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 3, and my current overall total word count is 81,245, which means I’ve written 27,391 words this week. (For my loyal stats fans, here goes: Monday: 4,932; Tuesday: 5,182; Wednesday: 4,964; Thursday: 4,528; Friday: 4,381; Saturday: 3,404).
I’m now approaching the halfway point of Chapter 11, so getting very close to halfway through the entire book. I was, as I’ve repeatedly said, supposed to be writing a completed 90,000-word novel within a month. I now estimate that the final word count of this draft will be around the 180,000 mark, and will need at least fifteen more days of (unpaid) writing beyond 7th November. You can see just how spectacularly far the mission has drifted — but as every writer knows, what you plan and what you do are often two very different things.
Plotting the graph of the word counts for this week would tell you something obvious — I’m flagging. I wake up before my 7am alarm almost every day, edgy, in a fuzzy state of mild and unspecific panic. It’s getting harder to get out of bed in the mornings, and when I do get to work and I’ve got the practicalities of set-up done, it’s getting harder to start writing — the moment of sitting down and putting pen to paper for the first time each day has become less joyous, and a bit more onerous. Once I’ve been at it for a bit, it’s okay, but most mornings now, the engine is very reluctant to start. My fingers, too, are unhappy at being bound in a layer of compression plaster for hours each day. The broken, blistered skin and the growing pen dent don’t feel like the scars of any great victory at the moment. (The over-use of ‘get’ in this paragraph should be enough to show you how worn out I am.)
I have transitioned from Part One of the book — The Visitors — into Part Two of the book — Voyage. (Yes, they are all named after travel-themed ABBA albums, so Part Three will be Arrival, and Part Four, giving you some clues as to how things turn out, is Waterloo.) Because I’ve printed the synopsis sections for each part on different coloured paper, I’ve now progressed from orangey-gold to bright pink. (Voyage is on green, and Waterloo on blue.)
This means my main characters have all now been introduced — the arrogant TV historian who is our hero, or better to say protagonist, because he has plenty of room for improvement; the translator who is his feisty love interest, a role traditionally occupied by a woman in romance narratives, but here, it’s a man; and the Head of Homeland Security who is the villain, or better to say antagonist, because for all his many faults, he is not cartoonishly evil, but a complex man with entrenched beliefs.
There is a fourth character hovering over the action — thought about, remembered, often talked about, very present but not yet seen — the protagonist’s wife, better to say his ex-wife, for they are separated but not divorced. She will only appear once, in Chapter 23. The last chapter. This is not to diminish her in any way. I have envisaged two further novels in the sequence of telling this full story, and trust me, she will come into her own when I write them. I had a realisation this week of just how instrumental she must become to the entire arc of the three books. But that’s all for another time.
I’m now getting to the stage where I am required to write characters whose attitudes, opinions and experiences do not correspond to my own, in three primary and overlapping areas: sexuality, religion and politics. I can already feel myself using my protagonist as an elevated mouthpiece for some of my own personal values on these subjects. That heavy hand will need to exercise a much lighter touch in future drafts. What’s getting trickier now, but what is proving to be most satisfying and enriching for me as a writer, is getting to grips with the thoughts, words and actions of the characters whose outlook I do not agree with.
The love interest is a person of ingrained but conflicted faith, whereas the antagonist is a white supremacist and a homophobe (an inadequate word, but probably the best we currently have, for someone who is hateful of and intolerant towards queerness and queer people — and while I’m aware that queer is itself an inadequate word sometimes, I’m using it here because that is the catch-all term for anything non-heterosexual that is used by the peoples and cultures depicted in the book.)
I’ve been dimly remembering, but have been unable to track down, something Jimmy McGovern said about the importance of writing with rigour and care for those characters whose perspectives and behaviours we find challenging, and who it would be easy, tempting and expected for a writer to write in ways that demonise them, trivialise them or keep them as one-dimensional monsters.
The examples I seem to remember him mentioning were a paedophile and a strike-breaker — wildly divergent on one level, but on the writing level, not different from each other at all. For those characters to come alive, for them to serve and be served by the story — as all well-crafted characters must — they had to be given the space to express the truth of who they were through the things they said and the things they did. It was McGovern’s job as the writer to facilitate that, no matter how unrelatable they may have been to him, or how repellent their choices and actions may have been.
The current and next few chapters of Obsolete Constellations will require me to tackle the antagonist’s social and sexual politics, whereas the love interest’s religious beliefs (touched upon briefly in Chapter 3) and those of his home planet’s culture will be addressed more fully in Parts Three and Four, where they become vital motors of the action, as well as explorations of character and setting.
It’s demanding work, putting myself inside heads filled with thoughts I find so profoundly hard to understand, but which I need to write about with clarity and authenticity, and without boring or alienating the reader. Maybe this accounts for some of the tiredness this week and the reluctance to start writing some days. Maybe it also explains the 3.30pm cups of hot chocolate I’ve been reaching for to keep me going through those last 90 minutes of work before hometime. If you’re venturing out into the deep dark woods, it makes sense to take a few treats along to make the journey a little bit easier.
