J P Smythe’s Website.

So, remember the notebook from a few days back?  The one I am was meant to be writing in for this novel was the green one?  Well, I made some notes the other day in the tan paper one, so that has stuck, for the time being.  And I said that I plotted the whole thing?  Well, after writing yesterday – I’m now up to 4931 words, fact fans – I decided to go back over my plan and see where I strayed.  Because, whilst I did plan it, I did it in a way that meant I wouldn’t be following it rigidly, and would stray – I’d use the plan from memory and see where it took me.  Like I said, this is the first time I’ve planned something this rigidly.  

Well, the best laid plans and all that.  Here’s what the first page of the plan looks like now:

So, starting at the top, I have basic character development, and then going down I have some events that have to occur.  This page took up a quarter of the overall plan, but since I began writing I have discovered that it will likely be less than a tenth of the length of the piece overall.  The black pen represents the changes that I made to the plan yesterday evening, after my initial burst of writing.  The flow of the plan has changed, but the basics of the structure have remained.  By the end of the final draft I expect that this page will be almost entirely – bar the opening descriptive paragraphs – bereft of red pen. 

What I also find interesting is how this removes character and boils plot down to something that almost resembles a formula.  Without the grounding of the style of prose, or the other character stuff that is coming out as I write the text, this seems wholly dry and staid.  

*****

My friend, Holly Howitt, has a launch for her collection of microfictions, entitled Dinner Time, at the Hay-On-Wye literary festival this thursday (the 29th).  She’s a quite incredible writer, and fills her work with those moments where the mundane gives way to the terrifying in quite the most beautiful way.  Can’t make it to the festival?  Buy her book here!

Oh, and if you do go to the festival and are wondering how to choose what to see, the Guardian is – as always – your friend.

There are many, many ways to convey time in fictional writing.  Easiest is the simple “later on”, or writing that an events occurs after or prior to something else.  With any narrative voice this can work, simply because you are allowing the reader access to knowledge that the narrator has.  ”What happened between these bits isn’t important,” you are saying.  ”Ignore the time in between.  It’s what happens after this that matters.”

With a first-person present-tense narrator, however, this sort of shifts.  If you are assuming that this person is speaking as events are occurring, and knowing, as you do, that something must have occurred in the space that we aren’t being told about, you wonder what it was.  I – as writer – have deemed this person’s life important enough to talk about, so why are those bits different?  And, further to that, what happens when we open up those spaces?  Do we discover events that could crucially alter our perception of the rest of the text?

I’m settled into the second version of John The Baptist now, and it is totally and utterly different to the first.  I’m only 2270 words in, so it’s super-early days yet, but there is no way it can even slip into the same thing, aside from one crucial fact: the protagonist will be addressing the antagonist of the novel in person, and will be the only person that the antagonist ends up dealing with.  This is designed to open up questions that many recent novels have contemplated concerning identity, as I want the reader to wonder if I am using that now-classic technique of dual identity.  SPOILER: I’m not.  But those spaces in between the passages of narrative suddenly become very important to me (as writer), you (as reader) and to Lawrence (as fictional protagonist).  Because any story that concerns identity has to have the protagonist question theirs, and the very nature of somebody who has gaps in their tale means that they are innately unreliable.  He can tell you what happened in them, but if there is no alibi – if the reader wasn’t there to see it – then it throws that totally open.  His accountability falls squarely on his shoulders.  

But how to write about the passage of time and wrestle the control of that passage away from the first-person present-tense voice?  That’s a tough one.  If it ran as:

I walk over to the front door and wonder where Chen is, and when he’ll be getting here with the rest of the drinks. I do some stuff, and potter around, and suddenly the time has gone, and the party starts.

Four hours later I’m chatting to this woman in the entrance to the kitchen. Her name is Laura, and she’s Scottish, which means we immediately have something almost in common.

Well, that’s an issue.  He has just told you that four hours have passed, but he doesn’t bother to tell you where he is.  I want to keep track of the time, but there’s no way to do that unless somebody tells you, so I have chosen to break the flow of time with a secondary narrative device.  The text actually reads like this:

I walk over to the front door and wonder where Chen is, and when he’ll be getting here with the rest of the drinks.

FOUR HOURS LATER

I’m chatting to this woman in the entrance to the kitchen. Her name is Laura, and she’s Scottish, which means we immediately have something almost in common.

He – Lawrence – has zero accountability for where he was, because I – as the writer – have torn that away from him.  That gap of time is where I have decided you don’t need to know what has happened, and it means that when he tells you what happened – if he ever does – you are, in theory, more confused as to whether to believe him or not.  And some of the gaps are far longer – there is one before this is that is TWO WEEKS LATER, and one after it that is ONE HOUR LATER.  By allowing me to present Lawrence’s life as vignettes, almost, I can both show and hide what is important far more easily.

Can anyone tell me where this has been done this way before?  

So, as you know, I am writing a thing called El Lobo De Plata Vs. John The Baptist.  It’s a three-part novel: one part is the tale of this Mexican wrestler, one part is the tale of a serial killer, and the final part is the tale of the two of them together, and also The Press.  It’s mostly about heroes and villains, and what we see as being different to what is actually happening.  Anyway, I want the first two sections to work together but to be extant – you can read them without reading either of the other two and bang, you have a great novel on its own.  Theoretically.  

So, this post concerns the John The Baptist stuff.  He is a serial killer, and I wanted to originally tell his side of the story as traditional crime fiction – that is, his stuff runs through it, but it is really the story of the detective that is pursuing him, like (nearly) all crime fiction.  But as time has gone on I have gotten sick of the detective conceit.  I really find it tired when I am trying to tell this as part of a bigger whole, so I started to think about ways in which a serial killer story can be told without a) the main character being the killer and b) it resorting to Lector-esque horrors.  I wanted this to be something more human, where you can almost empathise with this guy, but not by being near him, per se, but by seeing his vilification in effect.  

After weeks of worrying this, over and over, I think I’ve finally got it.  Last night I was watching The Apprentice and I started thinking, well, hang on, why do I have to have this being an issue?  Why can’t I just write something, and the serial killer is a part of it?  What if there is a way for a character to actually start to build a relationship with a serial killer through the press alone, simply by virtue of his reading about him and seeing reports on tv about him?  

So, I’ve started writing a story about New York – a place I am fixated upon in my writing, for some reason – I suspect because of the research I did for the first novel – and the people that live in it, and the terror that could occur if there is a killer at large when the police have absolutely no idea who he is or where he will strike next.  But it isn’t about that: it’s about a man and his divorce and his drunkard daughter and his own terrifying identity crisis.  

There is a reason for me telling you this, however, in terms of my own process: I have planned the whole thing.  I don’t usually plan. I planned Hereditation from the middle of the book, and ignored most of the planning I did.  I haven’t planned the El Lobo De Plata section of this novel at all – that is just flowing freely.  But this bit I have planned meticulously.  I have bullet points, character names, time scales, plans for different character arcs, and all before I have written a word of text.  I have no idea if I can work this way, but this afternoon I wrote the opening section and I love it.  If you are interested, right now it is First Person Present Tense, which I have never written anything in before, so I’m enjoying that.  

Apparently, these are of vital importance to writers.  ”Write down EVERYTHING that feels like an idea,” I tell my students, and they don’t.  I do.  I currently have four notebooks on my desk.  All are Moleskines.  Here’s what they look like and what I write in them.

That one on the end was a gift from my girlfriend for my birthday, and has been embossed.  I am absolutely terrified to write in it.  This is important, as I mark everything, usually, like a dog.

Every time I get something to write in/on, I write something on it to spell what that thing is going to do. This computer, for example – I wrote a section of my first novel, Hereditation – a chapter about a man called Quaid Sloane, which ended up being one of my favourite things from that novel.  Here’s a bit of it, if you care:

Italy agreed with Quaid, and he grew fat and complacent over the months that he searched for the woman that he knew he would marry.  Eventually he found the publishers of the calendar in Rome and they pointed him down a side street, to a small diagonal house that barely 
stood.  Quaid knocked on the door and when she answered – and she looked better in person, he thought – he went down on one knee and showed her the enormous diamond ring that he had to offer her.  She saw the ring and his clothes and said “Si”.   

They traveled back to America the next day, and married on the ship.  At night they would lie next to each other as they didn’t speak.  Quaid wondered, out loud, if they would have anything to talk about if they could.  Then, ten days into their trip Quaid’s new wife – he thought her name was Filomena, but it could have been a variation, her accent was so thick and impenetrable – sat with him on the bed before they slept.  She kissed him on the side of his face, on his unkempt sideburns, and he could feel her saliva in the hairs.  They had sex then, sex that neither of them would ever remember, frantic and disquieting.  This was how Ezra was conceived.   

During Filomena’s pregnancy she learnt American (Quaid refused to call it English, so proud was he of his heritage).  Her favorite word was “Tomato”. 

And that set a tone for the rest of the novel.  I was a hefty chunk in – 11 thousand words when I got the computer –  but that was only far enough (in the way that I write) to really establish character and basic pacing of the novel.  That chapter decided upon a broader tone – that of a slightly more sarcastic and damning narrator than I had first conceived, one who was more willing to judge.  

And voice is on my mind, right now.  I am writing this new thing, this El Lobo De Plata thing, and the novel is in danger of taking a different voice than the one that I started with.  Trouble is, I love the one that I started with.  The novel is intended to be in three sections – here is the first paragraph from one of those.  

His father was a proud man, and when his mother abandoned them for a mining captain he decided to maintain a façade of the ordinary for the sake of his son.

“She is at the shop!” he would claim when Hector asked about her. “She has gone to Church, where she will pray to have her sins wiped clean!” For three months Senor Chavez kept the act up, and Hector didn’t realise. His mother was, for the most part, a mysterious woman. When he had been seven she had spent the three months immediately following Christmas cooking only food where the primary ingredient was soft, white flour.

“It will make your body strong,” she told him when he complained, and then showed him a sketch that she made which explained that white flour was the primary component of human bones. When, two months later she began to make only fruit based concoctions he asked her where the flour had gone. He told her that he wanted his bones to grow strong.

“There was a mistake in the research labs,” she told him as she kneaded plums under her knuckles, “and flour had no effect. For now, the thing that will work is the fruit.” She gave him an apricot, and that was the end of the discussion. 

I am thinking about this one in ways that I hate myself for thinking, concerned with frontloading the novel with excitement, and with things designed to make the reader  - in this case, and every case until I get one, I think, an agent – want to read more.  It’s an easy mistake to make, as a writer, and I am making it.  I know that I am making it.  I can sit here right now and say that I wonder about whether, were I to have rearranged Hereditation, some of the agents who said no might have said yes.  I can’t help but wonder.  It started, as I have grown fond of saying, with a conversation littered with casual racism between characters about getting shoes mended.  I wouldn’t read that, I don’t think.  

[So, we've gone somewhere other than notebooks.  That's fine.]

With most agents in the UK you get the chance to send them 3 chapters of your novel.  Or, rather, you get to send them the first 3 chapters.  And, based upon those chapters they work out whether they want to read any more.  But it’s tough: one of my replied said that they loved it -the three chapters, that is – but not enough to take it on.  And that love didn’t even make them want to read the rest, as they have too much to read.  So, you think about that open: cold or hot? soft or hard? There’s that hateful idea that the first line of a novel is the most important – that’s rubbish, by the way, utter rubbish – but I think, with agents, you can extend that to the first chapter.  Because if you don’t have them you have lost them.

So, for the last 2 copies I sent off to agents I mixed things up.  I changed that conversation about cobblers (LITERALLY LOL ETC) to be the second chapter, and added a prologue that was actually a bastardised and edited version of the final chapter.  It means that the concept of INTRIGUE is established from the get-go, and will hopefully will one of those two agents on to read more.  Hopefully.  

So, when thinking about this next novel, I am really thinking about how to grab the reader.  I hate gimmicks and stuff, and don’t want it to be a pointless grab, but there are ways, I think, to ensure that the reader wants to carry on reading, above and beyond Good Writing.  

Hm.

*****

This is going to be a rocky road, I’ve realised, for you and for me.  I think that we’ll get there, but you’ll have to stick with it, and that might mean reading more about MY creative process than perhaps you think is necessary.  Still, we’ll get there in the end, right?  Right?

I’m going to try and do this, then: this thing of making note of how I am writing what I am writing. This is awfully presumptive, and more than a little bit egotistical, assuming that anyone else might find what I am writing of interest, but I am hoping to really delve into the creative process here in a way that is utterly reflective of literary criticism movements of today. I’ll be looking at how this works for me, and for you, potential reader, and seeing where we can hopefully meet.

So, I shall start at the start. The plan for the novel is that it will be titled El Lobo De Plata Vs. John The Baptist, which is the title of a novel that I would buy in a heartbeat. It started around two years ago – the idea, that is – when I got a new notebook, an ordinary brown moleskin (“Gosh! I am a writer!” etc etc), and wrote a quote in it that popped into my head. At the time I was planning a short story set around a luchadore wrestling match, diving in and out of the match to tell you about their lives. Whatever, right? So, I wrote this thing, just what I thought would be a two sentence prologue to the tale. Here it is.

Now, I’m fallible, I get that, and the quote wasn’t meant to be LITERATURE, per se. Rather, it was meant to evoke a slightly clunky and archaic battle by immediately giving the reader an overly scripted language.

This is nearly moot: this isn’t the novel. There is a character called Hector, but doesn’t share that surname. But this is the first seed, and this was where it was sown.

*****

Eli over at Novelr has written a post about why you probably shouldn’t write a fictional blog. I agree with him, nearly. Write some fiction, see if it is good. Is it appropriate for internet posting? Want to post it on the internet? Great! Do it. Don’t force the form into the format and all manner of other evils.

Also, I posted this on my tumblr the other day, but it deserves more views: 

| View | Upload your own

It is taken from the Penguin Blog – the first Business-driven blog I have ever added to my RSS feeder, fact-fans, simply because it is frequently interesting – and it funny and true.  

I am shin-deep into a new novel.  This means nothing, as yet, given that the first one I wrote isn’t yet published, and the second is sort-of-nearly-finished, but I hate it, so let’s not worry too much about it.  This one, however, could be really good.  It’s a novel that I’ve been planning/tinkering at for a while, and is the dual-stories of a Mexican Wrestler and a Serial Killer, all framed around the effect that the press has upon our – that is, ORDINARY PEOPLE’s – perceptions of the famous. I like it.  It’s full of magic and violence and comedy and horror, like all the best things in life, and it will hopefully – when finished – bridge a lovely gap between literary fiction and genre fiction in that way that people love to do at the moment.

But I’m sort of stuck, and sort of aimless, and I want to do something with the internet, more than just occasionally post images I like to tumblr and updating my twitter.   So I’m thinking of making this my main blog – I love writing in it, for some reason – and constantly providing an update of what I am doing and why.  For the first novel, and for the PhD, I wrote a Director’s Commentary, as it were, of what I was doing.  This proposed blog would be more like those little documentaries you get as DVD extras, insights into logics, characters, techniques – things you either find interesting or you don’t.  I love them.

So, this sounds like it would be fun for me, and might be interesting for you, also.  I’ve been looking for an excuse to start my blog up and running again, and I think this may be it.  Thoughts? Opinions?