Write what you care about and it’ll probably be what you know

In my last post I crunched some numbers to illustrate why I need to write 3000 words a day to stay on track with my series. I’m now 8 days into the first draft and I have over 30 000 words, so I’ve topped my target, which is great. The reason I have been able to do that, apart from being disciplined about my working habits, which is a no-brainer, I can put down to a single word: Planning.

Yeah, boring I know. Writing novels shouldn’t be about stuff like that. It should be about allowing the creative impulse to take hold, to weave a story out of thin air, bringing to life memorable characters and situations that take the reader on a roller coaster … Okay, cue the scratchy sound as the monologue is abruptly terminated. That’s all bullshit. It isn’t the way it happens.

Writing novels is really hard work. There are two ways to approach it. One is a version of the method I just dismissed, which is the head down and get it all out approach, most likely based on a pretty vague idea about the story and characters and where it’s all headed. Somebody once said, there are no great writers, only great re-writers. I don’t know who that was, but he or she was on the money because if you take the head down, get it all out approach, only one thing is certain, and that is you will be doing a lot of rewrites. Really. A lot. Either that or you will have a poorly constructed novel at the end of it.

I know this because I wrote my first published novel using this method. I wrote many, many drafts, probably a million words, and ended up with a novel I called The Snow Falcon. It started off being the story of an IRA hitman on the run in Canada, and it ended up being the story of a man with a troubled past, a boy, his mother (both also troubled) and a falcon. No IRA. No hitman. Nothing like that. It was translated into a dozen languages and sold something approaching a million copies. So, I’m not saying that method doesn’t work, I’m just saying it makes a tough job even tougher. (As an aside, I rewrote that book last year, because I’ve learnt a lot since it came out. It’s now much better than the original and you can find details on my website http://www.stuartharrison.com/ )

These days I plan. The Black Sun novels, being an ongoing series, require a lot of planning. I need a whiteboard or something to keep track of all the characters, the themes, the events. I’m going to have to do that because already I’m finding there’s stuff I can’t remember. So planning is about what? It’s about knowing the story arc, and all the twists and turns along the way, and of course the characters. Maybe not so much the characters because they tend to come to life as I write. Usually I try to know one thing about them, one interesting thing other than the part they play in the story, and that’s a good starting point. But I’ll come back to planning another time. It’s a big subject. Really what I want to mention now is an aspect of novel-writing that I think is part of planning. It’s often said people should write about they know. A more accurate rendering of that statement would be; write about what you care about. Write about things that interest you, or that you’re passionate about. That way you should already know a lot about your chosen subject, and what you have to learn won’t feel like a chore.

For me, choosing to write the Black Sun novels was a way of turning my fascination with mysteries past and present into a story that expresses some of my own ideas about what those mysteries signify. My story is set in the present time and the premise is that the climate change we’re seeing now is part of a cycle governed by the electromagnetic forces of the sun and the wider galaxy. In the past, these recurring cycles have caused cataclysms that wiped out civilizations and when that happened we lost the evidence of the true history of the Earth and the human race. In the novels I get to use all the research I’ve done, all the information I’ve gathered over the years from reading countless books, and I get to take all those questions about whether UFO’s exist, or was there a civilization called Atlantis, or how did religions really get started, and I can weave my own take on the answers into a fascinating (I hope) and entertaining (I also hope) story.

My point is that knowledge is part of the planning process. If you already have the knowledge, you’re halfway there.