Stuart Harrison's Blog, page 4

How I Made a Million Dollars From My First Published Novel (and changed my life)

It must be every aspiring novelists dream to be offered a contract worth a million dollars for their first published novel. It actually happened to me back in 1999, and although this and successive posts will tell the story of how that happened, it’s actually about much more than the money. In fact the money is the least important part, but it does make a nice attention grabbing headline.

The difficulty here is where to start. Arguably the story begins with some background to explain why I wanted to write a novel in the first place, and why my overnight success actually took about twenty years to happen, give or take a few. The day I signed my first publishing contract I was thirty nine years old, but I made my first serious attempt at writing a novel when I was about twenty. During the intervening years I left England and moved to New Zealand, got married (twice) and divorced (once), spent a year travelling around Europe in a Volkswagen combi, had a lot of jobs, most of which I talked myself into by slightly bending the truth about my university education (I actually left school when I was 16 , so never went to university) did well enough to eventually become a senior manager in a sales and marketing role in a mid-size New Zealand manufacturing and marketing company, bought a house with my girlfriend, struck out on my own to start a mail-order business, went broke, sold the house to pay off debts, married my girlfriend, and finally, we had a baby and with virtually no money we left New Zealand to return to England so that I could write a novel.

Okay, that’s the short version, but I think the story really begins in earnest around the time of those last few events; going broke, selling the house, married, baby, flying to England, all that. I think I need to explain a couple of things, like why I thought going to England to write a novel in those circumstances was a good idea. Actually, until I sat down to write this, I had forgotten why I did think it was a good idea. The answer is that from a strictly common-sense, paying-the-rent-and-putting-food-on-the-table point of view, I’m pretty sure I never claimed it was a smart move, even to myself. There were other considerations though, like having a powerful need to escape the scene of my dramatic and spectacular failure. To understand that, you have to understand the context.

I had spent my working life clawing my way up the ladder to a well-paid managerial role and along the way I met Dale (the girlfriend who became my second wife), and between us we had used the money we had individually accumulated to take a big risk on a booming house market. We secured a huge mortgage and bought a house in a highly desirable seaside suburb in Auckland, and then we leveraged the equity to raise the start-up capital for the business I started. When it all went tits-up, the entire house of cards crumbled and we were left virtually broke, and to cap it off Dale had quit her job as she was pregnant. How could I start again under those circumstances? It was bad enough that I’d have to add such a massive failure to my resume, bad enough that I’d have to explain it all over and over to recruitment agents and possible employers, reliving the grinding, painful humiliation every time, bad enough I’d have to face former colleagues and acquaintances who’d offer insincere commiserations while they were secretly rejoicing that it was me in the crap and not them. I don’t blame them. It’s human nature. I’d have done the same myself. But there was something worse than all of that. Far, far worse. It was simply this; I had always hated my career with a terrible soul-destroying passion.

This was the real reason I wanted to move to England. It was to escape. Partly from the failure, but more importantly from the prospect of having to go back to a life I didn’t want, a life that was eating me up from the inside out. I had always wanted to write a novel. I think I was fifteen or so when the idea first took hold, and it never went away. There had been various stabs at it over the years, but things got in the way – mostly lack of time, money, and the fact that I had no clue what I wanted to write about. In later years, on the occasions when I had thought wistfully about having another go at writing, what stopped me more than anything else, was fear of losing what I had: The company car, the salary, the expense account, the great house by the sea, all of that stuff. True, I put it all at risk to start a business, but I believed at the time that the business was a sure-fire-winner. Who would say that about taking a chance on writing a novel? Nobody. Certainly not me. But now I had nothing to lose, because I’d already conveniently lost it. Ironically, here was my chance. It was something of an epiphany.

The biggest stumbling block to my plan, was persuading Dale to see things the way I did. I was aware that it sounded hopelessly optimistic. What did I know about writing novels? And then there was question about why we had to move to England to accomplish it anyway, which I knew would come up. I had persuaded myself that I needed to return to my roots to tap into my own latent creativity. Something like that. Nothing to do with running away though. I prepared a persuasive speech. I even had an ace up my sleeve, because out of despair or desperation or who knows what, I went to see a clairvoyant who told me that I would be successful in my chosen field (as opposed to charging me $50 to tell me I would be an abject failure, for example). I had made a recording of the session so Dale could hear it for herself. The real clincher was the part where the clairvoyant asked for Dale’s date of birth. I told her and she then explained in convincing fashion why this meant that we were ideally suited, especially in times of adversity. I think she actually picked that we would have a baby soon too (yeah, yeah - cynics can say what they like about the likelihood of a young couple having a family, but you had to be there). It was all going well. I made my speech, I laid out my plan, I played the recording. It might have worked, only I had given the clairvoyant the wrong date of birth. I gave her my first wife’s birthday by mistake, which Dale pointed out. That sort of took the wind out of my sails.

Luckily though, as I now understand, pregnant women have weird hormonal stuff going on. It seems that they are prepared to place huge amounts of mostly unwarranted trust in their partner. It’s an evolutionary thing, because otherwise they’d have to admit to themselves that they had made a big, big mistake. They had let the wrong guy get them pregnant, which would be a bad idea because pregnant women are not in the best position to find a new mate. Or maybe Dale just loved me a lot. Anyway, she said, sure, why not? Who’d have thought it?

So, our first son was born in November and a few weeks later Dale and I got married at the registry office. A week after that we were on a plane to England. I’m trying to remember if I was optimistic. I mean really. Did I actually think I could write and, more importantly, sell a novel? And do you know what, I think I did. It didn’t really matter though. What I knew for certain was that until the money ran out, I was going to try to be a novelist. Maybe even more important than that though, was what I wasn’t going to be; which was somebody who got up dreading going to work every day. I don’t think I’ve even felt quite so happily relieved as I did then. I didn’t even hear the baby cry all the way to Heathrow.

So this is how I became a novelist

I’ve spent the week working on my latest novel and I’m feeling good about it. So good, in fact, that I’m not sure how to write about it without giving too much away. Writers in general are suspicious and paranoid when it comes to revealing too much about a work in progress, always terrified it will be stolen by some unscrupulous author out there looking for an idea. It’s not something that’s ever worried me. I know how hard it is to write a novel. You could give two authors the same brilliant premise and lock them away in separate rooms and I guarantee they would produce stories that bear no relation to each other. Having said that, I find myself reluctant to divulge too much of the plot of this book because I’m worried that somebody really might decide it’s too good an idea to ignore.

My fears are completely unfounded, of course. Probably. Firstly an author of the unscrupulous variety would have to stumble over this site, which is unlikely. Then said author would have to think my idea is just too brilliant to ignore. This is perhaps not quite so unlikely. I mean, if I didn’t think it was a great idea, why bother investing the considerable time and effort to turn it into a novel in the first place? On the other hand, as I said earlier, a single idea in the minds of two authors will likely produce vastly different books. Maybe what I’m afraid of is that if this did happen, the other book would be better than mine. Or here’s an even worse scenario, maybe the other book wouldn’t be a patch on mine, but the author who wrote it would be much more famous than me (not hard to imagine) and have a publishing deal in place. I did actually read about a case like this involving an author who claimed somebody very famous plagiarised a planned work of his, and the story sounded true. In the end the plagiariser gave a nod of acknowledgment to the aggrieved, poor author, and kept all the royalties, laughing all the way to the bank. I won’t mention any names but the letters J and P are a clue.

So, maybe I am paranoid after all. For now I’m going to keep the story under my hat, at least until I’m far enough into it that nobody could possibly beat me to publication. What I’m going to write about instead for a little while, is how I got started as a novelist. I know this interests people because it’s actually quite a good slice-of-life story, the kind that can cause a smile and make it seem like sometimes all the cards do fall into place when people follow their dreams, despite all the odds against success. I used to tell this story when I did speaking engagements years ago and it got a lot of laughs. People were always far more interested in hearing about how I got be a published novelist, than about the actual novel I wrote. I can understand that. If I want to know about a book, I read it. I don’t actually care for the whole analysis of the story thing very much. Anyway, the story (of how I became an author) is also worth telling because it hasn’t really finished yet. I’m still chasing my dreams although they have changed a bit over the years. In the not too distant future I’m going to take the kind of giant leap-of-faith I did once before and see what happens, so I may as well write about that too and if anyone is vaguely interested you can follow the ups and downs (of which there are sure to be many) right here.

So, this story takes a while to tell properly, so I’ll offer it up in bite-sized pieces here every week and along the way I’ll post updates on the progress of the novel I’m working on – though I won’t be giving too much away. Not yet. The first instalment will be next week and begins with the event that started on my path to becoming a novelist. It was the I day I sold my business, into which my girlfriend and I had invested all the money we had and quite a lot of the banks’ money too. I got a dollar for it.

Something else happened too, that day. What was it? Oh, I remember now, my girlfriend gave me the news that she was pregnant.

September Already! The lateness of the year mirrors the life of one of my characters.

Down here in the southern Hemisphere September signals the approach of spring. Outside the room where I write, the plum trees I put in last year are in full blossom. Soon the olives will follow, the handful of sheep we have will lamb and we can look forward to summer. The bad news, from my perspective, is another month has vanished. I’m aiming for an end of the year finish for the novel I’m working on, which I’ve been calling The Mysteries. That’s going to be tight.

This is the second version of this story. In this one the principal characters are a married couple who live in Hampshire, England. The husband, Daniel works in the advertising business and is in the throes of a mid-life crisis. Here’s one of the opening scenes in the first draft:

“What are you doing this weekend?”

Daniel turned around from the window where he’d been looking at the leafy trees in the park across the road. Ryan was watching him, legs crossed, notebook on his lap, pen tapping loosely against the side of chair in an unconscious rhythm, like a song from the radio was playing in his head.

“Going home. As soon as we’re finished here.”

“You mean home to Hampshire? As opposed to the flat.”

“Yes. I told Elaine I’d leave early. I think she’s cooking something for dinner.”

“Are you looking forward to that?”

“What? Dinner, you mean?”

Ryan didn’t answer, just twitched his mouth to acknowledge the evasion. It was an unusual name for a psychologist, Daniel thought. Ryan. Or perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps it just felt that way. He left the window and the park where mothers took their children.

“Do you like living here?” he asked his therapist, returning to the couch.

“Yes, I do.”

“We used to live in Kensington. Have I told you that? It was a lot like this. Near the park, nice street, not too busy, you know. The kids were young then.”

“How old?”

“About eight and nine, I think. When we left, I mean. We’d talked about it for years; moving out of town so we’d have more space, room for the kids to muck around. The rural dream, I suppose.”

“You sound…” Ryan hesitated, searching for the right term. “Disillusioned?” he suggested eventually.

“Do I?”

“Didn’t you like living in the country?”

“It isn’t that I don’t like it there. I mean it’s beautiful where we are. Not far to the coast. The New Forest is nearby. The kids went to good schools. I think they were happy there. I think they had good childhoods, happy memories, you know. Plenty of freedom to run around. I’m not sure they appreciate it yet, but they will one day.”

“Why do you say that?”

Daniel shrugged. “They both say they were bored living in the country. They would’ve preferred it if we’d stayed in London. That’s what they say anyway. Maybe it’s true. Who knows? Maybe living in the country was something I wanted.”

“You did? Not Elaine?”

“I think Elaine would’ve been happy either way. She didn’t mind where we lived.”

“So it was you that wanted to move, but now you’re not sure you did the right thing. What made you think you would like the country?”

“I grew up in a small village. I think I had a happy childhood. Maybe I wanted that for my kids.”

“Could there have been any other reason?”

Ryan was good at this, Daniel thought. When he’d first started therapy he’d found it irritating that Ryan asked so many questions. He was like a miner, or perhaps a better analogy would be a gem-hunter, somebody who used one of those small picks to chip away the rock to get to the gem inside. Of course, that was what a psychologist did; they asked questions and then listened, observed and interpreted all the minute signals a client gave out. A change in tone, a sideways glance. People didn’t always know what was bothering them, they didn’t always know why they behaved in the ways they did.

So that’s a sample. It may or may not make it to the final draft. The story sets up Daniel as a man in his late forties who’s questioning his life. He’s successful, but unhappy, though the solutions to his unhappiness that he’s so far turned to have only made him question himself more. Soon we’re going to meet Elaine, his wife. Something dramatic is going to happen to her and this event and its repercussions are what the novel turns on.

This story is based on some of my own experiences and feelings. Many novels of a certain type have a lot of the author in them. In this case I’m not talking so much about the events in the novel so much as the themes and the feelings of the characters. In this story Daniel starts off wondering about the value of the life he has built and lived, but as things progress he and the other characters are led to ask deeper questions, even the really big ones, like what is life all about. The story becomes a search to answer that question which is where the Mysteries eventually comes in.

The best novels probably come from somewhere deep within. In my own case The Snow Falcon, which changed my life, was a disguised version of how I felt about certain things in my life. I know the novel resonates strongly with people. I think The Flyer came from the same place. This one will too.

When great ideas happen

I’ve been posting about the progress I’m making with the first draft of my novel, The Mysteries. The story is based on the myth of Demeter and Persephone, which in ancient Greece was central to the Eleusinian Mysteries. Mystery religions in general pre-dated Christianity, and in fact Christianity in its original form probably followed the same tradition. The Jesus myth has many of the features shared by other Mystery religion avatars such as the Persian Mithras, the Egyptian Horus, Hindu Shiva and Greek Dionysus. The birthdate of 25th December, the virgin mother and death by crucifixion are common to them all. The myths are allegories of the passage of the sun along the ecliptic each year, bringing the seasons as it travels through each of the constellations that were and are known by their zodiac signs. The avatars are all sun gods. The myths also concern the cycle of precession, which marks the position of the sun against the same zodiac signs over a long cycle of around 26 000 years. According to scholars, the Mystery religions were celebrations of natural cycles based on the sun and constellations, which ignorant ancient people viewed as gods. In their view the Demeter myth is also a sun myth, but its subject is more directly the agricultural seasons. The problem with that view is its simplicity.

Most of the great minds we know of from the ancient world were initiates of the Mysteries. Plato was probably initiated at Eleusis. What the scholars ignore, is that the Mystery religions were associated with learning and profound knowledge, and that there were levels of initiation depending on a person’s commitment and intelligence. Ancient civilizations had very detailed and complex knowledge of astronomy, and that knowledge was only equaled in our modern age, and possibly not even then. To become an initiate at the lowest level the myths were simple dramas of natural cycles, where stars and planets were imagined anthropomorphically, but at higher levels the real meanings of the stories, which were based on complex astronomy among other things, were revealed. At the final ceremony of initiation some kind of dangerous trial was undertaken and a great revelation took place that changed people’s lives for ever. This ritual may have involved the controlled use of hallucinogens and possibly some method of inducing a near death state. Nobody knows because it was forbidden to reveal what happened, on pain of death. Though the Mysteries existed for thousands of years, there is no record of what happened at that final initiation. The nature of the experience was certainly profound and spiritual, and since the initiates were people of science who had undergone rigorous training in complex subjects, they were able to understand the experience in context. This was the essence of the Mysteries at all levels. Using hallucinogens and sound and lighting effects in the drama enacting the myths, people had a mystical experience. Later, when the Christian church had eradicated the Mysteries, there was no experience. The Jesus myth was taught as a literal truth, which is ridiculous, and people had to take it on faith. Only empty rituals remained, mostly copied from the old religions but without the real significance. The priests became the sole doorway to God or the Creator or whatever you want to call it, so long as you paid them and did what your were told.

My novel uses this history as the basis of a modern story, but the narrative I’ve been writing hit a road-block this week. While pondering the issue, actually agonizing over it for days, I had a revelation of my own. It was a totally different way to tell my story and it came in a flash of inspiration. This has happened before when I’ve been working on a novel, but on two occasions it felt like a veil had lifted and I knew on both those occasions how the novel would work and that it would raise the book above the ordinary because the narrative would resonate with undercurrents of truth. Sound a bit grandiose? Maybe. The first time it happened, the novel I wrote was The Snow Falcon, which became an international bestseller and I know from the mail I’ve had over the years really did strike a deep chord with many readers. The second time it happened was when I wrote The Flyer years later, which I’m still struggling to get published. I think the stars haven’t quite lined up yet. This time, with this new story, the feeling is stronger than ever. This is the book that I’ve been trying write for a very long time, and the story just came like a gift from the ethos. In fact, I think that’s exactly where it came from.

The only problem is, this story is very different to the one I’ve been writing. So what do I do? How can I waste all that time and effort? It doesn’t even have the same title (that came with the story). I know the answer of course. When something like this happens, you don’t ignore it, and my efforts haven’t been wasted. I also know, somehow, that this novel is a milestone for me. Great ideas happen, but you have to put in the blood and sweat first.

The Mysteries week two of the novel

It’s Friday and the end of the second week writing the first draft of my novel, The Mysteries. (The more I see that title, the better I like it) I now have 40 thousand words written, so about 120 or so pages. Next week sometime I’ll hit the halfway mark. Actually, if I remain on track that’ll be on Wednesday. About eleven a.m. I imagine some people might be surprised at such precision, but that’s how books get written. Start with a plan, churn out the first draft, then try to shape it into something people will want to read. If that’s going to happen within a reasonable time frame, say six to nine months, you gotta churn out the words.

I like the way the story is turning out. Sometimes getting the first draft down is like trying to steer a speeding car with a flat tyre. The story has a tendency to want to veer off in unexpected directions and I have to hang onto the wheel like my life depends on it. If I don’t do that I know I’m going to end up with a dog’s breakfast that will be pretty much impossible to salvage. Been there, done that many times, but not on this occasion.

For most of the week I’ve been writing Sophie’s story, or the first part anyway. If you’ve been here before, she’s the author of the journal Leyla found while helping Thomas clear out his house. It turns out that Sophie and Thomas were married and her journal covers a summer in the early seventies which she and Thomas spent on an island in the Aegean, where Thomas was assisting on an archaeological dig. Sophie is young. She envisages spending her days alone and her evenings listening to Thomas and the man leading the dig discussing their work in the kind of intricate detail that only an archaeologist could find fascinating for six long weeks. As soon as they arrive on the island, though, Sophie discovers that one of the team has abandoned the dig and because of him the authorities are threatening to revoke permission to excavate. They claim he is a bad influence on some of the young people and are worried he might attract the kind of people to the island who spend the summer on the nudist beaches of Ios, drinking and taking drugs, and engaging in other kinds of unwanted and disreputable behavior.

Sophie is intrigued by all this and volunteers to try to find Phillip Greene. After travelling to the south of the island she visits a secluded headland covered in pine forest, and while swimming at a deserted and beautiful cove she hears the sound of wind chimes. She comes across a house overlooking the sea and the man who greets her from the terrace turns out to be the missing archaeologist. He claims to have been expecting her and that the headland is an unusual place, one of many across the world where natural energy is focused by the unique geology. It was in such places that ancient cultures built temples, and where the Mystery Religions that predated Christianity by thousands of years were practiced.

As all of this takes place, more is revealed about the kind of person Sophie is. She married young, having grown up with parents who regarded the social upheaval of the sixties with horror. The sex, drugs and rock and roll culture that emerged had little impact on Sophie’s strict, middle class upbringing. Even at university the extent of her part in the revolution was to share a flat with some people who played Rolling Stones records and drank cheap red wine. When she met Thomas at a party where cheese sandwiches and cocktail sausages were laid out on a table, the fact that he was older and that his corduroy jacket reminded her of her father made her see him as sophisticated. Four years into her marriage she senses that life is passing her by.

The story diverts briefly back to the present, where Leyla’s relationship with Thomas, now an old man, develops as she begins to tell him about the confusion and resentment she feels from the conflict of growing up in Waltham Forest with traditional Iranian Muslim parents. Parallels are beginning to emerge in the two stories.

So another big week lies at the keyboard ahead as Sophie becomes more involved with Phillip and what is going on on the headland. More about that next time.

The Mysteries week one of the first draft

This week I began writing the first draft of my new novel. As I explained in my last post, writing the first draft from the plan I’ve worked up is, for me, the most exciting and enjoyable part of the process of creating a novel. With a blueprint to follow that covers all the main elements of the plot and characters, this is the time when I sit down every day and hammer out the narrative. Surprising and unexpected things happen. My weekly word target at this stage is about twenty thousand words, so around four thousand a day. To achieve that kind of output I have to write quickly, the scenes and character have to start coming to life. Details and nuances I couldn’t possibly have planned for appear as I tap into a creative well that must exist in my subconscious mind. Time passes very quickly and by the time I’ve hit my daily target about five hours after I begin, I feel slightly exhilarated and a bit wrung out. I read once that the brain burns more calories than you would if you were pounding a treadmill. If that’s true I must be completing a half marathon every day.

The story begins with Leyla who is nineteen years old and lives in Waltham Forest in London. She has spent her entire life in England, though her parents brought her there from Iran when she was a baby, along with her brother, Ray, who is a year older. In the opening paragraph she knocks on his bedroom door. Though he doesn’t know it, Leyla is about to leave home. She has decided to run away, although she’s aware that nineteen year old girls don’t have to run away. It’s what it feels like though, because she can’t tell anyone what she’s planning.

This is the culmination of years of pressure from Leyla’s parents. They’ve tried to make her conform to a code of behaviour that is based on Iranian culture and beliefs. It’s a culture that Leyla stopped identifying with the day she started going to school in England. She feels as if she’s led a double life, having to pretend to be the person her parents want her to be when she’s with them, and only able to be who she actually is when she’s at school or with her friends. What made it bearable was her brother, because he understood everything she was going through even if it wasn’t so bad for him because he was a boy. All her life, Ray has been her best friend, the one person she could tell everything. They have supported each other. But then Ray began to change, though Leyla didn’t know why. They drifted apart. He began to side with their parents, became interested in their culture, which was suddenly his culture. When Leyla goes into his room where she hasn’t been for a long time, she finds the walls are bare, stripped of the posters depicting the indie rock bands he used to love. It emphasises how different he has become from the brother she once loved and relied on, who has now become her oppressor, or would like to be. It makes her angry, and all the hurt and resentment she feels at his betrayal of her wells to the surface.

Leyla ends up living in a flat in Oxford, borrowed from her boyfriend’s aunt. The flat is part of a large house owned by Thomas Yardley, a man she hardly ever sees except for glimpses of him at an upstairs window when she’s outside in the garden each evening. He’s an old man who never appears to have visitors and rarely leaves the house. He plays classical musical that drifts on the evening air, and as Leyla relaxes with a few tokes from a joint, she’s entranced by this music, which is unfamiliar to her. Inevitably they meet, and Leyla finds Thomas to be cold and distant. He’s scathing of youth culture and disapproves of her smoking dope. She discovers that he was once a professor at the university where he taught History. His house is crammed with things he picked up in his travels. When he was younger he spent his summers pursuing his interest in archaeology. Since Leyla is looking for a summer job, he hires her to catalogue his effects and she’s intrigued to discover that there is nothing amongst them all to suggest that he has ever been married or even had a lover or friends. The remnants of his life tell her nothing about him. Then one day she discovers a photograph album and a journal written by his wife in the seventies, almost forty years ago.

From this point, the point I’ve reached, two stories will develop and converge. One concerns Leyla and the other is about what happened to Thomas’s wife Sophie on a Greek island forty years ago, and eventually the two stories will merge and hopefully illuminate each other.

Twenty thousand words down, eighty to go.

The Mysteries

It’s Friday and here in the ‘winterless north’ of New Zealand, the wind is howling from the east and the rain is coming down hard. From my office window I can usually look out on the olive grove, but right now all I can see is a veil of rain. The ridgeline of the hills in the distance has vanished beneath low cloud and the forecast is for more of the same over the next few days. On the upside it’s only a month until spring. Five months left of this year, and since I promised myself that my novel The Mysteries would be finished by Xmas, I had better get writing.

The time for planning is over. I have the plot and themes largely worked out, and I understand most of my characters. As I write the first draft I’ll be aiming for a word-count of around 15-20 thousand words a week, or roughly fifty pages. It isn’t easy to write at that pace, but the fact that I have a reasonably detailed plan to work to helps a lot. It’s not as detailed as I’d like, actually, because I’ve already ditched two quite well-developed plans and had to start again, but of course, that is the whole point of planning. Like any major project it pays to spend some time getting the blueprint right. There’s nothing worse than beginning a novel with what seems like a great idea, only to find after writing sixty or seventy thousand words that the story doesn’t work, that somehow the brilliant vision I began with has turned out to be a mirage and the closer I try to get to it the more it shimmers and loses definition until eventually it vanishes altogether.

Planning is the hardest part of writing a novel. No question about that. It’s where the original spark of an idea starts to take shape as a story, where characters, themes and plot points get tested and often rejected for all kinds of reasons. It’s where the writer has to dig deep and ask questions about what the story is really about, what motivates the characters and shapes their actions, and perhaps more than anything else, what impulse lies behind that initial idea that the writer feels compelled to articulate or investigate? For me, finding the answer to those questions and then marrying them to a plot that works is the real challenge. When I can see my characters in certain scenes like a movie on the screen of my mind, and I start to feel an emotional response from the story they will tell, right through to the climax when all the threads come together and make perfect sense of it all, then I’m pretty sure it’s time to start writing to bring it all fully to life.

For me the first draft is the fun part. I’m looking forward to that feeling I get when my fingers are flying over the keyboard and the words are filling the screen. Though they’re black on white, that isn’t what I see. My vision is turned inward and I see places that are real and people who speak and react to one another and I see their emotions reflected in gestures and a look as much as in the words they speak and the things they do. For me the process really is like watching a movie that I’m attempting to describe, and when I’m in full flow I struggle to keep up with what’s happening. I’d liken it to those times most people have experienced when driving somewhere you find yourself thinking about something else and then suddenly you realize an hour has passed and you have no real recollection of how you got to where you are. For a period of time you have functioned on automatic pilot, somehow able to make the myriad and complex decisions involved in driving, and yet remaining unaware of having done so. It’s a bit scary actually. When it’s happened to me I’ve had flashes of imagined scenes of chaos left in a trail behind me.

It’s a little bit like that when I’m writing the first draft (not the chaos part). My mind is operating on a level that I can’t access ordinarily. Ideas flow from some creative well, and usually they are tied to the inner monologues of my characters as they give voice to their feelings about what is happening in the story, giving insight to the events and influences that have made them who they are, and in that way their outward actions become understandable. This is the reason that I prefer to write novels from the point of view of each of a handful of characters at the centre of a story. There’s always one who is the focal point, the protagonist without whom there would be no story, but I like to get right inside the other characters too and show how they think and feel. It’s hearing their inner voices reflecting on their situations that illuminates who they really are and why they make the choices they do, especially when they understand their failings and struggle against them, but still can’t seem to make the right decisions.

Conflict is the heart of any story, and when it originates from within and manifests in actions that affect others, the story starts to really breathe. I find weakness is often more interesting than strength. In The Snow Falcon it is primarily Ellis who drives the outward plot. He is a weak man struggling against himself and I think he is one of the best characters in the book. In The Flyer, it is Elizabeth who struggles against Christopher’s weakness and her confused feelings for him, which is her weakness, while William, though resilient and determined to overcome everything life throws at him from the beginning, also struggles throughout the story against his sense of loneliness and estrangement, emotions that are themselves a kind of weakness. In The Mysteries the story takes place in two time-frames and only one character is in both. Thomas is like Ellis in Snow Falcon, in the sense that Thomas is essential to the love stories that occur in both time frames, and that in both it is his internal character and actions that are the catalyst for what happens. Like Ellis, he loves his wife and yet in the story that happens in the past, Thomas’s actions are the opposite of love. His weakness is his inability to rise above the way he views the world. In fact he clings to his conservative ideas because they allow him to justify his actions to himself.

So, what is The Mysteries about? As I’ve mentioned before, the idea stems from the myth of Demeter and Persephone which was at the centre of the mystery religion of Eleusis in ancient Greece. Ultimately it’s a novel about attitudes and beliefs with a bit of philosophy and religion thrown in, but the novel revolves around two love stories, and as I heard a famous and respected novelist comment the other day, all writers write about love in the end. I’ll be posting updates on my progress here each week, as well as extracts from the first draft and my thoughts on the plot and characters, so if you’re interested in any part of the process, stop by and have look now and then. Feel free to comment if you’d like. When I’m all done I’m thinking about producing some kind of special edition, signed by me with a personal message for anyone on my subscription list who might be interested, so I’ll let you know about that in due course.

In the meantime, thanks if you managed to read this far.

The Mysteries novel

It’s been a few weeks since I posted. I’ve been down with a head cold, or maybe it was the flu. Whatever it was, it knocked me about and I haven’t had the energy or inclination to work. Must have been man-flu, which as medical science has confirmed, is a particularly virulent form of illness. Despite that I didn’t entirely abandon the novel. Once I get started on a story I never really get away from it, even when I’m lying on the couch with tissues and a cocktail of cold remedies at hand. The characters, themes and ideas have been constantly jostling for space in my mind. I probably dreamt about them, though I rarely remember dreams so I can’t be sure. Anyway, the upshot is that I’ve been making progress even if I haven’t been actually tapping out words on the screen.

When I wrote my last post I’d decided that my central character was to be called Martin, and that he would arrive on a Greek Island in the present day where he would meet a mysterious character around whom the story would revolve. This scenario was not unlike the previous drafts I’ve written and during my enforced stay on the couch lately I day-dreamed the progression of the story, only to find that, like those previous versions, the narrative ran out of steam.

As I lay sneezing and coughing and spluttering, I came to realise where the problem lay. I was stuck on the theme of the story, which is the essential mystery behind the Mystery religions as I’ve mentioned in another post, and that led me to focus on devising a plot that would allow my characters to talk about all the fascinating stuff I’d discovered in my extensive research. And therein lay the problem. It seems obvious to me now, with hindsight. My characters were simply chess pieces I was moving through a plot-driven narrative. They weren’t alive to me, with real issues and motivations. In short, plot had overtaken character and so when I felt that the narrative ran out of steam, it was because I wasn’t engaged by my characters. This was a disaster in the making. If they didn’t seem real even to me, how could they be real to anybody else?

Perhaps this seems obvious, and maybe it is, but it’s easy to get caught up in devising plot rather than character. A really good novel, in my view, manages to get the balance right between these elements, which is apt really because The Mysteries is actually about metaphysics, and balance in all things is the fundamental element of all metaphysical philosophies.

The novel takes place in two time frames. In the first, during the fifties, a young woman and her husband travel to a Greek island where the husband will be taking part in an important archaeological dig. They are to meet another archaeologist there but when they arrive, it turns out he is missing and there are rumours that he has lost his mind. The couple ordinarily live in Oxford where the husband teaches. Though young he’s building a reputation as a scholar and he is quietly envied by many because his life seems unfairly perfect. He has intelligence, position and a promising future, and to cap it all his wife is considered to be beautiful and clever. People wonder how he managed to persuade her to marry him. However, they are happy together, at least until the young woman, intrigued by the rumours concerning the missing archaeologist, tries to find him. Her search becomes a search for not only him, but for her own identity. As the location moves to Turkey and Egypt the relationship triangle that develops will ignite passions and tensions that will irrevocably change all of their lives.

Now that feels like a decent starting point.

The Mysteries – A novel in progress

Another sunny winter’s day in the Bay of Island. My novel plan is taking shape rapidly now. When I look out my office window I can see the olive grove I planted about three years ago. The trees with their silver green leaves feel like a connection with the Greek island where my novel is set. I also have a garden sculpture out there, the idea for which was inspired by statues of Greek goddesses that were found within ancient temples. My statue is made of concrete as opposed to marble, but she still looks pretty good.

The story has changed a little bit from the précis I gave in my last post, which is the value of novel planning. As I worked through to the closing stages of the storyline I began to realise there were some problems. Without a detailed plan I might not have understood this until I had spent three months writing, which would have meant such a complete rethink that I would’ve either abandoned the story or ended up with something I wasn’t happy with. Instead, I stopped working and allowed myself time to think. Now the problems are resolved and it only took me a week.

I have two main characters, as before, though now they are no longer a couple at the beginning of the novel. The focus of the story initially is on Martin (his name may change, it depends if I get used to it). In the opening chapters we learn about what kind of person he is, and one of the defining aspects of his character is the regret he feels at ending a relationship he was in with Sonya. In fact in the opening chapter he attempts to contact her, though it has been over a year since they parted. As the story goes on we’ll learn about their relationship in much more detail.

Martin soon heads to one of the Greek islands in the Cyclades group in the Aegean sea, where he plans to spend the summer staying with friends while he works on a book he is writing to partner a TV series he hosts. Soon after he arrives, Martin discovers a spruce covered headland where a mysterious man lives, apparently alone, in a large house overlooking the sea. The man is a scholar, whose main interest is the mystery religions of the ancient world. He claims that the headland was the site of an ancient temple and that unusual things occur there.

This will probably turn out to be an unusual novel. I’m quite happy about that, in fact I’m starting out with that intent. When I say unusual, I mean in the sense that though the story I’m planning is essentially a love story, the way that I’m planning to weave it around the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone and the Mystery religions in general will make it resonate with readers in a special way. If all goes well, it ought to be one of those stories that transports the reader to an evocative setting, where the narrative both intrigues and informs and at the same time, perhaps most importantly, has emotional impact. It’s a big ambition I suppose, but without it there seems to be little point in writing anything at all.

The Mysteries A novel

It’s the first day of July and here in the Bay of Islands in New Zealand it is a beautiful winters day. This part of the country is referred to as the winterless north, and though I can almost believe it as I look out on blue skies and a sun-drenched olive grove, it was actually freezing cold this morning when I hit the gym at 6am. Okay, not as cold as it used to be when I was growing up in England, when my hands and face would go numb as I rode my bike through ice and snow to school, but still cold enough to put a dusting of frost on the ground.

Weather aside, it’s halfway through the year and at last I can get back to writing. I’ve spent the last couple of months sending out query letters to agents regarding my book The Flyer, and in between times I’ve been thinking about my next novel. I’ve written about the importance of author branding before. Publishers need authors to have a strong brand, which means they need to write in recognisable genres because that’s how readers are going to find their work in the first place. I’d be the first to admit that my own branding has not been a strong-point in the past, but I have come to the conclusion that the best of my novels are essentially love stories. The Snow Falcon and The Flyer both fit within this genre, even if they do contain plenty of other elements. For that reason, and because these are the stories I like to write, I’ve been working on the plot of a novel that I’m going to call The Mysteries, which is a multi-layered love story set in the present time on a Greek Island. It’s called The Mysteries, after the mystery religious cult that existed in Eleusis in the ancient world, which was based on the myth of Demeter and Persephone.

This novel has been kicking around in my head for a long time. The flow of ideas that I’ve been trying to wrestle into a coherent story for the past few weeks spring from differing inspirations. I suppose the main one is strongly suggested by the title, which is that I’m fascinated and intrigued by mysteries of any sort. It’s a human trait, of course. Just about all popular story forms of entertainment are predicated on the idea that we want to know what happens next. There is even a category of story known as the Mystery genre. It goes much deeper than that though. We humans seem to like puzzles of all kinds, but especially things that can’t be explained by reference to the ordinary workings of the world as we understand it. In my story a couple arrive on a picturesque Greek island where they plan to spend the summer. There are unresolved issues in their relationship that stem from events that will be revealed during the story, but neither of the couple are very happy. The young woman stumbles on a secluded part of the island where she encounters a man living alone in a large house on a private headland. He is older than her, perhaps by ten or fifteen years, but his dress and manner seem out of touch with the modern world. His politeness is almost courtly and though he tells her that nobody ever comes to this part of the island, he appears unsurprised to see her. It is almost as if he was expecting her.

So that is the first mystery, just a small one, but as the story develops there will be many more and soon the reader will be immersed in a world of this headland covered with cool forests of spruce, bounded on three sides by the glittering Aegean sea. It is a world where anything seems possible, where passionate emotions exert a powerful attraction, even when beneath the compounding mysteries there is a growing sense of unease and even danger.

As I said, this novel has been in my head for some time. In fact I tried to write it once before, and I spent about a year producing several drafts before I abandoned it. My problem was that I was never quite sure what kind of story I wanted to end up with. I’ve mentioned the mystery religions and Greek myths already, which play a big part in this story, but they’re not called mystery religions for nothing. They existed all over the ancient world in various forms and at their heart was a revelation, an experience of some kind that has been lost to us, mainly because initiates were forbidden, on pain of death, to reveal what it entailed. Whatever that revelation was, it had a profound effect on initiates.

So there are the ingredients to begin my novel. A profound mystery from the ancient world, a mysterious man who seems out of his time, an evocative and appealing setting among the islands of the Aegean and a couple with a troubled relationship. The question is what happens next.