We all have different approaches. I know one writer who plasters their sitting room wall with an A4 timeline featuring every chapter from one to however many have been planned, and then proceeds to write out everything that is going to occur in each chapter. I'm sort of in awe of this system, but also, not. It's a bit like playing chess. I'm hopeless at the game, being able to plan a couple of moves in advance before wondering how bats decided to hang upside down to sleep, why the mould in Roquefort cheese tastes delicious and not vile as you'd imagine it would, or how electricity really does arrive in a light switch, etc. Give me a game of Pictionary or anything that involves spontaneous action including drawing and laughing a lot, I'm yer dame.
I'm 10,000 words into the new book and although I thought this time I'd really plan stuff out . . . nope, not happening. The main character has stayed fairly consistant to what I had imagined at the outset but the secondary personage has completely morphed into a different sort of psychology, and actually, I like the way it's going. I once read an interview with Stephen King about his writing process, and it was gratifying to realise that he works in a similar way - the minor role housekeeper in one of his novels becoming a lead player which he seemed incapable of changing, for example.
It can be a bit frustrating when trying to imagine the whole universe of a book but then perhaps it's interesting to get distracted by details along the way, and draw subconsciously on the internal library of visual and audible memories one stores away. Inevitably in the second draft, small and major things change and by then the useful framework is set, allowing a feeling of a certain sort of safe place to play around in, knowing the bulk of the serious work is done, the scenes set and the characters corralled . . . mostly.
A small section from my latest novel, and the third in the Londonia series.
Kalistre O
The lock is glitchy again. I faff with the key remembering how easy it was before when with a finger touch the door would glide open. This hastily added slab of wood sits uncomfortably within the frame which in turn looks bizarre rammed into the pale grey plastic walls of my allotted room. That was during the last rounds of lec-fails.
A whistling wood-o had done the rounds of all the sliding doors on this level and had hacked them out, mad max style and replaced them with oddly elegant, dark wood doors. I’d asked him where they had come from. He’d winked: ‘Some old manor house cross the line – they’d all been liminated.’ ‘From what?’ I’d asked. ‘UI generated pox, folks say. Or coudabeen bandits.’
I cross the corridor, weaving between blank-faced pairs of serfs heading towards the assembly hall, and knock on Sassy’s door. She must have sensed me as it opens immediately and her large serene eyes are staring at me in as a doe might have in a wood, when there were such things. I don’t say anything for a few ticks. The deer image is so strong I can smell it.
‘Yos ‘magining again,’ she goads, ‘y, blondy dictichary.’
‘Dictionary.’ I say. ‘Can’t stop it. It’s just the way my mind is. . .don’t you?’
‘What?’
‘Think about stuff outside of here? Trees, clouds, birds . . .what wind would feel like.’
