So I’ve recently had a depressing realisation, followed by a revelation, followed by a dilemma, and it’s all to do with how I’m going to make a novel happen.
I’ve been working (for some time) on a novel that’s part historical fiction, part fantasy — a Cold War spy thriller with added magic. This project started back in the autumn of 2022 as a short story before metastasising into a novel in time for the November writing challenge of that year. The initial attempt at making this idea into a novel was a complete mess and I scrapped the whole thing.
I started over again, in the spring of 2023. It’s been slow going because of Life Stuff, but I’ve now written about 50 thousand words of this version— approximately the first half of the story. I spent some time earlier this year editing what I already have, before getting stuck back in.
A few weeks ago I sat down to pick up where I’d left off. I even did a calculation of how many words I’d need to write each day in order to finish by my (self-imposed and admittedly somewhat arbitrary) deadline at the end of October.
All was going well — at least in theory. Then I had the depressing realisation. I don’t want to write this book, at least not in its current state. It’s too slow, too boring, with far too many scenes of people sitting around drinking various beverages and having endless conversations and too few scenes of actual stuff happening. This is supposed to be a thriller, and it’s not thrilling me.
Oh dear. What am going to do? I can’t just carry on going with this project. I’m not enjoying writing it and I don’t think anyone would enjoy reading it.
Could I scrap it? Well, I could, but that feels like a shame after all the effort I’ve put in, and I do have a lot of emotional investment in the world and the characters I’ve created. I don’t want to just leave them behind. Also, while I always have ideas bubbling away on the back burners of my brain, I don’t currently have another Big Idea boiling over, urgently needing to be written.
Then came the revelation. It was this: despite everything, I don’t want to give up and write something else. I want to write this book, to get these people out of my mind and onto the page.
So, how am I going to do it? How do you make a novel happen?
You may have heard people talk about the difference between planners and pantsers. Planners are people who carefully plot out their whole story before they begin, chapter-by-chapter or even scene-by-scene. They like things to be neat and orderly. This is the autistic approach to writing a book, if you will (not necessarily literally, although many writers are neuro-sparkly in some way).
Pantsers, on the other hand, are people who like to just make it up as they go along. They might have a vague idea of where they want the story to get to, they might not, and even if they do have an idea they might get distracted by some other shiny object en route. This is, if you like, the ADHD approach.
Neither of these approaches is right or wrong. They both have their advantages, and their drawbacks. Planning gives you a more stable writing process and a more polished ‘first draft’ with all the plot holes already filled, but can result in difficulties if you are struck by fresh inspiration half-way through and want to venture away from the path you’ve set yourself. Pantsing gives you loads of opportunity for inspiration to strike and drag you off on interesting detours, at the expense of a messy and chaotic process and a first draft that’s probably as full of holes as a slice of Swiss cheese.
Mmmm, cheese… sorry, I lost my train of thought there. Is it time for lunch yet? Did I mention I’m easily distracted?
I tend to think of the novel-writing process as a bit like going for a walk. The planner knows exactly where they want to get to, and has their map and compass and cheese sandwiches all packed up and ready to go. The pantser just wanders along, maybe with a vague idea of they want to get to the top of that hill or to that castle or to that pub for some lunch, but quite happy to go on detours to look at wildflowers or waterfalls or is that a bookshop over there and a bakery next door? I wonder if they do cinnamon buns?
Now, there are not that many writers who are actually full planners or full pantsers — everyone has their own idiosyncratic way of constructing a novel, and it can vary from book to book even with the same author. I’ve always considered myself a ‘plantser’ – ie, someone who starts out with a rough plan, but allows space for inspiration as they go. I’m walking this planned route, but I can call in at that bookshop and get a cinnamon bun from the bakery and maybe that path to the summit of the hill looks a bit steep and scree-tastic so I’m going to take a slightly different path instead.
Call it the AuDHD approach.
Incidentally, I have recently been diagnosed with ADHD, and referred for an autism assessment. So it looks like I might have a double neuro-sparkly brain! Lucky me!
Being diagnosed with any kind of neuro-divergence as an adult is both validating (I knew I was different!) and disorienting (so what happens next?). And it does really help you to understand yourself, learn what you can do to manage your own brain better, and hopefully get your shit together. A lot of standard-issue life advice doesn’t really work if you’re wired differently, so you need to discover better ways of doing things that actually work for you.
I’m now dealing with my new (potentially double) diagnosis at the same time as trying to re-work all my ideas for this book. It’s a lot, to be honest, and I’ve discarded my deadlines in favour of a bit more self-care. I can’t simply force a new book to happen — I need to figure out the best way to coax it out of my brain. Writing is a process. A journey, not just a destination.
Now here’s my dilemma: planning or pantsing or plantsing? Or a secret fourth thing? Well, my current plantsing approach hasn’t really worked so far, but the good news is that I’ve identified the structural problems with the novel. And guess what, it turns out they are recurrent problems I’ve found with my writing before! Who could have expected that?
They are:
1) Not enough action throughout
2) Characters too passive
3) Indecisive ending
These are all, essentially, aspects of the same problem, the thing that made me want to stop writing this book in the first place: it’s all a bit boring. Or, to be a bit kinder to myself, I tend more towards the descriptive and introspective than the action-packed and exciting. I’m good at creating a vividly evoked setting and populating it with fully realised characters. And then they just sit there. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing in and of itself — and maybe some day I’ll just write a straight-up litfic novel where such things are more tolerated, even encouraged, than in genre fiction — but it does make it harder to construct something that could realistically be called a ‘thriller’.
I’ve written about this issue before and my attempts to deal with it, but it’s still something I struggle with. I suppose I generally prefer to sit around reading books about adventures to going out and having them, so I’m naturally drawn to writing about characters who are bookish and inactive — but goddammit, someone needs to go out and have the adventures, or else there’s no adventures to read about!
How to fix these issues? Well, for starters, I clearly need to follow Raymond Chandler’s famous dictum, and figure out points in my story that could benefit from a man coming through the door with a gun in his hand.
As for the characters, I can’t force them to change, but I can introduce a new character who’s a bit more of a chaos gremlin to shake them up a bit. This character arrived in my brain remarkably quickly, almost as if he’d been there all along, biding his time.
And as for the third problem… well, all I needed to do was to come up with a better, more decisive ending! Easy.
Strangely enough, I’ve found coming up with the basics of a new ending easier than I thought I would. I suppose, having already travelled so far with this story, thinking up how I could continue to a more satisfying conclusion came naturally. I haven’t smoothed out that path completely yet, but I feel like I’m getting there.
The other thing I’ve found has helped me is recasting the story in a different format, and I’m planning to write it from a different point-of-view. Considering things from a different in-universe perspective has helped me inhabit my characters better and understand how I want to tell this story.
So basically, my secret fourth way of making a book happen appears to be: start writing a short story, realise it’s got way out of control, start turning it into a novel without a clear plan, get to thirty thousand words, scrap it as a formless mess, do some planning, start again, get to fifty thousand words, scrap it as too boring to continue, start again again, try to do some more detailed planning and ironing out of problems before embarking on the actual writing part again, hope it’s third time lucky. It’s the writing equivalent of repeatedly setting out on a walk, falling into a ditch, and returning home covered in mud.
Will all this result in a better book? I certainly hope so. Will it result in a book I feel more excited to write? Definitely. Is this a way of working I’d recommend to others? Definitely not. When it comes to writing my next book after this one, will I try to do things in a more streamlined, less chaotic fashion? You bet.
As of now, I feel like I’m starting over yet again, but I’ve also learned a lot from this whole messy, frustrating process, about what I enjoy writing and where my strengths and weaknesses lie. I’m gradually working up a full plan for this thing, complete with a murder board, index cards, and colour-coded marker pens, trying to figure out all the potential pitfalls before I set out (again) on this hike up Mt Novel.
An important part of this process has been recognising that the times I have free for writing don’t always correspond with the times I feel focused and creative. Too often I sit down to write feeling tired, unfocused and fuzzy of brain, and I end up banging out paragraphs of literary loft insulation just to reach my daily word count targets. It’s far from ideal, but my schedule is pretty rigid, so I need to work with the time constraints I’ve got. The answer to this conundrum, I think, is to try to front-load the creative work as much I can by writing a detailed scene-by-scene plan when I’m feeling lively of brain, so at the times I’m feeling less lively I have a clear framework to work with. Call it trying to do the route planning in advance so my future self won’t get lost and fall into a muddy ditch again.
Does that mean I’m now a planner? Has the autistic side of my brain won? I suppose I don’t see it so much as a two-wolves-tussle but a way of trying to make all parts of my brain work together to get where we want we to go. And if we stop to look at some wildflowers and eat a cinnamon bun en route, well, sometimes it’s about the journey, not just the destination.
I would quite like to reach the destination, though. Fingers crossed I can get there this time.
