Earlier this year, I had one of those
serendipitous experiences which seem to solve problems in some mystical way.
Don’t worry, there’s nothing mystical about what follows; I just wanted to pass
on a wee lesson which I learned and it’s this: the way to solve writing
problems is to write.
See? Easy. In fact, it’s a little pearl of
wisdom that came out of a displacement activity and it actually produced a book.
It’s called Alternative Dimension and this is how it was born.
I’d just finished writing two non-fiction
books to meet deadlines and was looking for a way to get into my next novel. But
I’d been writing solidly for days and wanted to indulge my habitual laziness
for a while so, as a sort of stopgap, I thought of publishing a collection of
short stories. It gave me a good excuse to put the novel on the back burner
but, as I was looking though the stories to choose which ones to include, I saw
that there were about twenty featuring online role-playing games. Each was a
separate, self-contained item with its own characters but they shared similar
themes, such as fantasy, the tension between virtual and real worlds, the
dangers of assuming anonymity when online. The combined word count was around
30,000, enough for a collection, but the fact that there was a sort of
coherence about the themes made me wonder if I could do more with them. So I tried
to think of what that could be and how I could do it. Result? Nothing – no
muse, no flashes of inspiration, nothing – but I knew I could link them
somehow. So in the end I just forced myself to start writing. I knew one of the
characters pretty well so I just started writing some dialogue between him and
his friend.
It was OK, but only OK. Their conversation was
natural enough, their characters distinct, there were a couple of gags that
worked, but I still didn’t know where it was going. Then, suddenly, I had to
look something up, just to get some statistics to back up a comment made by my
main man. I did that and there, all of a sudden, was the solution. The character
had taken me in the right direction and I could see exactly how the stories not
only fitted together but actually offered a clear progression. He was no longer
just a character in one of the stories, he was the clue to how they could all
be absorbed into a single structure with one clear central narrative. I used some
software called StoryLines to group them into categories and put a generalising
label on each group. I then shuffled them around into a logical sequence that made
narrative sense and, at 44,000 words, constituted a novella.
All but two of them had been written to
make readers laugh but, while that’s still the overall intention of the book,
early reviewers have spoken of the mixture of laughter and darkness. If I’d
published them as a collection, I don’t think that darkness would have been as evident but linking them this way has worked a sort of alchemy that has changed
their overall nature.
See what I mean about it being somehow
mystical? Just by starting to write, without any notion of what the content
would be or what my purpose was, I’d given the character the opportunity to
teach me which way I should be going. As a result, instead of sitting
contemplating the awe-inspiring notion that I had to ‘start another novel’, I had
some specific, identifiable and eminently reachable goals. I knew there were
gaps between the stories which had to be filled, passages in them that needed rewriting
to bring them into a unified structure. So my character had changed the nature
of the problem: instead of having the monumental task of writing a whole book,
I had a series of much smaller exercises to complete. Once I was started, I
couldn’t wait to get back to it every day and, very quickly, the book was
finished.
So, if you’re stuck or have some writing
problem to solve, just write.
