Gottle of geer

"Find your voice!" the writing handbooks say.  Which is fair enough.  But there's more.

"Find the voice of your characters!"  OK, yes, reading it back they seem to be distinct personalities.  Next.

"Find your narrative voice!"

Ah.

Looking for Buttons was written in the first person, narrated by Kate, the central character.  I like first person narrative, I like its immediacy and intrinsic bias.  It's why I prefer Ice Station Zebra to Where Eagles Dare, although filmwise I'd call it the other way.  (Yes, I do realise that writers of romantic comedy do not as a rule cite Alistair MacLean as their writing inspiration, but I am nothing if not, erm, yes, you could say odd.)  The Difficult Second Novel, which has more in common with MacLean and Adam Hall than with Looking for Buttons, has a first person narrative.  So, first problem - does the narrator of the DSN sound too much like Kate, i.e. do both books in fact just sound like me?

The Difficult Third Novel is shaping up to follow Looking for Buttons into the chick lit genre, but it's written in the third person, with an all-seeing impartial narrator (a bit like David Attenborough, only without the charm and erudition).  Reading it back, it's OK, but it's not quite right.  So, second problem - should I rewrite it from the point of view of the central character and see if that sorts it out?  Which itself brings me to the third problem, which is actually the first problem all over again.

I feel I should draw a flow chart at this point, but that's just the latent scientist in me, and if I sit quietly with my copy of Doctor Faustus for a minute the feeling will pass.

It's not enough just to put words on a page in the right order.  You've got to throw your voice at the same time.  But if you don't get it right it turns into a boomerang and comes back to clout you round the ear.

It's enough to drive you to drink a gottle of geer.

Beginning at the beginning (or perhaps not)

I think I'm going to have to start a blog notebook in which to jot down all those wise and witty observations on the writing process that come to me when I'm clearing out the attic or wiping down worktops.  It would save a lot of time spent gazing at a blank screen with a mind that is even more so when I come to post something.

Having said that, occasionally what passes for my mind does throw the right thing up at the right time.  And time is what this post is all about.

Where does a book start?  Page one?  The first page after all the copyright declarations and the dedication to the author's mum?  Or does it start somewhere in the middle?

This isn't going to turn into a musing on the nature of space and time, even though I did finally get round to watching the BBC's docudrama on Stephen Hawking last night (to my consternation, I caught myself thinking there wasn't enough physics in it for my liking; obviously I'm more of a scientist at heart than I realised).  No, big bang theory and superstrings aside, I'm wondering how much the first paragraphs you write influence the rest of the book.

I don't necessarily mean the beginning of the story.  Looking For Buttons started with a young woman trapped at a party she didn't want to attend.  I wanted to know how she'd got there.  Several years later, the book was finished and, yes, the scene did make the final cut.  It's the set piece of Chapter Nine.  By the time I'd written the preceding eight chapters, I knew how the book would end and it was more or less a case of joining the dots until I reached the final line.

The book I'm supposed to be working on now sprang from watching a 60s spy show and disagreeing with how the hero dealt with a sticky situation.  My somewhat less than heroic protagonist deals with a similar situation in quite another way and does so in Chapter One.

As I flounder partway through Chapter Ten, I wonder whether this is the problem.  With Looking For Buttons, I knew where I was going and just had to find where to begin the journey.  With the new book, I got where I was going almost before I'd begun.  Maybe this is why it's taking me so long to get anywhere else.

Luckily, I have another scene in my head from much later in the story, as vivid as the reruns of The Professionals they're showing in the afternoons at the moment.  So all I've got to do now is strike out in that direction and hope it points me towards the end...

Getting Le Carré'd away*

For a writer of romantic(ish) fiction, I have a deep and possibly incongrous passion for Cold War spy thrillers.  Before I start rhapsodising about Adam Hall's Quiller series and the delights of early Alistair MacLean, let me explain how this relates to the writing process.

In 1974, John le Carré launched the first part of his Karla trilogy, pitting the British spymaster George Smiley against his enigmatic Soviet opposite number.  The book was, of course, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.  Hence my modus operandi for getting my book up to scratch:

Tinker... until everthing's just right.

Tailor... the work to your audience.

Soldier... on until you get published.

Spy... go and celebrate publication by reading The Scorpion Signal with a nice cup of tea and a packet of Fruit Gums.

While step four is somewhat personal to a thirty-something aspiring writer with a crush on a fictional secret agent and a weakness for PG Tips and Fruit Gums, I think the first three are good tenets to write by (or by which to write, if I'm going to have a crack at not battering the English language around the ankles with my prose).

The problem I'm having at the moment is Tinkering.  Looking For Buttons has been coming together for a few years now and has gone through seven drafts.  I give it a read through before I approach a new agent and sometimes I change things before it goes out.  I need to know when to stop.

But how?


* é appears courtesy of Lexi Revellian, who told me which keys to press (thank you!).