Different voices
National Novel Writing Month (also known as NaNoWriMo) is a bit of fun, the literary equivalent of Movember, a break-neck, month-long dash to write a 50,000 word novel, as opposed to not shaving your top lip.
I started a NaNoWriMo book a couple of years ago, when I was first introduced to it via twitter. The opening scene featured a body being found on waste ground near a tram station in Manchester – waste ground I used to walk across quite often myself. It’s a car park now.
Anyway, the body was a skinhead, then a young girl, and there was throat trauma, and I couldn’t decide whether to do a straight crime novel or a vampire novel and, basically, both I and it ran out of steam after a few chapters, and lay fallow on my laptop until this year.
When I wrote The Revenants I couldn’t find that original draft, but took the opening scene and adapted it, becoming the scene where the body of the skinhead is found in the alley, introducing Davis and the team of detectives.
That went one way, with a very traditional style, a standard, third-person narrative, for all the historical meandering and time-slip, it’s a pretty straightforward way to write a book. (Clearly this is based more on my experience of reading books than writing them. That was my first one).
Anyway, I did The Revenants, self-published and sent it out into the wide wonderful world, and I’m still trying to plug it wherever I can, but the proper, real world, grown-up plan was that I would have a real job by November. I didn’t, and my consultancy business was a bit on hold pending website being finalised etc.
So, to keep me busy amid updating my CVs and posting them on various websites, I dug out my old novel off the laptop, and lobbed it into my shiny, new, fully-licensed, not free-trial version of Scrivener, and banged on with it.
I kept the chapters I had done pretty much as they were, but noticed that the narrative was much more mixed. A bit all over the place. I had been reading a few proper books around then, DBC Pierre and David Peace among them, and they had clearly had an influence.
This book was written in the present tense, with the main protagonist, another police detective, referred to as “he” or “him” – “he goes into the office…”
Other characters are referred to by name, with very little use of personal pronouns – “Jones lights a cigarette”.
Finally there is the killer, who is allowed first person (“I go into the bar”) when they speak.
Why did I do this? It felt right for the subject matter, it worked, and it worked for the characters, I think. It was also a bit more fun to write, keeping the discipline, which I pretty much word after word, sentence after sentence, until 50,600 or so of them had been committed to digital actuality.
Was it the right thing to do? Is it an exercise in pushing the boundaries of modern literature? Is it a pretentious rip-off? Is it a pile of post-modernist, self-indulgent twaddle? Is it a good story told in an interesting and challenging way?
I honestly don’t know.
When I was writing it i was by turns really excited and quite despondent, I couldn’t actually decide if it was any good. So I did what I did last time, got some volunteers from the audience, and asked them to have a read. The first draft went out today. If people like it, I’m going to send it to a literary agent or two, just to taste the sweet, sweet sting of rejection. I’m told its character building. And my writing usually needs better-built characters.
