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.