader doesn’t get it, or doesn’t at least get something from it, then what’s the point? I’m sure that’s why I ended up doing four rewrites of my novel, chiselling it down from a first draft of 125,000 words to somewhere closer to the 80,000 mark.
As I discovered, telling a story really is all in the edit. Not that this necessarily surprised me, because whatever I write I tend to work the same way. The first draft of anything I turn out tends to come out of me in one almighty puke. It’s messy, it’s all over the place, it quite often stinks, and there’s almost always too much of it. But that’s fine. In fact, it’s comforting. It’s out, and I have something to work with – the raw material I can sculpt something from.
My great friend the late Pete Cashmore is the only writer I’ve ever known who could rush out copy that was near perfect in first-draft form. Although I do wonder how much better his writing might have been had he not been in such a hurry to file it. But then again, maybe some part of him sensed he didn’t have so much time.
Like most writers, I find the real craft of writing is found in the editing process. When, depending on your deadline, the fee or, in my case, how obsessed you get with the project, you polish and polish until your words gleam as brightly as your talents will allow.
REWRITE, REWRITE (AND REWRITE), RIGHT?
When it came to editing my puked-up first draft of The Ninth Death of Zachary Green, my experience as an editor meant I was confident I’d have the chops to do a decent job. What I hadn’t anticipated, however, was how inadequate my writing technique was, or how much more inventive I’d have to be to get my story across in a satisfying and engaging way.
As rewrite number two turned into rewrite number three (then rewrite number four), I found myself getting the education of my life. The process pushed me further and harder as a writer than at any point in my career. I don’t know, maybe I wasn’t half the writer at the start of the process that I believed myself to be. What I do know, though, is that by the end of the process I felt like I’d gone from driving a three-wheeled van to flying a jet fighter.
Maybe my first book will also be my last. I hope it isn’t, because as hard as I found it to write, I did write it. And as painful as it was at times, I liked the experience. Will I ever see a return on the hundreds of hours I invested in it? Probably not. But that’s not why I did it. I did it because I had to. Because I felt compelled. It was like it chose me to write it, rather than the other way around.
On the plus side, I did get a whole set of shiny new writing techniques out of the process, however. And part of me thinks it would be a terrible shame if I never got to play with any of those again.
The Ninth Death of Zachary Green by Nick Soldinger is now available to buy in paperback and e-book.
For more advice about how to write a novel, check out my next post.