Five Lessons From Twenty Books
Whale Fjord is my twentieth novel. Although none has sold as well as my first – Free To Trade, published in 1995 – I believe I have become a better writer over all those years. Of course, it's hard for me to know for sure; you will be a much better judge of that!
The other day, I was reflecting on what I have learned in the thousands of hours I have spent writing those twenty books. I came up with several lessons. Here are my top five:
1. Give my unconscious brain space to solve problems. I have never suffered from full-blown writer's block, but I do get stuck sometimes and I hate it. Forcing myself to sit down and keep worrying at a problem until I solve it doesn't work. Neither does drinking a bottle of wine, unfortunately. What does seem to work is writing down the problem on a Friday afternoon, avoiding thinking about it over the weekend and then writing down the solution first thing on Monday morning. This method doesn't always crack the problem – but it usually does.
2. The "quarterly review". A quarter of the way through a novel, after about 20-25,000 words, I stop and read through the book to make sure it's going in the right direction. I think about the characters, the pace, the tone, my original intentions. And then I make changes. This takes 1-2 weeks. I repeat this at the halfway and three-quarters mark, and at the end. Many times this "quarterly review" has brought a novel back on track and I'm sure it saves time on rewriting the second draft.
3. Maximum word count of 2,000 words in a day. From an early stage in my career, I aimed to write an average of 1,500 words a day and a minimum of 1,000. This worked well; if I keep to that target, a book will eventually get written. However, on particularly good days, when the words were flying, I would write 2,500 or even 3,500 words. That felt great, but the following day, when I was reading my work through, I would find that the last few hundred words were rubbish and needed reworking. That bogged me down for the following day's writing. Now, when I'm flying and I reach 2,000 words I stop. I start the following day raring to go and it's much easier to keep up the momentum.
4. Listen to editorial suggestions from editors and agents. This is much easier said than done. When I receive comments back from editors or agents on one of my first drafts, I immediately become defensive. My mind scrabbles about for justifications for the decisions I have taken, for explanations as to why the book is perfect just the way it is. But most criticism from good editors takes the form of pointing out weaknesses in the book; occasionally they suggest, but don't insist on, a possible fix. I tell myself it's better to know about real problems before publication – afterwards is too late! If an intelligent, experienced editor or agent has a problem, so will intelligent readers. So I put the email to one side for three days and then take another look at it. I nearly always address the problems that are raised. I only stick to my guns when I truly believe a change will make my book worse, but I find editors are very happy with that.
5. Whodunnit: don't decide until I come to the ending. There is a "whodunnit" element in most of my books. I try to make whodunnit a surprise for the reader. I find it almost impossible to come up with a really clever whodunnit plot at the outset and then carefully lay the groundwork of misdirection and red herrings before revealing a surprise for the reader. So I've given up. I now write the first draft with a fairly obvious bad guy. Then, when I am almost at the end, I stop and think: "OK. Who else might have dunnit?" At this point, the plot has been buzzing around my head for months, I know my characters intimately and my subconscious is well and truly immersed in the problem: I am much more likely to come up with a really clever twist. Then I go back and add the red herrings and misdirection earlier in the book. It amuses me when occasionally readers tell me they knew x did it from page 50, when I remember planning someone else entirely as the villain when I was writing that page!
These are the five lessons I have learned from my first twenty books. If you were to ask me which was the most important, I think I would answer the first: leaving problems to my subconscious. That's where my best ideas have come from, and I really do hate getting stuck!