The Big Secret And The Challenge

OK. It’s time to come clean. If you made it past the blurbs at the front of the website, something presumably caught your attention and made you want to read on. I therefore feel safe to tell you my secret.

I’m seventy years old. I hesitate to put that up at the front because people who haven’t personally met me or many other seventy-year-olds tend to make all sorts of assumptions. We’re sweet or we’re smelly, we’re feisty or we’re drooling nincompoops. We’re bewildered by technology, we unremittingly vote Tory to protect our holiday cruises, and if we are women writers, we write romance or family saga because we’re past the age where we can convincingly write chick-lit. 

That is, of course, if we’re not Margaret Atwood or Pat Barker, who are both in their eighties and who, most people will acknowledge, are in a different universe from the rest of us.  

Romance, family saga, and the astute, funny observational writing that is branded ‘chick-lit’, are all wonderful things. It took me while to come to those, because since childhood I’ve always been more of a science fiction, urban fantasy or horror reader. When I was eight or nine I got A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs (of Tarzan fame) out of the library. I loved it. When next asked to write a story at school, I produced my own variant, complete with pictures of stripey Martians sporting multiple limbs. I didn’t know the book was a pulp classic and hugely influential on SF writers like Arthur C Clarke and Ray Bradbury, and on the scientist Carl Sagan. It’s nice to know I had good taste, though.

As a child I was, and still am, completely devoted to the books of Alan Garner. Elidor was my introduction to urban fantasy. I still read it at least once a year. The idea of an alternate dimension leaking into 1960s Manchester, not with an almighty crash but with a quiet, menacing, creeping determination, both scared and fascinated me. I can see the influence of Elidor in a lot of what I write now. Blurring the lines, the familiar made terrifying, family dynamics (familiar and terrifying in themselves). Only I tend to put more laughs in. 

In my early teens, I loftily decided that Romance (unless it was Jane Austen) definitely wasn’t me. I was a snotty brat in my early teens. When it came to Romance I was a snotty brat for quite a chunk of my life. Romance was all Mills and Boon and it wasn’t me. Then I met a romance writer in a writers’ group, and had to read her stuff to provide feedback. Her work was beautifully written, immaculately researched, and had complex dual timeline structures I could never manage. 

It's never too late to admit you’ve been an eejit. Or that you can change the habits of a lifetime.

Up until now I’ve been mainly a short story writer. I love the short story as a form. Reading a short story is like catching a glimpse through a lighted window at twilight. You see a moment in the lives, not only of people, but of their surroundings. It doesn’t matter if the short story covers a day or a century; it’s a distillation of a theme, a certain experience, a certain emotion. 

Some people think writing a short story is easier than writing a novel. You don’t have to find so many words, you don’t have to pursue character or story arcs in the same way, you don’t have to commit months or perhaps years to it (although it can take that long to get there). Three thousand words, say, can be a single chapter in a novel. 

But that’s the point. An opening chapter sets the scene. You then go on to expand your ideas over another seventy thousand words. You can digress. You can use a few thousand words to dig more deeply into your underlying theme, explore different ways of expressing it, maybe introduce a totally new theme half-way through. In a short story, you have to do everything in a few thousand words. You haven’t got the luxury of having words do just one thing. 

Short story words have to do at least two things at once. They must tell you not only what the person is doing, but how they feel about it, where they are, and what they look like at the time. There isn’t space for separate explanations of how the room smells, feels, or sounds. Somehow you’ve got to find a few words that sum up everything.

It’s bloody hard work to write, and it’s glorious to read the best writers doing it. Stephen King, Raymond Carver, Katherine Mansfield, Doris Lessing, Guy de Maupassant. And many, many others. 

So here I am, completely in love with the short story, and I decide to write a novel. At my age.

It was partly to see if I could. Partly because I had an idea I didn’t feel I could contain in a short story. Maybe some of those aforementioned brilliant writers could, but not me. Age was definitely part of it. If you don’t give yourself new challenges as you get older, your brain settles into a comfortable rut and then can’t be bothered to take on anything different from what it’s doing already. 

As it turns out, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed writing the first draft of my novel. Feedback from my critique groups has been amazingly helpful and mostly encouraging. (Of course you want constructive criticism of the chapter you’ve spent days on and are so proud of. It’s helpful to know everyone thinks that bit really doesn’t work, it contradicts what went before, that character would never do that. Smile through your pain, park it for now, and be bloody grateful three weeks later when you realise they were absolutely right.)

I’ll say it again: writing may be a solitary pursuit, but it need not be a lonely one. It really is better if it isn’t. 

Of course, now comes the editing part. I like editing. Writing the first draft of anything is rather like having a great big lump of clay delivered. It’s full of potential, but you have no idea exactly what’s going to come out of it. Editing is the shaping, honing, smoothing, or maybe roughing, to produce the best thing you possibly can at the end. I’ll let you know how that goes. 

Thanks for reading. Do drop by again. 

Jane