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The Singer – How I Wrote It
Sometimes I like to write just for the joy of it. I’ll go in with no plan, not even an idea beyond a single sentence, and just see what happens for a while. Usually this is between bigger projects, or at least projects with more direction – I am notorious for not properly planning my writing, but even I normally scrawl down a few bulletpoints to get the general shape of a story, or at least the core concept, set out before me.
But sometimes I go in with nothing whatsoever. I find a vibe and I run with it. It’s creative relaxation, essentially; I’m still writing, but not pursuing any particular ending or story. Often – well, pretty much every time – this leads to a nice rambling tale that is unlikely to see the light of day without some serious cutting and pasting. I get lost in the atmosphere and just breathe. Normally these are stories with one key character, who I often don’t even bother naming: one person, from whose perspective I can slowly explore a slightly weird world. It’s almost first-person from my perspective, though these characters always end up people in their own right.
The Man on the Mountain is one of these tales, as is another upcoming story that you should find out about early next year – as was The Scar, too, to some extent when I first started the long version. As are several stories sitting on my hard drive, some waiting to be finished, others waiting to be beaten into shape.
And as is The Singer. Which is out now, in digital and physical form. A story in which I set out to just breathe in some fresh air, literally, by exploring an idealised countryside with many hefty injections of childhood nostalgia.
I set out with no plan whatsoever – the only thing I had nailed down was what the titular character, Tom the farmer, could do. (He wasn’t even Tom back then; I only named him when other people started inconveniently showing up and tracking conversations got confusing.) And his dog; he always had a dog. The first chunk of the story is literally me exploring it for myself: we see Tom’s fields, his home, his life, explored slowly and in detail. We see the village where he lives, and meet the other people there, most of whom are inspired by or at least named after the real people of my childhood. The Singer builds slowly because I was building it deliberately slowly. If you read it (and please do), you can probably tell that I’m walking these paths, watching the same sunsets, right alongside Tom and the others.
And then as I kept on, a plot started to form. This was the point at which things got ‘serious’; when I realised that there could be more to this story than just vibes and atmosphere. I didn’t really intend it. It just happened one morning: I sat down to write, picked up with Tom sitting in the Grandfather’s Axe, and found conflict walking through the pub door. And I ran with it. I was so immersed in this world, in how it would react, that Tom walking around the village and slowly gathering opinions and reactions is me doing the same. I didn’t know what anyone was going to do until they did it. It was a very refreshing way to write.
By this point, of course, instincts had kicked in, and I guided things towards the end of the story with a little more conscious involvement as the satisfying conclusion became obvious. But there are still moments, even there, where things grew out of nothing and blossomed into scenes and events all by themselves. The very end of the book, in particular, in the village square: that bloomed full-formed, and I’m grateful for it. It was one of those days where things just flow, and I sat back from the keyboard with those last lines written feeling not empty – as is sometimes the case when a story finally claws its way out of me to its bitter end – but full. Satisfied. I hadn’t set out to tell this story, but it had told itself, and it had, I thought, told itself pretty well.
So if you’d like to understand what I mean by any of this rambling, pick up a copy of The Singer. It’s only short. But of all the things I’ve published it has the most… reality to it. Maybe that’s just because I immersed myself in it so much. Maybe it’s all the things I drew on. But it’s a world that lives and breathes, at least to me. Maybe it will to you too.
