In the last blog post I talked specifically about one of planetfall‘s main characters, Kate Leland, and more generally about women in sci-fi. In this blog post I want to cover something a little more personal – my own story through the writing of planetfall book 1. It’s a bit of a ramble, a brain dump of how I felt in the minutes after I’d finished final edits (indeed I wrote it straight after finishing). But in that, it’s a representation, in all its unfocused mess, of what was circling in my mind. So here we go:

Today (12/06/2011) I finished final edits on planetfall book 1. As far as I’m concerned I now have a draft that I am happy to send to a literary agent, and for a literary agent to send to publishers. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a perfect version. It just means that I’m happy with the book, that I think it works, and that I think there’s enough to satisfy a reader. An agent and a publisher might (would!) of course have a different view.

From my research, it seems that getting published is not wholly about how good your book is. There will be a huge degree of luck in this, and not a little networking required. (For the cynical, or the realists, depending on your world view, you can read “networking” as “selfish exploitation of other people’s contacts”.)

I first finished planetfall book 1 in December 2010. I remember writing the (then) final words, “…we’re coming in hot. Out.” These are not the final words of this final draft. As a nod to the sequel, as a nod to the fact that the story ends just as another great story is so obviously beginning, and as a nod to the fourth wall breaking history of literature and performance, it now ends with the line, “This story isn’t over.” It is perhaps something of a cliché; undoubtedly there are hundreds, thousands of first-part stories out there which end with similar or identical words. Yet they seem to fit: to fit the story, to fit the character, to fit the tone of the end, and to fit the start of the book, its opening paragraph, which – perhaps fittingly – is where I made the very last edits, the very final changes. The opening paragraph has been re-written scores of times now. It starts now with a paragraph that contains the following (with some intervening words edited out), “ the system seemed to be looking for … a story”.

There is some symmetry now in the story. It starts with eyes opening, of vision across great distances, looking for a story to tell. And it ends after a story, at the junction between one story and another, as the main character’s vision is compromised, a door closing, cutting off their virtual sight lines, of being locked into the dark, and having to look inward, of having to use the insight they gained along the way to understand what is happening, what might happen next. “This story isn’t over,” is me talking to a reading audience. And at the same time it is the character – Kate, let’s name her, the main character – continuing her blossoming from a strong character who is highly competent in specific situations, to a character learning to be strong across broad, unstructured, unfocused, society-wide situations. A generalist. A General.

Kate’s story is not over. She will crop up in a later book. At the moment I don’t know if she will be in the sequel; sharing her own initial lack of vision, I can’t yet “see” her there. Her presence is there, she is still part of the story, she will be back, and she will be back to drive the story to its conclusion. But when? Where? Therein lies part of the joy of writing a story, a joy shared by the reader – I don’t know until she crops up and becomes apparent. I look forward to finding out who she is, how she’s matured and changed and grown in the intervening story time.

Back to the story as a book in reality. It has grown and changed and matured over time. From its inception as a 1-page short story about a Mexican soldier, to its recasting as a story about a space Marine, to my need to pull out a sub-plot and make it into the first book; through the various drafts, failed story lines, red herrings, dead ends, characters who changed gender, characters meant as throw aways who became more important as the story grew and took on its own life, from all and through all of that, it has finally become a product finished and polished and independently read enough to stand on its feet, on its own merits, and be sent into the big, bad world of literary agents.

I expect rejection letters, of course. I expect no letters or responses. I expect to feel the slow and creeping disappointment of a creation left to wither due to lack of the oxygen of attention.

Or perhaps I owe it to this funny little sci-fi story to keep it alive. To animate its existence with networking and exploitation and letters and phone calls and requests to friends and acquaintances and emails to business cards picked up in restaurants, given by kind friends of friends. Perhaps I should be inspired by the story’s will to power, the fact that it created itself out of nothing. This book that forced itself out of a writing exercise, that budded off from a parent story, plopped onto a page and wriggled and writhed and entrained my hands and mind and time and money, and birthed itself, which took over like a memetic virus my brain, so that I became enslaved to it for three years, so that I spent evenings and weekends and minutes between work meetings and train journeys and rainy weekends in remote cottages in the Scottish isles, and sunny tables in hostels in Africa, train carriages across Europe, coffee shops around London and Coventry and who-knows-where-else (in fact I do, they’re all recorded, timed & dated); this book that dragged itself from the aether into the world. That has implanted itself in other people’s existence and minds and experiences. This book mentioned on Saturday night television to an audience of millions (no, it’s not sodding Avatar 2). Perhaps the real journeys the book has been on mean I should continue to subjugate myself before it. To serve it until it dies – the death of a public readership, who will absorb it and own it and add their own lives and thoughts and opinions and colours and textures to it.

Perhaps the end of the book is a beginning for it.

I have finished this book five days before my last day in the office in my current job. I decided to leave this job three and a half years ago – almost the same month I started writing this book. I have finished it when I am finally leaving.

Across the three-plus years I have learned – in parts, a little bit – how to write. How to sustain a story over hundreds of pages. How to develop characters and ensure that, if I want, I can make them have some emotional impact on the reader. I have learned about description and context and flow and movement and how to generate tension. I have learned to write dialogue (although I am still not that good at it) and I have learned, approximately, how to structure a chapter. How to story board. When to write prescriptively and when to let go. When a story and character should write themselves and when to exert some control. I have learned I can create people I don’t like, who nevertheless continue to live and breathe inside me. I have learned not to be scared to let a character or situation do things that seem outlandish, to follow the logic of a story. I have learned that humiliation – giving your writing to other people to criticise and tear to shreds – never becomes blunted, but is as important to the writing process as putting letters on a page. I have learned that people can unanimously like parts of my writing that I feel nothing for. I have learned time can be made and found in a busy and hectic social life, and that Edison was right: producing something from nothing is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration (so he was talking about genius, but a little poetic licence is OK). Writing is work and you just have to get on with it.

This book started as an exercise. It was going to be a practice novel. It was going to be something written quickly and slapdash, something to develop a skill as a writer of books, so that I could write the book I really wanted to write. It was supposed to be throwaway. And over the years I grew fond of it, grew to love it, grew to realise that perhaps this piece of throwaway writing actually had a little more going for it than an exercise in dialogue and getting away with bringing back flying saucers in the sky.

Today I finished edits on planetfall book 1. Today I ended 3.5 years of effort on a single product, a single creation. Today I completed, in my mind, the equivalent of a degree in creative writing.

Tomorrow… Tomorrow we will see what legs it has.

In the last blog I wrote about “MacGuffins”, which are a device used in stories and films to drive the plot. The Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark is a MacGuffin: the characters chase after it and only really get their hands on it near the end of the film. The blog also covered issues of failure. planetfall had a series of MacGuffins, some of which initially failed, causing me to develop the storyline further – only for one of the original MacGuffins to go underground in the story (literally) and surface as a sub-plot.

I want to carry on with the failure theme in this blog. Failure is a very important factor in success. The fact that planetfall was started, written and (almost) finished is a testimony not just to my perseverance, but to the many, many failures I encountered and made and caused along the way. The point of course is: use failure, learn from it, and keep going.

The failures I’ve talked about so far are failures that I’ve spotted and come to accept myself. Failed storylines, failed characters, failed MacGuffins, failed structures and failed sub-plots. Now I’m going through a separate set of failures: those spotted and communicated to me by those friends who are proof-reading book 1.

For politeness’ sake we call this constructive criticism and feedback. But in reality, it’s another failure.

So far feedback on planetfall book 1 is good and positive – people like it, they enjoy the story and reading it, they like the characters, they want to read more. All very pleasing. And it’s very important to know, as a writer, what I’m doing well and right – then I can do more of it, gain some confidence that those things I did, those things I wrote, those risks I took have paid off, were worthwhile.

Yet it is the bits that don’t work, the parts where people feedback the “Ooh, um, see this bit?” where we learn more. And ultimately it is addressing those failures that will strengthen the story.

The most consistent failure to date has been that of character development. There are six principal characters in planetfall book 1: Daoud, Sophie, Verigua, Kate, Win & Djembe (plus four minor characters, Masjid, Peter, Huriko and Kiran).  Daoud is mysterious, his intentions cloaked, and his character is developed enough to create, I hope, this air of mystery. There is little background or insight to his thoughts or feelings precisely because he needs to remain mysterious (though if I ever get there, the final book and the prequel stories will reveal more of his character). Verigua, as previously mentioned, was a fun character to write, and invented itself as I wrote, based on the Cheshire Cat and Haruki Murakami’s black cats, plus a bit of Iain M. Banks’s Minds.

Which leaves me with three characters where feedback consistently asks for more.

The character Sophie Argus is also mysterious. She is Daoud’s right hand, the implementer of his whim. The text contains hints to a long history and background with Daoud, yet this is never explored. Events later in the story (no spoilers) also hint that there is more there for the reader to access. In short, feedback says: tell me more about her. The answer is simple: no. Sophie has a much longer story arc than book 1, although this is not immediately apparent from the text. I have 3 books scoped for her, with another 3 for scoping at some point: if I get my way, I would like to franchise the writing of planetfall books, and have other people write the back story. For planetfall could reasonably be called The Tale of Sophie Argus. It is all about her, from beginning to end. planetfall book 1 is a key moment in her life, although her presence in the book is somewhat shrouded. Readers (when they eventually appear) will have to wait for her story to be revealed – and it will set book 1 in context for them.

Which leaves us with Djembe & Kate. I accept the feedback from everyone – there is not enough about them in the story. Their basic motivations are apparent – Djembe is a follower of rules and protocol, and with his name being borrowed from a drum, provides the beat and rhythm for the story. Readers will eventually find he has a project management role in the story, keeping people to time. His name is no accident. However, criticism so far shows that his rigid personality works, but that it fades or is watered down near the end of the story. I was minded to ignore this feedback, as Djembe also has a longer story arc than book 1, and in fact his personality is not watered down in the slightest. However, as I got more feedback I came to realise that within the confines of book 1 Djembe does indeed more development. There are questions left unanswered about his actions later in the book, where he appears to lose his way. This in part is my fault – I’ve written before about not particularly liking the character, and there was a point where, having given in to the character and allowing it to write itself, I grew tired of him and allowed him to drift into the background. There was a deliberate thought process to this – it’s linked to his re-appearance later in the series – but what I’ve realised is that this needs explaining; or, at least, contextualising, so that the reader accepts a fade out toward the end of book 1. This forms part of my current re-writes on book 1.

And finally we have Kate, ostensibly the main character of book 1. She also has a longer story arc than book 1, and I think I managed to give her a complete and enclosed story line in book 1 (i.e. it appears to make sense and have a beginning, middle and end). However, overwhelmingly everyone asks for more on her thoughts and feelings. She is the principle source of tension in the book. Her hopes and dreams, her values are put to the test, and there is simply not enough about her inner struggle to justify her character, no matter how complete her overall story line.

I find this failure to present completely rounded characters humbling and instructive. I don’t want to excuse myself with a “it’s my first book” line. Managing six principal characters and four minor characters is no mean feat. But it doesn’t excuse not presenting well developed major characters. I am already using the experience to flesh out more the characters in planetfall book 2.But for the moment I am trying to go through a finished novel and weave in extra characterisation which makes sense, is consistent with the rest of the story, supports and develops it for the reader, and meets the need to address the failures of the draft version.

I hope, of course, it will lead to a better, more rounded, more complete first book, that can stand up on its own and escape, as much as possible, a “first book” feeling.