planetfall

Writing planetfall

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Last blog post I talked about finishing planetfall book 1, and writing a synopsis prior to finding a literary agent. I covered my immediate feelings on finising the final edits – that the book will probably end up like thousands of others, lost in a slush pile or flat out rejected, and how that awakened a determination to fight for it.

In this blog I want to step back from the technical process of writing – character development, plot devices, and so on – and give a little insight into some of the materials I use for writing. Other writers may gain more from this than casual readers.

I normally start writing in long hand. That’s not to say I can’t write straight to laptop – I’ll come onto that in a later blogpost. After some experimentation, I’ve found the following work for me:

  • Uniball black gel pen
  • Moleskine notebook
Moleskine notebook and Uniball gel pens

Moleskine and Uniball pens

The Uniball gel pen took some finding. I used to write with biro, and of course if I’m caught without my writing materials and feel the need to scribble, I’ll still use one. When I discovered I preferred starting stories in long hand, I realised immediately that I’d need a comfortable pen to write with.

I have very messy handwriting, and I’ve always found biros too skinny and slippy for comfortable writing. The thin stick of the pen casing digs into the flesh between my thumb and forefinger. The small circumference makes it hard for me to keep a reliable grip. And the easy rolling of the biro’s ball makes slips across the page far too easy. I knew if I was going to manually write stories that I’d need to change this.

I don’t remember how I found the Uniball pens. I know I bought a couple of different pens from a local stationery shop, and chose them all for the thickness of the barrel. The ink-type and nib had no bearing on the decision. The gel ink of the Uniball stood out immediately. It feels to me (and this may not be real, just perceived) that the Uniball has better traction on paper, that there is some resistance. The ink also comes out in thicker lines, which helps to hide the drunk-spider scrawl that is my normal handwriting. The thicker barrel makes the pen easier to hold and more comfortable for a longer period of time. In short, it is a more satisfying writing experience.

Now, the Moleskines. You’ll all be rolling your eyes – so cliched, right? Well, yes, but then cliches come from somewhere, don’t they?

I bought a Moleskine due to a story I read about  a writer who could only write with Moleskines (read it here). I was fascinated. What were these notebooks? It was around this time that I discovered they’d gone out of production. A short while later there was a newspaper article – Moleskines were back in production. This was long before I was writing seriously, so I squirrelled the information away: at some point in my life, I would try one out.

When I started writing more seriously, and found that long hand was my preferred initial method of writing, I resolved to try them. To that point I’d been writing on A4 pads, top bound, flip up. I found them unsatisfactory. Now, I know some writers swear by them. They write with a pencil on A4 block. They write only on on side, using the block’s longer and broader expanse to give their hand room to roam & write and make notes. But I don’t write with pencils – for a start you have to keep sharpening them, which means carrying a pencil sharpener around. I would lose it quickly. And pencil fades and slips across the paper. No, not for me.

I tried, too, Uniball on A4 paper. While I liked the feel of the Uniball, I found the ink is too heavy and thick, and the paper too thin, so that you can see the writing on the other side of the page. I don’t write on one side of paper, it’s a waste of resources. And anyway, I was going to be out and about writing. I’d already decided that. There are too many distractions at home – TV, Wii, internet (internet!) – so I remove myself to cafes to write. Somewhere where there is nothing left but the page and the pen and what’s in my head. Carrying an A4 pad around would be too bulky and awkward.

It was on a trip up the Lea Valley (north east from Greater London) when I was volunteering with Friends of the Earth that I spied a pack of 3 Moleskine notebooks in Liverpool Street Station’s W H Smith. I bought them, put them away, went and did my volunteering (for the Climate Change Act, as it became), came back to London after a pint and my first ever pickled egg, and put them away. And promptly forgot about them. It was over six months later, in January 2008, when I decided to go on a writing break to the Isle of Skye that I dug them out.

And was hooked.

Their covers are made of a rough, black card-like paper, so they look a little mysterious, like they could contain anything: diaries, stories, poems, sketches of sweethearts and brawling drunks. They have rounded corners which don’t get caught in things. The paper is thicker and yellower then A4 pads. The Uniball gel ink clings to the paper and draws the pen across its surface. They are a construction made for writing.

Stacked Moleskine notebooks

My Moleskine notebooks

I have since filled 7 notebooks with notes and storyboards and thoughts and plans for planetfall and a couple of other short stories (Ayla’s Journey, First Things First, The Boy). The picture above shows the 7 filled notebooks and the current 8th, and the picture below shows the first page from the first Moleskine I ever used, including my first attempt at story boarding.

Moleskine notebook opened to writing page

The first page of the first Moleskine notebook, plus my first ever story board

I now carry my notebook and pen with me pretty much all the time. There is always time to scribble something down, even if it’s a word, a short sentence, or just looking at what I’ve written, or the story board to fix the narrative in my mind.

When I write in the notebooks I record the date, time and place. Although it is not meant to be a diary, it gives me, of course, a reminder of where I was at particular times. Sometimes leafing through past notebooks makes me wonder why I was free at 14:52 on a Tuesday, rather than at work. In that sense it records some of the context of my life as I was creating this other place, this other world, these other people, these other events.

So there we have it. Uniball gel pen, Moleskine notebook. That’s how it all starts. Next time, a little something, I think, on transferring the writing to the laptop and how I go about editing the work.

Kate Leland & women in sci-fi

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In the last blog post I posted a teaser pic from my storyboards! The written blogpost before that was about getting feedback on planetfall book 1, and dealing with other people’s views of characters. In this blogpost I want to pick up from the feedback angle, and go into a little bit of detail about Kate Leland, the principal character in book 1:

I recently received a critique of the current draft of planetfall book 1. Amongst the various comments noting what worked and what needed more work, was a comment about the characters in the book, “I liked that women held many of the positions of power.”

Sci-fi has traditionally been a male preserve – or if not a male preserve, at least perceived by the vast majority of people as a male preserve. There have been few female role models or characters in sci-fi.

Two of the highest profile female characters in popular sci-fi are often singled out for the most criticism. Princess Leia Organa and Queen Amidala / Senator Padme Amidala, both from the Star Wars films, start off as strong characters, helping to drive the plot. In both trilogies (episodes IV-VI for Leia, and I-III for Padme) the lead female character becomes weak, insubstantial and subject to the whims of men. For Leia, she starts as an Ambassador to the Imperial Senate, is then revealed and seen in Empire Strikes Back to be a leader in the rebellion, and ultimately is reduced to a bikini model in Return of the Jedi, ineffectual, and desperate for the love of Han Solo. By the last film her leadership qualities have all but disappeared from the narrative. She is rescued by men after being subjugated, is desperate for Luke’s emotional bond, is repulsed by her connection to her father, is shot, injured and cared for by an ascendant Solo, who by now has turned from smuggler and rogue to dependable General, father figure and provider.

And so for Padme. In her first film she is a queen, a strong figure defending her people, and starts the first rebellion against the Trade Federation, personally leading her people into battle. In …Clones she is a senator to the Republican Senate, resists Anakin’s advances, and at the end is a warrior alongside the Jedi. Her tumble from the gunship at the end of the film foreshadows her loss of power in Revenge of the Sith. By the time of this film she is pregnant and emotional and clings to Anakin. To be fair, in a pregnant state, many women will want to be nesting and have the father around to provide stability. But her role as creator of the rebellion is missing from the film. The scenes were filmed, the political aspects of the film – which would round it out and make it a more mature piece – are left on the cutting room floor. We are left with Padme as a weak person, wobbling around with a swollen abdomen, unable to save the man she loves from becoming a murderer, unable to stop him from committing infanticide even as she carries his own children, and unable to stop him from turning to the Dark Side. Until eventually her desire to save the man she so long resisted results in her death at his hands.

One reasonable reading of this, is that no matter how strong women start off, they will end up as weak and ineffectual, in thrall to more charismatic men, while those same men go off and continue to decide their own fate and those of others (for good or ill).

In planetfall I deliberately wanted to avoid this.

The main character of book 1 is a woman, Kate Leland. Her character is intended to be the best of women in sci-fi. Strong, forthright, intelligent, and compassionate as well, but without that compassionate side being her undoing. Similar, in restrospect, to Captain Janeway in Star Trek Voyager.

The story centres around Kate’s desire to discover alien life forms, in a galaxy apparently barren of them. Early in the story (no spoilers, don’t worry) she is sent to investigate an apparent first contact situation. And she is sent against a powerful man. A man of no little dark mystery, who puts Kate in the way of conflict and inner turmoil.

I never considered that the main character in this book would be anything other than a woman. In fact I had no choice in the matter.

The first draft of the first 30 pages centred on Daoud, to set the scene on the Colony world of Fall. The character Sophie Argus followed within about 2 pages. Sophie was designed to be a strong character, someone who has more power than is at first apparent. She does in fact have more power than is apparent in book 1, but that, I hope, will come out in future books. For a short while Sophie was going to be the lead female character, and the more I dug into her character, the more I realised planetfall was all about her – and that this wasn’t the right book to make her the dominant, lead character. So she has a supporting role, and that left a gap in the story.

For a couple of months I was stuck at around 30 pages into book 1. I knew the overall storyboard, I knew who Daoud was and what he was up to, and I knew that he needed a foil, an equal, someone with whom he could dance through the narrative. I never considered that his foil would be a man: it had to be a woman. But if not Sophie, then who?

After a couple of months of struggling, I had a realisation about the way I was writing. My imagination was on the planet, in the colony, waiting for someone to arrive. Every time I looked out of the planet, up into its skies, I could see a ship approaching, but not who was in it. I could see into the future of the story and see someone arriving, but the details were missing, lost in darkness.

Eventually I realised I could just change my perspective. Rather than looking from Fall up into the skies, from Daoud’s perspective essentially, why not look the other way – from the perspective of the person approaching Fall. This realisation, this shift in perspective, took about 2 seconds to have an effect. With that re-alignment of the story’s camera, I was suddenly on a space station, with a team of 3 people. And sitting, in reality, in a coffee shop in Crouch End, I zoned out, my eyes blurred, I was locked into my mind’s eye, and – BANG! – out of nowhere, this woman walked into my head, fully formed, fully imaged, her character almost complete. Her name followed in the next minute or so. I knew it would start with a hard sound, something substantial, not a soft thing like ‘m’ or ‘w’ or a baby sound like ‘b’ or something weak like ‘f’. It would be a hard sound, to give the name an immediate punch. A hard ‘k’ sound popped up naturally. In the first month I hadn’t decided what the name was, and in my notebooks she wobbles between Karen and Kate. I eventually let go of the name Karen because it’s too lyrical, it rises and falls after the ‘k’ sound. Not so with Kate. It’s short, punchy, one syllable long, and ends with a similarly hard sound, ‘t’. Kate’s surname, ‘Leland’, just popped into my head once I had the ‘k’ sound to start the name. In the minutes afterward I tried to reason where it might have come from, and while in my subconscious there may be some proper explanation, as far as I can tell consciously, it just popped out. My back-casting would say it’s based on Leland Palmer from Twin Peaks. Or that it’s a nod to the defunct British Leyland brand, a sign, once, of solid engineering. But it’s neither of those things. ‘Kate Leland’ was just the name that popped out, and it doesn’t really bear closer scrutiny than the sounds of the first name.

Kate is the principal source of tension and conflict in the story. Her character has a journey to make, and a choice, too – she is presented with a dilemma by Daoud. Now Kate could quite easily sidestep the tension if she could think more strategically. Indeed, any major character in any book could avoid most of the tension and drama if they could just make certain connections quicker – but where would the fun be in that? And besides, it would make them gods, able to understand everything going on and able to influence it with omnipotence. I found, in the first few weeks of writing about Kate, a tension within myself. I wanted her to be strong and intelligent, and I wanted a decent female role model. And that meant not giving her any weaknesses. But of course we are human, and we all have weakness and lesser abilities amongst our strengths and capabilities. The challenge I found after that was how to make her all too human and keep her strong, while handicapping her so that the principal, central conflict of the story was maintained.

I found the answer in two places, which both led to the same answer: the first was a person I once worked with, an intelligent person who couldn’t see the wood for the trees, who was mired in their own prejudices, which would blind them to more strategic thinking. And second in my initial ability to know that someone was arriving on Fall as Daoud’s foil and the role they would play, matched to my inability to know who that was specifically. Kate’s weakness would be the same – far sighted enough to see the outcomes and consequences of events, and to make intelligent predictions about the future, while missing the key fact that would help her. This is reflected in parts of the book, for example, the sequence of Kate going into the tunnel:

“She gazed, searched, squinted into the darkness, the deep black with its mysteries so close, so hidden.”

There are examples in the first half of the book about Kate being unable to see, of her vision being obscured. The light that she really needs to illuminate her is missing – it is no coincidence that she is surrounded by holograms, which for the most part are insubstantial light, unreal and outside her body. They are are a false light, externally supplied information, where what she really needs is insight, internal illumination.

In the second half of the book, Kate’s character has a turning point, although its consequences are not fully realised in book 1. When she commits herself to a journey in the dark, the tunnel-as-metaphor, she makes a mental breakthrough, and her vision starts to clear. It doesn’t clear quickly enough to avoid the events of the book’s end, of course! The point where her character makes that leap in understanding is at the end of the tunnel, in the chapter, “Something wicked this way comes”, when this happens:

“Kate turned around, her eyes wide, still accustomed to the dark, to the claustrophobic airlock, the lightless pasage beyond, adrenalin coursing through her, and faced a bright, blinding light.”

Here she is still trapped by her inability to see what’s coming. She has approached but is blinded by the light, incapable of seeing what’s in front of her, what’s staring her in the face. Her journey through the darkness of the tunnel ends with a bright light. And here she has a final choice. Go back into the darkness, be “claustrophobic”, stay in the darkness the rest of her life, or go into the light, be ‘enlightened’, and learn a greater truth. Our major characters have to go through some test of faith, or even several tests, to prove themselves worthy of our admiration. Kate eventually commits to a course of action:

“Kate blinked, closed her eyes to slits and took two confident steps forward. She didn’t want to show weakness or panic again.”

Not one step forward but two. Far enough that she can’t take a simple step out of it.

By the end of book 1 she grows into a more mature character, is caught between different courses of action, each with horrendous consequences, and tries to navigate a course through them. And while there is a completeness in her actions at the end of the book, Kate’s story is unfinished. The outcome of her decisions are explored in more detail in book 2. And for that … you’ll just have to wait.

planetfall & the MacGuffin

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In the last blog I introduced planetfall book 2, its main protagonist (a space Marine), and the first-person approach it will take, with the Marine having no name: essentially the Unnamed Soldier.

In this blog I want to return to planetfall book 1, and talk about a specific plot element that helps drive the story. It’s a thing that many of the characters are either trying to find, or keep hidden. Sometimes this thing reveals itself, subtly, tangentially, metaphorically, but most of the time it is mysterious. At no point do the characters who are trying to find this thing ever get their hands on it.

This thing is the MacGuffin.

Alfred Hitchcock popularised the MacGuffin. He said that, “In crook stories it is almost always the necklace and in spy stories it is most always the papers”. It is the thing that causes the characters to run around. It is the thing around which events happen. And it is generally inconsequential to the plot of the film, despite being central to it.

In Indiana Jones land, the Holy Grail and the Lost Ark of the Covenant are the MacGuffins. Indy spends most of the film trying to get hold of these things. As do the bad guys! And then it turns into a race to steal it from each other. In Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, the stolen Death Star plans are the MacGuffin. In this scenario the good guys have them and are trying to keep hold of them and transport them to a safe place. It is the bad guys who are trying to get them back.

Often considered the most beautiful example of a MacGuffin is Rosebud, the last word of Kane in Citizen Kane, and it is the protagonist’s attempts to work out what it means that drives the plot.

So description aside, how is this applied to planetfall? What’s the MacGuffin?

I was inspired to write this blog post by graphic designer and bloopy sound producer Dave House (listen to his Reverse Engineer stuff), who tweeted me after reading just 10 pages of planetfall to say he’d “started reading it and is hooked after 10 pages. Mystery black blobs and fungal panspermia. Loving it.”

I started thinking back over my original intention for planetfall‘s MacGuffin: the black pods – because “mystery black blobs” is exactly how they started life. Without giving too much plot detail away, in planetfall the existence of the black pods is revealed to the reader very early on (another plot device borrowed from Hitchcock, but for another blog). The characters presented as the searchers in the story, the ones looking for something, are kept in the dark about them. During the course of the book they spiral closer and closer to coming into contact with them. But do they get them? Do they even know the pods are something to get?

As I wrote and developed the concept of the black pods (reverse engineered from the material secom which appears in book 2) I realised I needed something stronger as a MacGuffin; the black pods just weren’t working out in my initial planning and writing. I needed something elusive that would give the characters something to do, and continually keep them moving to other situations. So the black pods fell out of favour, and I developed another MacGuffin, which I will mention briefly below. The pods, though, in being abandoned as the story’s principal MacGuffin, refused to give up so easily, and acquired a life of their own – they were just too interesting to abandon from the story, and so turned into the driving element of planetfall‘s cyberpunk underbelly, a part of the story I had never planned or envisaged until it popped out one day in the ubiquitous coffee shop in Crouch End.

This is one of those wonderful artefacts of failure. I tried to make these black pods – analogous to the black box of technology and physics explanations – into a strong driving force for the main story, and failed. In failing, they rallied in my mind, coupled themselves to a character, Verigua, who had charmed its way into the story, and ended up creating a whole story line of their own. It was unbidden, it was unplanned, it wasn’t storyboarded, and I had a lot of fun and frustration and thrown-out writing trying to figure out how they actually fit into the main plot of planetfall.

I wanted to write about this failure-leading-to-success for any others reading this who are writing or thinking of writing a story of their own. Failure is a necessary part of success. You have to try things, work with them, and throw them out if they’re not working. Because sometimes in the act of “killing your darlings” (as a friend once put it), you find something more interesting and creative than you could have come up with on a blank piece of paper. Failure is an option; in fact it’s essential to success. But it has to be coupled with determination and keeping going. This is something that too few of us realise or are taught, I think. It doesn’t matter if you fail – it’s that you tried in the first place. But if you try and fail, and learn nothing, then you have truly failed.  If you try and fail and learn and evolve and learn (and maybe go back to it with something based on your failure) – ah well, then you’re a success. It doesn’t feel like it at the time, it just feels like you’re set up to fail again.

Back to the real MacGuffin of planetfall. On the first page of the book (so no plot giveaways) a character is killed. It is that character’s death, and the hunt for the killer, that is the real MacGuffin.

planetfall starts off as a sort of murder-mystery. It’s a whodunnit?. And like most MacGuffins, as I said at the start, it keeps the characters running around and having fun, while the other MacGuffin, the one that refused to go away, slowly and inexorably catches up with it.  How that happens – well, you’ll just have to read the book when it’s released!

So what about planetfall book 2? Does that have a MacGuffin?  Is there something the characters are chasing or trying to protect or steal or find or figure out? At the moment, even I don’t know. And it’s going to be fun finding out.

planetfall book 2 – progress report #1

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In the last blog post I wrote about some of the cultural references squirrelled away in planetfall book 1. Pink Floyd and Alice in Wonderland are the major touch points. I made the point that both recognisable and non-recognisable cultural references add quick depth and context, allowing the author to concentrate on other aspects of description and plot and so on.

In this post I’m going to give an update on planetfall book 2. Most people reading this blog contemporaneously won’t have read book 1 yet (it will be self published over summer 2011 on Kindle and other platforms), so it may seem strange to discuss the sequel already. However I need to talk about it! And who knows, perhaps it will give a sense of the wider universe I have planned out.

Where planetfall book 1 deals with the events that lead to the collision of great cultures, book 2 deals with the aftermath. It is set around 20 years later, although I don’t have a specific time span; sometimes I think it’s 13 years. But roughly 20 years will do.

Events have moved on, and war has broken out. The story follows a Marine and his experiences of life on the front line. In the original drafts of this part of the story the Marine was non-gender specific. I wanted to create an illusion that the Marine could be male or female, so that anyone could identify with him. However over the years,  and especially since I returned to the story in early 2011, I made a decision to give him a gender.

What he still doesn’t have is a name, and this is deliberate. The story is told from a first person perspective (for those with limited experience of grammar, that means it’s from a “I did this” perspective, rather than the second person of “You did this” or third person “She did this”), which has fallen somewhat out of fashion in literary circles of late. However, I am keeping it like that as I want to cash in on two things. First, the typical use of the first person is to help create a sense of immersion in the story for the reader. One of the reasons authors use “I” is to encourage the reader to feel like it’s them in the story, or to make it easier for the reader to identify with the protagonist (the main character). And secondly, I want to bring some  of the sense of the first-person shooter computer games to a book. There are few books inspired by computer games, even fewer inspired by first-person shooters. And while this book isn’t inspired by any particular first-person shooter, it is a popular convention and something that a lot of people recognise. So why not?

To whet your appetite, here’s a sneak preview of the opening page of planetfall book 2. It hasn’t been through a vocal edit yet (during which I read the work aloud to pick up on rhythm, clashing sounds, and so on), nor through an edit based on continuity of tone with later material, or had anyone else read it. Excuses aside, here it is:

Dust falls. I exhale. Sections of roof crash to the floor, red-orange with heat. The dust is thrown up with irradiated ash.

The building’s remains give me shelter, of sorts. The walls gape at the wasteland outside. Lightning crackles from the air. From a cloud. From the ashes and dust. It’s all the same. The land is carbonised. The air is ash. The clouds are dust. The nuclear blast has laid waste to all.

The secom suit is struggling. It talks to me, through my body, through its intimate embrace. It images tactical data on my retina. The suit has formed a hard protein shell against the radiation. I look wicked, like death incarnate.

Bodies surround me. My colleagues. Dead. Their bodies lay carbonised like the land outside, limbs cauterised where suits remain intact around them or where the geometry of the blast wave failed to find them.

I live.

I walk to an external wall. Twisted rods poke out of the fractured biocrete. I look through the lightning glaze. Silhouettes of ruins jump and are static in the strobing.

I remember: I am a killing machine. That this was necessary. That destruction and death is needed for survival. I remember there are sometimes necessary losses.

Death finds its accommodation in war. In this war it is at home.

I ask my secom for a radiation count. The suit is working. The internal radmeter is still green. I was lucky.

For the new few hours I settle into a routine: survey the area in small sweeps; take holos of the blast zone, the target; attempt to revive the suits of my dead colleagues, the other Marines. Secom is more valuable than the person. I check radiation levels. I check for enemy signs. I check for a rescue signal. Some of the secom recovers so I absorb it into my own suit.

Lightning stalks the land, angry. Winds stir the ash, settle the ash, blast it into gales. The planet is trying to fix the trauma.

Eventually my suit picks up a signal. I signal in return. After twenty minutes a dropship arrives. Marines jog out, their suits encasing them in organic horror.

I am in the dropship, sinking into a jumpseat. Safe again. The suit grows into the seat, bonds with the ship. My body floods with a sleep drug. I see my mother’s smile. I pass into a dreamless sleep.

planetfall & cultural references

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In the last blog I wrote about my approach to writing planetfall – I use story boards for the overall story structure, I develop character biographies, I wrote a 1000-year history of the planetfall universe. And I use that framework to allow the world to come to life, so it has a consistent internal logic, while leaving enough space for characters and situations to explore their own spaces within the story.

This post will be the last (for a little while) taking a broad sweep view of planetfall. More specific issues will follow, but before that I want to briefly highlight the cultural reference points in planetfall.

Most cultural output references things that came before. Nietzsche reportedly filled his writing with cultural references; George Lucas famously referenced Akira Kurosawa and Joseph Campbell when writing Star Wars;  and Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright stuff cultural references into pretty much every scene of their works.

Using cultural references like this is useful. For those in the know it gives extra context and depth to the story. Previously read, seen or experienced stories or music or artworks will colour the narrative immediately, whether the conscious  mind picks up on it or not. As a writer they give a useful shortcut – rather than filling the page with unnecessary description, a quick reference to a commonly experienced cultural narrative can paint in more description in a word or phrase than the author could have achieved in ten pages.

For example, if I want to create an immediate, creepy sense of foreboding, I simply need to say to someone, “My, what big teeth you have,” and they will (or should) instantly bring up the tone, imagery and events of Little Red Riding Hood, and the wolf who ate her grandma, and which waited for her in grandma’s bed.

planetfall is chock full of cultural references. Some will be obvious, others less so. Some can be understood by the vast majority of readers with no or little prompting, while others will only be understood by a few, who share my taste in music or film or literature.

I’m not going to catalogue them all here, I can’t remember them all (some are lost as background description) and anyway it’s a boring job. Other people can pore over the text and figure out the references. What I do want to do is highlight the major reference points I used.

Literature

Alice In Wonderland – this book is a major influence on planetfall. The indirect reference comes from the Fall Colony being underground. Kate’s arrival at the Colony comes from entering a rabbit hole – a hole in the surface of the planet, into a cylinder-like underground colony, filled with caterpillars and mice and cats that disappear. Verigua at times turns into the Cheshire Cat, most notably when Verigua and Win are in the flying saucer, and when Win joins Verigua on the branch of the tree. The Cheshire Cat tries to come in at other points (Djembe in the departures/arrivals hall, the black cat when Verigua meets Kate, the black cat on the flying saucer) and was a welcome, if intrusive reference.

I had no specific ideas about using the Cheshire Cat. The first use of the cat with Djembe is a reference to the cats in Haruki Murakami’s books. Later the black panther was a reference to both this and Bagheera from The Jungle Book. All are tied into the Cheshire Cat however. They all disappear, and the act of the cat disappearing signals a change coming for a character, or a significant event happening. During writing each cat tried to change into the Cheshire Cat, an unwitting action from me, and I spent time playing with the Cheshire Cat, changing it into these other cats as often as I could. At one point I share a joke about this, when Win and the cat are sitting on the branch:

Win walked into the cube, stood under the tree, pulled himself up onto the branch the black cat sat on. “Do no harm?”

“That’s right.”

He sat for a moment. His hand reached out automatically to stroke the cat while he thought through the risk. “Well, I can’t sit here for days and days, and that’s a fact. What’s it like, taking this compound?”

“The humans tell me it’s like going raving mad.”

Win sighed, smiled, shook his head, “I thought they would. Very well,” he nodded, slipped from the branch.

This section is paraphrased from parts of Chapter VI: Pig and Pepper of Alice in Wonderland. 

Isaac Asimov – the section just quoted also references Isaac Asimov’s First Law of Robotics – “Do No Harm”. Verigua is a construct, and although intelligent and considered a life form, it is still a computer constructed with human input. planetfall follows the accepted laws of robotics – that they should do no harm, and Win’s reference is a light-hearted reference to this principle.

The Bible – The chapter “Nineveh” uses a re-telling of the Biblical story of Jonah & the Whale.

Iain M. Banks – the Culture novels are an obvious reference point for planetfall. In early drafts I described AIs and technology, almost justifying their use in the story. After a while I came to the conclusion that most sci-fi readers would either have read the Culture novels, or ones similar to them. And following successful sci-fi novels, I chose not to explain how (most of) the technology in planetfall works. It just does. A justified universe loses some of its sheen and magic; if you spend your time trying to convince the reader that what they’re reading is reality, you allow them pause for thought, room for scepticism. If that justification is taken away and the reader is presented with a universe in which there is such technology, they will accept it and focus more on the narrative.

Cartoons and comics – at one point, Verigua transforms into a fairy-like character, which is a reference to (but not a borrowing of) Disney’s Tinkerbell. I made the fairy a little colder and more elfin in its face, but certainly the visual imagery is influenced by Tinkerbell drawing her wand over the Disney castle logo and leaving trails of glitter. The mouse that Verigua becomes when visiting the depths of the colony is a mixture of Reepicheep (the Narnia books) and Fievel (An American Tail). The old British comic The Eagle is referenced several times: first when The Mekon makes a sly appearance when Win and Verigua go up in the flying saucer (the green lizard-like man on a floating platform); and, second in the ship name Eagle’s Dare, which also combines a reference to Dan Dare, the erstwhile hero of the comic’s main strip, and the Eagle ship from Space 1999, on which the description of the Eagle’s Dare spaceship rests.

Music

There are lots of references to music, and unfortunately I’ve forgotten most of them. The majority are to Pink Floyd. Floyd geeks will be able to reel off a large number on first reading (Obscured by Clouds, Dark Side of the Moon, Meddle and the Ummagumma live album are referenced most heavily). There is also some Sonic Youth in there (Theresa’s Sound World) amongst other music. The chapter “Echoes” (the name itself being a Pink Floyd track) starts off with a son et lumiere to a soundtrack of Time, from Dark Side of the Moon. (Try it yourself, read the chapter start as the track begins just after the alarm clocks ring.)

Films 

Star Wars is the biggest reference point. Fall is a desert planet with two suns. While most people immediately think of Arakis from Frank Herbert’s Dune on reading the opening pages of planetfall (and that is a major influence), the planet was initially based on Tatooine. The site around the Fall Colony, though, is based on Uluru, previously called Ayer’s Rock. I borrowed the rock island, the inselberg, from Australia.

The end of planetfall is based not on any specific film but the sort of imagery used in sci-fi B-movies. The giant green circles beaming onto the planet from space are borrowed from two sources. First, the old RKO Radio Pictures broadcast tower seen at the beginning of their films from the 1930s. The company famously focused on B-movies for a while, during which time it produced films like Cat People and I Walked With A Zombie. And second, the stun ray used by the Stormtroopers in Star Wars: A New Hope, when they capture Princess Leia.

Toward the end of planetfall is a section based in a field of flowers. The initial part is based on Stephen King’s Children of the Corn, while the end of that section is based on imagery from The Midwich Cuckoos. And somewhere in the introductory sequence for Kate’s team is a reference to The Blob.

Art

There are three works of art or genres specifically referenced in the first book of planetfall. The statue on Daoud’s desk is Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, my favourite work of art, and a major influence on me. At some point there is a sly reference to Van Gogh’s Starry, Starry Night (which also crops up in book 2). And finally the Japanese art work which shows willow trees and Mount Fuji, mixed with a little bit of Minton’s Willow Pattern designs (which are based on Chinese scenes) for the Memorial Service.

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I was careful, I hope, not to allow the cultural references to overpower the story. They are there as touchstones for description, for mood and context. They are designed, in the way they’re used, to help the reader conjure a visualisation without asking them to do too much work, so that the story can continue with as rich a base as possible.

Many of the cultural references will be invisible, with the reader unconsciously finding the right images when reading.

If you find any text which you think is a cultural reference, leave a comment, and I’ll try and confirm for you if it is what you think it is!

Creating the planetfall universe

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In my last blog post I gave an outline of how planetfall came about – its genesis as a short story, as a writing exercise, and then its evolution as my own writing skills improved: the story of a Marine stretching to 200 pages, edited down to 35 pages, grown again to 75 pages, abandoned for a few years while I wrote a sub-plot, the realisation that the sub-plot was a book in its own right, and the eventual return to that Marine.

But how do you write a sci-fi book set one thousand years in the future, stretching across two books-worth of material (even if half of that has now been deleted)?

Some authors literally make it up as they go along. Or so they say. I often wonder how they develop complex characterisation and a realistic environment by making it up as they go along. I can’t believe there isn’t a little bit of planning in there.

My approach with planetfall started off like this – make it up as you go along. And I quickly realised that wouldn’t work. To make a universe realistic from the first page, the first paragraph, sentence – the first word – it has to seem lived in. It has to feel realistic to the reader. It has to feel like there’s an internal logic, even if the reader hasn’t yet discovered it.

I spent time developing a one thousand year history for planetfall. It starts from around 2050, covers humanity’s first foray to the edge of our solar system, and then its spread out into the galaxy. The major socio-political events are mapped out, the great technological turning points are described, and the artistic periods are mapped and named. Half-page to full-page mini stories, in the style of Wikipedia, exist to describe specific events that form the backdrop to certain characters. For example, Daoud, the Administrator of the Fall Colony, has several pages of character development. His story concerns a trip to Jupiter, and subsequent arguments with the shadowy Cadre which runs society.

For much of planetfall it should seem like references to the broader social universe are consistent – technology, feelings, cultures should all go to a common reference point, regardless of what the characters’ views are on them.

Sometimes there are points in planetfall where I realised there was a hole in history – where the story needed to reference cultural norms or events of the past which I hadn’t written. At those points I had to make decisions – do I make a throwaway reference and hope I don’t need to use it again, or do I take time out to flesh out the universe’s history?

In some cases – the trip Kiran takes out of system – I used throwaway references. The great thing with a galaxy of planets and stars is that you don’t have to return to them. With others – like the AIs and their levels and complexity – I had to sit down and figure out what they were, their characters and relationships.

The most important aspect of pre-writing development, however, is concerned with the characters. Characters in books need to be consistent (even if they are unpredictable, their unpredictable nature is at least predictable) so that the reader can form a relationship with them. In planetfall there are biographies for Daoud, Kate Leland and Sophie Argus, and lesser biographies for Win Ho-Yung, Djembe Cygnate and Doctor Currie – the six principal human actors of the story. Only one character has no developed character biography – Verigua, and that simply because the character wrote itself, and it essentially has no background. Kate, Win and Djembe also have drawings associated with them, which detail my initial thoughts on their view to life – are they people who look backward, who look forward, or who are happy in the moment?

For all the character development I carried out, characters still have their own life in the same way that sometimes new cultural reference points, historical events or places need to come into being to suit the story as it’s written. Djembe was the biggest surprise here.

I do not particularly like the character of Djembe. For many months I fought against the character and tried to make him less straight-backed and rigid and systematic. In the end I gave in and let the character write itself, and the writing became much easier. A salutory lesson in writing characters – they have their own life, they find their own place in the story, and regardless how much character development and universe creation I carried out,  the interaction between characters and environment always brought about story elements that I could never have predicted. Djembe’s antagonistic relationship with Verigua is one of them; Sophie’s fate is another (she had a different fate planned for her which I had to scrap when the story turned a different way).

There’s a common thread coming out here – sometimes the story writes itself, but only, I think, when the author has a deep understanding of it. I’m not sure if non-writers believe this. In many, many places of planetfall I do not feel I was in conscious control of the writing. Many times I would sit in a coffee shop (usually Costa Coffee in Crouch End) and simply read the story at the pace my hand was writing it. It was as new to me as a reader picking up the book for the first time. This is an amazing feeling, and I presume what people are referring to when they talk of their ‘muse’. When the story elements combine so well and are so embedded in the psyche that their immanence flows directly to creation of the story, bypassing the conscious mind and flowing straight from mind to hand.

This doesn’t happen without development and planning. And it also doesn’t happen without letting go of the story and characters and letting them interact on their own terms.

Some places in planetfall are completely planned – the sequence with Djembe and Verigua in the corridor was very carefully planned and measured and drawn – while others flow from letting go of the story – pretty much all of Verigua’s sections (bar the one just mentioned) and the events in the very last chapter (a complete surprise to me, and I almost did a little wee with excitement at one point when it went all 50s sci-fi B-movie on  me). However all of it exists within a framework, a story board I developed right at the start, which in around 20 frames tells the main story points from start to end: arrival on Fall, the trip to the surface, Kate’s travel through darkness, the arrival in the sky.

I guess the realisation I’ve come to is that I have a preferred writing style. I like to know what the universe is like before I find the story within it. Making up the universe is fun as you can put whatever you like in, and then the story can write itself, within a broad and flexible framework, over the top of it. And that broad and flexible framework has to provide enough room, space and air for the story to create itself, to write itself into being.

planetfall: genesis

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planetfall – correctly written with a lower case ‘p’ and as one word – was borne out of a short story, and like most first-novels went through a long development process.

I treated the writing of planetfall as a self-education in creative writing. While writing it I tried many different exercises and approaches, failed more than I succeeded, then failed some more, went off on tangents, took breaks, became frustrated, scrapped pages and pages of material and generally found that auto-didacticism is easier to spell than to do.

The short story from which planetfall evolved is about a Mexican man looking back on the Mexican-American war around the time of the Alamo. It was a writing exercise in which I challenged myself to write a short story that had a definite beginning, middle and end, was character based, and which would fit onto one side of A4. The story was mostly dialogue, the Mexican man talking to his young son about what it means to be a man while he shaved his cheeks and shaped his moustache. I put this story to one side and moved onto other writing projects (I think some exercises on colour and motion).

Some time later I returned to the short story and thought it would be interesting to re-write the story from the son’s perspective, this time he would be a grown man thinking back to his father’s advice. I placed the son in a war and wrote a nostalgic piece, the son looking backward, close to death, wanting the protective presence of his father.

Realising that a soldier on a battlefield gave me scope for more writing exercises – the ravaged landscape, the loss of life, commentary on war and its interaction with society – I continued to write. The story became science fiction when I decided a battleground of post-nuclear detonation would add drama quickly. After about 3 or 4 pages, I chopped off the original short story – the Mexican  man with his son – and started thinking about how someone would survive a nuclear blast: you’d need some kind of fancy protective suit for a start. And so secom was born, a material that never made it into the final draft of the first book (at least not in an obvious way).

planetfall evolved quickly after that. There were three characters – Ramirez, Mina and David – a mysterious planet and a scene I visualised as a ‘planetfall’, in which the characters would leave a ship in orbit and fall to the planet below, battling aliens as they went. This scene gave its name to the book. I later named the mysterious planet ‘Fall’ as a temporary joke (planetfall/planet Fall) while I tried to figure out a better name. I never found one. Planet Fall became the central character in the first book of planetfall.

Two hundred pages came out quite quickly, and at that point I took a break to write a short story (“Ayla’s Journey”). I opened up the writing process for this short story to a friend with professional writing experience. She taught me how to edit, about rhythm and flow, and what was good in my writing and what not. A very instructive experience, I went back to planetfall three months later and sat down to edit. Two hundred pages collapsed under my editor’s eye in a cottage on the Isle of Skye, and became 35. From there I wrote out again to around seventy five pages, and got stuck. A sub-plot, a conspiracy theory centring on the planet Fall, wasn’t working. It took a few months before I decided to pull the sub-plot out into a separate story, which would run alongside the main story of the soldier (now a Marine) and act as counterpoint to his first-person perspective story.

I tried writing the two stories side by side, but their different writing styles and points of view soon forced me to stop. I decided to focus on the story of the planet Fall first. That story, in retrospect, was easy to write. Daoud was a character I already had from writing background notes on the planetfall universe and its history. Kate arrived one day while I was in Costa Coffee in Crouch End. Verigua was supposed to be a limited character, borrowed from an Iain M. Banks Culture novel. I will write about these separately.

Each chapter, except for the final one, was written with a particular approach in mind. Some chapters are sense-based: visual, auditory, tactile. Some were very much about movement (a Doctor Who: Confidential episode, in which they discussed up & down movement, was a particular influence), and some were indulgent: abstract, dream-like and experimental (on my part). One chapter was simply written in a short story style as a break from the main narrative (The Tale of Huriko Maki).

The first draft was finished in December 2010 and I started to think about returning to the main story, the story of the Marine’s experience of a great war. As I’d written the story of the planet Fall, I conceived a story structure in which that story would revolve, DNA-helix-like, around the main story of the Marine. It would be capped with a short story (The Tale of the SS Maris One) which would act as the telomere to the story’s helix. However, in early 2011, three and a half years after writing the story of the Mexican, I made the decision to publish this story of the events on planet Fall, the start, the genesis of the war, as the first in a sequence of books. I still intend at some point to release the series as intended, with new, original material throughout to tie it all together.

Until then, you have planetfall book 1 this summer, and planetfall book 2 currently in development. Enjoy.