I’ve mentioned on twitter that I’ve finally completed the novel I began writing in August. I’ll hopefully be releasing it in January.
A few people have emailed me asking for more information about it, and other have asked me to write a bit more about the writing process. The following essay is very long, and I’ve written it this way for ME as much as any other reader. It’s like a record of what I’ve been through, and what I feel like the day I finished it. In the future I’ll read this back and remember what an idiot I was, but I think it’s good to get this kind of stuff down.
The working title for this project is Combat. It’s a short novel, taking maybe 6 hours to read. It’s a near-future science fiction novel, sort of a techno-thriller, with military SF overtones. As you see, I’m not entirely sure how to categorize it. But it’s a story I wanted to tell, so I’m not too concerned about slotting it into pre-existing sub-genres.
The concept behind the story is one I’ve been thinking about for a long time. So much science fiction, especially space opera and military science fiction, glorifies war and military action and violence. The authors invent use their new technological inventions to come up with ever more creative way to kill people. I mean, I love reading this, if it’s written well and is actually logical. But it can’t be healthy, right? Just thinking up way to kill people? And no matter if the overall message of the novel is “war is bad”, it invariable ends with a personal shootout between the protagonist and antagonist.
So Combat (working title), is my attempt to take military science fiction in the opposite direction. How about I try to come up all the ways that technology can be applied to stop people killing each other. That said, there is a LOT of action in the novel, as different approaches to peace are pushed to the limit.
There’s a load more to it than that, but I don’t want to give it away.
Combat (working title) is a followup to my first novel, Minding Tomorrow. It isn’t a sequel, nor is it a prequel, it’s just set in the same world as Minding Tomorrow, and has a few characters, events, locations, themes and, of course, technologies in common. It answers question and mysteries that go unexplained in Minding Tomorrow, but at the same time it has questions and mysteries left unresolved that are answered in Minding Tomorrow.
The idea is that you can read them in either order, and you’ll get a different experience depending on which way round you take it. If you read Minding Tomorrow first, then Combat, you’ll know more about some of the situations the characters in Combat find themselves in than the characters themselves, and enjoy the cross-references. But if you read Combat first, you’ll share the characters’ confusion and questions about their situations, but you know the questions can be found elsewhere. And the same is true if you read the novels the other way round.
Or that’s the plan. I hope other people find the idea as interesting as I do.
Ok, on to the writing process. Like all of the novels I’ve written in the past year, it’s a story that’s been knocking about in my head for a loooong time. So long, in fact, that it was once (in theory) a sequel to a novel I began to write back in 2001 (which I only got about 20,000 words into before realizing I didn’t actually have an ending). As I was writing Minding Tomorrow last year, I knew it would become part of that world, so I intentionally wrote things into that novel which would make this novel work.
At the same time, I had a separate idea for whole other novel, featuring the main character of Combat. Over the past two years I’ve realized that the two novels are linked thematically in such a close way, that I couldn’t separate the ideas from each other. I decided that I needed to combine them into a single, united project, and knew that by doing so they would each comment on the other as they progressed.
The result is a non-linear structure where one story takes ten chapters (ABCDEFGHIJ) and so does the other (1234567890). One story takes place eight years before the other, but they are arranged A1B2C3D4etc.
But a novel is more than just a story, especially a science fiction novel. People want to read about new technologies and science and the impact they have on society. Thankfully I come up with this kind of thing all the time, and a lot makes its way into the novel. Some things I’m sure have been written about before, but like in Minding Tomorrow, I like to think I’ve put a new spin on what I write about.
And there’s still many more layers to a novel. Some great advice is “write what you know” so I decided to take that to heart in the writing of this novel, to a greater extent than I ever have done before.
I’m a professional juggler. I love juggling. One of my favorite activities in the world in a game jugglers play, called Combat. Yes, that’s where the working title of the novel comes from! So juggling makes an appearance in this novel.
And my father had a very interesting time in the military. He was an officer in British army, stationed in Belfast in the early seventies. For those who don’t know the history of the Northern Ireland troubles, those were considered some of the worst years in terms of riots, shootings, and general sectarian violence. He told loads of stories growing up, about what it was like to go out and arrest leaders of the IRA, and what it’s like to face down a riot, and what it’s like to shoot and kill someone, and just how screwed up it can make you.
Now, the story in this novel is not the story of my father, but there are many parallels that could be drawn. Some of the incidents are lifted directly from my father’s stories, but the big picture story is very different. I thought a lot about if this is a good way to write, as maybe a “real novelist” should create their situations from scratch. But you know what? I’d be an idiot if I didn’t use this knowledge in some way, even if it is second hand, because I’m sure it adds a strength to the situations and questions the main character faces.
All this thinking took place over the past few years, but accelerated since I finished Minding Tomorrow, knowing that would be a great springboard into this new project. I wrote Monster Story (working title) in February, and a big chunk of Human Danger (working title) in May/June. My big lesson in not completing Human Danger was that, while I had loads of ideas, I didn’t have the final events EXACTLY clear in my head. I thought I’d be able to get it sorted as I wrote the first half. And I did. Unfortunately, as I was writing I found that the most AWESOME ending to Human Danger, I mean, so AWESOME I couldn’t imagine it ever ending in a different way, made the everything I was writing up until that point obsolete. For the story to make sense I’d have to go back and completely rewrite everything so far, as there was probably something in every single sentence that needed changing, and the character’s voice would have to be completely different.
Bummer. At the time I wrote on my blog that I should have spent another month making notes and thinking, rather than the month writing. I’ll still go back on work on Human Danger again, as I find it very exciting, but I knew at the time I had to move on to a different project in the meantime.
So, with Combat, I didn’t want to make that mistake again. I wasn’t going to get caught out this time! For the (projected) 60,000 word novel, I wrote about 8,000 words of notes. I did some exercises outlined in the Snowflake Method (google it). Every chapter was broken down into scenes, and I listed every key piece of information that had to be revealed or created in each scene, plus any lines that needed to spoken. Then I wrote down as much as I could about each character, and what each of those characters brought to the story. I wrote a synopsis of the story from their point of view, to make sure that every character had depth (as needed) and went on some kind of journey (as needed).
I also discovered storyfix.net, a website that concentrates a lot on plot structure. I’d already grasped 95% of what Larry Brooks writes there, but it was great to have things cleared up into handy checklists and questions to answer.
I decided to write the story chronologically, so tackle the ABC story before writing any of the 123 story. I judged this would be the shorter part, at about 30,000 words, so judged I could manage that in 20 days if I stuck to 1,500 words per day. I made sure everything was in order, made a new word-count tracking spreadsheet, prepared to start in early August.
And then, before I’d even started, Pola dumped me. That sort of killed my enthusiasm and focused my mind all that the same time.
Instead of concentrating on long descriptions and beautiful writing, I just made sure the entire scene or chapter was 100% clear in my head, even if it took a few days, then wrote it down as quickly as I could. This meant the story was shorter than I originally planned, but took much longer to write. In 12 writing sessions I managed 22,000 words in total, but those were spread out between August 13th and September 13th. After deleting notes and superfluous scenes; 20,372 words.
A third shorter than planned, but I think that stripping out everything that isn’t 100% relevant and required for the story gives it a lot of energy and momentum. Or so I hope.
Life takes twists and turns, so I thought I’d put off the second half of the novel until November, and tackle it as a NaNoWriMo project. This meant more thinking, more note taking, more thinking. Yes, everything was in order. No getting to the last chapter and not knowing where to go this time!
November 1st…. and I’m off! November 8th and I’m over 18,000 words, almost 5,000 words ahead of schedule. I get a bit busy with traveling, so in the next week I only add another 4,000 words.
Then, life takes over again, and I work on a big video project to the exclusion of all else. At the time the video release date was December 1st, and I wanted to get it completed well in advance. By the time I finished the video project, Combat had slipped out of my mind, and I’d lost all momentum. I marked NaNoWriMo 2009 down as a big fat fail. To be honest, I never thought I had 50,000 words of the novel left to write, as I guessed the 123 storyline would come to 35,000 words maximum.
Then travel got in the way again. Oh, and in that time I watched season 1 of Dexter. And later I read the 1000 page long Anathem, by Neal Stephenson, plus a few other novels.
But in all this time Combat was bubbling away. I just needed to WRITE IT! I decided to go back and edit everything I’d written so far, which was actually a nice way to ramp up into the writing again. I really enjoy editing.
Doing so made me realize an awesome action scene that took place at the Millau Viaduct just didn’t fit the tone of the what I’d written so far. Sure, I’d stuck with the “write what you know” thing, and because I’d visited the highest road bridge in the world this summer, I just knew it had to be in the novel. There were bungie-snap jumps from the deck to the river, hostages, explosives, gun fights, everything. But it just didn’t fit. I loved the sequence, but it just didn’t fit. I’d put it in because I thought it would be cool, and it was, but the tone was way off. So instead I wrote a replacement scene, this taking place in a far, far, far less glamourous location, and with an appropriate level of threat and action. Boo, but yay at the same time.
With that replacement scene, I was back into it! I only had a few chapters left to write! 5,000 words in two days, no problem. And then, I got to the final chapter in the 123 storyline. Could I even think about how to even START writing it? Could I fuck.
For a full day I sat looking at my notes. Everything was laid out for me. Every question that needed answering, every event that had to take place, loads of lines for each character to say, a love story to tie up, the groundwork for the followup novel to both Combat and Minding Tomorrow to lay down…
It was just too much. There’s quite a lot going on in the story, and I simply couldn’t work out which questions to answer first, and in what order. And I had the location sorted out, a return to a place of import in Minding Tomorrow, but I was stuck on exactly who was going to be standing where, etc. I spent a whole day just staring at these notes, not sorting them out, but just adding to the mess as I came up with new cool ideas and dialogue.
So I took a break and reviewed Anathem.
And then, on Friday night, to use the lingo of Anathem, I had an upsight. A quantum event in the sub-structure of my brain caused the firing of a single neuron, which sparked an idea, which caused an avalanche. In a flash, the entire chapter sprang fully formed into my brain. Awesome.
I spent the next four hours typing furiously, and bashed out the final chapter, at about 3,200 words. It feels so good to write that last sentence. And then I thought of an even cooler last sentence to that chapter, and added that at the end.
After stripping out all the notes and duplicated scenes the final word count came in at 49,990. Even if I was aiming to hit a NaNoWriMo length novel I couldn’t have landed closer.
As a final step before sending it out to first readers for feedback, I read through the entire novel between 9am and 3pm today. I corrected grammar and spelling, and added a few bits and pieces from my to do list. The bits and pieces brought the final final word count to 50,333.
Then I sent it out to my first readers. I hope I get good feedback. To be honest, I think this novel is really, really good. I thought Minding Tomorrow was good, but as it was my first ever completed novel, I didn’t have anything to compare it to. Monster Story I thought was okay, and this view was confirmed by my test readers, which is why I’ve not released it yet. It needs more work.
But Combat? I think it’s better than Minding Tomorrow. If other people disagree, even after my future edits, I really don’t mind, because it’s exactly the novel that I set out to write. In fact, I think it’s better than the novel I held in my head in July, probably because a novel is a bit too big to hold in your head, and it takes the writing to really understand what’s going on.
Thanks for reading this epic post about my writing process. The story isn’t complete yet, as I still have final edits and EPUB formatting to look forward to, and hopefully some original artwork for the cover image too, but I’m going to stop here.
Catch you later,
Luke Burrage, December 19th, at sea off the shore of Chile.
PS. Why, after finishing a whole novel, did I feel the need to write another 2,750 words like this? I guess I just love writing.