Path To Publication

‘Help! I can’t write a book’.

Okay, I have to admit, this was a new idea for me, a novel perspective – excuse the pun – but thanks to a FB post by Rachel A Dyson, I am currently obsessed with a new thought, a new possibility that there are writers out there who write well, and with discipline, and who are brilliant editors, but for whom the challenge is to write enough words to make a full-length book.

There are lots of strategies we can use to help us handle the slightly scary notion that if we wish to write a book, it is up to us to pen something in excess of sixty thousand words into story-like order.  For example, a short story = 3000 words; one short story a fortnight = 78,000 words.  Or if we write novellas @ 30,000 words each, just write three of these.

But why would a great writer have problems writing a full length work in less than ten years?  Actually, it can take that long, and for some, it is the price of success.  Not everyone has the time, inclination, discipline or method that allows them to churn out a book a year, though personally, I feel that one book a year is a reasonably comfortable ambition, assuming we don’t have an editor breathing down our necks, insisting that we procure a book a year, which is an entirely different proposition.

Perhaps our fingers clam up and our minds go blank because we feel self-conscious about the process of writing, or we grill ourselves into expecting that we should be writing because this is our writing time.

Oddly, I have discovered recently that I do much of my best creative work when I’m about to take daughter fencing, or while I’m making pancakes – the batter has to cook on both sides, so I have a comfortable two minutes on the first side, and one minute on the second side.  It helps wile away the boredom of standing in the kitchen, and I can get a surprising amount written in a hurry when I have to get back to the stove right away.  Or when I should have been going out ten minutes ago: When I don’t plan to, and there is no heavy, empty white page in the diary screaming, “THIS IS YOUR WRITING TIME, AND BY GOLLY, YOU WILL WRITE” that is when I find myself set free.

The pressure of other jobs to do, of people wanting their next meal and of tradesmen expected, can be brilliant for forcing us to simply dream up the wildest, craziest ideas and run with them.  But then, I’ve always been a contrary soul.

(To be continued.)

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Killing Our Darlings

One of the main reasons we don’t get round to finishing a book, is because we become too attached to our words and cannot bear to edit them down.  All our words are beautiful, and we cannot bear the notion that many of them, maybe even as many as half of them, will have to go.  Who wants to publish a first book running to two hundred thousand words?  Not me, I’m afraid, no matter how brilliant. (‘War and Peace’ is good, even sublime, but I gather that Tolstoy was not a nice man, so I feel quite free to skim over endless details about battle tactics, troop movements and such like. Interesting, but I don’t need to know about quartermaster’s supplies…)

It hurts, having to delete good, even brilliant passages from our work.  But it gets easier, and we can console ourselves that actually, there is no shortage of good stuff waiting to see the light of day.  Every book is a compromise, a tiptoe through scenarios that may go this way or that, a flirtation with characters who may or may not decide to take up starring roles or supporting parts.  And brilliance is subjective.  If our audience is not, and is not expected to be, as learned as we are, then no number of veiled references to Nabokov will hit the mark, no matter how apt, witty or erudite.

There is probably no point having written a wonderful book, brimming with ideas and potential if it contains

• Too much information. Some details need close focus, others prefer the broad brush. No reader can read close focus for the entire length of a novel.

• Too many words.  A high word count suggests that at least a third of the total can be culled, re-written, or tightened up.  Some characters may need to take a back seat – which may give us scope for a sequel, or a new branch of novels.  As a reader, a high word count is exhausting to contemplate, and not all readers can spare that kind of commitment.  That said, one publisher I spoke to at the Frankfurt Book Fair actively searches for longer manuscripts, following a trend that suggests readers perceive fatter books as better value for money.  (Lesson: Ideal book length is apparently as much a matter of fashion as any other aspect of publishing.)

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Writers Block

There is an on-going – and often rather heated – debate about whether writers block is real, or imaginary, a figment of fertile and rather sensitive imaginations.  Whether, in fact, it would be easily solved with a dose of Epsom salts and a canter over Hampstead Heath or any other rather forbidding and earthy expanse of hill, moor, rock or mountain.

For the sake of the argument I will assume that Writer’s Block is real, and that it is a symptom of writers who try so hard to get it right, that one day, their brains simply refuse to co-operate nor write another word.  Writer’s Block is that outcome which says, You want me to write about feisty heroines, dashing cads – or dark and gloomy molderquarshes and franticulating fantoozies….again?  Now?  I just wrote you a wonderful piece last year?  You need another one??  Oh the hell with it, no, No, NO!

Writer’s Block is that outcome which manifests in a total inability to write anything except laundry lists, and even these have to be overseen by a kindly laundry mistress who holds the pen and croons soothingly, ‘There, there….’

Some wonderful authors have indeed had very serious writing allergy syndrome.  Their lives collapse, as around them the publicity machine, their agents, publishers and the hopeful public wait for another gem from the pen of…. Which simply refuses to materialise.

So to avoid writers’ block, these are my top tips:-

• Scrap perfectionism.

• Get the plot down in outline first, without obsessing about the details.

• If the thought of writing makes you dizzy or ill, nauseated or stressed, LEAVE IT and go for a bracing run on Hampstead Heath or some other or any other rather forbidding and earthy expanse of hill, moor, rock or mountain.  Nothing is more important than being happy and relaxed.

• Life is not about writing.  Life is about friendship, love, companionship, having fun, being kind to people.  If you can’t remember what that feels like, (if you can’t remember what fun means) you need to get away from your desk for at least a fortnight, probably a month, and preferably somewhere where you will be fed peeled grapes by an adoring acolyte who makes you feel special.

Thanks for reading!

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