Hard Hats Must Be Worn

There are three stages to writing fiction. (At least, the way I do it. There are, of course, sundry approaches.) They go like this:

1. Planning. In many respects, the most fun part of the whole process. This involves assembling characters and concepts from the random disconnected scraps your brain has been accumulating and setting aside in storage, and piecing together a narrative in which they can interact with / discover / create one another. Do this right, and the various strands come together like some fantastically intricate wire sculpture. It can be beautiful to watch.

(I tend to produce disproportionately long planning documents which go into great detail about the characters and their setting, provide scene-by-scene breakdowns of the action and the like. The proposal -- which I may get round to posting on the web at some point -- for what was originally called "Lost Souls of the City of the Saved" was just under 30,000 words long, a staggering quarter of the length of the full novel. Of course, that did include a lot of material which made it to the final draft in some form or other, so I saved myself time later.)

2. Composing. This is the bit where you actually sit in front of your bloody computer and bang away at the keyboard, translating the sparking of the neurons in your brain into actual words on (what will ultimately be) a piece of paper. This is the horribly painful and unpleasant bit -- as Douglas Adams once said, "Writing comes easy. All you have to do is stare at a blank piece of paper until your forehead bleeds" ["On Writing Humour", 1984]. (Mags Halliday recently put this equally succinctly: "All writing boils down to someone sat alone at a keyboard, swearing.")

Of course, when it goes well, this part of the writing process -- using a God-given talent to its fullest expression -- is one of the most gloriously satisfying activities a human being can undertake (at least alone and with their clothes on). When it goes badly, however -- as it seems to, for most of us, at least half the time -- the frustration and despair can be enormous.

3. Polishing. This is the other fun bit -- taking what you've created and making it better. At this point you can't lose -- you have the necessary raw material (even if extracting it felt like open-cast mining being carried out on your brain) and you can't wreck it by refining it. As you sort, reject, tweak and append, you see the work solidifying and taking on its final form: it's like the moment when, stirring together melted chocolate and cream, the two suddenly combine into one glossy, sleek and dark-brown substance.

The problem at this stage is knowing where to stop -- no work of art is ever perfect, and unfortunately there comes a time when, while the author can see the imperfections, they're too familiar with the text and too involved in it in its extant form to see how to improve it. (A clue is when you find yourself putting things back how they were before the last set of revisions.) At this point, ideally, one puts it in a drawer for a year and forgets about it. In practice, this is usually the point at which things get submitted, rather late, to editors.


...All of which is leading up to explaining that I've recently finished stage 3 on the Shakespeare-themed short story, and now need to return to banging away at stage 2 of the novella.

The story has turned out very pleasing, actually -- it was handed in way overlength and past deadline, but since both of those extensions were cleared with the editor this doesn't seem to constitute a problem. I'll say more about the end product when the anthology is announced, which looks like being sometime next year. And now I need to return to the novella, which is around one-third finished and has a deadline of the end of January.

It's going to be a lot of work, and needs me to immerse myself fully in the experience as soon and as thoroughly as possible. There's no time to lose here.

Hence this second blog update of the day.