planetfall

Writing Planetfall 2: Children of Fall

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At long last I have finished and published Children of Fall, the second book in the Planetfall trilogy. Phew, and Yay!planetfall 2 title graphic

In this blog, I’m going to take you behind the scenes of the novel. I’ll show you some of the process in building the story, writing the first draft, how early (constructive) criticism changed the novel between the first and final draft, and then explore the journey to creating the cover art.

First, if you haven’t seen the book online and want to buy it, then paperback and Kindle options are on the links below:

Buy paperback or Kindle (Amazon)

Buy paperback (not Amazon)

Conceiving the story

Children of Fall has taken ten years to write, and is the biggest and most complex book I’ve ever written. I first conceived the story in 2007, and realised by 2008 that I didn’t have the skill as a writer to bring to life the story in my head. It probably took me about 65,000 words of writing, scrapping material and re-writing to come to this conclusion. There also seemed to be a lot of back story to get the reader to a point of understanding the story I wanted to tell, which forced me to a logical conclusion: I needed to write another novel first, something simpler and more straightforward, to set the scene. This became Planetfall book 1: All Fall Down.

The starting point of Children of Fall (and the whole Planetfall series) was inspired by Quatermass and the Pit, an old science fiction film in which an astronaut returns to Earth, infected with alien DNA. I didn’t so much want to re-tell that story, as use it as a point to jump from: what if a soldier on the front line of a war became infected with alien DNA? How would that soldier be treated? What might that soldier become?

Thoughts about DNA suggested a structure for the novel: there would be two stories, intertwined, like the double-helix of DNA. At points they would come close and at others they would spiral apart. This meant writing two separate stories, side by side, which occupied the same universe and the same overall narrative, but which had their own characters and viewpoints.

After writing All Fall Down, a process which took 3 years, I tried to write Children of Fall again, and failed again. I was committed to the story structure – I could see it in my head – but I couldn’t make it happen on the page.

The next book I wrote was Backpackers, a romantic fiction novel about young people backpacking through south east Asia. The structure of that novel is of a series of short stories, each based on a different character, but who all come into contact with the book’s protagonist, Cath Pearson. Each story comments in some way on that central character, so we see slices of her drama. This let me build my skills in writing from different characters’ points of view, letting a longer narrative play in and out of other stories, and getting it all to make sense. I was building my writing muscles: first, I had written a novel from start to finish in the universe I wanted, and then I had written a novel with a similar structure to the one I wanted to write.

After those two novels were finished, I made my next attempt, and managed to write a decent amount of a first draft. But the story at that point was different to what it is now. I started with the former inhabitants of Fall being refugees, aboard their own starship, and committing piracy to stay alive. They wanted revenge on their former colony administrator, and kidnapped Kate Leland in the hope she would be their leader. Kate also started out at a different point in her life: an embattled war General, who steals an old ship to house the refugees and let them hide beyond military sensors. The other main character, Swan, had something closer to a hero’s journey. He even tracked down Daoud at one point, and tried to kill him. You won’t see anything of this in the new novel, and once you’ve read it, you’ll wonder how the finished story could even have included the above.

Receiving criticism and re-plotting

With that first draft in hand, I put the draft novel to one side, intending to come back to it a month later. Events overtook me: the UK’s former Prime Minister Baroness Thatcher died, and a story idea came to me. I have written about that on this blog, suffice to say the month became somewhat longer, until another couple of years had gone by. I released that new book, Sympathy for the Devil in 2015, and returned to Children of Fall.

I tidied up the draft and sent it to a trusted beta reader. His feedback contained the catalyst for scrapping most of the first draft (again!) and re-writing almost from scratch. Amongst two pages of feedback on individual chapters, lines, typos and overall story commentary, he wrote this:

“I didn’t get much of a sense of Kate this time around. I remember last time thinking she was fully formed and focussed as a character. This time she seems less focussed, except maybe at the start, when she steals the ship and goes to fall. I didn’t really get the grand plan she had to stop the war.”

When I started to unpick Kate, and try to understand why this might be, the entire plot fell apart. This comment proved to be the single thread that causes a carefully knitted garment to unravel. Out went the ship stealing (too aggressive), out went the grand plan (too vague, obviously, but too organised as well – it took away the dramatic tension). Importantly, I took that comment on her having “less focus” [sic] and used it, completely re-imagining where Kate might be a dozen years after the first book. Kate is less focused from the start of the book now, but she is deliberately out of focus: even she doesn’t know who she is. Indeed our first view of her is as a hologram, unreal, made of light, gone at the flick of a switch. As the book goes on, and events unfold, a new Kate emerges and comes into focus. But even at the end, we don’t fully understand who she is. And neither does Kate. She’s someone who has lost touch with herself, who is running away, and who needs to make a decision: does she keep running, or does she commit to something bigger?

I want to make the point, which I think is fairly clear, that early drafts of books need criticism, they need objective viewpoints to force us to think differently about our stories. No story, no novel, can be any good without feedback and criticism at different stages.

Developing the plot

Having an idea about a soldier who becomes infected with alien DNA is all well and good, but how do we find the story around it?

All Fall Down gave me the space to find the alien DNA: it was in place at the start of Children of Fall. The moment of infection I also had early on – without going into spoiler territory, I very much wanted a scene like one you would find in a superhero comic. But it also had to feel real and believable.

I was helped in this by some feedback on an early chapter I took to my writing group. In the early draft, Swan invades a ship and comes face to face with the alien enemy. The aliens are described, and a battle ensues. At my writing group, I was given a throwaway suggestion: don’t ever let us see the aliens, so that they have more power. This led down two paths. The main alien enemies in the book are never seen. They’re referred to, and the most description we get is that one species is “lemur-like”. Beyond that, they’re ever-present, never seen, yet a constant threat.

At the other end of the scale, I thought it would be good to bring back the aliens from All Fall Down. Ones so large, so gargantuan, that their sheer scale would induce numbness in the reader. Not horror, not awe, but something too big to be human, humanised or understandable. A numb, blank spot in the story, around which Swan spirals. The opening lines of the book are deliberately meant to reference this effect, where Swan talks about memory wipes, of feeling like his head is full of snow and ice, of feeling blank. It foreshadows what is to come, and also links us back to Kate in All Fall Down, when she wipes a key character’s memory.

Dehumanisation is a key theme of the book. We find many of the characters losing their humanity and their empathy as the book progresses. Children are grown to become soldiers; not only is every character flawed, but many of them are actively trying to avoid humans or otherwise send them to their deaths. Marines are clad in organic battle suits, looking “monstrous”, like something that has “crawled out of a swamp”.

Cover art

I start the cover art process by throwing a lot of visual ideas at my cover artist. These will be images that I might have used as inspiration for certain scenes or characters, or that helped me with mood or feel or emotion.

Below you can see some art work that covers space scenes, classic scifi UFO-type art work, some panels from Swamp Thing, and two book covers.

cover dev 1cover dev 2

Accompanying these visual ideas is a summary of the story, key themes in the book, character profiles and any particular scenes that help to bring the story or character to life.

Rob, who produces the Planetfall covers, then works on an outline cover idea. This [below] was an early draft. At this point I give constructive feedback, which again takes the form of both written comments and visual ideas.

Original Children of Fall cover idea

Children of Fall draft cover idea

Below are images I sent back along with my feedback on the cover art. The overall comment was that the cover needed more drama and more contrast.

In the images above you can see some specific images connected with hairline (top-left). There are also images connected with the texture of the mutation creeping up Swan’s face (top-right and bottom-left: ‘Mutation’ by Tom Stewart).

The top-middle image shows the draft cover angled over, with an exploding asteroid or sun in the bottom left-corner, a suggestion towards the need for more drama.

Out of all this comes the final cover image:

planetfall 2

Writing update – marketing and editing

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Finishing the first draft of a book is difficult. Doing it while trying to write a marketing plan for another book raises the stakes. Doing those while holding down a full time job puts it all in peril. And doing all of that while selling, buying and moving house and becoming a first-time father puts us in high stakes drama mode. So here I am – Planetfall 2 draft finished, a marketing plan for Sympathy for the Devil in development, bedrooms full of unpacked boxes and a 2 week old daughter in my arms.

One of the first lessons we learn as authors is that we have to make space for writing. We all do that differently. Some of us grab the spaces between other things and scribble like mad. Some of us eschew television or social engagements. Some of us rise early and dedicate an hour or so before our ‘normal’ day begins. And some of us may give ourselves two hours every Saturday and Sunday alone in a cafe to catch up on our writing. Whatever our approach, we do it because it’s important. Writing needs space, it needs dedication, and it needs its own time free from other distractions.

That lesson is even more important when a baby comes along. Babies don’t care about our approach to grabbing time for writing. Those two hours we normally have? Gone in bringing up baby’s wind. The social engagements we eschewed are no longer an option while we catch up with just 20 minutes of writing in-between changing nappies, putting the washing on, tidying up the kitchen and cooking a meal.

I’ve carried on writing throughout this tumultuous period and it’s been difficult and it’s also been necessary. Ever since 2008 I’ve planned my writing time, and now that’s really paying off with the following writing updates:

UPDATE – Planetfall 2: Children of Fall

I finished the first draft of PF2 in early June, amid a rush of writing as moving and birth date approached. I was really pleased with the first draft. It was structured and planned in much more detail than previous books, which meant when I came to write, I could rattle off a 5000-word chapter in a couple of days.

The first draft has already been to a beta-reader, and I now have an extensive list of re-writes. The most significant re-write will be around returning lead character Kate Leland, whose character I haven’t quite nailed. Returning characters are a little more difficult to get right, I think. I last wrote Kate in 2011, and in-between wrote Backpackers and Sympathy for the Devil. PF2 is also set 12 years later, and there needs to be clear character progression between the two books. Kate needs to ‘feel like’ Kate from All Fall Down, and she also needs to feel like she’s matured, and changed in response to her personal history. A returning reader should be able to tell they’re back with her and also recognise and ‘allow’ her to be and feel slightly different.

I’ve just completed my own read through of the first draft. The second half of the book I’m very happy with. The first half, or at least Kate’s first four chapters are going to be completely scrapped so that I can get her storyline and character right. There’s also work to do in bringing out the other returning characters who are only present in light brush-strokes at the moment (Djembe, Daoud). And there are character relationship issues between new characters (Swan, Stendahl) which need strengthening and made deeper.

Children of Fall was originally slated for a Christmas 2015 release. I think this is now looking unlikely. Even if I get a second draft written by October, I’ll still need to go through a 3rd and 4th draft and then let the book rest for a month or two before I can contemplate a final draft. Perhaps May 2016 would be more realistic?

By the way, I maintain a Facebook page for Planetfall, on which I also share news about science fictions films, books and other media. Please Like it for updates: https://www.facebook.com/planetfalltrilogy – when Sympathy and the next PF book are published, there’ll be exclusive competitions on the page.

UPDATE – Sympathy for the Devil

To fill the release schedule left empty by Planetfall 2, I’ve got Sympathy for the Devil almost ready for publication. I was disappointed not to find representation for this book. Based on feedback from agents I know the quality of the book is at the right level for ‘formal’ publication. Unfortunately the book is satire, and the agents who sent personal responses (as opposed to template responses) said that publishing houses rarely pick up satire. This means it’s not worth their while putting effort into representation. Their time is money, and if there’s very little chance of publication, their time is wasted. I understand this, we all need an income. I’m also disappointed – it would be nice to have the book’s quality validated by industry recognition.

Onwards and upwards though! I’ve been extremely fortunate in working with a talented artist and now have cover art for the book. The design ethic is a departure from my previous book covers (Planetfall is a deliberate mix of scifi art and graphic design, Backpackers was self-designed with help on the lettering from Whitefire Designs), and I’ll be revealing some of the artwork on here in the next few weeks.

In the meantime, I’m waiting to get my new home wired up for broadband before I start any significant work on marketing the book. Before that I’m writing a proper marketing plan. This is a first for me – previously I’ve used marketing plan templates and taken bits and bobs from them as tips. This time I’m raising my game and putting together a proper action plan. Once it’s prepared I’ll share it for other writers to crib.

That’s all for now. I hope you’re writing is going well. Drop me a line here on  Twitter @astrotomato if you want to chat about any #amwriting issues.

astro x

Writing updates 30 May 2013

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A quick update on my various writing projects.

Planetfall book 2

I written around 100,000 words in the sequel to Planetfall: All Fall Down, which is called Children of Fall. Writing has gone very well, and I know from feedback from my writing group and from my own sense of my writing that it’s a more mature and better written work. This is good, and I’m happy.

Despite being at the 100,000 word mark, the novel is only halfway through.  Full length books are supposed to weigh in between 70,000-100,000 words. This means I’ve written a full length novel in word length alone, and I guess it equates to having finished my 3rd novel. Except.

Except this book really is only halfway through. It’s a concept double album of a book. It will eventually be somewhere between 170,000 and 200,000 words. And this leads me to consider something: do I release it in two parts? I won’t go to agents with this book, as the first book is self-published, which pretty much means the rest of the series won’t get picked up.

I’ve got a while to think about this, though, as I’ve put the book on ice for 6 months.

Book 1, by the way, has now been downloaded or sold in physical paperback about 310 copies. I get good feedback for it from complete strangers.

Backpackers

Backpackers has been available as an ebook and in paperback for just over a month now. It is selling terribly – I think I’ve shifted about 8 copies. This is a shame, because it’s a much more commercial book, and the writing is better than Planetfall: All Fall Down. Backpackers was almost picked up by a couple of agents.

I’ve been trying to have Backpackers reviewed by book review sites run by bloggers. One recently got back to me and said after consideration, having received the book, they’ve decided not to review it. Obviously I’m disappointed, though I understand their editorial policy is to only review books they really feel passionate about, and road journey books aren’t for everybody.

I will continue to seek out book reviewers and blogs to review this. I really believe in the book, and I think it has a readership out there. If I was better at marketing I’d figure out how to bridge that gap. More news as and when.

Secret project

The past 6 weeks I’ve been working on another novel. It’s a sort of horror-comedy-steampunk-political satire affair. I’m not releasing any details until the book is finished. I can say that my writing group have said it’s the best thing I’ve ever written, which is exceptionally gratifying.

The writing is coming very easily for it. I’m at 28,000 words at the moment, and I’m aiming for about 75,000 words, so it’ll be a short book.

Those 28,000 words are currently with two trusted reviewers (outside my writing group). It’s essential that writing is shown to people and feedback is received.

As with all my writing projects, this is a real test and it’s taking me outside my comfort zone. I’ve never written comedy (except for an attempt at a sitcom script last year, which resulted in one and a half pretty good episodes), I’ve never written horror, I’ve never written political satire (though I have done dystopian political writing) and I’ve never tackled steampunk.

This book will also be the first of my books that I will send for professional editing. That’s simply because I’ve saved up £500 for it, whereas Planetfall and Backpackers were finished when I was unemployed.

Other writing

I recently wrote two synopses for other books. One was a political/crime thriller, and the other a Young Adult adventure. Both way outside my comfort zone. Both synopses were intended to be my secret project, but I chose not to progress them. I may publish the synopsis to the Young Adult book in the spirit of sharing and being transparent with my approach to writing.

Buying my work

Well, a plug. If you wish to buy either Planetfall or Backpackers, they’re available in ebook and paperback, from both Amazon and Lulu. Links to both are below, and you’ll find that Lulu is the cheaper option, where ebooks are 90p each. The paperbacks are more expensive than I’d like, but they’re print on demand, and most of the cost goes to the printer.

astrotomato on Amazon

astrotomato on Lulu

That’s it for the moment. As ever, I’d love to hear what others are up to. Until the next blog,

astro

x

Customer reviews for Planetfall

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Tonight I put out the call: “Have you read Planetfall? What did you think?”

Two readers came back with comments, one on Twitter and one on the book’s Facebook page.  Here’s what they had to say:

The first review was on Twitter, and straight to the point!

Planetfall is bloody brilliant

Planetfall first customer review

Phew! It’s always good to know that a reader likes your book. But what about the other readers? Here’s some more feedback, this one from one of the lucky competition winners:

Competition winner's review of planetfall

Competition winner’s review of planetfall

As you can read, they “loved it” and thought it was “great writing”. This is the point where my head starts to explode. But fear not dear reader – hopefully soon there’ll be a magazine review which totally demolishes it to bring balance back!

I probed a little with this competition winner, to find our what they specifically liked. They mentioned the main character and the pacing of the book:

Strong female protagonist

What was your favourite part of Planetfall?

I’m relieved that the main character, Kate, has come across so well. I put a lot of effort into writing Kate, and it was very important to me to have a strong female protagonist; science fiction is often lacking in these.

One of the early criticisms of initial drafts of the book was its slow start: the opening chapter was slow and cinematic and atmospheric. But of course readers need a hook and action. I’m really happy that the reader has said that they “loved right from the first page there was action”.

The comments about Kate are reflected by another reader who compared the book to Iain M. Banks’ work. The first comment comes from their experience part way through the book:

Customer feedback6

Then a little further in in which they compare it to Iain M. Banks (nice! thanks):

Customer feedback5

And finally after finishing the book:

Tweets about planetfall

A series of tweets about planetfall

That final comment is great, “More please” and chimes with the reader further above who asked for more.

After five years of writing the book – and indeed, as the first book I ever wrote – this is a huge relief. I remember when I finished the first draft, and somewhere on Twitter is a tweet proclaiming it. And now I’ve had my first reader reviews I feel like I’ve finally completed a journey with it from decision to write, developing as a writer, finishing the book, having initial drafts proof read, making amendments, beefing up certain characters, re-writing the opening chapters endlessly… The end of a journey, and a happy one at that.

If you’ve read Planetfall: All Fall Down and have a review, I’d love to hear it – good, bad, indifferent, I don’t mind. Please let me know what you thought of it.

astro x

Competition winners

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A few weeks ago I ran my first ever competition to promote Planetfall: All Fall Down. I put up two signed copies of the book.

Not to be falsely humble, but as a self published author with no commercial backing or significant public profile , I knew that there was a risk no one would enter.

I am, therefore, hugely pleased to say that I had four entries to the competition to win the two books. And because I was so relieved, and because the number of entries was just a couple more than the number of books available, I’ve decided to award all entrants with a signed copy.

So congratulations to:

  • Martin in Neath
  • Paul in Huddersfield
  • Carolyn in Leicester, and
  • Holly in Chingford.

They’ve all won a signed copy of the paperback, which *cough cough* is available from Lulu through my store with a 15% discount for the next few weeks. Well done to all of them.

The correct answers to the quiz questions were:

1. All Fall Down is set on a desert planet, where there are important minerals in the sand. Which famous science fiction book (and later film) was set on a desert planet devoid of water and full of giant worms? – DUNE by FRANK HERBERT

2. All Fall Down is available in paperback and as an e-book. Which platform/website is each available from? (Hint: check my Store.) – KINDLE and LULU.COM

3. The final question is actually just a question from you: what was your book of 2012? I’ll collate the competition entries and produce a list of favourite books from you all. There’s no right or wrong answer, I’m just looking to share reading tips!

The books recommended by our lucky winners are:

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

Walking Home by Simon Armitage

Before I Go To Sleep by SJ Watson, and

Will We Ever Speak Dolphin? by Mick O’Hare

I hope the winners enjoy the book!

astro x

Debut novel launches on Kindle and paperback

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Today is a proud day! Today I finally published my debut novel All Fall Down, the first book in the planetfall series.

I started this book (originally just called “planetfall”) in September 2007, and finished the final final final final final final draft in August 2012.

Writing my first novel has been one of the most rewarding and satisfying experiences of my life. Let’s not beat around the bush: it is hard to write a novel. If it looks easy to anyone, if it looks like it’s just scribbling a few words down when inspiration strikes, then I can only suggest looking harder.

Writing a novel is hard work. At every sentence on every page in every chapter across the whole book, you have to bear in mind how it affects every other sentence on every other page in every other chapter across the whole book. You have to invent people and their lives and hopes and contradictions and life histories and families and let them live inside you and interact with each other. There are rooms to describe, worlds to invent, references to embed, colours and sounds and smells to be aware of. And all of this – for most of us who write – against the background of going to a normal day job, shopping, cleaning the house, trying to have a life, pay the bills and keep up with our own reading and watching movies and so on.

There are harder things, to be sure. Bringing up children is no doubt harder and more rewarding. But that’s not to dismiss the dedication needed to create a book and the world and people and stories inside it. It is akin to a child being created. And like all children, it must at some point be let go to fend for itself.

And so to my debut novel. Planetfall: All Fall Down, my first novel, is now available on Kindle and paperback. There are links in my store, or follow one of the links in the text above.

Good luck with your own writing projects. And if you have a minute available, please visit the Kindle page and “like” the book, even if you don’t download it. I’m told if it reaches 50 likes, that it will be promoted on Amazon’s new books email to thousands of customers. Thank you.

planetfall – update

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Years ago I started writing this little book and called it “planetfall”. And I failed. I failed to write it. I failed to make it happen, I failed to conceive of a decent story. I failed to have the ability and find a way into it.

But I learned from the failure. planetfall was supposed to alternate between two stories – how a war started, and the war itself. But writing from two different perspectives, with completely different characters, soon proved too much. I decided to split the story into two, and write ‘how a war started’ first. It took me just over four years.

Finishing that first book, which I’ve since named All Fall Down (though it remains Book One of the planetfall series), took a massive effort. I’ve blogged before about how much I taught myself and learned from others about plotting, character, editing and so on.

In the summer of 2011, with a finished draft of All Fall Down brimming with pride on my laptop, I sat down to write ‘the war itself’. And failed again.

So I wrote another book, called Backpackers. And a book of short stories, called Dark Things. I took a creative writing course at London’s City University. I joined a writing circle. I wrote an 8 minute film script, and then a 30 minute pilot sitcom script. And started a fanfic novella about Robocop.

Phew. I was busy last year, between Aug ’11 and Aug ’12. But then I was unemployed, so it was a good time to really improve my writing skills and achieve something.

Over that year I occasionally went back to ‘the war itself’ and tried to make it work. Occasionally I would have a little breakthrough. An idea for a scene. A line I’d edit which would work really well. And sometimes there’d be a big breakthrough, like finding the narrator’s voice. That, really, was the hardest part to get right – his voice, his view of the world.

“Voice” is an interesting concept in writing, and it’s not one that many amateur writers come across until they go on creative writing courses, hang out with writers more experienced, or really delve into the amazing writing tips websites now available.

Trying to get into the mind of a person and speak from their point of view, to find their voice, is difficult. And that’s what kept bringing me back to that original story, and sending me away. I kept coming back because if it was difficult finding this character’s voice, then it must be a prize worth achieving. And I kept leaving the material to rest so that I could develop my writing skills in other media, try writing in different voices, and bring them back to this original idea I had in 2007.

A couple of months ago I sat down and re-wrote the opening 15 pages of the original planetfall. And I found a voice. In truth it wasn’t so different from the one I started with originally; the changes really were that it had more hope in it, less misery, it had a pinch of vulnerability, but it was also confident. It was angry, remains angry, but there’s a sense, I hope, of it building to something. This soldier has a mission.

A few weeks later, though, still unsure if this re-write was working, I re-wrote the first 5 pages from a completely different point of view: 3rd person, near (or 3rd person, limited, as it’s also known).  This worked, and I had a voice in that, too. And of course a quandary: I now had two versions which worked, one in first person and one in third. What to do?

At this point I was just finishing my sitcom script, which follows two characters whose lives cross early on, and keep crossing despite neither of them wanting to. A thought struck me: I needed to pick up the events of book 1. I’d always intended any reference to book 1 coming through from the first person narrative, a very narrow point of view (POV). But writing the sitcom, where the viewer would need to know more than a single POV, gave me an idea. What if I could go back to my original idea? Write a first person narrative with the voice I’d found, and write a third person narrative which followed other characters, so that necessary plotting could be picked up there.

It’s a risky decision. It essentially means the chapters go like this (example text):

Chapter One – My team died that day, and it made me angry. Three months later, I died. And that made me angrier still. I vowed revenge.

Chapter Two – Kate was alone on the planet when the ship came to get her. After twelve years, her solitude was over, and like it or not, she was going to be plunged back into the war.

Chapter Three – …and so on back to first person…

So how’s it working out? Is it another failure?

From my perspective, it’s working beautifully. The change between points of view has unlocked so much of the story, and made it so easy to write, that I’ve gone from 15 pages to 65 in a matter of days. The third person narrative brings the events of All Fall Down into the new book, providing continuity for the story and reader. The third person narrative brings something new. It places the reader in two parts of the world: a god-like part, where plot unfolds and great events move forward; and a personal part, where we feel what it’s like to be on the frontline of the war, narrated by a soldier.

It is a risky approach to telling a story, and I’ve never tried swapping POV like this – or rather, I did, once, in 2007, and I failed miserably. And five years of writing experience has given me the ability to achieve my original ambition. From failure came a number of successes.

As writers, we need failures. We need to write crap and tear it up. We need to write awful dialogue and curl up with embarrassment when we read our work aloud when we vocally edit. And we need, importantly, to learn from those mistakes and failures.

I’d be interested to know what failures you’ve had, and what you learned from them.

Character profile: Win Ho-Yung

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So, for a few blogs I think I’ve promised to go back to talking about some of the characters in planetfall. The last blog post was about updating the storyboard for book 2, which may need further updating after I wrote to the end of chapter 3 yesterday and found the story writing itself into an interesting place. It’s not the forward storyboard that will need updating, it’s what’s already been written: probably just needs a minor tweak here and there and some extra character development and scenes to make it feel complete. But I digress. Let’s get onto a character from the first planetfall book.

In this blogpost I want to talk about Win Ho-Yung, and from the perspective that (at the time of writing) the book isn’t yet available, and so you haven’t met him. Let’s consider this an introduction, then, and avoid any spoilers (sweetie).

The first thing I want to talk about here is the name, “Win Ho-Yung”. All the characters in planetfall book 1 have names that either cropped up naturally (cf: Kate Leland) or which I constructed to have a specific meaning (cf: Sophie Argus) or which are a nod to cultural issues outside the book (cf: Masjid Currie, named after Marie Curie). Not so for Win.

Win’s name I agonized over for a quite a while. It is a made up Chinese name; actually within the context of the book it is a Qin name, the evolution of the Chinese society, which allowed me to take some licence – I have no idea if “Win Ho-Yung” would be a real Chinese name, or indeed if the names are more suited to nearby Oriental language groups, like South Korea.

I struggled with the name because of its obvious English meaning, “to win”. What I didn’t want people to do was associate the name with that English meaning, to think that here was a character whose name predicated their role (there is some of that in planetfall, just not for this character).

The name “Win” first appears in my Moleskine notebooks on 25 May 2008, and I’ve copied in some of my preparatory and biographical notes below. You also have another picture of my atrocious drawings, you lucky people. I didn’t record where it came from or why it was the only name I considered. I only know and remember that after much thought (translation: staring into space) that this was the name that I came up with. It felt right.

So the name has no specific meaning, but it is the only name I ever considered. In my notes there is no alternative, which is different for Djembe (I will cover that in a separate blog) and Kate Leland, for whom I have already talked about wobbling between Karen and Kate for a while, knowing only that the name had to start with a hard k sound. It’s also different for Sophie Argus and Masjid Currie, who will also be discussed in future blogposts.

Well who is Win, then? Enough about the anxieties of the author, and more about the character. Here are some heavily edited notes, originally written on 25 May 2008 in Costa Coffee, Crouch End, London, UK

Name: Win Ho Yung (note, no hyphen at this stage)

Age: 42

Born: Habitat in the Orion I system.

Biog:

Win Ho Yung’s ancestors remained in Qin space (the area occupied by the former Qin Empire, itself a closed-border volume of space created by Chinese peoples fleeing Earth’s environmental collapse in the book’s history), venturing out just three generations previously (before the book’s start). This conservativeness remained in their son, who was unambitious, despite his great skills and understanding of environmental systems. He was a person very much of his background, born in a Habitat, between Qin space and the rest of the human settled space. A Habitat between systems, but comprised itself of interlocking systems, asteroid and metal and farming pods, carefully balanced and carefully maintained. He wished not to go back to his ancestors’ roots, but neither to venture forth on his own. He had no desire to imagine different futures for himself. More important was understanding what was around him. How his environment worked, fit together, was influenced and influenced in turn. Win was a person of the moment, his sense drawn around his immediate presence and wholly focused on it. That allowed him to sense when something changed, not because he was out looking for it, but because it stopped affecting him. And that was also his weakness. If it stopped affecting him, he effectively became blind to it.

With an initial understanding of his background, I then tried to represent this as a picture. The photo below shows some of this, with the necessary explanation below it:

Planetfall notes on Win

Initial attempt to capture Win's character

Let’s take this picture from top left, go across the page, then drop down briefly to the bottom.

On the top left is a little graphic. In the middle is a dark dot, which represents Win, and out of it come a number of arrows. The strong arrows pointing up & down represent Win’s character trait as described: “Win was a person of the moment, his sense drawn around his immediate presence”. He looks left and right, to his immediate surroundings. A faint dotted line arrow can be seen pointing to the right, representing his limited traits of being a far-sighted person or thinking strategically. You can also just about make out an arrow going backward, which represents Win’s use of scientific data – already established facts, or “knowns” as I phrased it in my notes on the right hand side of the picture.

What you can also see in the picture is that I got confused between Djembe and Win’s characters when I was trying to represent them graphically. The crossings-out at the top and very bottom of the picture show the names being swapped around so that the drawings better tied up with the character biographies I’d written immediately above. What can I say? Sometimes we don’t concentrate on our work as well as we should.

Setting up these early character notes and biographies helped me in understanding how Win would respond to a situation. For example, because he is tied into the moment and the surrounding environment, he is very aware of people’s emotions; it allows him to be a more empathic character. And because of this tendency to empathy and emotional awareness, Win was the first character in the book for whom I developed any conception of family. He is married and has a son (you find this out in the book, and it’s not a spoiler). And because of that, he was my first attempt at creating a character with a tangible emotional centre. My approach was, “If I can get the emotional content of this character right, then I can use the experience to develop the emotional life of the other characters”. I think because of that I formed an emotional attachment to Win, and in planetfall book 1 he’s my joint favourite character (along with Verigua, the Colony’s Artificial Intelligence).

In trying to work out the rest of Win’s character I didn’t have far to look. Having already blogged about the cultural references in planetfall, it will come as no surprise – given my teen years in the 80s – to find that Win is based on the character Data from the 1985 film, The Goonies, but grown up and now aged 42. (For those who need a prompt, Data was played by Ke Huy Quan, and carried about his body a number of ‘wacky’ scientific inventions.)

In planetfall Win’s role is as environmental analyst and general inventor-of-cool-tech-and-weird-virtual-reality-simulations. He gives a lightness to scenes and acts as a foil to Djembe, who is very much a straight laced person. The two play off each other, and while they are very different characters, they are shown to be good friends, both admiring the other’s skills. Because of Win’s character trait of looking to facts and knowns, he is also the major character for filling out the history of planetfall, and for bringing in plot devices by interacting with his environment (translation: he runs around and pokes stuff).

In proof reading, it is Win who is mentioned most often as people’s favourite character, which is very pleasing. Scroll back several paragraphs to where I said, “he was my first attempt at creating a character with a tangible emotional centre”, and you’ll understand why this is pleasing.

So there we have it. Here is another character biography. Was it what you wanted? Would you have preferred to understand how the character developed as I wrote the story? Or about other interactions? If you have any feedback, please use the options on the page to let me know.

Updating the storyboard

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The previous blog post was all about editing. How I have several editing passes, which includes typing up from written notes, reading on screen, printing out and going through with a red pen, and the final vocal edit – reading the work out loud.

I think I also wrote about going back to some more character based blogs – about specific characters from planetfall book 1. I will go into those in the next week or so. However, while it’s on my mind (actually, on the desk in front of me) I want to go back to storyboards.

For anyone new to the blog, I draw out a storyboard which describes the overall story structure: key points in the plot. I have no idea what happens in between. As I write I feel my way between those plot points, and that’s where the fun is.

I also write in long hand quite regularly, in Moleskine notebooks. Every time I start a new notebook, I copy the storyboard into it, so that I always have it inside the current notebook to refer to. Sometimes when I’m copying I realise that small details have changed within the storyboard. Sometimes these changes are large, sometimes they are incidental.

Tonight I was copying the storyboard into my current Moleskine and realised that, as I’d been writing from my memory of the storyboard and writing what seemed natural to the story, I’d drifted slightly from the storyboard I’d established some months ago. Here is a pic showing the difference between the original (left) and new (right) storyboard for a particular key plot point:

Storyboard image

Original and new storyboard frame

Now let’s tackle one issue first: I can’t draw, and you shouldn’t expect to understand exactly what you’re looking at! So let’s describe this slightly. In both pictures you see a figure falling through the sky (the shared stick man figure). You can even see some sort of animated speed lines (the two lines going up, with cross hatching across them). This much is the same. So what’s changed?

This scene is key to the books. It shows the “planetfall” which the main character in book 2 takes, and from which planetfall takes its name. (And so for me there is huge pressure to get this scene right.) Originally, on the left, the protagonist was to fall over a verdant planet, swathed in grasslands and prairies, with a river glittering below, a blue snake across the landscape. You can see hints of this in the curved shape in the left hand panel’s upper right area. Small squares along the river’s side are suggestions of buildings, conurbations.

In the right hand panel this is gone. As I wrote, as the protagonist approached this planet, as it made planetfall, the river, the grasslands, the buildings all disappeared. Now there is a crashed ship (the black blob, with the broken lines behind it a gouge in the planet’s surface) to which the protagonist is making planetfall.

This changes things.

The subsequent panel in the storyboard shows some issues around the buildings identified in the left hand panel. Now this has to go. The action has to transfer to this crashed ship.

But can the action remain the same? What was supposed to be in those buildings? Whose buildings were they? Alien or human? And the ship, whose is it? Again, alien or human? Why is there no river now? If there are no buildings, does that mean there is no oversight? If there is no oversight, does that change the scene’s dynamics?

There are consequences to the decisions made in writing. Not all of these decisions are deliberate – the writing often decides where it’s going.

Now I have to follow this path and find out where it goes. As I copy up the rest of the storyboard, I have to think about how it changes. Does it change? Should it change? Does a small change in this panel have any effect beyond the subsequent panel? Or is it a wrinkle that will be smoothed by the overall story structure?

More, perhaps, soon…

(And next time, I promise to get back to some character-based blogging.)

 

Editing planetfall

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The last blog post was a little light relief, a short description of the pens and notebooks I use when I write. (But hey, you got some photos with it.)

This blog post follows up on that, and will lead back to the technical issues of writing creatively. I’ll get back to writing about particular characters in planetfall after this blog post.

I normally start writing long hand. Not always, but most of the time. I do this for several reasons. First, writing can be quite lonely, and writing long hand is best done in a cafe where I can be surrounded by people (ha! and look mysterious and author-ly). Second, when I’m trying to find those first few words, the mechanical nature of moving my hand back and forth across the page feels more interactive than having my fingers hover over a keyboard, watching that blinking sentinel of a black cursor on a white laptop page glare at me. Third, I like to draw.

Now let’s explain this drawing thing. I can’t draw like an artist. There are no secret sketch books filled with pen-and-ink compositions waiting to be discovered. No, in that sense, photography is my creative, visual outlet (see my photography on Flickr). Ever since I was a teenager writing in English Language classes, I have doodled first before starting to write. I’ve written previously about storyboarding planetfall, which combines my habit of doodling with my approach to starting writing.

When I start to write a sentence in a fresh writing session, I often sit and doodle. But these days, in my Moleskines, I doodle without touching the page. I wave the pen nib over the paper and sketch invisible patterns. I see blank lines form traces over the yellow-ish page of the Moleskine, and as quick as they’re formed, they fade. This, combined with the hubbub of background chatter, forms a sort of audio-visual white noise, quietening competing thoughts and dimming distracting inner eye pictures. At some point while waving this pen-as-magic wand, the nib will be attracted to the page, the doodling loops will form the recognisable sigils of letters, I will see the scene in my head, and it will download to my hand and onto the page.

It is because of this process that I prefer to start writing stories and each fresh writing session by hand. I can get to a similar point on a laptop, but it takes a while. It’s generally only after having typed for some minutes that I can see through the laptop screen – well, let’s get this right, that I stop seeing the laptop screen and letters appearing one by one – to the movie playing out in my head, and can access that download sensation.

Which brings me onto editing.

Once I’ve written in long hand, I return to my flat and type up the writing. This allows me a first pass at editing. While reading the long hand and stumbling with my fingers over the keyboard, I notice missing words, clunky sentences, half-completed thoughts, uncompleted cross-references, areas where the scene is sketched but not coloured in. It is this process which acts as a first edit and a first chance at re-writing.

The second pass at editing comes in a couple of different forms, and neither is my preferred second option. The first way is to have a day or so’s break and re-read recent text on the laptop. This I generally do if I’ve written a new long hand scene knowing I’ve jumped a little bit, and need some filler sections. In those circumstances I will need to re-read the last couple of pages to get back into the scene and what’s come already, so I can properly fill in. Sometimes this fill in can be a line, a paragraph, or several pages. The second way, which I do for everything I write, is to print it and read it like a book, with a red ink Uniball gel pen to hand. I make editing notes as I go along. Quite often the editing notes consist of lines through entire sentences or paragraphs: deleting previous writing is a shame, but it is absolutely fundamental to producing the final text. Often I will change words or phrases, pick up my punctuation (I over-use commas) or write new sections. I deliberately chose red pen as it links back to those early days in school, and allows me to occupy another version of me, a separate, slightly more objective version, one that is modelled on teachers and is expected to criticise.

The third and final pass at editing (before the writing goes to other people to read) is the most critical and also the most painful.

I read the material aloud.

Every single word, every single sentence and paragraph and page.

This is a very powerful tool for self editing. I find it painful for two reasons. First, I don’t like my voice. Second, when I read my work, I can get a pretty good sense of how it would sound to someone else (with my voice included). The presumption of embarrassment of someone hearing nonsense is very strong. Yet this is a strong feedback loop. Once you hear your work out loud, you get a very different feel for it. You can hear the sounds, the rhythm, the way different words rise and fall and complement each other. You can finally hear the tone of your work, which can be fundamentally different to how it sounds in your head.

When we edit by reading, we use a limited number of senses. There is the look of the words on the page, and there are the sounds heard by our inner ears (by which I mean, the mental constructions of our internal monologues) and the spatial feel of the words and story in our head: the space it creates and the form that takes.

When we add real sound to this, coupled with the tangible, mechanical feel of our jaws and tongues moving, we add extra dimensions. The story comes alive (or fails to…) in different ways.

A poet would use the process to match sounds to each other within the metre of their verse. I do some of this, sometimes, if it feels important, although I am no poet and do not always have a sense of lyrical sounds in the text.

The simplest thing I get from reading aloud is how difficult it is to read the words. If my tongue really stumbles over certain word combinations, then it will be harder for someone else to read with their internal monologue. If I can smooth the sentence aloud, I know it will read more smoothly to someone else when they read to themselves. (I have had this direct feedback, unprompted, from a friend who proofread part of planetfall book 1: “It reads like someone’s reading it to you,” she said.)

The process is also important for creating a visual environment. Stories have an oral/aural history. The sagas of old were told around camp fires and in huts and caves in the dark. They had to create an inner, visual world for the listeners, both as distraction from the nightmares that stalked the night outside the protected circle, and also so that as many senses were utilised to help the listener remember the tale. I have a tendency to be a very visual writer, to rely on visual creations of scenes to transmit the story to the reader. If the work isn’t read out loud, if I don’t check how it hooks into those feedbacks between our sense of sound and sense of vision, then it will fail to make the final leap: to evolve that internal silent movie on the cinema screen of your mind, into a talkie; a moving picture with original soundtrack.

Editing is a very important process in writing. The writing starts – for me – with a connection between movement and inner vision. When I type I exploit the same mechanism. When I edit I edit visually. But when I do the toughest edit, I combine as many senses as possible – I add sound to the movement and images. This whole process always leads to significant changes to the text, and most authors at some point have spoken on this. To finish, here are two quotations from people deeply involved in (and far better than me at) the writing process:

Harry Shaw: “There is no such thing as good writing. There is only good rewriting.”

Michael Crichton: “Books are not written – they’re rewritten.”