Thank you very much to Jen Morgan for passing the
Writing Process Blog tour baton on to me. I've known Jen for several years
through the SCBWI Cambridge social group and through the wonderful Heffers Children's Book
Shop, where she works. Jen is one of those people who does so many things and
does them all so brilliantly that you instantly feel overcome with a sense of
inadequacy! She writes, teaches creative writing, mentors, edits, works in the
book shop, runs the book club, looks after small children . . . I’ve probably
missed half a dozen things. And she manages to be warm and friendly and
supportive to everyone else at the same time. Keep up the good work, Jen!
Jen’s fascinating blog post about stilling the mind
for writing is here:
The format of the post for the Writing Process Blog Tour is to answer three questions and then say something about some aspect of your writing process.
1) What are
you working on now?
I am exactly half way through the first
draft of the second book in a new Middle Grade series called Secrets of the Tombs. The first book, The Phoenix Code, set in Egypt, will be
published by Orion in July. The one I’m working on now is set in China and is called
The Dragon Path.
Like my previous series Adventure Island, these are mystery-based stories in which young
investigators solve puzzling crimes. The new series has an archaeological
theme, with both historical and contemporary elements to the mysteries. As well
as featuring very different characters and settings these books are a bit
fatter and more complex and aimed at the upper end of the Middle Grade age
range of about 9+.
2) Why do
you write what you do?
I write the kind of books that I loved to read as a
child. I devoured any kind of mystery novel – Enid Blyton’s Famous Five and Adventure series were my favourites. In my own books I try to capture that magical combination
of resourceful independent kids zipping about on bikes with only the minimum of
parental involvement, sleuthing and problem solving, getting in and out of
scrapes, eating picnics and putting the world to rights.
3) How does
your work differ from others in the genre?
There’s a great tradition of children's mystery stories, of
course, with Enid Blyton being the best known. The Adventure Island series pays
homage to the past masters, but I hope with an original twist.
For a start, I try to
introduce bucketfuls of humour to offset all the peril and problem-solving. I also enjoy weaving in snippets of science and
history and nature that I find fascinating and just can’t resist sharing. I
also love to introduce readers to amazing words they might not have come across
before (whenever I use words I think readers might not already know I have fun
making sure that the context supports understanding of the word, and I’ll use
it a couple more times later on in the book so it becomes familiar.)
The new series also has its roots in a
well-established tradition; the archaeological adventure – best known through
films such as Indianna Jones and The Mummy. My work differs from many
other books in this genre because there there’s no magic or mythical heroes or super-powers
involved. There are so many great books out there that do that, I couldn't even start to compete!
Just as with the Adventure Island books, I try to
make the characters and situations realistic enough that readers feel ‘this
could actually happen to someone just like me.’ That’s how I felt when I read The Famous Five. Although now I think
about it I did spend much of my childhood in a state of perpetual
disappointment at the distinct lack of kidnappers/smugglers/spies leaving
trails of footprints and cigarette ends for me to follow . . .
Plotting
and The Friday Afternoon Brain Hurricane
I thought
I’d say a bit about my plotting process because that was the part I found most daunting
when I started out, but now it hardly scares me at all and I've actually started to really enjoy it.
With mystery books plot is crucial, of course. There’s a pretty clear expectation that something bad/secret has happened
and the investigators have to solve puzzles and follow clues to find out who
did it and why. So the start of the process is to figure out what The Big Bad Thing
is.
With Adventure
Island, the options are constrained by two main factors: (1) things that
could semi-plausibly happen on a small Cornish island and (2) dastardly deeds that would
interest an 8-12 year old readership, without being (a) sordid and seedy or (b) dull and depressing.
That rules out about 99% of real life crime!
In my new series. Secrets of the Tombs, the location changes with each book, so I
start with a marathon reading session, looking for fascinating archaeological
sites and intriguing historical events. I read like crazy, both fiction and
non-fiction, and conduct long rambling internet searches, jotting down
fascinating facts. I visit lots of museums and I even go and see the place in
person (by clever alignment of family holidays!) And it all counts as work!
This is fun!
Gradually I start to turn pages of scribbled notes
into a plot outline. I always give it the heading Outline but in fact it could be anything up to 10,000 words long.
It’s a bit like calling War and Peace a
novella. I’m wondering whether I
should call this document my First Draft in future. It would make me feel like
the work was almost done before I even started!
I have no special formula for writing this rambling
plot outline. I just start knitting all the pieces together. I've slowly built up a sense how much action and sleuthing fits into, say, a
30,000 word Adventure Island book and
how to distribute the noisy peril scenes and the quieter problem-solving scenes along
the way. Although even after fourteen books I was still trying to cram too much
in every time. And when I started Secrets of the Tombs and moved up to
about double the length I got totally carried away. Not having enough to say is
never a problem!.
This long outline will include snatches of dialogue/jokes/connections
to subplots – anything I want to remember, as I have an atrociously poor memory.
My next job is to distil it down to the bare bones again. Often I’ll end up
with a series of ever-shorter documents ending
with a bullet point version that makes it easier to see the series of events;
perhaps not at a glance, but at least in under a week or two.
The reason that the plot outline is so long – apart
from my pathological inability to get to the point – is that a crime mystery essentially
involves coming up with two plots for one book. The first is the Bottom Story – not, I hasten to add,
because it is about bottoms, or at least, not as a rule - but because it is the
story that lies beneath. It’s the story of what the baddies actually got up to.
This often involves going back many years before the book starts. The
repercussions of past events come back to motivate recent misdeeds (for
example, a tragedy concerning a 1980s rock band leads to the body in the sea
in The Mystery of the Drowning Man;
the wreck of a ship carrying soldiers back from the Boer War leads to the discovery
of a long lost treasure map in The
Mystery of the Hidden Gold.)
Although much of the detail of this story won’t emerge until the denouement
(“oh, that’s why they did it!”) it all needs to be worked out in advance.
Then there is the Top Story: this is the
investigators’ journey from coming across a clue or hearing of an odd occurrence to figuring
out the entire Bottom Story. I think of the relationship between the top and
bottom stories as looking at a scene on stage (bottom story) through a tattered
curtain (top story). The holes in the curtains are the clues that allow the
investigators to peep through and glimpse the reality beneath – solving the
crime involves joining those holes together.
 |
| Bottom Story |
 |
| Top Story |
Once I finally have my plot outline I stick
to it quite closely. I print it out and take with me everywhere through the
next couple of months as I write the first draft. Themes and motifs and jokes start to develop and I’ll go back and weave those in. This means that the
plot outline gets additional comments scribbled all over it.
I love finding connections and themes and quirks as
I go along. These just sort of evolve. I like to have
ripples and echoes running through to give the book a feeling of
roundedness. That probably sounds a bit pretentious for a detective story but
it’s one of the things I enjoy most about writing.
But before I get to the point where I have the
final version of my plot outline that accompanies me through the first draft
there is one more important part of the process – in fact, the most important part of
the process: the Friday Afternoon Brain Hurricane (I told you it took
me a long time to get to the point!)
I’ve been lucky enough to work with my wonderful editor
Amber Caravéo on twenty books now and we've always ironed out the plot the same way. I send Amber my outline and we then spend a Friday afternoon on the phone pulling it to pieces
and putting it back together again. It’s like a brainstorm, only more. It’s Force 12 on the Beaufort
Scale of brainstorms; hence the brain hurricane.
 |
| Every writer needs a brilliant editor! |
This is how it works. At around two o'clock I shut myself in my office.
This is the sign to my family that I am Not To Be Disturbed. The door is open at all other
times. I don’t like being in rooms with closed doors and my office is tiny and also
has to accommodate two large border collies who like to sleep, one under my
desk, one across the doorway, to protect me in case of ambush by a pack of wolves.
Fuelled only by a cup of tea, and with only the
occasional interlude to let cats (Amber)
or dogs (me) in or out,or say hello the postman/window cleaner or shout
instructions to a teenager (me) about where to find their Jimi Hendrix t-shirt
(the words Have you looked in the airing cupboard?
will be engraved on my headstone)* we set to work.
(*Yes, I know. I just said that my family recognise The Closed Door as a sign that they shouldn’t disturb me. What this means, is that they now only alert me in the case of a truly life-or-death airing cupboard malfunction or epic someone’s-had-the-last-pack-of-tortilla-chips-out-of-the-pantry disaster.)
Amber can spot a plot hole at three hundred
paces. Politely and precisely she will ask the killer
questions. Why, for example, would the old pilchard fisher want to steal
the priceless tiara to frame the man who stole his son’s prize chinchilla, if
he knew that the said chinchilla-napper was in prison at the time and so
couldn’t have done it?**
(** However thrilling a pilchard fishing and chinchilla themed mystery may sound this is for illustrative purposes only and not a genuine plot from one of my books (yet!).)
‘Because he . . .er . . .yeah . . . good point.’ My entire
plot is unravelling before my eyes.
‘Ok, maybe chinchilla guy’s not in prison?’ Amber
suggests. ‘He’s just gone on a cycling holiday to Tenerife.’
‘Yes,’ I agree. But then I realise that won’t work.
‘But he needs to be in prison to overhear his cellmate plotting to blow up the old
tin mine.’
‘Ooh! Ooh! I
know, what if . . .’ At this point Amber comes up with a brilliant idea that
totally solves the problem. And, it now occurs to me, leads to another
interesting plot twist that would work perfectly. ‘Ooh! Ooh! I know, what
if . . .’
If the Friday Afternnoon Brain Hurricane had a
catchphrase, this would be it: Ooh! Ooh!
I know, what if.
We are usually done within three hours, although some particularly thorny plot issues in The
Mystery of the Missing Masterpiece took us, I remember, nearer to four.
Somehow we always arrive at a point where the story
seems to work. The chinchilla is back with its rightful owner and the tin mine
disaster has been averted at the very last second. Hooray!
I hang up and look down at the detailed notes that
I have been writing all through the phone call. To my horror the pages appear
to be covered in (a) random fragments of nonsense and (b) exclamation marks.
He’s not really a newt trainer!!!
Because it was FRIDAY –dahlias??? - yes!
Wrong kind of omelettes!!!
She comes back – ALONE!!!!
Dazed, confused, drained, I stare at the page. Does
any of this make an iota of sense? No, it does not. Even the bits that have been circled three times and underlined. I start to feel
immensely sorry for myself. I have literally and metaphorically lost the plot.
At this point I give myself a talking to. Pull yourself together woman! Remember the guy who had to cut off his own
arm to escape from that mountain (actually I don’t remember it very well as I
have a phobia of sharp objects and so spent most of the film with my hands over
my eyes). Remember Joe Simpson in Touching
the Void. He survived a fall into a crevasse and dragged himself back to
camp, half dead and with a broken leg and with Boney M’s Brown Girl in the Ring stuck in his head the entire time!*** You
only have to type up a plot!
(***I’m not making this up. If you’ve not read Touching the Void, do. I know it sounds like I’ve just ruined the plot for you but you’d have guessed he made it out alive anyway; he lives to tell the tale.)
My pep talk does the trick. I’m now ready to climb
a mountain with nothing but a tweed skirt, a thermos flask and a stout pair of
walking shoes.
I take a deep breath and hammer away at my computer
keyboard, deciphering the coded fragments in my notebook into
the changes and additions and deletions to the plot that they represent,
working as quickly as I can because if I stop I might just drop the whole
fragile spun-sugar-and-bone-china construction that I’m balancing in my brain
and it will shatter into a million pieces.
At last I stagger from my office - tired but happy in best mystery-solving
fashion –and crawl to the fridge for a very large glass of cold white wine. It
is Friday evening, after all, and thanks to Amber, editor extraordinaire, another
plot has been well and truly hatched.
All I have to do now is write the book.
Just as soon as I’ve got to the bottom of tortilla-chip-gate
and found the Jimi Hendrix t-shirt, that is.
Now I’m delighted to hand on the baton to the
lovely and super-talented Robin Stevens. Robin not only works full time at Orion Children’s Books, but is also about to publish her
debut novel, Murder Most Unladylike. I was lucky enough to win an advance copy
in the Authors for the Philippines auction, and I can tell you that it is
utterly wonderful.
Robin’s blog post will appear on Monday 21st
April. Here is the link to her blog. http://robin-stevens.co.uk/