Writing East Midlands

When someone asks me how I write my novel, I say “124 words at a time.”

Okay, if I’m being truthful that’s not quite right as nobody has yet asked me how I write my novels. When someone learns I write their first question is more typically “Have I read anything you’ve written?” and when I say “It depends how much horror fiction you’ve read” their response is usually to look around the room for an Accountant or an Estate Agent or a Hedge Fund Manager… anyone, really.

But let’s live in the land of make-believe just for a moment. If someone does ask me how I write my novel I will say “124 words at a time” and then they’ll look blankly at me and I shall explain:

It’s like this. A novel is a lot of words - the first draft of “The Lost” is likely to come in somewhere around 120,000 words. It was written in two “sessions” (separated by the edit of Bloodie Bones) and for each of those sessions I wrote about 8,000 words a week. Some weeks I wrote more (hurrah!) some weeks I wrote less (boo!) but over the piece it averages out somewhere near 8,000.

That isn’t a coincidence. When I write a novel I try and plan out my time to enable me to hit that target of 8,000 words a week. And each day I chip away at the 8,000 words so that hopefully by the Sunday night I know I’ve done my week’s work. It might be that without that target in mind I would still write 8,000, but I don’t think so. I think I would probably write 7,500, or maybe 6,000, maybe even 5,000. 8,000 words each week is a stretch and sometimes I’m not quite there - which is where my 124 words comes in (you’d thought I’d forgotten, didn’t you?).

Because I know what I’m aiming for that number is there in the back of my mind. Last week I was 124 words away from my target for the week. Not a lot, but after all my planned writing sessions I was still short, and I knew I was short. Those 124 words nagged at me until I was able to find a few minutes to write them (and, as it turned out, a few hundred more words as well). As soon as they were written I could relax.

Until the next week, and the next 8,000 words.

So that’s how I get to the end of a novel - 124 words at a time.

And just a quick plug reminder: in between these blog posts you can visit my website: www.richardfarrenbarber.co.uk for my erratic postings on the 10 novels that shaped me as a writer. 

I had a short story accepted recently and it made me think about what it takes to succeed in writing. I think I can distil it to three requirements:

Imagination – which I believe is as much the ability to *identify* the potential for a story as it is the imagination to create the world, the characters, the situation etc.

Technical skill – the ability to write in an engaging way that communicates what you’re trying to get across.

Persistence – a stubbornness to keep going when everything (the rejection slips, the industry gloom, the fact that getting a publishing deal is only slightly more statistically likely than winning the lottery, and a lot less lucrative) tells you that it just isn’t worth pursuing.

Now me, I’ve got bucket loads of persistence (that sounds much better than stubbornness) as people who know me will happily testify to. I hope I have imagination and technical skill too, otherwise I’m sunk, but today I thought I’d look at persistence.

I recently hit a bad patch with the current novel I’m writing, “The Lost”. 65,000 words in and it felt like I’d lost the thread of what I was writing. There are a couple of tricks of the trade to overcome this – skip to a different section of the book and start writing there, spend a while plotting out some more of the book to try and identify where I was going wrong, or ‘write through’.

By ‘write through’ I basically mean grit your teeth and pull out each word one at a time. Sometimes it feels like trying to cross a muddy field on stilts, but each step forward (word written, if you’re following the analogy) is a step closer to the other side, and at some point during the walk I tend to find the ground gets firmer and you can throw away the stilts and start to run again.

Running! That’s why I write. That sensation when it feels like you’re not writing a story, you’re telling it. When the words flood out.

I’m not quite there with “The Lost” yet, the ground is definitely still a little soggy underfoot, but I feel like I’ve got through the worst patch, and as I nearly have two thirds of the novel complete I suspect there aren’t too many more sticky patches to navigate before the end.

And back to that story acceptance. Sometimes it’s the ability to keep writing when it feels like every word has to be pulled from you, and sometimes it’s the ability to keep submitting and damn the rejections.

There’s a mantra in writing called “Heinlein’s laws” (after Robert Heinlein, the Science Fiction author who wrote ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’) and it goes like this:

You must write!

You must finish what you write!

You must refrain from editing

You must market your story

You must keep it on the market

You must start something else

I think you need to take the “refrain from editing” with a pinch of salt (they were written in 1947 so rewriting was probably more of an effort than it is now) But that, my friends, is the secret to writing success. (Only $2.99, send your cheques and postal orders to…)

The story I just had accepted had been passed over by fourteen other editors before it reached the one that it accepted it. It isn’t that it’s a bad story (I try not to let those ones out of their cage) and in fact a couple of times it got to second and even third readings at publications. It just wasn’t right for them. So as important as that initial idea and the craft needed to imagine and then write the story, is the tenacity to keep it out there until it finds a home.

That’s all for this week. At the moment I’m alternating these blogs with my list of “novels that influenced me as a writer”. Which you can read on my website: www.richardfarrenbarber.co.uk. 

There are no fat pigs in sight but there was a fat envelope when I sent “Bloodie Bones” off to TLC. But this was where I came unstuck as I sent the first three chapters and calculated I had a couple of weeks to type up the last few amendments before anyone would be close to asking for the rest of the novel. How wrong I was! Within a day TLC contacted to ask if I could send the full typescript.

Cue a frenzied couple of days when every spare minute was spent typing up the changes I’d hand-written on the manuscript. Even now that it’s done (and I can sleep again!) I’m not sure in hindsight if it was a good thing or not. At least I’d already done the amendments and the request from TLC required me to get it sorted and out instead of tinkering again and again with the text.

So now it’s done. I understand from TLC that they’ve already been in discussions with agents and have got two lined up to read “Bloodie Bones” which is great news as just getting someone to open a submission labelled horror can is tough.

I’m trying to be realistic about this. The agents are going to look at “Bloodie Bones”, that’s as far as the deal goes. No promises, no commitments, definitely no guarantees. But having the novel put in front of an agent who has already agreed to read it is a big step forward.

At this stage I know I should sit back, rest on my laurels, wait for the bidding war to start.

Yeah. Right.

So instead I’ve moved onto the novel I started writing in April and then put aside when interest in “Bloodie Bones” picked up in July. It’s tentatively called “The Lost” and it’s currently about 45,000 words in length. I read through the opening section at the weekend (mainly to remind myself what the story was….I knew the big picture but the details were lost) and it actually reads very well for a first draft (IMHO).

So here’s my big tip for anyone out there who’s finished a novel and it’s out there in the big wide world looking to hook an agent. Write something else. It would be easy to focus on “Bloodie Bones”, wondering whether anyone has read it, what they think about it. Immersing myself in “The Lost” takes the edge off that.

A little bit… I’d be lying if I said I don’t still have those thoughts and maybe check my email box a little more frequently than usual.

I haven’t blogged for a while as my work on Bloodie Bones has been low profile (editing, editing and more editing) but now I’m coming to the end of that I thought I’d better explain what I’ve been doing.

I have just returned from a weekend at “Fantasycon” in Brighton where authors of Fantasy, Science Fiction and Horror meet. I’d never attended Fantasycon before (I don’t write Fantasycon, so it was a no-brainer, right?). I finally saw the error of my ways when an anthology which had one of my stories was being launched at the conference.

I did a reading of my own work (Last Respects – a short story being published in an anthology by Derby Scribes next month, and the first chapter of Bloodie Bones) and then a reading to support the anthology being launched, called Alt-Dead.

The readings were great and I met lots of authors from all the genres, with a particular bias to horror. On the Saturday I took part in the book launch. I watched as people came, bought the book, and then went along the line of authors having their books signed. It has to be one of the most surreal experiences I have ever had. I’ve attended enough signings as a reader but to be present on the *other* side of the table as a writer was very odd. It was great to meet people who are actually going to read what I’ve written. In the past I’ve had stories accepted in publications, but I haven’t met the people who buy the magazines and read my work. Having that direct connection to readers was a great experience.

So now I’m a Fantasycon convert and the date for next year’s event is already in my diary. On a more immediate level, I’ve just finished tidying up Bloodie Bones and TLC has offered to take it out to agents on my behalf. So tomorrow the first three chapters go into the post and then I’ll spend a couple of days typing up the amendments I’ve made to the rest of the typescript. Once that’s completed then I’ll pick up where I left off with my other novel, “The Lost”, and hope to finish that before Christmas.

At the moment Bloodie Bones is taking a rest while I wait for the response from the second reading to come in from The Literary Consultancy. So I could kick back and catch up on some TV and books. Nah

I started my new novel and I’m roughly 1/3 of the way through (32,000 words) after a month. Now comes the tricky part. In my experience the opening of a novel is fuelled by the white heat of creativity; the ideas are flowing, the characters are blooming into life and as a result the pages almost write themselves. But somewhere around the 25-30K mark that initial burn fades away, a bit like a shuttle blasting into space. Now is the time for booster rockets and the closest I ever get to plotting.

I have a good idea what the novel (tentative title: The Lost) is about (always a benefit, I find) and I have a rough outline in my head of what’s going to happen, but to get through the next 30,000 words I need something a little stronger.

I expect the next 30k to be a harder slog and take longer to write. That said, I’m still looking to finish the new novel by mid-August.

I think what I’m happiest about with the new novel (apart from being back writing a novel again. I mean, I don’t do this for the pay-check do I?) is that I’ve managed to grow it whilst still working on other things. I’ve edited a couple of short stories, including re-writing one at the request of an editor, wrote and presented a session for Derby Scribes, kept up with submissions and got into the swing of writing critiques for Critters. This feels sustainable. At the same time I’ve seen a couple of short stories published - one in the Derby Evening Telegraph and another in Morpheus Tales - Urban Horror Special. (My first in an anthology!). This also sees the first of my short stories to be published under the pen name “Richard Farren Barber”. (Remember, you saw it here first!)

The challenge now is to maintain the balance between writing the novel and keeping all those other plates spinning.

I spent an afternoon in York with Mark Morris reading through Bloodie Bones. After four hours in a pub poring over 600 pages of manuscript my neck ached, my eyeballs ached, my heart ached, but I had a much better understanding of where Bloodie Bones sat in the great scheme of things.

I would recommend the process to any writer. Having someone else read through my entire novel, someone who understands novels and the genre, was fascinating and immensely helpful. During the four hours I saw the same mistakes appear time and time again in my writing and while I may have identified them (with help) over a shorter piece of work it made a huge impression on me to see the same errors. Most of them were such small things and, now that I know to look out for them, easily spotted and resolved.

At the same time I had to do some soul searching about Bloodie Bones. Was it the novel I had expected it to be? (Well no, they never are!) Was it as good as it can be? Would it find a place in the market? I knew I had some reservations about Bloodie Bones: concerns about the structure of the narrative and whether it would work for a reader.

The short answer is that there are flaws in Bloodie Bones. Some flaws I had already suspected and others that came to me unannounced. With more work Bloodie Bones could be a better book. But could it be a published book? The horror market is in a strange place at the moment; it’s still very much below the commercial tidemark (go into Waterstones and look at the horror section… you get extra marks for actually finding it without asking for help…and then discard all those authors who have been publishing since the 1980s. Consider what you have left. There are some new authors there, I grant you, but then do the same trick over in the crime aisle. Get the picture? Now step away from the crime aisle, they don’t need your money.) The short answer is I don’t know. I have the feedback from Mark on Bloodie Bones’s strengths and weaknesses and I have some ideas on how I could improve it and resolve the issues identified. But could it be published? I know that ultimately the only way to find out is to do the amendments and then take it round publishers and agents. For now, I have Mark’s feedback and at the end of the month I’ll receive the feedback from TLC (which will mark the end of my period on the mentoring scheme with them) and at that point I’ll take a hard look at Bloodie Bones and decide where to go with it.

I left York with my head thudding (and not due to any excess of alcohol from the BFS open evening, I hasten to add!) with the dilemma about what to do with Bloodie Bones. I knew my time with Mark had taught me at least one key lesson, the importance of improving my skills at critiquing my own work and also having my work reviewed by others. With that in mind I set myself the task of finding a suitable online critiquing group. I signed up with Critters and I’ll give it a few months to see whether this takes me in the right direction.

And in the meantime. When I got home from York I started writing Chapter One of my new novel: The Lost.

I’ve been to my fair share of writing classes and writing workshops and writing groups, and one thing that comes up regularly is how to come up with ideas. I have to say, for me this isn’t a problem - the problem is how to recognise which story ideas are good enough to use and how to focus on one idea to the exclusion of all others for the duration of the project.

Now that last one is a toughie. There’s something seductive about the white-hot realisation of a new idea - the moment when you recognise it, when it’s better than anything you’ve written before, when this could be: the one!

So I thought I’d turn my attention, briefly, to where the ideas come from. For me it’s often an image. So for example, the short story I’ve just finished was prompted by the image of our cat on his haunches stalking a couple of birds in the garden (Don’t worry - this is a popular past time of our cat but the birds are safe, and I think they know it!).

Race, which was published in Morpheus Tales IX, came from walking down an old cobbled street and everyone seemed to be pushing and shoving each other to get past. While Murden’s Hollow, published in the House of Horror (and you can read it online for free!) came from sitting in the car on the M1 and seeing the road bend around a small, enclosed field. In fact, motorway driving (or passengering, in the case of Murden’s Hollow and SkyDogs which is the story I’m editing at the moment) is an excellent breeding ground for ideas.

So many of the images are mundane, nothing strikingly terrifying about them (at this point I think about Stephen King saying that The Langoliers in “Four Past Midnight” came from the image of a woman holding her hand over a crack in the wall of a plane - now that’s a terrific image to start a story with!) but often the image is the speck of dust around which the pearl of a story is formed.

There are all sorts of tips and techniques on how to generate story ideas if you’re stuck for something to write about. Perhaps the one I most vehemently subscribe to is: write it down! I quite often have stray opening story lines roll into my head (Don’t ask…it’s a strange enough place at the best of times) and so I always try to capture them. Sometimes these lines flourish into whole paragraphs (gasp) sometimes they even make it as the opening of a completed story, but they always start with me making a note. I have these errant opening lines all over the place - I even have a special folder in my writing files just for “opening lines”. Often they’re never more than that, but it does mean when the white-hot fire hits me I’ve got a way to capture it and try and tame it.

Which brings me back to where I came in. For me, the challenge is usually not identifying the idea, it’s holding onto it long enough to make it into a story, when there is the lure of all these other, newer and hotter ideas vying for my attention. Having somewhere to store everything that comes in also allows me the freedom to put it out of the way so it doesn’t distract me from what I’m supposed to be working on.

And as for “Fornits”… well you’re just going to have to work that one out for yourself!

I’ve received my initial feedback from one of the readers who has received Bloodie Bones and I’ve now agreed with TLC who their reader will be.

To recap: I’m receiving a read from TLC as part of the mentoring scheme (Kindly sponsored by Writing East Midlands… just to give them another plug!) but I had concerns that they wouldn’t be able to allocate a reader with experience of the horror genre and so through WEM I approached a horror writer (who I can reveal is Mark Morris) who agree to provide feedback as well (For a fee…. so don’t go drowning Mark in your manuscripts just because he’s a good egg).

Mark has come back with his analysis and a suggestion we meet up to discuss his feedback in greater depth, which we’ll be doing later this month. But in the interim I have his comments to look at, all seven pages of them.

Deep breath.

So let’s trot out one of the aphorisms about becoming a writer: that you need to develop a thick skin. It’s hard to put your work out there and then read what someone else has to say about it. It’s even harder when you read what they say and the little voice inside your head is going “Yup, thought that might crop up. Yup, reckoned you were gonna come unstuck there. Yup, I told you that was a problem.” (In case you’re unaware, my internal voice appears to be an elderly gentleman from the deep south) .

Another deep breath.

I received the response from Mark and damned if I didn’t recognised many of the points he raised as concerns I’d had but (and get this, because this is learning in action!) I hadn’t had the courage or conviction to do face them. I’d buried my internal critic up to his neck in wet cement and then tried to pile another load of debris on top of him. And it worked. Well, it almost worked, there was still some wriggling (which is probably what spurred me on to be so adamant about the need for an opinion from someone within the genre) but I thought I’d done a fairly good job in burying the bodies. Reading Mark’s analysis told me I was kidding no-one but myself, the bodies were still lying out on the freeway for everyone to witness.

I have to be honest, Mark’s analysis was hard to read. Hard because it demonstrated where I am as a writer and where I need to be. Hard because I recognised it was true. And perhaps hardest because it challenges me to look at Bloodie Bones and consider whether the flaws I have been studiously ignoring are so fundamental that it renders the novel un-readable.

Now you see why that was a tough document to read, and why authors need a thick skin?

So how did I respond? I picked up my pen, edited some of the short stories that have been waiting patiently in the “to do” pile for the last few months, and wrote a new short story. And at some point soon, when I find the courage, I’ll pick up Mark’s feedback and read it again and again and again.

With all the furore over the printing and submission of “Bloodie Bones” last week it completely slipped my mind to declare (in big letters, with a smattering of fireworks and a fanfare of trumpets)

I have won a literary award!

I hear you ask, “how could you forget to mention this?” I also hear you cry “but the Booker shortlist is announced in September and your name isn’t on the BFS awards.” True. Very true.

My prize ladies and gentleman, was first place in a writing competition at my son’s school! It looks a little like this:

(I also received a book voucher.)

Now I hope it doesn’t come across that I am in any way belittling my prize - because that isn’t the case. I was absolutely thrilled to win and I sat in the hall in one of those tiny seats that you sit on at parents’ evening, and when my name was called I proudly went up to collect my award.

Which brings me onto where this post is going; Validation! It’s very difficult to develop objectivity when writing - is it good? is it bad? is it brilliant? is it terrible? Quite often the stories that I have thought were my best work have been rejected by many publications, whilst stories I thought were just okay have been snapped up as soon as they reach the editor’s hands. 

It’s for this reason that getting published (or winning an award!) is as much about the validation of what I have written as revelling in the financial rewards (although I will thoroughly enjoy spending the book tokens). Obviously it’s also about raising my profile and getting the name “Richard Farren Barber” (Did you see what I did there? notch up another hit on the Google-ometer) more widely known and adding to the list of credits on my writing CV.

And for any of you out there wondering - no, I didn’t win at the expense of some six year old who went home weeping and clutching their crumpled sheet of paper to their chest, there was a category for parents. 

I’ve just realised that in previous posts I often talk about these huge leaps I am taking: I started off in February last year with a leap of faith and finished my last blog talking about great leaps into the unknown. Apart from making it sound like I’m some moon-bound superhuman lolloping all over the place, it’s not true. Writing isn’t about great leaps (at least, not for me…) it’s more about small steps. At the time they seem like momentous occasions but in hindsight it’s just another couple of feet down the road that will (hopefully) one day lead to publication.

That said, some days those baby steps seem more significant than others. So last week I stood in my local print shop and watched as two copies of Bloodie Bones rolled off the presses (I didn’t want to do it at home as I thought it might shake my poor printer to smithereens) and then packaged them up and sent them on their merry way through the postal system. (Now that’s an expensive business… someone explain to me how the Royal Mail are losing money hand over fist when they charge that much?)

It would be a lie if I said I didn’t feel any emotion - here’s two years of my life (well, if you exclude the sleeping, eating, going to work, watching telly, reading etc….) rolling out of a machine. It’s tangible proof that I have been sitting in the corner rocking to myself. Well, not all the time.

So they’re gone, and I suppose I should feel relieved, and part of me does. But perhaps more than that I realise I now need to worry about what happens when the damned things come back. What if they don’t like it? What if they hate it? What if they say perfectly healthy trees were unfairly put to death for this?

I am sure I could put the time before I get the feedback to good use, sitting in a corner rocking perchance? As it is I’m trying not to think about it and instead I’m typing up the novel I wrote just before I started edited Bloodie Bones (from the bad old days when I wrote everything out longhand… boy am I regretting hanging onto that trick for so long!) and finishing off a huge backlog of short stories that are nearly all *almost there*. So as usual there’s lots to be going on with.

But those two copies of Bloodie Bones are out there… and one day they’ll come back home.