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.