Starting a novel

Today I’m at the start of the latest project, working title: Accidental Gods.  This is rather like planning a climb up an unseen ascent. I sat on a train yesterday, with time lines running through my head, snatches of dialogue, broad-brush outlines of people, what they care about, what they think, what they want, what they need (these two often, but not always, being different), whom they love.

Every book has a texture, a colour palette, a particular pattern to the weft and warp and I need to find it and let its resonance sink into my writing hind-brain before I can start putting words on the page.  This is the kind of thing that goes on behind the seeking-of-facts research. I need to know the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, feelings of an era or a place, but along with that, I need to know the tensions that will inhabit it.

And yesterday, staring out at the landscape on the way home from five meetings in London with publishers, editors, agents and a TV exec (did I mention it was the train ride from Hell?), the various disparate pieces clicked into place.  This isn’t to say I know what happens, who makes it happen or why, but the over-arching feel of it began to have coherence, and one of what we might loosely call the main supporting pillars took shape.  It’ll be a year in the making. You’ll read it, when it comes out, in about 8 hours.  This is the nature of writing.

And between now and then will be false starts and dead ends, edits, re-edits and throw-that-entire-thread-away-and-start-again surgical cut and slash.  There’ll be discussions on titles and cover art and whether the concept will work on both sides of the Atlantic and in either hemisphere.  And then we hope there are still bookshops left to sell it, and enough people still reading to buy it.  But in the meantime, it feels as if the starting gates have opened and I can head off out into the sunset, which is the best feeling in the world.  See you in a year…