I still #AmWriting

Hello; it’s been a while (again).

The book reviewing has taken a back seat, largely because Horrified closed down at the end of last year, partly because I seem to have lost enthusiasm for reviewing (for now, at least), and partly because all my creative energies have been spent writing my own fiction, which is the main thing.

So, my cosmic technician The Engineer now has 6 (six!) adventures under his belt. These have been gradually increasing in length and complexity, and with each one his Univese expands and (I hope) deepens. In my last #AmWriting post I wrote about how I was probably writing a novel by stealth. I’ve always been more comfortable with short fiction, and I belatedly realised that that’s because creating characters is not something I’m either particularly good at, or (to be brutally honest) have tried hard enough to get better at. Many of my shorter works have a situation, and the character rattles around inside that rather than – as should be the case – driving it by their decisions and personality.

Hopefully that’s all changing. The last Engineer story I wrote (“The Collector”) had an unusual genesis. I’ve had the overall arc of The Engineer’s story (or one of them – he’s centuries old, so there are lots of potential stories I could write) in mind for ages, and I realised that the pieces I’d written up to then could be used as earlier parts of the larger story.

So, I wrote a synopsis for the rest of the story: half a page, which laid out the main events. And then I immediately lost interest: what was the point in writing it? Everything was there on the page. Of course, that’s not true, but that’s how it felt. More likely I was just daunted by the scale of what needed to be written. So I took a single sentence from the synopsis, which featured a minor character’s skirmish with an otherworldly entity, and decided to write that story. I thought it would be 5 or 6 pages long, and lead in tangentially to the larger story. Instead, it grew every limb imaginable, developed characters I had never considered, re-introduced an old one, fleshed out the Universe, got very dark in places and grew to 60 pages: the longest piece of fiction I’ve completed for over a decade.

But more important than the length were two things: the characters, and my prose style. First, the characters: if you’re writing a piece that long there is no way that they can be at your mercy: they have to define the story based on what they are like as “people”, and if that means your story plan goes out of the window four pages in because a character says something, then – assuming the character is being “true to themselves” (I hate that phrase) – you just have to roll with it. Characters are what readers engage with, and a story is not a story without them. Maybe it shouldn’t have taken me thirty-odd years of writing to truly appreciate this but better late than never, eh?

Second, my prose style. I’m sure any of you who are writers know the feeling of reading something you’ve written and cringing because it looks, feels and smells like you. Conversely, there’s the feeling when you read something and it’s as if it was by a different writer entirely – and a good one. It’s a rare feeling, and precious. During this story I became increasingly conscious that, because I was telling a story that happens over a (roughly) two-year period, and had long detailed flashbacks to the the Second World War, my normal “short story” voice would not suffice. My default mode is to write at the level of detail, in contrast to what I’d describe as a “storytelling” voice, where the focus is not – or only rarely – on events as small as someone picking up a cup. You know what I mean: there are writers whose style means the conjuring of a kingdom or a century in a paragraph. Salman Rushdie, for example, doesn’t give a shit about someone picking up a cup. Well, I decided to flex muscles I wasn’t sure I had and tried writing in that mode. It felt really good, and I realised I’d stumbled onto something – or found a part of my writer’s armoury – that I never thought I had.

So, what’s the takeaway from all of this? Confidence. Have confidence in your abilities as a writer. Try things you’ve never done before: you might fall, but you might fly; and even in falling you learn a lesson (and the scars are always a good conversation piece). It was having the confidence to write “with a bit of swagger” that produced the first Engineer story, and periodically I think I need to remind myself of that.

And so, onto the next story. I’m taking the plunge (for now – this could all go horribly wrong, of course) and writing the rest of the story arc: however long it needs to be, and however many characters are required, then that’s what I’ll write. I’ll keep you all posted along the way. Wish me luck.