Writing: A User Manual

A practical guide to planning, starting and finishing a novel

David Hewson

• Publisher: A&C Black Academic and Professional
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781408157411
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Creative Writing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

You are a writer and you have a killer book idea. When your project starts to take off you will find yourself managing a writhing tangle of ideas, possibilities and potential potholes. How do you turn your inspiration into a finished novel? Writing a User's Manual offers practical insight into the processes that go into writing a novel, from planning to story development, research to revision and, finally, delivery in a form which will catch the eye of an agent or publisher.
David Hewson, a highly productive and successful writer of popular fiction with more than sixteen novels in print in twenty or so languages, shows how to manage the day to day process of writing.
Writers will learn how to get the best out of software and novel writing packages such as Scrivener, which help you view your novel not as one piece of text, but as individual linked scenes, each with their own statistics, notes and place within the novel structure. As you write, you will need to assemble the main building blocks to underpin your artistry: story structure; genre - and how that affects what you write; point of view; past, present or future tense; software for keeping a book journal to manage your ideas, research and outlining; organization and more.
The advice contained in this book could mean the difference between finishing your novel, and a never-ending work in progress. An essential tool for writers of all kinds. Foreword by Lee Child.

Part 1
Plan

Books don’t come into the world out of nowhere, even if it seems that way sometimes, to the author as much as the reader. Something must happen that makes an individual think: I want to become a writer.

A sudden yearning for easy riches?

I hope not. You’ll probably be disappointed.

Celebrity?

Think about it. How many bestselling authors would you recognise if you saw them in the street?

Books come from somewhere else. An odd, subterranean desire to invent stories, to play with your own imagination and share the results with the world at large. There’s no point in trying to analyse the creative urge. You either have it or you don’t. But it is worth trying to work out where it comes from, and to set down a few basic strategies for how you intend to pursue the elusive goal of a publishable novel.

Charlie and the Mermaid

Your name is Charlie Harrison. You’re a teenage boy walking in the shadows of a burnt-out pier on the seafront of a run-down English resort, watching shyly from the shore as a pretty girl stares back from the water, the still grey sea up to her waist. She’s wearing a cheap, colourful cheesecloth shirt and her hair is soaking wet as if she’s been swimming. The girl is crying uncontrollably and refuses to come out. She seems to want to say something but she can’t quite bring herself to utter the words. A stray, bizarre thought occurs to you: she’s actually a mermaid, someone stranded and in trouble, for reasons you can only guess at.

An idea, a seed is sown …

All books start like this whether we realise it or not. A sight, a few casually spoken words, a line on a page, an encounter with a stranger. That trigger may lay dormant for years then one day, summoned usually by something you can’t quite place, it emerges. Finally, you say to yourself, ‘I am going to write a book.’

And so a long, strange journey begins, one that ends for so many in failure and frustration. We know intuitively there’s a story inside us somewhere. We have to believe we have a tale worth telling and of sufficient interest to others to make the effort worthwhile.

Why, then, is it so difficult to bring this blurry narrative to light?

In part because we often approach the problem from one direction only, that of writing, of production, of hunting for words to fill the void of a blank page. In our ignorance we think that staring at a dead white monitor will, through some magical intervention, bring forth a solution. We bang our heads against the same hard wall repeatedly wondering why we can never break through. Or if we do get to the other side we wind up asking ourselves what cruel turn of fate made the way ahead just as foggy and impenetrable, as devoid of reason and progress as the grim place we came from.

Writing is never easy, but it can be made less difficult. Some of the answers lie in understanding the process that brought you to the point at which you said, ‘I have a story to tell.’ Starting work on a novel is usually the culmination of years of reading, thinking and dreaming, most of it muddled and unfocused. In other words a hotchpotch of ideas suddenly fighting to come together in the form of a long and convincing narrative.

Books don’t enter the world from a vacuum. Nor can they be shapeless, without some kind of form, structure and direction. Bringing a full-length story to a satisfactory conclusion will require more than a single bright spark of inspiration. You will need to understand the nature of the obstacle course ahead, the skills required to negotiate it and the crucial decisions every writer will face along the way.

The seed is important too, of course.

Who is Charlie Harrison? What is his relationship with the girl in the water? What happens next? What kind of story could a starting point such as this one prompt?

Only one of those questions has an answer at the moment. That’s the last one and it’s dauntingly vague: any kind. This could be the opening for a tale of young love, a thriller, a crime story, even some kind of fantasy or gothic horror. The seeds for books are the same as those in your garden. You can never know what might emerge from that small brown husk when all you see is a tiny green shoot just starting to poke its way out of the top. Rose or thistle? Precious flower or not-so-welcome weed?

The temptation, always, is to seek the answer by sitting down at the keyboard and hoping some revelation will flow from your fingers. You may be desperate to get that first page out of your head and on to the screen – and if you are, then do it. Perhaps you’ve written it already and started to wonder … what next?

To finish a book, though, you need, at some stage, to walk away from the computer and try to think through some of the long and complex tasks ahead.

Don’t worry. The words in your head won’t disappear overnight. Why should they? If this is your first book they’ve been festering inside you for years, hidden away, murmuring in the dark, nagging you one day to try your hand at writing. They’ve been patient for a long time already. They can wait.

A Writing frame of Mind

I said in the Introduction that this book was divided into three sections representing the different phases of producing a book, its planning, its writing and finally, its delivery. The section titles you see here differ slightly, however, and say simply: ‘Plan’, ‘Write’, ‘Deliver’.

Why? Because words matter. An appreciation of their subtle power is vital for anyone who seeks to use them. ‘Writing’, ‘planning’ and ‘delivery’ are all nouns, static, descriptive terms we use to denote things. This is fine for a description of how a book is organised. But a section title is an invitation to dive in and act. So instead I use verbs here, exhortative ones in this context that could just as easily be written as ‘Let’s Plan’, ‘Let’s Write’, ‘Let’s Deliver’.

Verbs are anything but stationary. They denote movement, vitality, effort and dynamism, all attributes that will be needed to see you through the difficult and testing task ahead. Self-doubt and negativity are not just threats to the completion of any writing project. They’re an insidious poison that will seep into the text itself, instilling in it a dismal and pervasive mood visible to the reader.

Any book is a massive undertaking requiring commitment, skill, determination and an extraordinary amount of perspiration. Most people with half a feel for language and fiction can write a thousand words or so to kick off a story. Many can make it to some kind of mid-point. A few get to the end, and a small number of those few will manage to do so with sufficient dexterity to attract the attention of a publisher and see the fruits of their imagination reach, finally, the pages of a finished book. Of those only a handful will still be seeing their work published a decade or more after their debut and truly lay claim to the title ‘professional author’.

Is it talent that separates the career writer from the amateur? Up to a point. But attitude, energy and resolve matter as well, which is why those section titles are active verbs not immobile, descriptive nouns. Creating a book may appear a solitary, cerebral activity from the outside. Beneath the surface it’s a vibrant, exciting and immensely ambitious exercise, one that demands those traits of an author too. Successful writers don’t sit down to start something. They set out intent on finishing it. You need to find the same enthusiastic doggedness in yourself.

Like the books they write, authors are a heterogeneous mix, some private, some extrovert, some deeply ingrained in academia, a few (this one, for example) with scarcely an educational qualification to their name. They do, however, tend to share some similar personal characteristics.

Here are a few. Some, you will note, are contradictory, but this is a profession of eternal paradoxes.

SELF-MOTIVATED. Most of us write our first book with little if any support or clear idea of what we’re doing. Even established authors are, for the most part, lone operators, dependent on their own imagination for their ideas. You need to be able to analyse the problems you meet and find solutions without much in the way of outside help. Even when you have an agent and publisher you will find it’s not their job to fix your career beyond advice and guidance. No one can write that book but you. If you’re the kind of person who can’t start work until you see the boss casting his beady eye in your direction something has to change.

FOCUSED. Writing requires intense concentration often to the exclusion of matters that, seen from the viewpoint of a non-writer, may appear more important. You could find yourself forced to write on planes and trains to keep up your work rate or locked in a room in your home with the sound of children in the next room and the noise of traffic outside. You will have to accustom yourself to devoting your leisure hours at the computer to work, not browsing the wastelands of Facebook and Twitter. This is a vocation for the single-minded and the obsessive.

INDUSTRIOUS. A novel may involve 150,000 words of raw text or more, research, editing, revision, liaison with editors, the occasionally fun but always time-consuming round of marketing and events. If you want to write full time in mainstream popular fiction you will usually be expected to deliver at least a book a year and risk losing your foothold on the sales slots if you’re late or turn out something unexpected or not up to standard. Anyone looking for a secure and comfy job with long holidays need not apply.

PATIENT. Finished manuscript to book on sale may take two years or more from the moment a work is bought by a publisher. Add another year to that for the mass-market paperback edition if you first come out in hardback. In translation we’re talking many years more. Should your book be optioned for film or television it may be a decade before you know whether there is any chance of the project being green-lighted into production. Nothing you can do will shorten any of these processes. Accept all this and use the waiting time wisely. There is no better way than writing another book.

OPEN TO CRITICISM. First-time author or old pro, your work will be judged by others and usually found wanting in some way. How do you react? Do you throw up your hands in horror and scream, ‘But this is my book, not yours?’ Or do you listen to the wisdom of people who have been in the business for years and have a very clear idea of what does and doesn’t work? Writing involves constant learning. Even with sixteen or so books under my belt I discover something new with every fresh project. Successful authors pick up more from their mistakes than their successes. Smart ones ask a first-time editor, ‘Tell me how to make this book better, please,’ not, ‘Tell me I’m clever and that you won’t change a word.’

OBSERVANT. Books, ultimately, are about people and the universe they inhabit, about the creation of fictional characters who pass as real human beings and fictional worlds that are authentic enough to convince the reader they exist. You will never be able to achieve this small miracle unless you have the ability to listen to and try to understand the people around you, and to make notes constantly about what you hear and see and how that might affect your writing.

THICK-SKINNED. Few of us escape rejection at some stage. Those who go on to be published are often later happy to admit they should be grateful for their early rebuffs. Many books will be ignored by the critics and find little in the way of shelf space in a shop. Occasionally you will be subject to filthy reviews, particularly from the new army of so-called web critics, and rarely achieve much in the way of sales. If you crave instant public adulation or if disappointment dims your ardour, your writing career is likely to be brief and dispiriting.

REALISTIC. A sensible author understands that they are unlikely to be the next Lee Child or John Grisham, that Spielberg will not option their book, and that bestsellerdom normally takes many years and several books if it happens at all. He or she will be aware that it is an enormous achievement simply to be published, and that every book needs to be regarded as a stepping stone to a brighter future, not some desperate one-shot chance at stardom.

AMBITIOUS. You must aim high, craving a chance to sell more titles and write better books. If you don’t believe in yourself why should your agent and publisher?

SELF-CRITICAL. It’s no use trying to convince yourself that everything you write is wonderful. A serious author should be the first to find fault with their work and, whenever possible, correct that before passing a manuscript on to an editor. We all write rubbish sometimes. It’s of absolutely no consequence provided we recognise it for the drivel it is and do our best to ensure it’s never inflicted on others.

Is it reasonable to expect a novice to possess all these from the outset? No. You pick them up over the years. But you can prepare yourself for what lies ahead in some very simple ways. The first is the most obvious and pleasurable of all. Which brings us to the last universal quality to be found in all those who write for a living …

Well-read.

In order to write Books You have to Read Books

The publishing business likes to focus more on the positive than the negative. So here’s a truth you hear rather too rarely. Agents everywhere are drowning in unsolicited manuscripts from hopeful writers that are so bad they make the poor souls who receive them want to weep.

Not bad in the sense that they’re sub-standard. Bad in the sense that they are pitiable, dreadful efforts that can only have come from the minds of people who simply don’t read books at all.

Are there really individuals out there who think you can be a writer without also being a reader?...