From 7th October, I’ll be leading True Voyage Is Return, a literary experiment which turns The Exchange, University of Birmingham’s city centre public engagement space, into a hub for new writing. Every Monday, two different professional writers will each join me to produce new pieces in a week. There’s a public callout inviting submissions of new work from across the region. There’ll also be writers’ surgeries and panel talks and (eventually) an anthology and a podcast.
Alongside managing all of that, I’ve courageously/foolishly (delete as you see fit) committed to writing a novel of at least 90,000 words in the space of a calendar month (7th October to 7th November). Most days, I’ll be writing in full view of visitors and cafe customers at The Exchange. I’m terrified and exhilarated at the same time. My blog posts throughout this period will focus on documenting this experience as the project progresses and as the new book, I hope, takes shape. I really, really, really hope it does take shape!
So, end of Week 2, and my current overall total word count, for fans of such things, is 53,854, which means I’ve written 29,718 words this week. (For stats lovers, here goes: Monday: 4,469; Tuesday: 7,453 (because I stayed late); Wednesday: 3,608; Thursday: 4,561; Friday: 4,891; Saturday: 4,736).
And for context, I’m (only) halfway through Chapter 7. There are still 23 planned chapters in total, plus prologue and epilogue. This draft could be on course to land somewhere between 175,000 and 200,000 words. This is, of course, commercial madness for an unpublished author’s second novel, whose first unpublished novel is itself just over 150,000 words long. Will I ever learn to write economically? Not this year, I won’t.
Obsolete Constellations is going well. Even though I’ve been ill all week (a combination of writing hard, project management responsibilities, early mornings, lack of sleep, not eating properly, not drinking enough, a 50-minute each-way walk to work in variable weather), I’ve been powering on and have felt at ease with the writing. The synopsis has not just been a roadmap; it’s become a lifeline, a trail of breadcrumbs through what could otherwise have been a dark and impenetrable forest. It’s taking me down a much longer path than I’d expected, but I’m content to go where it leads, however much time it takes.
It’s been an interesting week on a technical level. I’m extremely aware of how much dialogue there is in the chapters I’ve written so far — much too much, I think — which has been a surprise to me; perhaps it’s a residue of twenty years’ writing for theatre. You can take the writer out of the theatre, but can you ever take the theatre out of the writer?
It’s helping me illustrate quirks of individual characters, which are very satisfying to write — their vocabulary choices, sentence length and complexity, their simple style or their verbosity. Even better, given that the book features different cultures and multiple languages, much is revealed by how much or how little each character knows of languages other than their native one.
My main character is an arrogant TV historian who frequently travels to worlds beyond his own, but his inability to say much in other languages beyond simple greetings or thanks, or to order whisky and club sandwiches in the hotels he visits, tells us a lot about him as a person — his self-importance, his presumption that other people will always make accommodations for him, and a lack of real empathy or understanding for those around him. Suffice to say, over the course of the novel, his experiences send him on a journey of change, as he learns (the hard way) about the impact his actions have on those closest to him, as well as on the fate of four worlds, and as he starts making intentional choices to behave differently.
I also wrote my first ever sex scenes this week. This blog is not about to confront you with any prurient details, but it has been a massive object-lesson in the writing of sentences, which I’m keen to share. Every aspect of these scenes could be viewed as a template for the kind of questions we need to ask ourselves about every single thing we write.
Whose perspective are we writing from? There are two men involved in these sexual encounters, for example: if I’d been writing in first person, whose viewpoint would I have chosen to experience it from? That choice would have been crucial in determining the tone and the language I used, and also as a result, in shaping the reader’s response to the scene based on how they felt about that particular character: crudely put, if they liked them or if they didn’t would make a big difference to how they reacted to that scene.
Because I’m writing in omniscient third person, I was able to observe these two men from an intimate distance, with privileged access not just to the physical interaction between them, but also to the sensations, emotions and thoughts in each of their bodies and brains. Vocabulary again became really important: the verbs and nouns someone taking part in a sexual encounter might use are very different from the ones a writer not taking part in the encounter might use. Who is doing what to whom, and what they are doing it with — shorter and more charged words if you’re involved with the action, longer and more neutral words if you’re watching from the sidelines — all make a difference.
It was also the most literal confrontation I’ve had with the essential principle (absorbed from Joe Moran’s brilliant book First You Write A Sentence) about how sentences relate to one another on a fundamental level. The sentence I’m writing now (and that you’re reading now) must propel itself forward into the next one. The full stop functions like a springboard to bounce both of us from the unit of thought in Sentence A into the next unit of thought in Sentence B.
Within a sequence of action like a sex scene, there’s an obvious and straightforward sense of progression, from anticipation to first kiss to the intricacies of whatever happens next and on to the climax (literary and physiological) and then the uncoupling, as the participants reconfigure their post-coital connection and as the writer sends the narrative in whatever direction it needs to go from there. My writing had to recognise and embrace that as I crafted every individual sentence.
It’s been a good reminder to keep applying that principle diligently to every other sentence I write in the book, even when people aren’t having sex (which, I can tell you now, only happens three times in total, and two of those times have already been and gone by Chapter 7.) I’ve got a LOT more sentences to write — I might hit 75,000 words by next weekend — and it’s important for me to find the fun and the flow that keeps me moving inexorably towards the end, by making sure that every single sentence does its job of propelling the story, the novel and my characters forward, all the way to the final full stop on the very last page.
