Progress Report 1: The Story So Far

The Story So Far

I’m going to try to post fairly regular updates on what I’m writing and how it’s going, so let’s start by setting the scene and getting you up to speed.

I’m currently reworking a novel. This is an exciting place to be: I have the raw material of the text finished, and am now tinkering, adjusting, refining. But it’s been quite a journey getting to this point. For example: last autumn, I cut 74,000 words. Just took out and threw away a novel’s worth of writing. (And haven’t regretted it for a second.)

I thought it might be interesting to explain how that came about. The short version is this: the novel changed under me while I was writing it.

Planning vs letting it grow…

I’m not good at planning novels. I plan screenplays (because you have to: people want to know in advance what the story is going to be, before they commit time and money to a script.) But novels have always evolved while I was writing them; and of my three published books, I didn’t start a single one knowing exactly where it would end up.

This time I was determined that it would be different: that I would write better, and more efficiently, if I made at least some kind of plan before I got started. I had a basic idea: a middle-aged astronomer who sets off to try to find a woman he’s seen on the news, and who he’s convinced he knows from his childhood. The woman is in a crowd of protestors but her glimpsed face is enough to propel him away from his job and his life and onto the road, searching for her (and, I think we’d all agree, probably searching for other things too – his own past; his lost youth; paths not taken… that kind of thing).

I had a title – Leaving the Observatory – which I was pleased with because it had a neat double meaning: Finn, the astronmer in the story, has always been on the periphery of things; always an observer but rarely a participant; and this quest was going to mark his alteration as a character, his decision to engage. So he leaves his work at the observatory but also makes the shift from watcher to doer.

So far so good. I wanted Finn to have some other characters to bounce off before he finally locates (or doesn’t locate) the woman he’s searching for, so I introduced his childhood best friend, Garrett; although it quickly became quite fun to see how Garrett was the worst kind of friend anyone could ask for. Boorish, drunken, incredibly selfish, borderline unhinged; I wanted him to be the anti-Finn, a kind of force for egotistical chaos who would keep derailing Finn’s ordered, scientific universe. I thought he could be real fun to write (and to read).

I also thought it would be useful, and interesting, to have a child involved in the story; in order to get a different perspective on the two adult worldviews represented by Finn and Garrett. So I gave Finn a travelling companion in the form of Noah, the daughter of Finn’s boss at the observatory. I decided Noah was fourteen, and that her mum Marie was not just Finn’s boss but also his best friend. I figured that Marie and Noah’s dad were separated, and Marie wanted some time to try to work things out with him; so she’s asked Finn to take Noah off her hands for a few weeks. Finn agrees, but then this childminding gig crashes into his personal midlife crisis when he sees the woman on the news and decides he has to go in search of her. Noah gets caught in Finn’s slipstream, so she’s along for the ride.

First draft

With my characters in hand, and a setup, and a fairly good idea of where things were going to go, I started writing. This must have been about three years ago now. I found the going quite tough. I felt confident writing Finn, but less confident writing Garrett; his boorishness and narcissism could be funny (which I liked) and sometimes shocking (which I kind of liked); but I struggled to humanise him, to take him beyond a kind of caricature of a figure. I wrote a couple of scenes in which Noah, the kid, called him out on his behaviour: it felt to me that her generation is far less tolerant of this kind of masculine bullshit, and I let her articulate that. The thing was, having written this, I found myself kind of disliking Garrett; and when I stopped having sympathy for him, he became tougher still to write as anything other than a caricature, a foil for Finn and Noah.

Nevertheless I pressed on, because I suspected this could be fixed once I had a first draft. I could go back, rework some of Garrett’s passages, work on him more.

By now I was approaching the midpoint of the book. There was a key sequence coming up which changed the focus of the story quite severely: took us away from our comedic childhood-pals-reunited dynamic and into something more serious. As I got closer to it, I had an idea – one which I thought was exciting. The more I thought about it, the more excited I got.

The idea was this: to swap the perspective of the story, just for a handful of chapters, from Finn to Noah. The book was written in the third person, but firmly from Finn’s perspective: Garrett and Noah were characters, but it was always Finn’s story. But I couldn’t leave this idea alone: why not do a few chapters from Noah’s point of view?

It would allow a striking shift of worldview, away from the adult characters. It would allow me to foreground elements of Finn’s character of which he’s not fully aware, but which Noah – from the outside – could see clearly. It would let me comment on what had gone before with a new voice. The nearer I came to the point where I was going to switch voice from Finn to Noah, the more excited I became.

The plan, initially, was to break at the midpoint of the book; do three chapters from Noah’s perspective; and then return to Finn, to carry us home to the conclusion of the story.

But the moment I started writing in Noah’s voice, everything changed. The book started to flow. I found the way that the adult world looked through her eyes was exactly what the story needed. The themes of the novel snapped into focus seen this way. Noah was the secret weapon the book had been waiting for: where Finn was hesitant, Noah was dynamic. Where Finn was uncertain, Noah had conviction. Where Finn was an observer, trying to leave his observatory, Noah was already a participant in the world: leading him by the hand, almost.

I quickly abandoned the three chapter plan, and settled on a new plan: that the book would be in two halves. First Finn, then Noah. The same story seen from two angles; but not told completely in either – Finn would start us off, and Noah would finish the narrative.

I finally got the novel finished in Spring of 2023. Section 1: Finn. Secion 2: Noah. Garrett a brooding, drunken, chaotic through-line, bringing trouble to whatever he touches.

Feedback… and it’s not good.

At this point I let a tiny group of very trusted readers take a look at it: close friends and family whose opinions I value extremely. I was quietly confident that they were going to like it.

Instead, all three said variations of the same thing: the novel wasn’t working.

(This is just a horrible thing to hear. A gut-punch. I was utterly dismayed; but they were all saying variations of the same thing, so there was no way I could not listen.)

Here are their thoughts in summary.

Reader 1 said she loved Noah but, almost as a consequence of that, hated Finn. Felt that he was essentially taking advantage of Noah in pursuing his midlife crisis with her in tow; and reneging on his duty of care. She also didn’t like Garrett, who she found dull. All her sympathy was with Noah, and she felt that the adults were letting her down so badly that the book infuriated her.

Reader 2 said that she didn’t know whose story she was supposed to be following: was if Finn’s story? Or Noah’s? What was Garrett doing in there? She didn’t like Garrett much, but her most central criticism was that there were too many voices vying for the reader’s attention. Why had I split the book down the middle? Whose story was this?

Reader 3 said she found Garrett difficult and unpleasant, Finn rather too passive, and that there were too many voices; but that she loved Noah’s story strand and felt that I’d painted a really tender portrait of a teenager trying to deal with enormous issues.

And all I could think of was how the book had suddenly felt like it came alive – started to flow – the moment I began writing Noah’s strand. How exciting that part had been; and, compared to it, how tough I’d found the earlier Finn / Garrett chapters.

It suddenly seemed very clear that the book had changed while I was writing it: that the two sections into which I’d divided it weren’t two halves of one whole, but rather, two books. One about Finn and Garrett, one about Noah. And no-one was liking the Finn and Garrett part.

Not even me, by this point.

It was very weird to have to admit that to myself, but it was true. I didn’t like Garrett any more; and Finn had shifted in my head. Initially he was the central narrative voice of the book, and Noah a background character acting as a foil; but the moment I started writing in Noah’s voice, all that changed. The truth was that Finn had become the background character in Noah’s story; and that Garrett had become entirely redundant.

Where do we go from here?

I took the summer of 2023 to think all this through; make my peace with the criticisms; and come up with a plan for how to deal with them.

I came back in the autumn feeling a strange, slightly reckless determination. I knew that if I was going to sort this properly, it couldn’t be a half-arsed solution: nothing tentative was going to have the effect necessary. I needed to be brave, because what  clearly needed was a pretty radical reworking of everything I’d done so far.

It’s at this point that I cut 74,000 words from the book. The entire first half. (Weirdly liberating, once I got going.) I also cut the ending, because it was Finn’s ending (when he finds, or doesn’t find, the woman he’s been searching for); and this was no longer Finn’s book.

I removed Garrett from the novel entirely. Now he exists only in a ringbound printout in a drawer. (He’s probably furious about this.)

Finn I recast as an important, but supporting, character in Noah’s story. His quest – seeing the woman on the news; embarking on the search for her – got lifted out. Instead, the characters are propelled into their situation by something more prosaic and teenager-centric: a family holiday that ends up going adrift when Noah’s mum has work commitments she can’t escape. Finn, who’s been Noah’s friend all her life, takes her on holiday instead; and that’s how the story begins.

There are still observatories: Noah’s mum is still an astronomer, and so is Finn, so observatories and telescopes are things that Noah has known all her life. But they’re in the background now. The foreground is filled with issues that are much more to do with Noah’s life than that of her parents’ generation. Climate change and what the future holds for Noah and her friends are central concerns in this version of the book.

Noah’s in charge now

So what happened, essentially, is that a secondary character took over this novel: wrested control from the guy supposed to be the main character, made the story about her instead, was so vivid and compelling that she wouldn’t stay in her place. The book became Noah’s story in spite of what I was trying to do as an author.

I am now in the final stages of redrafting the book with this new, fresh perspective. The initial crude edit was a bit like taking a chainsaw to the story: it left a lot of tattered edges which no longer connected to anything. I needed a new start, a new end; what was interesting was how immediately, and convincingly, those came. Writing Noah just feels far more natural than what I was trying to do, initially, with Finn.

Over the past six months or so I’ve come to think of my original Finn / Garrett narrative as scaffolding: necessary, in order to construct the story that needed to be told, but then able to be taken down and put away. What’s left is Noah, and I suspect she’s all the stronger as a character for having come about organically, almost without my noticing her. I said at the start of this that I’m not good at planning novels. Well, I really tried this time; but it seems that the rule still holds true, because all the material I planned has ended up being thrown away; what grew out of it is what’s now standing, and I’m so much happier with it.

There’s still a little work to be done, so I’ll post updates on how that’s going; but the heavy lifting is out of the way now and the shape of the novel is good, so this tinkering is all about texture, character and polish. More on that in due course.