Sometimes taking the roundabout route is better for you, even if you don’t realise it at the time. Here I am in 2017, using scene sheets to help me write my current novel, based on my own version of the narrative arc, with friendly instructions and powerful questions incorporated. But how did I get to the point where I knew what to do? This week I’m writing the story of my own novel writing journey in a series of blog posts, to celebrate my book How to Write a Novel and Get It Published being only 99p on Amazon, so here goes with part two.
Back in the 90s, I had an old beige Apple Mac and I had two hours off teaching on a Friday afternoon. That’s when I wrote what I called ‘The Novel’ which became The Water’s Edge but was called ‘Returning’ for a long time. Trouble was, finding a story to tell, because I found sequencing extremely difficult, almost impossible, because I’m dyslexic but I didn’t even know what sequencing was.
I had no confidence in my writing or even what it meant to be published. For some reason I was obsessed with doing it. I loved it. Everything I wrote was in this grand project called ‘The Novel’. Of course, it wasn’t – I didn’t even start setting the thing in a Hotel until a couple of years before I finished it.
I got hold of a copy of Jinny Ditzler’s Your Best Year Yet, and worked through all the exercises and made it my top goal to get my book ‘Returning’ published.
I knew I needed to give my novel structure, I just didn’t know how. I still didn’t know how my dyslexia was affecting me – but this seeming inability to understand structure was one way.
I figured that to do that, I would apply for the MA in Creative Writing at my alma mater, UEA, after all, i) it was famous, ii) it was where I started the thing, and iii) I knew my way around.
Doing the MA certainly did give me a structure. The best kind of structure it gave me was structured writing time. It turned out that writing a novel is about putting in the time regularly. I worked 3 or 4 days a week, went to Norwich for a day, and wrote for a day. I had no social life! That said, the MA didn’t teach me very much about storytelling, the narrative arc, classic narrative structures and how to use them.
The Water’s Edge was published in 2003, before I got to grips narrative sequencing or the narrative arc. I was suspicious of any ‘formula’ that showed you how to do it. At the time, I wanted to write like Jeannette Winterson (Oranges, or Sexing the Cherry).
Setting the book in a hotel gave the book a structure (from the seasons). My detailed planning of the characters’ family trees gave it a structure. The Persephone myth gave the book a structure. My agent told me to ‘turn it into a love story’ which gave it a kind of structure. But I was still looking for the elusive definition of ‘story’ – actually, I needed to understand sequencing. I thought I had a ‘problem’ with story. I didn’t. I was still learning. It’s just I took the roundabout route.
Taking the roundabout route has its advantages. It’s more personal for one. When you teach yourself something, either because you deliberately set out to learn a skill, or because you got into a habit – I was doing both of these – then it’s more hard won. I internalised what I was learning. It meant I learnt to teach these skills and techniques to other writers, and it meant I eventually worked out what narrative structure and storytelling meant to me, at a deep level.
Discover how I eventually got to grips with storytelling in How to Write a Novel and Get It Published myBook.to/writeanovel