My first novel is going to be published.
I still can’t get used to writing that. It doesn’t seem entirely real, and I can’t quite believe that this thing I’ve written, this long splurge of text I’ve spent so long agonising over and chopping and changing can actually be called a novel.
First up, I never thought I could write anything longer than 10,000 words. After spending mot of my life writing short stories, reading short stories, dreaming short stories, something flipped in my brain and I felt the need to inhabit something longer. I began to lose myself in long novels, in multi-season TV dramas. Maybe it was an attention re-set: like many people, I’ve had long periods of shredded concentration. Forget writing a novel, even reading one was beyond me: so flabby, all those words … the truth is, my shattered sense of reality just couldn’t follow a longer narrative arc.
And then life changed – I changed – and suddenly I wanted things to grow.
My mind teemed with new stories, all of which required juggling multiple characters and storylines, and I had absolutely no idea of how to go about it.
So I decided to start small. Try my hand at writing a fairly straightforward story in a structure I knew and loved: the haunted house. I just have to see those words on a book’s cover, and I’m heading over to the till or check-out desk, excited to get home and plunge into a new discovery. Over the years I’ve read so many brilliant variations on the theme, that it’s also quite a daunting sub-genre to take on. But I was under no illusions: I would not be writing a brilliant novel here, just using the template to learn how to (eventually) write one.
That was my first mistake.
So, I devoured all the information I could find on narrative structure: inciting incidents, plot points, character arcs, etc. I made charts and spreadsheets, figured out exactly where to pin a story on it, and wrote. Kind of like painting by numbers, I told myself, but something just didn’t feel right.
Coincidentally, something amazing happened: I entered the opening chapter of my first draft into Pen to Print’s Book Challenge, and it was accepted. Meaning I had won a year’s mentoring and a guarantee of publication by New Generation Publishing at the end of it. I couldn’t believe my luck (still can’t, if truth be told – impostor syndrome runs deep in me).
Of course, all it took was one external reader – my mentor – to look at this zero draft I’d slogged so hard over, and the whole house of cards fell apart.
I hadn’t really done any of the important work I hadn’t thought about why the characters were doing what they did, or what they wanted. They were all simply puppets in service of a plot. Which, if it had been a better plot, I might have got away with (I’ve read and watched some great sci fi stories without caring too much about the minimal characterisation). But my plot was not only weak, it was completely artificial. I’d borrowed some basic genre tropes but not bothered to invest them with a sense of life.
By now, of course, I was under this commitment to deliver a finished manuscript by the end of the year. And I couldn’t bring myself to hand this one in. So I did what any self-respecting eejit would do at this stage. With over half the year over, I rolled up my sleeves and decided to start all over again.
And I mean, all over again. So, the original school setting – gone. The main character’s connection with the house – totally different. Hell, it wasn’t even set in the same country! Because suddenly I realised that the haunting I was trying to write about wasn’t a generic haunting at all; it was a specific haunting, and it didn’t belong to the English countryside.
And so Elderwood had a second birth, and emerged as something else.
The result was something I certainly felt happier with, something that had begun to mean something to me.
In an ideal world, I’d have tucked my finished re-draft away for a few months and revisited it again, preferably with my mentor or some other advisor on board, to remould and polish it into something closer to what I wanted this novel to say. But this isn’t an ideal world, and by then I’d burned my way through my twelve months’ grace period and had to submit it as it was.
There’s a large part of me that mourns the novel it could have been. Putting it out in the world in its current state is perhaps throwing away the chance I had to fulfil its promise. Instead, I’m exposing its flaws, inviting criticism of all the shortcomings I’m aware of, and many that I haven’t yet had time to recognise.
I have to accept that this, too, is part of the learning process. Just as I couldn’t put my finger on what was wrong with that very first draft until my mentor saw it, I can’t identify what needs to improve without this level of exposure. It stings. But I want the next novel to be better.