The Trilogy Effect

Writing is turning out to be a never ending learning process it seems, and the fun fact for today is: Trilogies are damn hard!

It has been a little while since I finished the rewrite/second-edition of The Keepers of the Key and so I have set-to with working on its sequel.  After finishing writing Book 1, I thought that Book 2 would be an easier, more carefully thought out process and that I would not fall foul of all the pitfalls that I did first time.

Wrong.

Ever since I settled the plot for Book 1, many years ago now, I have had the “grand plot” reasonably straight in my head.  I knew what would happen in the next 2 books, what the over-arching themes would be and which of the characters would return where and for what purpose.  With all that in mind I finally got about 50% of the way through writing Book 2 when, thanks to the input of my unpaid, unofficial (though much loved!) editor, I realised that I was going nowhere.  My plots were riddled with holes and failings of logic, certain characters lacked any depth or real function within my world and were being tagged along simply out of habit and, generally, I was on a hiding to nowhere.

So, before Book 2 is even anywhere near complete, I am starting a rewrite.  About 50% of what I have so far written is being scrapped and I am now pitching at a very different set of themes with a  tweaked cast and rather different end-game.  How I came to be quite so lost in the wilderness is genuinely beyond me.  The notes I have made for this book are 5 times larger than those of Book 1 and while Book 2’s plot is far more complex, I really though I had a handle on it and would be able to just push through, but all that I had thought to be cut, dry and set in stone is rapidly coming undone once I get down to the actual writing.

I know Book 1’s legacy was going to leave me with work to do, as several of the “main” characters were under-formed due to there being simply not enough space to really give everyone their day in court, but I thought the familiarity of already known and liked characters would balance that out.  What it in fact has done is made everything ten times harder.  When brainstorming for Book 2, this familiarity has essentially bred laziness in me, leading me to conjure nebulous ideas that sound great in theory, but lack actual substance or depth when I came to write them.  It is as though I have written the trailer for a film without actually having any clue how the envisioned scenes link together.

To say that I am starting to see why so many writers bemoan series and complain about the difficulty of actually getting them done is a wild understatement.

Anyway, time to go and write chapter 10.  Again. =/

Remembering the forgotten

The actual process of writing a book of fiction is, as has been said at length in many places, pretty damned hard but what is striking me more and more is not the difficulty of the task but the utter weirdness of it.  While planning out your opus can be tricky, ensuring that your plot unfolds in an interesting way can be tough and actually sitting your ass down and just doing the work can be outright difficult, all of these things can be overcome with simple, dogmatic determination.  Force yourself to sit at the keyboard long enough, set yourself goals and markers, reward yourself for your achievements and the words will come.

The bit you don’t know about from the outside, the bit that you simply cannot imagine before you begin work and the bit that I had entirely forgotten after writing book one, is the utterly baffling feeling you get when you actually write.  Let me see if I can explain this, though I am not certain I can.

You have a plot.  You have characters. You have scenes, ideas and an over-arching design for your story.  You  are good to go.  The thing is that no matter how anal-retentive you are about your planning, your note making and your designing, it is not until you come to actually write a given section that you give form and flesh to your ideas.

This may sound obvious, that you have not written it until you have written it, but it is far more than that.  Your charters are alive, in very, very real terms.  Many is the time I have sat down to write a chapter, absolutely comfortable in the knowledge of how it will play out, only to find that, upon writing it, something else takes over.  Your characters simply refuse to do as you tell them and instead, happily amble off in a  somewhat different direction, apparently making their own damn decisions.

For example:  The other day I was writing a chapter for The Keepers of the Fire in which Julie and J from book one were working with a Denier (a “class” of demon from the first book whose purpose was not explained therein) to, essentially, save a man from dying.  I created the idea of Deniers years ago, had planned out how they looked, how they “worked” and what exactly it was they did.  When I came to write the chapter, a chapter that gives the reader their first insight into these creatures, my whole construct went out the window and a new back-story, demeanour and role suddenly emerged from nowhere and casually wrote itself across my screen.

I honestly had to stop and sit there, blinking in utter confusion, and read back what I had just written as I had no bloody clue what was going on at all.  I even tried to rewrite it, forcible jamming my characters back into my original plot but no matter how hard I tried, it simply would not go.

The feeling of disassociation this induced was incredible.   And it is not the only place I feel it.  Clearly, as I said at the top of this post, I have forgotten a lot of the process that created the first book as, when I reread The Keepers of the Key (as I do quite often) I am struck over and over by one question: who the hell wrote this?  I recognise my characters and my plot but in many, many places, it feels as though someone else took my ideas and ran with them.

It really is like having a ghost writer that simply steps in and inhabits my body at times, merrily doing as he sees fit with the insides of my head.  Clearly whoever this other chap is knows what he is doing but it would be nice to get a little warning before the bugger decides he is gonna rewrite entire story-lines!

 

So…what’s next?

Well, with the writing done (some time ago if we are brutally honest – editing is quite possibly the most time consuming task the world has ever known – again: more later) what was next?

I foolishly assumed that the hard part was over.  While writing I had kept reading, kept my ear to the ground with what was popular and what was selling and kept a keen eye on what genres and styles had vanished like so mush Scotch Mist.  I thought I was well informed, clued into what the public wanted, ready to sell my work to a publisher safe in the knowledge that I had written something that was fresh, that was relevant, that ticked all the little boxes on their retirement plans.  I was convinced that, given my work was written well enough (Tolkien or Banks I am not – of this I am painfully aware – but I at least know how to use words, how to build sentences, how to create atmosphere and how to define interesting and engaging characters), formatted nicely and neither a million word Neal Stephenson epic (bless him – I’d love to spend 10 minutes in his head – it must be the most fascinating place in the world) nor an over-inflated short story, that I was in with a real chance.

Unfortunately in the few years I had been writing 2 things had happened:

1) eBooks

2) Certain online and high-street stores had taken the legs out from under the publishing industry.

Grasping my freshly printed samples with one hand a huge wedge of self-addressed envelopes in the other, I threw myself into the Writers and Artist’s Yearbook with glee, expecting lively discussion on the merits of my work, a huge wave of rebuttals (either because their ledgers were full, they do not publish work like mine or maybe even ‘cos they found me downright offensive!) and then, eventually, after many tries, maybe a glimmer of interest.

What I actually got was apathy.  Speaking to publishers is entirely akin to trying to have a lively conversation with a co-worker who just got fired and is busily stuffing their personal belongings into a small cardboard box.  My packages were sent back unopened, my carefully chosen (and might I add, cheery and fun) postcards which I dispatched with each manuscript (so that they could bung them in the post, letting me know they had received my work) were “misplaced” and generally all my hard work was casually filed under B1N.

In fact, apathy turned out to be the good response on occasion.  More than once I get a reply from a publisher berating me for even daring to send them my work!

“We don’t deal in such matters here, Mr Howard, and if you had even bothered to read our website, we are certain you would know this.”

Regrettably I am not the kind of person to take stupidity on the chin so I found myself in heated debates with such people, carefully and in painful detail explaining to them that I am not bloody psychic and that if they are going to have ludicrously finickity rules about the types of work they are interested in then it would help if they actually told some bugger about them!

Yes.  Fun.  The upshot was that after sending out to every last publisher in the mighty tome that is the Writers and Artist’s Yearbook who might even have a passing interest in my work (just over 50), I received a grand total of 7 returned postcards, 5 nicely worded rejections (predominantly “sorry, we have too many clients, but good luck to you”), 3 flame-bait emails and 1 utterly heart warming letter from some poor chap down in a forgotten basement of some large publishing corporation who actually took the time to climb out from under the landslide of submissions he was being paid to wade through and say that he loved my work and really wished he could have passed it up the line but that their ledgers were full and they simply would not consider any new authors at this time.

I sent that guy a thank you card.  I like to believe he got it and it made him smile.

18 months well spent then.  So.  Next step: ePublishing!