The First - and second - novel - Part Two

I hope you do complete your first long piece of writing. When I first started writing novels as an adult, I couldn’t finish them. They were highly derivative fantasy stories written firmly under the influence of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Mists of Avalon and Anne McCaffrey’s Dragons of Pern series.

At the same time, I was writing poetry and getting the odd poem published. The never-ending fantasy stories were an antidote to the brevity and urgency of the very contemporary, laconic poems I was also writing. I loved beginning these stories but couldn’t muster the necessary enthusiasm to finish them.

My poetry apprenticeship had begun years earlier, with active study in one way or another. I’d written them in primary school and memorised, scanned and analysed poems for various Speech and Drama exams. I’d studied them at University with a sense of familiarity because of the years of Speech and Drama but also because of a childhood of hearing poetry around the kitchen table and declaimed over the washing up. It wasn’t hard turning this formal and informal study into a more concentrated writerly examination of poetry when I decided to focus my attention on this form.

By the time I wrote my first complete novel, I'd already had a collection of poetry published. I wrote the novel because I was at home, first pregnant and then with a new baby, and I felt as though I should be doing something more with my time than writing poetry. The best thing about the novel remains the title – My Aunt Sophie, the Clairvoyant. It was, even then, firmly in a young adult voice. It was based on both my imagination and events I had either witnessed or eavesdropped on. The first person character was a feisty but somewhat vulnerable observer. These characteristics haven’t changed much. I now move from young adult to middle or younger reader with a fair amount of ease. I’ve written in both female and male voices but those voices have remained somewhat feisty but vulnerable; observers who don’t always put the information they’re witnessing – the adult world – together in a way that is helpful to them.

That novel has never even been sent to a publisher. And no wonder. The theme was wonky. The plot unbelievable. The dialogue often wooden. The structure was written without any idea of timelines. The characters, while I adored them and their weird foibles, often behaved uncharacteristically. I knew all this. I knew, too, that I’d spent too long on the first two chapters (approximately six months? could that be true?) and rushed the end of it, just to finish the damn thing. The opening of the novel, however long it was polished, nonetheless always took the reader on this rollercoaster ride of backstory and information. A friend said it left her breathless. It was not a compliment!

After my mother (The Editor) read it, she remarked with her usual honesty, 'It's a good thing you're a poet'. That sealed the novel's fate. It was bottom-drawered immediately. But I didn't give up writing novels.

Another novel followed My Aunty Sophie, the Clairvoyant. This was called something like Oliver’s Women. I didn’t even bother finishing it.

Then I started to write yet another, a story I’d been telling myself for years. It was about four teenagers and their intersecting relationships. I wrote it in prose, after all, that’s how you write a novel. I sent five chapters off to a good reader I knew. She sent it back with as much criticism as I’d sent manuscript.

The short version – it was no good.

I was angry with myself for having messed up a story I loved and characters I knew and was fond of. I sat down and wrote it as a verse novel. A Dangerous Girl was published. My first published novel. In verse.

Nonetheless, that novel taught me about prose novels – it taught me about plotting, structure, characterisation and how to hold on to a theme. It taught me about shadowing characters, foreshadowing events and the importance of details. All of these elements I would use in my first published prose novel.

Writing Short Stories

I once heard Thea Astley at a Writer's Festival talk about how she'd started writing poetry, but that was way too hard. Then she'd switched to short stories which were hard enough before finally trying a novel - a piece of cake in comparison. I'd agree that anything depending on brevity is going to be difficult. Coleridge's definitions of writing was 'prose,—words in their best order; poetry,—the best words in their best order.'

Equally every word in a short story should count.

In order for this to happen you need a good reason for writing the short story - it needs to explore an important theme, to communicate a clear message to the reader. Too often I read short stories by new writers which don't actually have an underlying theme. They may a plot and a few characters, but the theme hasn't been teased out sufficiently.

As the theme largely drives the plot and the motivation and transformation of the central character, you can see how the whole story can be shaky if the theme isn't identifiable.

I could begin two stories with identical characters and a common event as a catalyst, but where I take the story will largely depend on the theme I choose. For eg. my central character is a wife who has decided to leave her husband. She packs up and leaves while he's at work, but he comes home unexpectedly, driven by some instinct or intuition. There's a scene. He breaks down. She drives off regardless.

The theme will dictate how I frame this simple story. If I'm exploring infidelity and betrayal, I might begin the story with the wife's discovery of her husband's infidelity. It might be the final piece of the jigsaw of his indifference she's been slowly piecing together. He's been alerted by a call at work - it's not mere intuition on his part (although, in order that this is kept in the third person limited I would want the wife to guess this, rather than the reader know it from a scene at the husband's work). He breaks down and the wife drives off, not promising to return but not resolved to completely separate, either.

On the other hand if the theme is personal growth, I'd frame the story differently. The wife has felt trapped in her marriage. She's decided over a period of some time that change must happen. It hasn't. One morning she decides she has to reinvent herself or stagnate for the rest of her life. The scene when the husband arrives home is quite different. He tries to convince her that they are soulmates - otherwise how would he have guessed her intentions. She's tender with him, but her tenderness is caused through guilt. She agrees to a break. But the map she pulls out of the glovebox as she leaves gives the reader the feeling that she won't be back.

So the first thing you need to consider is the what theme you want your story to explore. Then you need to limit the cast of characters to as few as possible. You don't want the reader overwhelmed by the number of characters they have to remember. You want the story to retain a strong focus on one central character.

You need to think of the time over which the story takes place. Reduce this as much as you can. It's very difficult for a successful short story to take place over a lifetime. You need the discursive nature of the novel to accomplish this.

Do try to avoid the twist at the end of the tale. These worked beautifully at the height of their popularity. They were clever, quite unpredictable and in vogue. These days they are appear forced and predictable.

Don't think you need to explore large, melodramatic events in a short story. Small real things are often the catalysts of change - and easier to write convincingly. Remember, just because it happened, doesn't make your fictional version of an event ring true to the reader. Truth is stranger than fiction and you, the writer, must convince us that your fiction is the truth.