Category: Stolen

What to work on next?

12/12/2014

I am halfway through editing my upcoming novel, Stolen, and inevitably around this point I get sick of editing and start thinking of what comes next. I always have a pile of things in my head that I want to write and now is no different. I’ve been compiling a list…

Finish What Alice Sees. I started this novel in 2006. The first 30k placed in a few competitions, so I think it’s likely to be a really good book… once it’s finished. I’m up to about 45k and I reckon I’m about halfway through. I have the rest mapped out in detail, so I’m not stuck with the plot. Seems at the beginning of every year, I place this on my ‘important to-do list’ and I might do a little, have a fiddle with the words, then it gets set aside. Again. Poor Alice really wants her story told. Is 2015 the year for her?
Write Plague 2. Undeniably, Plague has been my bestselling, most popular book. It’s been number one on Amazon in horror for weeks on end, sold 10s of thousands of copies and I’ve had so many emails from fans asking for number two that I’ve lost count. And yet I stall. I was going to write it in the autumn of 2012. Like Alice, I have this plotted out in detail, along with a third instalment. Then in the summer of 2012 I was diagnosed with cancer, and writing got swept to the side. Part of me is afraid I won’t write the second part to the standard of the first, and I’ll disappoint my readers. No, not part of me, pretty much all of me.
Write the second part of Sacrifice. This was always planned as a series and I was in the middle of editing the first one in 2012 when I got sick. It was pushed to a back burner and only finished and released this year. I have yet to write the next part, even though (you guessed it) it is plotted out in detail. I sense a pattern emerging here!
And then for something new. I’ve got a paranormal series I’ve started. The first book needs to edited, but I haven’t written any more of the series and I’m loathe to release another beginning of a series just to abandon it again!
Rewrites. I have a horror book called The Crocodile that I wrote before or just after Coombe’s Wood, maybe in 2008? It needs to be completely rewritten, but would be worth it because I think it’s a brilliant story. Imagine your stuffed toys coming to life and stalking you…
And then the new ideas. I always have them. New ideas, old ideas, plots that want to be written. There are maybe four bouncing around my head right now, all clamouring for attention. Which comes first? So hard to decide. And that’s not including the partials, books I’ve written maybe 10k and plotted out and want to get back to. Sheesh, there just aren’t enough days/hours/weeks to do everything.

So there you go, I should be editing, but instead I’ve got this list of books that I want to move on to. Deciding what to do next is so hard for me. My usual default is to avoid the number twos that need to be written and go straight to number six on the list. That Elusive Cure happened when I was avoiding What Alice Sees. It was a brand new idea. Not plotted and written by the seat of my pants. Stolen, the book I’m working on now was an idea I’d had years earlier. It wasn’t plotted out, just a jumble of ideas in my head. That beat out Plague Two earlier this year.

So what’s next? Will Alice finally get her story told? Or is that idea about a brain transplant going to come first? Maybe I'll start the rewrite of the toy crocodile that comes to life. What about the adult fairy tale featuring a man with violet eyes? Or imagine being cryogenically frozen and waking up to a completely different world hundreds of years later? One thing I’ve learned from writing my list is maybe I need to stop plotting things out. Seems to kill books in my mind. Perhaps I’m a ‘seat of the pants’ writer and not a plotter.

How do other writers do it? Do they have the same internal battles trying to work out what comes next? I'm beginning to think maybe my problem is that I just need to learn how to type faster.

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The Lump Theory

9/9/2014

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Anyone who writes probably knows the value of Stephen King’s book On Writing. It’s a definitive work aimed at the reader as well as the aspiring writer. Mr King started as a high school English teacher, and it shows in the interviews and lectures I’ve seen and most definitely in On Writing. After reading this book it’s apparent he’s never stopped teaching.

A new idea I learned from him recently is what I now call: the lump theory. More of that in a moment. The first thing he said that stuck with me in this particular lecture is this: “A notebook is the best way to immortalise bad ideas.” I’ve always kept a notebook. It’s how I remember things, ideas, snippets, book titles I have no book for yet, pictures, concepts, anything that has triggered an chain of thoughts in my mind. I use physical notebooks but I also have a Word document in the documents folder of my computer that I add to constantly with links to articles or anything that has made me look, made me stop and then made me ask, what if? How could the great Stephen King tell me I’ve been doing it wrong all this time?

I let his reality sit with me for a few days. I realised I never search through the notebooks for ideas. I write what’s nagging me, what’s at the front of my brain and jumping up and down screaming, “Me next!” I don’t open that Word document other than to add to it. I don’t read what I’ve put there and I don’t search through the links. I just add more ideas and go away. Okay, so maybe Mr King has a point. Notebooks are perhaps the best way to immortalise bad ideas, because if I needed them, if they were any good, I’d be going through them and taking inspiration from the pages, right? Then I remembered reading something about Roald Dahl, another of my literary heroes. He kept a notebook. This was a sketching type, with no lines, no constrictions, and he did just what I did, write down lines, words, titles, sketch things, adding to it over time. Okay, I’m on the fence again. Maybe it’s one of those things where you do what’s best for you personally? Everyone is different after all.

But then Stephen King said something I found very interesting. To paraphrase: He explained how if you were to put breadcrumbs in a strainer and shake, all this stuff that isn’t very big and isn’t very important falls out. But the good stuff stays, the big pieces stay.

So why did I find this interesting? Because he’s right, so much so that I’m debating throwing away all my old notebooks and deleting the idea documents on my computer. Put all your idea in a strainer and start shaking. Keep doing this for a few years. Have a look inside occasionally to see what’s there, what’s too big to fall through the holes. What’s left in my strainer are the ideas that refuse to leave me alone. The ones that whisper to me at night, the ones I think about when I’m half asleep getting my chemo. The ones that keep bugging me for years and years and never fall through the holes in the strainer. This is the lump theory.

Stolen was one of those ideas that took root in my mind and never let go. I think I first made notes about it more than ten years ago. Possible titles were Fifty Words for Snow (each chapter was to be inspired by Inuit names for snow, matching the snow type to the mood of my main character), The Stolen Life of Mandy Brown came next, and then eventually the book name became simply Stolen. I changed the name of the main character to Emily Jenkins and the original span of time the book would encompass went from over three years to just under a year. What originally was a story of unthinkable abuse became a story of survival. But the essence of the tale stayed, the feeling I wanted to evoke with my words remained. Stolen was one of those lumps that refused to fall through the holes of the strainer. The idea stayed with me, slowly growing until earlier this year when I sat down thinking I was going to write something entirely different and Stolen forced its way onto the page.

Am I going to throw my dusty notebooks away? Am I going to delete my many Word documents with forgotten ideas? No… not yet, anyway. They are a comfort blanket to me. I have a queue in my mind of ideas waiting patiently (and some not so patiently) for their turn on the keyboard. Stolen is now in the editing stage, hopefully to be released before the end of the year. In the meantime, please enjoy this preview of the wonderful cover Jane Dixon-Smith made for me.

And remember to watch out for those writerly lumps and don’t sweat the stuff you’ve forgotten. If you seem unable to remember an idea, chances are it never would come to anything, anyway. Instead scoop out those juicy lump ideas and gorge on them!

You can see the Stephen King lecture that inspired this post here.

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What to work on next?

The Lump Theory

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