My Writing Process

Many thanks to Rachel Dax who interviewed me about my writing process for her blog, and as a result enabled me to spend a Sunday afternoon, not writing, but blogging…

1.  What are you working on?

That’s an interesting question.  I’m at that glorious juncture in the writing life where one book is in the slow wind-down to being put to bed (those with kids will be familiar: you think the little dears have gone and then you realise they were ‘just brushing their teeth’ and they’re actually having a pillow fight on the bannister that has somehow metamorphosed into the opening stages of a coup that will take over the entire village) – in the case of a book, I did the line edits in January and somewhere, stalking the hallways of my publisher, is a copy-editor who will require that I make fundamental changes to the plot and structure in the name of ‘consistency’ and I will chew large lumps out of my desk in frustration and do about half of them, writing long, detailed notes about why and how the other half prove the editor in question just didn’t bother to read the text. Then I’ll give up and do them anyway.  At some point after that, 3 proof readers will prove that they can still miss the inevitable typos and I’ll realise that, yet again, I’m lousy at proofing my own work. Somewhere in between, will come the inevitable fight-to-the-death over the cover (I imagine something artistic, yet compelling which will speak of the whole book.  Until such point as I see something different, I will continue to imagine that, and will recall with great fondness the Boudica covers, which did just that.)  And sometime next spring (ish), it will emerge into the light of day and you can read it.

The book in question is called Into the Fire. It’s a dual-time line book based on the fact that I’m pretty sure I know who Jeanne d’Arc really was – and it wasn’t a peasant girl who saw visions of saints or angels. Quite how that appalling calumny has survived the last 600 years intact is beyond me, but from the moment you start to examine her – really well documented – life, you will realise that it’s entirely inaccurate.

You don’t have to have tried to ride dressage horses to write this, though it probably helps (I was training for Novice until someone said to me, “of course, the amateur riders, who are only riding for 2 or 3 hours every day won’t ever really develop the right kind of balance…” and I realised I was the kind of amateur rider who was riding an hour a day at most, and that actually, I needed to be riding 3 or 4 different horses every day, to be any good, so it was time to give up); you don’t have to have done battle re-enactment, though in any kind of historical writing in which battle is waged, it helps (The Commission of Array: 5 years), you don’t have to be a historian – in fact, it’s probably a very, very good idea not to be a historian, because they seem incapable of reading basic information without investing it with fantasy-magic and out of date belief systems.  In all my other historical writing, people have helped with the historical data – historians have helped – in this book, I’ve had someone say, “I’ll do what I can, but you have to promise me you won’t mention my name, it would destroy my career” – so real historians would rather believe in an Imaginary Friend in the Sky, and its bizarre, psychotic actions, than actually… examine the history.  Amazing.

But the really, really, really interesting bit about this, is the impact on the modern world when someone comes along and says, ‘she wasn’t who you thought’.  The guy who thought he’d found her bones was kicked out of France.  The far right has taken her as an icon and the far right, as we know, is on the rise  – tho’ when I wrote the outline of the book in 2012, we didn’t know how much of a rise.   Anyway, this is a thriller about a body found in a fire, and the ramifications of that, as much as it’s a historical look at the siege of Orléans and its aftermath.   It’s been the biggest, most historically taxing write of my life and I loved every second…

2. How does your work differ from others in the same genre?

That’s an interesting question because when you’re writing dual time line books, a lot of the genre rules are thrown out of the window.  Are you writing parallel narratives? (See Possession, if you can get past the first page, which I can’t), or the interwoven thrillers that draw from two separate periods often centuries apart, as crafted by Tom Harper and Kate Mosse? Or are you writing the kind of inter-famillial giants of Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, which is one of the best books I’ve read in ages? Or the beautiful, eye-watering literary glory of Simon Mawer’s, ‘The Fall’ which details two parts of a man’s life, his childhood and his adulthood?  Or are you trying to do something novel, something entirely new, in an age when there is nothing entirely new under the sun…?

The Girl Who… aims to drag you in and keep you reading till four in the morning; if that doesn’t happen, what’s the point? So the characters have to engage you utterly, and their quest must become your quest… but it’s also spreading out a reality that differs from the one we think we know, and that has to be comprehensible, and it all has to be wrapped up in language that makes it real for you at the same time as it reaches into your chest and warms your heart.  So I am the worst person to talk about genre in this context.  I think this is a radical departure from anything that’s gone before, but it can’t be that far of a departure or it would have a different structure. When it’s out, you tell me.

3. Why do you write what you do?

You realise people write entire theses on this question alone?  I write what I do because it inspires me, because I have a bull-dog like desperation to hunt down, unearth, expose, broadcast the truth and there’s so much of our history (and our contemporary world) that is covered in fiction masquerading as fact and I want people to know, to feel, to live/breathe/dream/inhabit the reality so that it becomes a part of their reality and sweeps away the agitprop idiocy that has filled the space before.

Whether it’s the Boudica books showing who we were (and so who we could be) or the Rome books detailing the facts behind the fantasy-mythology of Christ…or the truth about Jeanne d’Arc, I want to bring it out into the world in a way that when you’ve finished reading, you know this is how it was.  No questions.

But I also want us to find people we can engage with, who inhabit us, inspire us, fill the texture of our days – and I want us to see what happens when the masks fall away, or are stripped off, as the veneers of social construct are removed and we find out who they – and so we – truly are underneath: because that’s what matters: who we are when we find our authentic selves. When we are the best -and perhaps the worst – that we can be and it informs all our actions.  I genuinely believe that only when we are authentic in its deepest sense, of being absolutely true to our deepest self, not our ego or our fears or our failed hopes or tarnished expectations, then will we know truth in all its forms and then can we transform the world.

With the Boudica books, the aim was not only to over-write our execrable images of who we were before the Romans came, I wanted to create a template for who we could be once their influence has gone: so the books are there to provide that template, and to encourage people to explore the dreaming, the connections with the old gods, for themselves…

So in some ways, I write to change the world – my world, and so your world – writing is such a two-way process: I put black marks on white paper and by the astonishing alchemy of language, the video running through my head translates into your head.  Except it doesn’t ever quite translate any more than my dreams become your dreams when I tell them to you: instead, you create your own reality, with the prompts I offer and after a while, if I’ve done it right, that reality over-writes any previous concept of what was real.

4. How does your writing process work?

Slowly.  Veeeery slowly.  There’s a lot of trial and error that goes on in my head, a lot of walking the dog in the woods and across the Long Mynd and exploring the feel of the book, the texture, the weave of light and dark and what we might call the internal colour palette before I start to write.  I need to have met at least one primary character in my head before I begin, although as I get to know her/him better, there’s a lot of early rewriting that goes on.

Then I need to find the voice; that combination of viewpoint (or viewpoints), tense and vocabulary that lays out the structures of the book and is integral to how it unfolds.  The Girl Who is written third person past.  The last of the Roman spy thrillers, THE ART OF WAR, was written multiple first person from the viewpoint of nine different characters, none of whom was the primary character – I wanted use to see him as other people saw him, after three books in which we saw the world primarily through his eyes.  The one I’m working on now, TWISTED FOOT, (an entirely different project, about which more another time) is told third person past at the moment, from the perspective of a 15 year old boy who can walk between the worlds, but it’s in the plastic, fluid phase where that may yet change.

The actual story evolves as we move forward. There’s always an aiming point, a point of transformation where our lead character(s) are driven to the edge of themselves and have to make choices based on their extremity, but I rarely know at the start what takes them there and I never know where they’re going to go   – if I did, there’d be no point in writing.

As Rachel said, the first throw-down is easy – I take the video in my head and put it on paper (screen), but the editing, the actual crafting, comes in the many, many, many edits later – I’ll have been over a scene thirty or forty times before it makes it to a first draft and when that’s gone to my agent (who is an editing agent), it can all go in the bin and we start again.   Writing is a very solitary craft, but a good agent/editor can make or break a book and the best form the basis for a Brainstrust as outlined by Ed Catmull in the amazing, Creativity Inc (read it: it’s brilliant).

So that’s about it.  I’ve nominated KATE WORSLEY, author of the exceptional debut novel, SHE RISES.  I’ll add a link to her blog, when I’m back from London (and the HWA AGM) at the end of the week… in the meantime, follow the links backwards… and enjoy

Manda