Today I’ve decided to do something a bit different. I’ve been focusing on academic writing for a while, but since we’re all on strike, this is an opportunity to work on other things for a moment. Next week, I’ll get back to writing the 100 Magical Objects project and tell you about a thrilling morning I spent at Manchester Museum. Right now, though, let’s talk about fiction.
Most of the advice on the internet suggests if you’re not a Huge Name in fiction, you shouldn’t really talk about our own work. Well, I’m throwing out the rule book right now, since there is a tight crossover between my academic work and my fiction, and it can be helpful to get a sense of where all the research I do ends up.
First, let’s have some backstory. I’ve always been ‘a writer’, as in I wrote stories and books in my spare time even when I was very young. It was automatic to me. I used to think this was special, but it’s actually pretty common. Back in the 80s and 90s, creative writing degrees were rare, so I did Geography instead. Because honestly, if you’re going to write fantasy and speculative fiction, Geography and Classics/Ancient History are probably essential.
While I was working on my first PhD, a friend got me talking about the world I’d been building. It was called Amnar, which referred mostly to the civilisation rather than the physical name of the place. She got me writing again. In the last two and a half years of my PhD thesis, I wrote one seven book series, and two background books. Once I’d finished, things fell off (working corporate contracts and managing mental health is really hard).
After the financial crash destroyed everything, I did put out another three books, but at the same time, I’d started a new series. Some friends and I were playing a game of Dungeons and Dragons, and I decided to build a world where I could write about the character I was playing. Somehow—and it’s hard to remember how that happened—I decided that this world would be the precursor to Amnar. It would be the world that came before, the collapse of which would lead to the foundation of the new civilisation.
You could call this “seven books of backstory”, and it is, in a sense. It’s also interesting, because Amnar was built up as a world over a couple of decades. I wasn’t sure I could build an effective world in less than that. I once received an email from somebody who’d decided to make their fortune in writing, and asked how long it would take to build a world, then write a seven-book series about it. He estimated it should take about six months, right? I replied to say it had taken about two decades to come up with and develop Amnar, and then a couple more years just for the first drafts of the seven books. And at the time, I wrote pretty quickly.
Now I’m much slower. I’ve been working on the first book of Five Empires since about 2016. I got closest to a complete draft in 2017, but then decided I had the plot wrong, and went back and started again. In 2018, I wrote another 70,000 words, and then went back to the beginning. It feels like the Groundhog Day of books. This year, I did a writing course with Write Here, Write Now in Manchester. Halfway through that course, I started again. You can imagine, at this point, I’m starting to drive myself a little bit crazy.
However, part of the reason I’m writing this today is that I’ve finished Nanowrimo 2019, have 61k of 100k written, and have just spent the last month editing one protagonist’s chapters because somehow I got everything out of sync and the midpoint break didn’t happen how it was supposed to. I’m having a little celebration that I only have one and a half more chapters to do of that editing, and I will be back into writing whatever draft of this I’m on and might, this time, finish it.
This gives you an idea of how complex writing is. I know a lot of the people who get these newsletters write or want to write fiction in some form. I think it’s easy to get the impression from the outside that the process is mechanical. Draft One is a clear and distinct thing that we start, write, and finish. Then we polish and that’s Draft Two. Somewhere between that and the final version are a bunch of other drafts, with their own numbers.
The actual process can be a really mangled one (about as mangled as academic research can be). If you’ve written the draft of something, or part of something, and you’re worried it’s not long enough or short enough, then you’re not alone. If you stop in the middle and have to go back and re-do midway through, that’s also a thing that happens. Creativity doesn’t sit on rails, it’s not a train with a destination and a timetable* to stick to. Even when it does have a timetable, it doesn’t obey it** necessarily.
For now, I’m happy with where things are. I might actually have a workable plot, and even if the chapters need work and improvement, I have two thirds of something I can polish into a better and better version. Hopefully, this time, I won’t go back to square one again. But then, if I do, that’s still part of the process.
As far as Amnar goes, I haven’t forgotten it. My Nanowrimo 2018 book was a new Amnar one, although I’m back to experimenting there, and not quite sure where I want the new work I do on that to begin. That, like everything else, is as crazy a process as this one has been. Tomorrow, I will come back and tell you what Five Empires is about, and how it connects back to the original Amnar stories.
*Bearing in mind that the trains around here, while they do sit on rails, tend not to obey any timetables known to humankind.
**Much more like our local trains.