Can I Write It? Yes, You Can!

Over the years, I've seen a few people ask: “I have this great idea - will it work?” The answer I’d give to this is always the same: “Almost certainly, provided you write it well”. Unless your idea is total rubbish, it will probably work if you write it well enough. It may not be brilliant, it may be a bit derivative or not quite add up when you put the book down, but for the purpose of reading the novel – yes, it is very likely to work.

So someone might ask: “I’ve got this idea for this prince who goes on a quest to avenge his mother’s death, but really she hasn’t died, she faked her death because she hated her husband the king who used to beat her and she’s gone off to be a vigilante like Batman but more medieval and this prince doesn’t know it and swears to kill this Batman person because he’s breaking the king’s laws which is treason, but he doesn’t realise that it’s his own mum, and meanwhile she’s being blackmailed by pirates. Would this work?” And the answer is “Sure, why not?"

Medieval Batman, by Sacha Goldberger

Say every element of this story is well written. Say the two main characters, the prince and the queen, are really well constructed and believable. Say the king beating the queen and the queen escaping from him are credibly portrayed. Say the training and the being Batman and the quest elements are exciting and well-paced. And the pirates are suitably villainous. Why shouldn’t it work?

Of course, there are certain things that you may have trouble with when deciding what kind of things you want in your story. In particular, I'd be wary of writing of experiences that other people may have had that you haven’t, because it will be far, far easier to call you out. You may be able to convincingly depict a shuttle flight to Mars, based on your work on a cross-channel ferry, but you may not be able to write convincingly about a divorce, because nobody you know has been involved in one. And the divorce is much easier to get wrong, because other people will be able to turn to you with certainty and say “It’s not like that”.

On the ferry to Calais, Mars.

Someone (possibly J.N. Williamson) once said that originality wasn’t about doing what had never been done before, but doing what you wanted. The originality is often not in the basic concept, but in the treatment, the way that it's approached. If you have an idea that seems strong even after you’ve turned it over and thought about it, and that idea is not glaringly offensive to anyone with a brain, the question then becomes “Can you write this well?” 

And, ultimately, nobody can answer that until you’ve tried.

Five Thoughts About Beginnings

“A beginning is a delicate time.”

Frank Herbert, Dune.

Ironically, the opening of the film of Dune is one big infodump!

One of the hardest decisions about writing a story is how to start it. Too slow, and too padded with backstory, and it runs the risk of losing the reader’s attention. Too fast, and you risk of simply chucking the reader in at the deep end and confusing them. Here are five suggestions about avoiding those problems. As ever, what follows are not rules that can never be broken, but what works for me and avoids the most obvious dangers.

1 Focus on one person and hit the ground running

To get interest from the reader, it's easiest to focus on the actions of one person as quickly as possible, preferably from the start of the story. That person is going to be the point of view of the reader, as if the reader is watching the events of the story from a camera strapped to that character’s head. Of course, you can change viewpoint character later on, or introduce more central characters, but to zoom in like this will give the story a sense of immediacy from the moment it begins.

It's probably best to introduce only a few characters at the start, which might be a problem with an ensemble cast. I'll talk about this in a separate post, but I'd suggest that you drip-feed them in. A good example is in the first Dragonlance novel, which is literally the write-up of a Dungeons and Dragons game involving six main heroes. The characters meet at a rendezvous, but arrive in ones and twos, so the reader isn't swamped with descriptions. Then, once assembled, they leave in a group.

What I think you should avoid, or at least treat with great caution, are the writing equivalent of those panoramic shots you get in films, which take several minutes to look over the landscape before narrowing down to follow one person. Apparently, Stephen King often begins a book with this sort of sprawling introduction - and then deletes it when he edits the story.

2 Our sympathy is with an innocent, dynamic character

If the story starts with a man running through the undergrowth, pursued by sirens and snarling dogs, we’ll automatically side with him until we have a good reason not to. He’s the underdog, he seems not to have deserved what’s happening to him, and he’s doing something exciting. This is important in an opening. Characters become sympathetic partly by being likable, but also by doing exciting things (often, but not always, physical ones). Readers will automatically want to read about a character who drives the plot forward, unless they are a blatant villain (and even then, they may still want to, as per The Day of the Jackal).

Lovely chap.

3 First impressions last

I’ve heard that Pixar have a rule that when the lead character in one of their films is introduced, he has to be shown doing the thing that he does best. This immediately sets him up as That Kind of Guy. My own book, God Emperor of Didcot, begins with Isambard Smith escaping from two angry aliens, jumping across a bridge and stopping for a cup of tea. He then expresses puzzlement that aliens don’t want to join the British Space Empire. This tells you a lot about him, and the sort of things he can be expected to do. If you give a misleading first impression of the character at the start of a story, it may take a lot of time and effort to alter the reader's view.

4 Start at a point of change

I particularly dislike stories that begin with the lead character being bored. This seems to be very popular where the hero is a student of some kind. The trouble is that it’s tedious in itself. If you are successfully evoking the feeling of boredom, you are boring someone! Best to start at the point where things change: the hero is sitting in a dull lecture when a bird flies through the window. The heroine is eating breakfast when her husband opens a letter and faints. The point where normality breaks is usually the point where the story – not the background for the story – begins.

5 The reader doesn’t need to know everything

And shouldn’t, either! A good beginning poses two big questions (and many others): “Why did that happen?” and “What will happen next?” People will want to read on to find out the answers. They will have to have answers, too, or their interest will fade, but no doubt those further questions will be answered in turn. Even a book without much action can raise questions. Take the opening of 1984, which includes all sorts of intriguing hints that something is wrong with the world. The rest of the book, in a way, is Winston Smith’s quest to find out why. Not that it did him any good...

Do I Really Want to Write This?

A lot of words

A novel tends to be at least about 70,000 words long. That’s a lot of typing. Within that space, you could expect to have five or six well-developed central characters (if not more), the main plot, some sort of subplot, and perhaps a second subplot. To put it a different way, that’s quite a lot of words to do with the subject of the book.


The big question

So the question is this: do you really want to write 70,000 words or more about this idea? I don’t think this is asked often enough of writers. The idea that seemed so great to begin with might not have the mileage in it to last a whole novel. Or it might just not interest you as much as you thought it would. You might find that you don’t have the time or the resources to do justice to the concept, especially if a lot of research is involved.

(It's slightly different if you're writing a book to order, but we'll come to that later.)


Letting ideas ferment

My own tactic, if I have a brilliant idea for a novel, is to wait for a month before doing anything with it. By that time, the idea will either have matured (or mutated!) into a story that I’m happy working on properly, or will have faded away. What often happens is that two otherwise weak ideas will end up mixed together to produce a third, much stronger concept.  It might be that a concept which can’t sustain a whole novel becomes part of a different work, or a short story in its own right.

In my own writing, I’ve jettisoned a lot of concepts that sounded exciting at the time, but which didn’t feel so good a month later. I’ve found that there were two settings in particular that I wanted to use to write stories: the tongue in cheek space opera setting of the Space Captain Smith books, and the murky world of the fantasy stories that I’m currently writing, which is a sort of magically-supercharged Renaissance.

Personally, I’m sure that you will never write a great novel on a subject that you don’t really care about. You might write a publishable one, maybe one that will be quite saleable if it’s like something else that sells well, but it won’t last. So you have to really want to do it. And that means having not just a good idea, but all the elements to keep the book engaging to the end. Because if you’re entertained, chances are the reader will be, too.