Introducing 'Becker'

The Random House course starts with creating a character. The first week’s exercises were all designed to help students give form and substance to a new fictional character that we would flesh out and develop over the entire course. I had nothing in my locker so I was starting from scratch - others on the course already had characters and even novels already in mind. Me, I had nothing.
I’ve always found heroes quite vanilla and dull, so I came up with an unlikeable anti-hero, ‘Becker’, to give me a little more licence to make things interesting. I was probably just trying to do something different, but it seemed to work for me. Becker (the name soon changed) was arrogant, materialistic, self-centred and deeply unpleasant. You may not like him, but any emotional response is better than none, and starting at a low point gave him plenty of opportunity to become a better person. For speed (the course went at quite a pace and deadlines were every few days) I had an actor in mind to help me quickly develop the character’s appearance and speech patterns. Every little helps.
The first sentence I wrote for the course is still the opening of the novel’s latest draft:

Before I found the man who would change my life, I found his bag.

I think it’s a neat opening (an Editor at Random House said it was ‘wonderful’ - it isn’t, but it ain’t bad) and, inadvertently, it actually introduces us to two characters: the man, and the person whose life he transforms. In that first week I didn’t have a clue who that second person was but hopefully I could use each course submission to develop both my anti-hero and the narrator, their relationship and character arcs. And maybe, just maybe, an idea for a story. If I was lucky.
It turns out I was.

Wanted - one John Watson

Once I had my protagonist I needed a companion for my anti-hero, someone who would act as a surrogate for the reader, who would be as surprised or shocked or confused or amused as the reader was. (There’s no doubting that Sherlock Holmes is a great character, but he wouldn’t be quite so amazing if we weren’t seeing him through the admiring and sometimes critical eyes of Dr John Watson.)
I planned to write the story from a first person perspective and almost by accident that gave me my second character, one who, much to my surprise, actually became my favourite in the story - Claire MacDonald.
Writing Claire, the 23-year-old who steals Barclay’s rucksack at Waterloo station, is no small challenge for me: I’ve never attempted a strong female character before, let alone as a lead, but on my Creative Writing course I found that her ‘voice’ came naturally and she proved pretty straightforward to write, a distinctive, feisty but flawed character, more identifiable than Barclay. It’s true what they say - work at it and the characters really do write themselves. Here’s a conversation from one of the course exercises that didn’t make it into the novel. Claire and Barclay getting to know each other over dinner:

“I find it difficult to make new friends, like I’m being disloyal to absent friends,” I said. 

“I don’t have that problem.” 

“You make friends easily?” 

“No, I meant I have no loyalty issues. I’m not very loyal to anyone,” he said.

“You’d make a rubbish dog.”

“Don’t mention dogs.” He didn’t laugh.

“No. Sorry. Delicate subject,” I said. “I do get lonely though sometimes, especially the evenings.” Confession time. It just slipped out.

“Who doesn’t?” Was he being sympathetic or sarcastic? I couldn’t tell.

“You don’t strike me as the lonely type.”

“Everyone is lonely. It’s just that some of us find it difficult to admit to it. I’d like to think I’m a loner but sometimes...” 

And he left it there, hanging. Looking back on it, that was the nearest I ever got to a confession out of him about him being unhappy. With Barclay it was all front, all bravado. But deep down, further down where he didn’t let you dig, there was a lonely, unhappy little boy still. Spoiled rotten, unprincipled, sad even. The bugger just wouldn’t admit to it.

A bit revealed about Barclay, a bit about Claire. It seemed to work.
As the course progressed I found myself having to work harder on establishing Claire than Barclay; I didn’t want her to be passive in the story I was starting to concoct and was keen to make her as realistic as I could. I knew I’d got close when I wrote something and someone else on the course exclaimed ‘But the Claire I know wouldn’t do that!’ Success!
Claire lived!

The First Draft underway

I finished the Random House Creative Writing course at the end of November 2015. From it I had around 22 500-word pieces and a short story, all featuring my two main characters, Barclay and Claire. These pieces would be the starting point for a novel, the story of Claire’s fall from grace after meeting the enigmatic Barclay and being dragged into his nasty, sordid world. Although I had an ending to the story in mind I didn’t at that stage worry about how the characters would get there as I wanted to see where the story went as I learned how to write - I didn’t want to just be joining the dots each day as that would be boring and routine.
I mapped out the pieces I had from on the wall and identified where I needed to add scenes, characters and storylines for my initial draft. Anything used from the course would need expanding or rewriting but I felt I already had the bare bones of a half-decent story.
I was working four days a week, writing in the morning and spending the afternoon revising and planning the next day’s work. My initial plan was to get a completed first draft of around 200 pages by Easter, with an expectation that the final draft would be around 300 pages and I’d publish that by the end of 2016. On a good day I’d get between five and ten pages down that I was reasonably happy with. On a bad day I’d write, re-write, lose all my confidence and go to bed wondering if Time Inc. had any openings I could apply for.
Fortunately the bad days were easily outnumbered by the good, and by Christmas I was about halfway there, just a few pages short of the page 100 milestone.

Finishing the first draft

Terry Pratchett had it right:

“The first draft is just you telling yourself the story. So let it run. Turn all the knobs up to 11. Second draft: hell. Cut it down and cut it into shape. Third draft: comb its nose and blow its hair.”

I finished my first draft of my first novel on February 1st 2016. It was a major personal milestone and I was quietly delighted with my efforts. After taking a few weeks off for Christmas I had returned to the laptop with a vengeance and, although I still had some elements of the plot to work through, I felt I was writing better. I was probably writing too fast (5k words a day) but everything seemed to be clicking in to place.
The first draft ended on page 224, just over 56k words. But it wasn’t anywhere near as good as I wanted it or even polished enough to share with friends. I had too many plot holes, ideas that I’d started but abandoned, characters I’d introduced and left hanging for no good reason and the underlying logic of plot was just plain wrong. And, undermining my confidence on a daily basis, I still wasn’t convinced it was a strong enough idea to hang a novel on.
All the advice I’d received suggested that I needed to leave the first draft in a drawer for six months, create some distance from it, work on something else, and then come back to it when it feels like it was written by someone else and rip it to shreds and start again. The real work starts with the second draft.
But I was impatient. Three weeks later I started the second draft.

Second draft, second thoughts?

This novel writing game is a frustrating one.

One Saturday I set aside the whole day for some second drafting and plot tightening. I had pretty much two whole weeks coming up to crack on and complete much of the second draft and was keen to proceed.

But by 4pm I’d hit such a low that I was thinking of trashing the whole novel. I had characters that were going nowhere, it seemed every time I filled one plot hole I seemed to create three new ones and one of my favourite chapters was slowing the story down too much and just had to go. Worse, a read-through of some of the second draft edits suggested my writing was becoming too verbose and clumsy, the editing process making it feel overworked, overwritten - I was going backwards and making the storytelling over-complicated and characters inconsistent. It also looked like the research I’d done into the locations and cars in the story was taking over the narrative in places and the Random House Editor’s words echoed in my head: “never let your research show”. Not only did it show but it was so out of place amongst the deliberately brief descriptions I’d used elsewhere it read like it was pasted in from a different book. Aaargh!

Who’d write a novel?!

Just a few days later though, having binned all of my work from the weekend, I was in a much better frame of mind. By putting aside for later the redrafting of one particularly problematic chapter (its heading is ‘Exposition’ - says it all, really)  I had moved on to the chapters in the second draft that I knew were fun, strong on emotion and better written, reminding me that it was not that bad and I didn’t need to rethink the whole thing completely. Phew.

One of the problems I’ve had with the second draft is determining what needs a gentle polish, what needs a heavy edit and what would best be served by a full rewrite. One of the reasons I did such a light edit as I progressed the first draft was that I know that I can tinker and tweak to the point of losing, literally, the plot. When I worked as an Editor I was forever berating Subs for destroying a piece’s character by overworking it, and sometimes in my second draft I’ve done that myself. 

I’m still learning every day and I have to remind myself that learning in itself is progress, even if the writing process itself does have these ups and downs.